I have to mention the war

I have had the habit for some years now that, when I come across an interesting article about P.G. Wodehouse, I copy it into my electronic Wodehouse folder, ready for use in some future, as yet unknown, piece, as Bertie Wooster would call it. Then, of course, I forget all about it.

Days, weeks, months, even years later I’ll be trawling through the folder, which has no rules or structure or anything other than alphabetical order, when I come across an opaque filename. “Ho,” say I to myself, in the manner of Constable G. D’Arcy Cheesewright, “what’s all this then?” You know what it is, don’t you? Yes, it’s the anecdote or observation I needed to fill out properly the story I’ve just published, or the talk I’ve just given. Dammit.

Frustration has burst upon me again in this way but for once I have frustration fooled – unlike in past instances it is not yet too late to add to the yarn. What follows therefore is a lengthy addition to Pelicans and Pink ’Uns – Wodehouse in Clubland, posted before Christmas, plus a bit more. My curiosity led me down an unexpected path.

Confined to barracks the other day because it was 43deg. outside, I was browsing my folders in search of something to do when I came across a file labelled “intro to Leather Armchairs by Charles Graves” and dated 23 February 2017. When opened, this comprised a single page in JPG format, headed FOREWORD and signed P.G. Wodehouse. It carried no note about where it came from. It was not a photo in my phone, and I had no record of receiving it by e-mail or any other means. The look of it, though, indicated it was scanned from a book flattened out on a printer plate, and that meant it could only have been done by me. After a moment’s reflection I reckoned I knew the source. I Googled “Leather Armchairs by Charles Graves” . . .

Bingo. This immediately produced a book reference, Leather Armchairs: The Chivas Regal Book of London Clubs, which confirmed my suspicion the page most probably came into my possession from the Melbourne Savage Club library. I don’t have the book – at least I hope I don’t, because I wouldn’t like to think I didn’t return it and it is now lost among the hopeless mess that is my library. I must have come across it at some stage when I was looking for something else on the club bookshelves, maybe even to do with London clubs although there’s nothing in my scribblings from the time to suggest what.

The book is, as the title indicates, a catalogue of London’s gentlemen’s clubs sponsored appropriately enough by the makers of Chivas Regal Scotch whisky and published in 1963. The author, Charles Graves (1899-1971), is more interesting. A veteran journalist and author, he was the brother of Robert Graves (poet, author of, inter alia, the famously dramatised I, Claudius and its sequel) and, despite a nearly 20-year age difference, an old pal of Plum from the high-living days of the twenties and thirties. More than that, when I looked up Graves in the Wodehouse biographies, I discovered a story much better than a bit of trivia about Plum doing a favour for a mate.

So what did P.G. Wodehouse say about his chum’s clubland encyclopedia?

He began: “When my old friend Charles Graves asked me to write a foreword to this book, I thought at first I should have to issue a nolle prosequi . . .” This is classic Wodehouse – his characters issued many such notices of disengagement over the years, and Plum always adopted a self-deprecating style when writing about himself. The tone here echoes another  book intro he wrote for Graves (pictured) as far back as 1930 and quoted by Frances Donaldson in her, in turn, self-deprecating preface to her biography of P.G. Wodehouse (1982).

Anyway Plum thought he would have to turn down Graves’ request because he was under the impression (from the United States) that London clubs were not travelling too well financially and the whole enterprise would be too sad. In his day Wodehouse was a member of six London clubs, most of them simultaneously, and invented quite a few more. But he read the thing and “nerved” himself to have “a bash at” a foreword as requested.

“I was gripped from start to finish,” Wodehouse wrote. “But I detected three rather serious omissions. The first was that the author did not touch on the tendency of weak-minded people like myself to join clubs and omitted to give us some hints on how this was to be avoided. You know how it is. You lunch with a friend at his club and in the course of the meal he says ‘You ought to be a member here’. It is impossible to reply that you would consider it the fate that is worse than death, so you make polite noises and the next thing you know you have been elected and all the weary work of resigning to be done.”

