Slowing Down (15 page)

I’m walking much better but if, as sometimes happens, my right knee seizes up I have to go up and down a staircase sideways, although an application of Olbas Oil, a natural product brought to my thankful attention by my homeopathic-minded brother-in-law, soon eases it and indeed all other aches and pains.

I sleep a great deal. I probably would anyway, as my nights are made restless due to my pee pills, at least eight visits to the loo six feet from my bed and lasting up to 6 a.m. But then all my contemporaries take siestas and none of them suffers from water retention. We all rhapsodize about the joy of climbing into bed. It’s almost erotic.

The only place my back and ankles play me up is at art galleries, especially annoying as there are several wonderful
exhibitions I haven’t
yet
seen. Fortunately most publicgalleries have benches at fairly frequent intervals where I can slump and straighten my back, a trick I learnt when fishing for too long in middle age. I’ve tried a wheelchair but that needs someone to push it and Venetia, with whom I used to attend many shows, likes to move at her own pace, not mine, and is embarrassed, not to say irritated, by my tendency to express my views in a loud voice as a result of my deafness.

I am also conducting a series of visits to my sweet dentist, Dr Couttino, a woman of Eastern origin whose many brothers are all doctors of one sort or another. A few days ago she gave me three local injections, each accompanied by a loud squeak as the needle went in. What she was up to was removing the root of a cap which had broken off. Of course it didn’t hurt, as my upper jaw was completely numb after twenty minutes reading
Hello
magazine in the waiting-room while the injection hit. But it was quite noisy, as she used a kind of minute electric screwdriver to loosen the cap. She told me (Brr! Brr!) that she worked slowly for fear of chipping the root further, but her assistant gave me a pair of very dirty spectacles. Thinking they belonged to her I pointed this out but, explained Dr Couttino, they belonged to nobody. She just asked me to wear them to protect my eyes in case a fragment of tooth flew into the eyeball.

At last the root came away and she held it up for me to see. It was quite large and like a modern sculpture carved from red coral. The red was my blood which, despite various cotton or cloth plugs, took a long time to staunch. This achieved, she told me I could eat, or drink (or smoke, I thought) anything as long as it was not too hot. The fragment that was once me went into the pedal bin.

Next week I go back for the extraction of another root on the other side of my mouth. Then the two missing teeth are to be added to my top plate, and there are quite a number of small fillings to attend to later. She did tell me, however, that I was brushing my teeth and gums much more thoroughly. A small bring-up.

Her surgery is part of a practice. It’s in the sub-basement in one of the anonymous terraces leading off Exhibition Road and faces a small park. The function of the rest of the building is unknown to me though it is probably connected with a branch of Imperial College.

There is, happily, a modern lift, metal-lined and with a feature I have always, perhaps childishly, found pleasing: you enter the lift facing the ground floor, but exit through another door opening at the side, like a secret panel.

I used to attend private dentists in Harley Street when the fees were still comparatively modest and anyway I was earning a great deal more. There was always a large waiting-room full of intimidating, heavy and gloomy furniture inlaid with brass, with only current posh magazines,
Country Life
and its companions, laid out neatly on a large polished table. Today my National Health equivalent is bright and unthreatening. The secretaries are welcoming and efficient, although when I first went there a strange, very old lady paced and mumbled her way around behind the desk. I supposed her continued presence was due to the charity of her employers, or perhaps she needed her salary. Both reasons seemed equally admirable. Anyway she is long gone.

The waiting-room itself, straight on past the desk, is fairly narrow and faces the three surgery doors. The chairs are
comfortable and well designed in wood and aluminium and there are some with faintly sinister goo-goo eyes below the seat for nervous children. The magazines are in various states of disintegration.

Leaving Dr Couttino’s yesterday I aimed for a small supermarket adjoining a café which has a bar in the basement, almost salivating at the thought of a large G with ice and lemon and the mouth-watering clink as the tonic hits the ice. There was also a packet of unopened Marlboro Lites and a lighter in my sweater’s zip-up pocket.

IT WAS SHUT FOR THE EASTER WEEKEND.