This led Wodehouse to what he believed was Graves’ second omission – advice on how to word a resignation letter: “What you want is something that will not hurt anybody’s feelings . . . ‘Kindly accept my resignation’ seems so abrupt, and one feels one ought to edge into the thing with a few preliminary words on the weather, the crops and any good books one may have been reading lately, springing the bad news in a postscript. (P.S. Oh, by the way . . .).”

The third complaint was that Graves failed to mention some really interesting clubs, such as the photographers’ Negative and Solution and the debutantes’ Junior Lipstick. “I shall never forget,” wrote Plum, “lunching with Adrian Mulliner, the private eye, at the Senior Bloodstain on the occasion when by pure deductive methods he tracked down and exposed a piece of kidney in the steak and kidney pie.” In case you haven’t figured it out, Plum delved into his own files to give Graves a couple of free jokes.

Wodehouse reckoned the book was fascinating despite the “omissions” and concluded: “You can always rely on old Charles to do a good job on any theme he may select, and in this volume, his forty-fourth, he has in my opinion – and mine is an opinion not to be sneezed at – excelled himself.”

Which was very generous of Wodehouse, given that he more than likely knew of the role Graves played (albeit somewhat inadvertently) in the vilification of Wodehouse in Britain and the US after his infamous 1941 broadcasts from Berlin. Frances Donaldson quotes in her Wodehouse biography the relevant passages from Graves’ autobiographical “diary”, Off the Record, detailing how the almost equally notorious Cassandra BBC broadcast about Wodehouse came to be created and put to air. Graves attended a lunch with Duff Cooper, the Minister of Information, and others at which what to do about Wodehouse’s broadcasts was discussed. Graves suggested that something be said after the nightly BBC news. Various lightish formats were dismissed by Duff Cooper who thought they were too soft. But one of the attendees, William Connor, who wrote a column in the Daily Mirror under the name of Cassandra, suggested he broadcast to America on the subject of Wodehouse’s (alleged) tax evasion. Duff Cooper jumped at the idea. The BBC rejected it because the circumstances of Wodehouse’s actions were not known. But Duff Cooper enthusiastically embraced the script Connor produced and directed the broadcaster to air it, which the BBC duly did under strong, written protest.

Connor, who had earlier unburdened himself against Wodehouse in his Cassandra column, began his talk: “I have come to tell you tonight of the story of a rich man trying to make his last and greatest sale – that of his own country . . . It is the record of P.G. Wodehouse ending forty years of money-making fun with the worst joke he ever made in his life.” This set the tone for the years of accusations and abuse that followed.

William Connor (1909-1967) built his whole career on his biting wit and sarcasm, for which, like Plum, he was duly knighted by a grateful Sovereign. He is famous for beginning his first column after war service: “As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted . . .” Curiously, the book of collected columns that I took down from my shelves for this post contains nothing from before 1948.

Graves recorded his opinion of the Plum problem in Off the Record (1942): “He [Wodehouse] was cut off from the rest of the world at England’s darkest hour – Dunkirk. Since then he has heard nothing except what Goebbels has pumped into him, & it would not surprise me in the least if he genuinely thought he was doing us and the USA a good turn with his talks . . . He is the last man in the world to be doing what he is doing if he really knew the truth.” Nevertheless, as Donaldson pointed out, he was responsible for the conversation which led to Connor’s broadcast.

Official inquiries cleared Plum of everything but a disastrous lapse of judgement – a verdict kept secret until 1980, five years after his death. Neither he nor Connor knew that verdict when they met over lunch in New York in 1953 and Plum charmed Connor into a friendship which resulted in Connor recanting. While Wodehouse is entirely to blame for what he did, and never excused himself, it was the continued vilification after the war, in the absence of any real knowledge, that played a major role in his exile to America. When finally forgiven with a knighthood (at the instigation, it is believed, of the Queen Mother) he was much too frail to travel “home” to receive it. Indeed he died six weeks later on 14 February 1975, aged 93.

The peculiar thing about the Wodehouse talks I have given at the Savage Club is the continued lively interest in Plum’s wartime misadventures. To my dismay, this sometimes overtakes the intended light-hearted discussion and celebration of his works and literary legacy. I try to keep these lunchtime chats anchored to the jokes, the similes, the metaphors and generally the wide world of Wodehouse. That is all the clubland chat was about but I spent some considerable time after it under intense questioning about Wodehouse, the traitor and/or the Nazi sympathiser.