After a few moments, like Beatrix Potter’s two bad mice, of ‘rage and disappointment’, I made off instead for a pub in nearby Kensington. En route I passed the V & A Museum. What an area this is for deification of Prince Albert! Not only the V & A itself, not only Exhibition Road, but the memorial, recently cleaned and re-gilded, and facing it the Albert Hall itself – all concrete proof of the profound grief of the Widow of Windsor.

The pub itself, the Hoop and Toy, is small and its exterior late nineteenth-century baroque. Its interior is cosy. It played a slight and mildly ludicrous role in my past. In the fifties, in circumstances which now escape me, perhaps a gig in what was then the nearby Royal College of Art, I found myself with Mick Mulligan, my band-leader, and his clarinettist, Ian Christie, at the bar there. We had such a good time that we made one of those optimistic, alcohol-inspired decisions to meet there every week! Of course none of us ever did, not once, and it became a band joke, but here I was again, in my seventies, gulping and puffing away at a table. The only drawback to the place is that, in common
with most old pubs and many theatres too, the gents is down a steep flight of steps.

I went home, not all that far after all, in a taxi, although nowadays, if convenient (no changes and the like) and I’m feeling especially spry, I take one of the big red buses or a tube.

Next morning Shirley, my secretary, came. When I mentioned my dental visit, she told me she too had a root extracted on the same day and her dentist had given her exactly the same instructions: no rinsing, any food or drink but nothing too hot. The only difference, due either to Dr Couttino’s superior skill or, more likely, my tougher nervous system, was that she’d suffered considerable pain when the injection had worn off. Smug me. I felt none, I told her, although the gap is still just a shade tender and I chew food on the other side of my mouth.

Unless there’s a crisis, this, I promise you, is the last medical report until in a week or so I have a scan before visiting Dr Kohn for a check-up on my lungs.

After this reassuring but minimal description of my very ‘slight discomfort’ I feel I should balance things by listing what I suppose I should call my ‘minimal pleasures’.

First, I suppose, I’d put fishing top of the list. Although much curtailed, it’s still an activity which I shall never entirely abandon if I can help it. At the beginning of this still-teething century I published a book called
Hooked
which was concerned with the ‘why’ rather than the ‘how’ of angling. It finished just after we’d sold the Tower (Norman in origin) on the great and improving River Usk, where I’d cast for twenty years, and bought a cottage in Bagnor, near Newbury,
Berkshire. It’s a charming village and faces, across a jungle of pretty weeds, a narrow tributary of the Lambourne, which is a chalk stream with many trout, some large, and has benches for the benefit of old gents to sit and remember their days pig-sticking in India or sending murderers to the gallows.

The village is about a mile away or more, despite the current improvement in what Fats Waller called his ‘pedal extremities’; this means transport. Diana, having defeated the possibility of my being carried back to the Tower lifeless on a barn door, was aware I had become too wobbly to resume mounting a moped and being brought home to the cottage on a billboard advertising the next race meeting at Newbury race-track. She came up with a practical idea – a granny-mobile! Of course this is not what they’re really called. Mine, insofar as I can remember, is named very inappropriately the ‘eagle’, or some other member of the animal kingdom noted for its ability to put on bursts of incredible speed, hardly appropriate for the old ladies (less often gents for some reason) doing their shopping in the supermarket on such machines. Animals, though, seem to be an obsession of the manufacturers. There is, on mine, a knob with an arrow, backed up by a switch, which can make you go faster or slower. If you turn the arrow to the left until it’s pointing at the image of a tortoise, the vehicle can’t go more than four miles an hour – rather faster than the average tortoise, I’d have thought. But even more questionable is that if you turn the knob to the right there is the image of a hare. Going downhill you can get up to about six miles an hour top whack but I don’t think the average hare pursued by a predator, swerve as it may, would last
very long at that pace. If you’ve been driving slowly though, and then change pace suddenly, it does give the illusion of competing in a Grand Prix.