I accept that much of this kind of interrogation is an attempt to bait me, for I am among good friends and they know how to stir me up. That’s what mates do for fun over a convivial or two. But sometimes it gets in among me to no little extent and I want to dive into the detail to show the accusers how wrong they are. I resist the impulse, though, and I’ll continue to resist it because nothing could be duller than a lunch mired in hunting, like Adrian Mulliner seeking his piece of kidney, for the truth about Wodehouse’s war.

Only one man knew that for certain, and he’s dead. Fortunately, he left us a great legacy.

FOOTNOTE: Always a damned footnote, isn’t there? This one should interest my Savage Club readers (both of them). The Robert Menzies Collection, papers of Australia’s Prime Minister and long-serving president of the Melbourne Savage Club held at Melbourne University, lists a copy of Leather Armchairs among its possessions and notes: “Reference to Robert Menzies on page 81 referring to occasion when Menzies wore the Savage Club tie to a meeting with Colonel Nasser.” Don’t ask me to explain who Nasser was. All I’ll say is that he never captained England at cricket.

 

 

 

Pelicans and Pink ’Uns – Wodehouse in Clubland

What ho, to the faithful few who have stayed the course with me through the barren months since my last post. Let the bugle sound Reveille. I’m back. Here is a lightly edited version of a talk I gave to the Ferkytoodlers group of deep thinkers at the Melbourne Savage Club a little while ago.

 

Clubland. If you go to London and start down Piccadilly from the Boots pharmacy, where the drug addicts pick up their supplies every day, by the time you get to Green Park you will have crossed clubland – off to your left down St James’s Street, just before you get to the Ritz, and to your right through Mayfair.

Along St James’s Street you’ll find, inter alia, Boodle’s and the Carlton Club – I’ve been treated to dinner at both. The Carlton [recently seen on TV after some event or other] is at the heart of the Conservative Party and features a parade of intimidating portraits of old soldiers and Prime Ministers on its walls. Boodle’s is more comfortable, more like the Melbourne Savage. It’s a male-members only club, too, but it does have one quirk – it has a ladies section. But the ladies can’t enter by the front door. They have to go around the back to a separate entrance and some nicely appointed rooms in what appears to be a basement. Apparently some of the ladies don’t like having to do that. At least, my host’s wife expressed herself somewhat strongly on the matter. Down the hill is Pall Mall which hosts the Royal Automobile Club and the Oxford and Cambridge, the latter of which has a nice back porch for a bit of after-lunch sluicing on a summer’s day.

Bertie Wooster says of St James’s Street, in describing the habits of his uncle George:

[He’s] one of those birds in tight morning coats and grey toppers whom you see toddling along St James’s Street on fine afternoons, puffing a bit as they make the grade. Slip a ferret into any good club between Piccadilly and Pall Mall, and you would start half a dozen uncle Georges.

That was back in twenties and thirties [and earlier] of course. These days you’re more likely to run into lithe young creatures in lycra heading for the appalling gym across the road from the Carlton.

On the other side of Piccadilly in Mayfair can be found the Savile and Buck’s clubs. The Savile is where the P.G. Wodehouse Society (UK) now holds its monthly meetings, having been kicked out of a pub along the Strand where it used to gather. Buck’s is the model for Wodehouse’s notorious Drones Club, a place where lively young characters meet and throw chaff and breadrolls at one another.

Wodehouse sited the Drones Club in Dover Street, Mayfair, but in 1984 it got moved to St James’s Street. A man named Barry Phelps, a journalist who was a Wodehouse collector, established an occasional dining club called the Drones. It had its inaugural dinner at the Carlton Club, and still meets a few times a year.

Those prominent Drones, Bertie Wooster and his pal Bingo Little, had a searing experience one day in the smoking room of the Senior Liberal Club. Let Bertie explain:

Once a year the committee of the Drones decides that the old club could do with a wash and a brush-up, so they shoo us out and dump us for a few weeks at some other institution. This time we were roosting at the Senior Liberal, and personally I had found the strain pretty fearful. I mean, when you’ve got used to a club where everyone’s nice and cheery, and where, if you want to attract a chappie’s attention, you heave a piece of bread at him, it kind of damps you to come to a place where the youngest member is about 87 and it isn’t considered good form to talk to anyone unless you and he were through the Peninsular War together.

Bertie and Bingo start talking in hushed voices:

“This club,” I said [Bertie], “is the limit.”
“It is the eel’s eyebrows,” agreed young Bingo. “I believe that old boy over by the window has been dead three days but I don’t like to mention it to anyone.”
“Have you lunched here yet?”
“They have waitresses instead of waiters.”
“Good lord! I thought that went out with the armistice.”
Bingo mused a moment, straightening his tie. “Er – pretty girls?”

Turned out that the Senior Liberal did have at least one good-looking, personable waitress, and Bingo who had a history of such things fell in love with her at first sight. This one he married [the “ripped bodice” novelist Rosie M. Banks] – but that’s a story for another day.

Wodehouse was a Savage and, at one time or another, a member of five other London clubs. But he mostly inhabited the Constitutional Club, which had a quiet library where he could write.

And so we come to the Pelicans and Pink ’Uns. Some of the most disreputable and aristocratic men about town in late Victorian London belonged to the Pelican Club. This was a time when the young of the English upper classes never felt the need to work at anything other than enjoying themselves.

The Pelican Club was not their only haunt but it is the best known. It was owned by one Swears Wells and operated only between 1887 and 1892 before collapsing in a welter of lawsuits and creditors. It was the centre of London’s bohemia, and inseparable from the Pink ’Uns, characters who worked for the Sporting Times, a newspaper printed on pink paper because its owner couldn’t afford white. The Pink ’Un was billed as a chronicle of racing, literature, art and the drama – but mostly it dealt in scurrilous gossip and racing tips.

Wodehouse, you need to remember, worked as a daily journalist in London before he took off for America in 1908. He knew all the stories about the Pelicans and Pink ’Uns, and he used many of them in his 75 years of writing – and we know this for sure because of the work of the late Norman Murphy, known to Wodehouseans as N.T.P. Murphy.

He was a retired army officer who cottoned on to the idea that Wodehouse’s fiction was based on fact and set out to prove it. The result was the two-volume Wodehouse Handbook, a smaller tome on the origins of Blandings Castle – the home of Lord Emsworth and his prize pig, the Empress of Blandings – and another book on the doings of the Pink ’Uns and the Pelicans. Norman has therefore obviated the need for me to do anything tedious for today’s talk, like actual research.

He was a brother Savage who could be found most afternoons propping up the bar at the club, ready for a chat about the good old days. He died a couple of years ago so I never got to meet him when I went to the Wodehouse Society’s biennial dinner in 2018. His widow, a lovely American lady named Elin, is a kindred soul who until recently was editor of the society’s quarterly journal, Wooster Sauce.

Norman not only confirmed the status of Buck’s as the model for the Drones but actually found the source of one of the most despicable incidents in the Jeeves stories. The Drones differs from Buck’s in that it has a swimming pool in the basement but with an extra feature – rings strung across the roof so the over-active among the Drones can exercise by swinging themselves from ring to ring across the pool, like Tarzan, or Cheetah if you like.

On occasion, after dinner, chaps like to bet their fellows they can’t swing across in full evening dress. One night Bertie accepted the bet and was well on his way to winning when the treacherous Tuppy Glossop looped back the last ring and Bertie had no option but to drop into the pool dressed in his brand new set of soup and fish. Bertie pursued revenge through several stories but never managed it. Norman Murphy established that there was club in Mayfair, called appropriately enough the Bath, with a pool where this actually happened.

I need to set the scene a little for what follows. Lord Emsworth’s brother, Galahad, played hard with the Pelicans and Pink ’Uns in his youth but in the twilight of his life amazes everyone with his energy and his continued belief that alcohol is one of the major food groups. For a man who apparently never went to bed before 2am and should have had the liver of the century, he is remarkably fit in his old age.