As a technology dunce (I call myself the Ned Ludd of the computer), I must say the machine is almost absurdly simple to master. You insert a black bayonet key big enough to be difficult to lose into a hole in the side of the anti-dashboard, press the lever on the left and you go backwards, press the right and you move forwards. Release both and it stops. There is also a switch activating both the front and back lights at the same time and another switch to flick them on and off to show you’ve pulled up or are in trouble, a horn button producing a noise not loud enough to excite Mr Toad and two other buttons on the opposite ends of the dashboard to indicate I’m going left (the left-hand button) or right (guess).

That’s about all. Fuel? Under a flap at the back end is a length of black electric cable, coiled like a snake with a conventional plug at one end. When you get home you just plug it in and turn it on. In the morning it’s fully charged. How can you tell? There is a panel centred right in front of your nose with an indicator in bands of different colours: dark green, raring to go like a greyhound in the traps, paler green, via yellow (remember to recharge it later) to dark orange (keep your fingers crossed).

I hope I haven’t bored the leathers off you with this detailed description of my much-loved machine. It’s my revenge for those macho car-owning figures who have bent my unreceptive ear mercilessly, despite my protesting I’m in no way interested in what they tend to call ‘me motor’.

There are still a few outside features to go. There is a
small wire basket at the front for purchases (‘Look, Albert, I’ve remembered your Bengers’) and at the side, low down behind the saddle, a deeper metal basket intended for your crutches. When I’m going fishing I put my rod in there (the front basket holds my net, fishing bag and eventually, if I’ve had a successful day, trout). People used to ask me, on seeing my extended rod, ‘Why have you got an aerial on your machine?’ Actually, of late I’ve taken to breaking down my rod because the tip has twice snapped off when it caught the lower branches of a tree.

While a figure of fun to passing youngsters, the machine can be driven on the pavement (the tortoise in evidence), up one-way streets and parked more or less at random. There is, it seems, no road tax, although I’m not sure about insurance – but anyway it’s no great financial burden.

Incidentally, for those who are royal snobs, the late Queen Mother waved to people from one in her final years in the streets around St James’s Palace on her birthday. In her case, however, there was a uniformed chauffeur by her side. Even if I could afford it, I couldn’t follow her lead there. My granny-mobile holds only one. A pity, because I could easily imitate the languid wave patented by the House of Windsor (wave, wave, smile a bit – but not too much! – wave, wave).

Actually, out of that entire family I had some empathy for the Queen Mum. It seems she drank too much, loved the company of queens and overspent wildly, three vices I share. I hear too that during the Blitz she spent quite a lot of time secretly in the Lake District where someone spotted her by chance and was sworn to secrecy by her minders. I don’t hold this against her. Why did she have to remain in Buck House all the time, a sitting target for a German airman?

Anyway, she did visit the East End with her shy, stammering husband. Someone sent me quite a long list of what East Enders are purported to have said about her strolls through Whitechapel or the dock areas. I don’t know, of course, how truthful this anthology of favourable reactions is, but my favourite quote is this. A woman, after meeting her: ‘She said, “They tell lies about you. You don’t smell of shit.”’

She too, in her younger days, was an angler. When fishing for salmon on a Scottish river, she was spotted by a woman casting from the other shore, who concluded she was poaching. Wading into mid-stream, she recognized ‘the poacher’ and performed a low curtsy, her thigh waders filled up with water and she was swept downstream by the current, but, happily, not fatally.

Finally, something connected with her which I witnessed myself. My father took me to the Grand National at Aintree and we stood near the winning post. The Queen Mother, like her daughter, had a keen interest in racing and her horse (you can imagine the excitement in the Royal Enclosure) was streaking ahead, well in front of the field. Within a few yards of the post, all its legs splayed and it collapsed. A woman standing next to us was desperately upset and, in a strong Liverpool accent, burst out with, ‘Surely they’ll let it win, won’t they?’

So, one way or another, I was more pro than anti the boozing, overspending homophile – but, apart from the Queen who performs her boring duties in a suitably boring way, I am appalled by the rest of the House of Dyslexia, some pathetic, some arrogant. Here’s to your memory, Queen Mum. And if your chauffeur is driving your granny-mobile up the celestial glens, unscrew the top of your stick
(which they say contained a hollow flask of gin and dry Martini) and knock it back.