Through several books, before the Empress [the pig, remember . . . please keep up] eats his manuscript, he keeps busy writing his memoirs of scandalous gallivanting around the haunts of old London. Murphy claims Gally rewrote these tales, bequeathed them to him and he (Murphy) has published them as the Reminiscences of Galahad Threepwood. The book mostly combines stories of the real Pelicans and Pink ’Uns with some fictional ones featuring Gally’s pals like Plug Basham, Tubby Parsloe and Barmy Twistleton (otherwise known as Uncle Fred). Murphy said there were only 16 pages of fiction in the book and defied anyone to identify them.

I think I’ve sorted out some of the real stories I think you might appreciate.

The proprietor of the Pelican Club was born Ernest Frederick Wells but known universally as Swears, after a firm of furriers named Swears and Wells. He was the shrewdest of men who needed all his cunning to deal with his rambunctious clientele. For example: a luncher complained about his chop one day, Swears said nothing, took the chop back to the kitchen, turned it over on the plate, counted ten and took it back. All was well. Swears told the cook never to place a chop concave side up on the plate.

One hot day in July an arrogant young member ordered his lunch complete with “a bird of course”, by which he meant a game bird. [I’m not sure about this but it seems that back in those days getting a game bird at the height of summer was not possible.] Anyway the head waiter choked back his laughter, managed to fill the order and charged the pompous one three guineas for the bird since, as he pointed out, it was the close season. When this became known the other Pelicans were unanimous that the three guineas charge was ludicrous – the club parrot was worth at least five.

Swears literally ran into a countess one day in Richmond Park – he in his dog cart and she in her rather larger carriage – he apologised and presented his card. The grand old dame appeared at his door the next day, checking the address was real. Swears invited her in and offered her a cup of tea. Swears had not drunk the stuff since childhood but his manservant scrounged some suspicious dust from his landlady and brewed it into a brown liquid. He added a good dose of brandy just to make sure. The countess had three cups and the day after sent her footman around to ask for the name of his tea merchant.

This tale reminds me of one of Gally’s chums who got frightened by the temperance holy-rollers and swore off the drink, in favour of tea. Gally warned him this would be disastrous but he went ahead anyway, and was dead within weeks. Got run over by a hansom cab in Piccadilly.

Anything could happen at the Pelican Club. One evening a prominent member bribed the driver of a four-wheeler – a horse drawn carriage – to hand over the reins, and promptly drove the whole rig up the club steps and smashed through the glass doors into the room beyond.

Another member claimed the title of London’s biggest liar with the following exploit. This goes for several pages in the book, so I’ve condensed it a bit.

A Pelican named Billy was in his rooms one evening when his chum Charlie charged in with his girlfriend. They were in a terrible state and wanted somewhere to hide – they’d been sprung by Charlie’s wife and she was chasing them. Indeed, they could see her through Billy’s curtains standing guard at the top of the street. So Billy, being a gentleman, surrendered his bedroom and went off to his club for the night.

Next morning the wife had ended her vigil and Billy came home just as the lovebirds were about to leave. Suddenly another Pelican named Legs burst in. He too had been sprung and was being chased by his wife. “Get into bed, Billy,” he shouted. “You’re at death’s door.” Billy obliged just before Legs’ hopping mad wife rushed in, only to be confronted by a fully dressed and therefore respectable couple, plus Legs seated by Billy’s bed lamenting the state of his mate. To complete the scene, Charlie and the girl managed a tear or two.

Legs spun his wife the yarn he’d been there all night and had been so distraught he had forgotten to send word to her [no phones in those days]. She bought it. Not only that but did not dissent when he declared he would have to come and sit by Billy’s bed the next night as well – indeed he got away with it for three splendid nights on the town.

As for the Pink ’Uns, everybody knows journalists are the souls of decorum and discretion. They would never pull a stunt like that. The paper itself was as honest as the day was long. In fact it has a place in history as the paper that invented the Ashes. [For our American cousins, that’s the most hallowed of international cricket trophies.] When Australia beat England at The Oval in 1882, it was the Pink ’Un that published the famous In Memoriam notice for English cricket which ended with the line “the body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia”.

The Pink ’Un taught its readers that the word “oof” meant money, that a “prosser” was a cadger, and a “tart” a lady of easy virtue. Wodehouse named the richest member of the Drones Oofy Prosser and made him a very mean and pimply drunkard. And a word about “tart” – if you read C.J. Dennis you’ll find the Sentimental Bloke uses “tart” as a synonym for “girl”, including his beloved Doreen.

One edition of the Pink ’Un carried on its front page the following par:

Last week a man was fined 30 shillings in Clerkenwell Court for docking a dog’s tail. If that’s the going rate, what price the Chief Rabbi?

I doubt anyone could get away with that today. And maybe I won’t either.

The Pink ’Un had another Australian connection, through the black and white cartoonist Phil May. A Yorkshireman, May had spent some time working for The Bulletin in Sydney and built up a great reputation but he eventually went home to become the finest cartoonist in London. Phil had a flaw not often found among newspapermen – he would rather enjoy himself than work. Deadlines were not his concern. The proprietor of the Pink ’Un found a solution of sorts – he would buy whatever cartoons May had in his pocket. If that didn’t work, he would put a sovereign on the table and make Phil do a cartoon on the spot.

Norman Murphy and Wodehouse have done us proud. There are many more stories of the great carefree days before the Kaiser ruined everything but the sun is setting and I must go down with it. So I’ll end with this one.

Once upon a time there was an actor named G.P. Huntley who put into the language the exclamation “I knew it! I knew it!” Only he didn’t know it. It seems Huntley had a problem with drink – he couldn’t find any he liked. Nothing against a libation; he just didn’t like any of them much.

A pal found him at lunch in a restaurant one day looking gloomy because he couldn’t find anything on the huge wine list that he fancied. Well, said the friend, who had already lunched, why don’t you tackle the problem methodically – start at the top of the list and work your way down to the end? Huntley thought this was a splendid idea and promptly ordered a bottle of sherry, it being No.1 on the list.

Weeks went by until the pal saw Huntley again. He was down to No.42 or 43, among the burgundies. The pal told him it was a joke and he should stop. Huntley waved him away – he was sorry he hadn’t thought of the idea himself.

More time went by until the pal was lunching at the same restaurant one day and he asked the maitre d’ whether Huntley had been in. Indeed he had and Huntley’s quest had taken him down to the liqueurs. So? Well Huntley always ordered and drank a bottle of his drink for the day. That day Huntley had consumed an entire bottle of absinthe. You need to keep an eye on him, said the maitre d’.

The pal went in search of Huntley, given that he was supposed to be on stage that night. He was nowhere to be found, and the stand-in was warming up when Huntley rolled in, a bit pale but lucid. He gave an excellent performance – except he said everything twice. Luckily the audience started laughing, thinking it was a gag. The more he did it the harder they laughed – and when he came to the line “I knew it!” he exclaimed it twice, the audience picked it up and it became a catchphrase.

So gentlemen as you exit our reddish doors this evening what will you take away with you? Regret that the great days of really playing up are behind us? Or joy that we have P.G. Wodehouse and N.T.P. Murphy to bolster our spirits and give us something to which we can aspire? The world might be disintegrating around us but, for me, I’ll always have the Master to hold things together.

FOOTNOTE: You might have noticed in the Bertie-Bingo quote the reference “since the armistice”. During the Great War women took over many jobs left vacant when the men went to the front. Then, when what was left of the men returned, the women got booted so the men could have their jobs back.

This is one of the few instances in Wodehouse in which either of the world wars is mentioned. Jeeves is said once to have dabbled to some extent in “the late unpleasantness” (i.e. WWI). One earlier character was a veteran of WWI. Some post-WWII stories have oblique references. When Wodehouse realised he was writing a series of stories he sought to make them timeless. But as the years went by, his avoidance of topical references turned into hilarious (and, I suspect, unintended) anachronisms.

Also, I have not bothered to explain here who all the Wodehouse characters are or where they come from. That, I judge, would have been tedious in the extreme, both for myself and the reader. If this is your first encounter with old Plum, the best thing to do is start reading the canon and you’ll come across them soon enough.

Unmitigated tosh

BRISTOL, ENGLAND

A pretty girl threw herself at my feet. “Ah,” I smirked, all Errol Flynn. Ta-pocketa, ta-pocketa, ta-pock . . . I had to pull myself up short. She was crying out for help. This was no ordinary damsel – this was one in distress.

In an instant Robin Hood morphed into Sir Walter Raleigh. I swirled my cape of concern. Ta-pocketa.

“What ails thee, little one?”

“I’ve got a wet bum.”

Dr McKinley rose to the surface, anxious to examine the patient. Another one for his casebook. Ta-pocketa. If only I’d had my little back bag with me . . .

“Stepper!” the voice rang through my cranium. “Stepper [as some people know me] what do you think you’re doing?”

And then I was just me, a day-dreaming old granddad. Truth is, though, a pretty girl did fall over right at my feet. Alas, the key words are “fall over”. She had been negotiating passage over some wet cobblestones, she looked up to step past me who was coming in the other direction, her pink-sneakered foot slipped as if on ice . . . and down she went, smack on her derriere.

I actually came over all Baden-Powell. All that first aid drill half a century ago kicked in.

“Sit for a moment . . . there, now let me help you up,” said I, none too steady myself. I did a quick Dr Snoddy – in the name of proper medicine you understand – and she looked all right to me, slender and compact in her tight black ta-pock . . . “Stepper!”

Oh all right. “What you need is a hot drink with sugar. You’ve had a bit of a shock.” Ministering angel, me.

Then I knew she was fine. “I’ve got a wet bum,” she said gazing at a young fellow who’d just turned up. He looked a bit like George Clooney. I suppose he offered her a Nespresso.

I passed on, all aglow with my good-turn-for-the-day. This had never happened to me before . . . a desperate girl at my feet, a bona fide first-aid case. Just call me House. “You didn’t really fall over – you were struck down by a rare South American parasite that is particularly attracted to shapely females in pink sneakers. Oh, I know you love me . . .” Ta-pocketa, ta-pocketa, ta-pocketa.

The world-weary surgeon/physician trudged through the cobbled streets of the Bristol tourist area on a soaking wet Monday. My decision to persevere with a walk instead of a ride to the SS Great Britain and Brunel museum, despite the rain, was paying off. There were hardly any other tourists around and I didn’t have to fight for space on the path. I could . . .

And down I went. Hubert Opperman, pressing for victory, had his wheels taken out from under him on the treacherous pave of Paris-Roubaix. Undaunted, Australia’s greatest cyclist sprang back on his trusty Malvern Star and pedalled into the gloom. Ta-pocketa, ta-pocketa, ta-pocketa.

What your grossly overweight, aging fantasist actually did was haul himself slowly and painfully to his feet, while a kindly soul – dry and comfortable in a car – asked him if he was all right. As it happens, I was, apart from wet trousers and a sore, but not damaged, left knee. I was lucky. I could resume my march to the Pole.

With the blizzard raging about him, and instinct nagging him that something was not quite as it should be, Robert Falconer Scott stopped to assess his position. Dammit, instinct was right – he was heading north, instead of south. Wearily, he turned around. This could take some time. Ta-pock . . .

Over the bridge on the river . . . get thee behind me, Alec Guinness . . . and down the railway track on the waterfront . . . you, too, Marlon. Finally, I made it . . . Isambard Kingdom Brunel, I presume, and one of his finest creations, if not the finest: the SS Great Britain, the huge iron steamship that transformed ocean voyages forever.

This was what I had come to Bristol to see. And I had travelled over Brunel’s Great Western Railway from London to get there. It was a fulfilment of sorts, for I have long been a Brunel fan.

The man in the stovepipe hat stood proudly on the deck of his sea monster, the giant steam pistons throbbing slowly beneath him. “She’ll do it in 60 days . . . Liverpool to Melbourne . . . you’ll see . . .” He waved a confident cigar in the doubting faces. “You’ll see.” Ta-pocketa, ta-pocketa, ta-pocketa.

But you know what? This was no fantasy. The Great Britain consistently did the run to Melbourne in only a couple of months. That’s another story – check back later.

FOOTNOTES

• All those who didn’t recognise Walter Mitty ta-pocketing with his machine gun go to the back of the class. Furthermore, do you know how hard it is to avoid double entendre?
• The Stepper, or the Old Stepper, is, I think, P.G. Wodehouse’s only Australian character. It seemed obvious I should assume the name for the purposes of an e-forum run by The Wodehouse Society in the United States.