About retirement – dispatches from the front line – Part 19
Posted: May 16th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: About retirement - Howard Croft | 1 Comment »Dear Philippa,
The comment from Maral (see Part 18) referring to Ben Gingell brought back some stuff I haven’t thought about for years, In 1975. when I was a young and thrusting publisher and could still pee standing up, I was sent by my employer to war-torn Rhodesia in anticipation of an expected “settlement” of the Rhodesian stand-off between Harold Wilson and Ian Smith, which as it turned out was some way off. I went originally for a two year tour but was pulled out early when enforced enlistment into the army threatened and transferred to Nigeria, a much more dangerous place. I was replaced by Maral, who as a female could not be conscripted. Ben Gingell was our boss.Rhodesia was a very old fashioned place. When British Airways planes landed there the pilots used to say “Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to land at Salisbury International Airport. Please fasten your seatbelts and turn your watches back forty years”. The truth behind this joke was brought home to me after a couple of days in the country when I was invited to a barbecue. I had very little in the way of tropical clothing, and had arrived in November fully kitted out for the English winter, and had no choice but to wear a light suit bought that day. I was a bit worried about being over-dressed, expecting everyone to be in shorts or safari suits, but to my astonishment I was under-dressed – all the men were in dinner jackets, the women gussied up as for Ascot. Ben Gingell fitted right in to this scene.
Ben lived in a splendid house called Jericho Lodge, where he lived alone supported by a cook steward called Wil-son and his woman Weezy-Weezy, to which he kindly invited me to dinner. I say kindly because he resented my presence and regarded me as a “spy from London”; there was some truth in this. A party of about ten sat about the drawing room enjoying pre-dinner drinks and after about an hour the double doors that gave on to the dining room opened with a flourish and in stepped Wil-son splendid in a white steward’s outfit with diagonal sash, a cummerbund and a fez – all scarlet. He carried a bugle on which he gave a few toots, saluted and cried “Master! Dinner is served!”
At the end of dinner Ben asked his lady friend, Jenny, to lead the ladies away to powder their noses, and said to the men “Gentlemen, step out into Africa I beg of you” and through the French windows we went where the men all proceeded to urinate into the borders. Back in we went for port and cigars while the ladies continued their powdering elsewhere joining us later back in the drawing room for a session at the scotch. The doors opened again and in came Wil-son, this time with Weezy-Weezy, more toots on the bugle after which they bowed deeply to each guest in turn – “goodnight, master – goodnight, madam” then retreated backwards out of the room as if from the presence of a monarch. As they disappeared Ben shouted out “Wilson, my boy! Take a bottle of beer from the fridge I beg of you!”
Ben had joined the company in England as a graduate trainee and was seen as someone with great promise. a potential chief executive in the future, and his overseas posting was part of the grooming for future greatness. He never left. He told me that as soon as he stepped off the plane he thought he’s died and gone to heaven, and hated the thought of returning to England with its cold climate and lack of indoor servants. But with changing times he was sent home where he lived unhappily on the south coast, dying shortly afterwards I suppose of unhappiness.
He was an unusual man, a published poet, shy with a pawky sense of humour, and I think that by the time I left we had become friends although we were very different. He regarded me as a bit unpolished, and from an unprepossessing background, representing all that was disagreeable in what England had become. Maral did better, being a tall, willowy attractive girl with all the polish that seven years at the Herts and Essex High School could bestow, notwithstanding the fact that it was – and is still I think - known locally as “Herts and Tarts”. My daughter was in due course to attend the school, but by then it was a comprehensive.
Best wishes,
Howard
Hello Howard, I have become one of those devoted to your blog which I find funny & so enjoyable. You have managed in this artful description to summon up a vignette of colonial life lived to the full by our former manager who could not have coped well with life in modern Britain. I must say I found this blog very amusing and approximating to an objective reality which I believe I saw, too. I could not decide whether your piece about arriving in a country at a crucial turning point in its history at a time of war and finding yourself an onlooker in a set for a 1930s drawing-room play complete with black servants wearing fezzes & red cummerbunds ( a hark back to an even earlier period in colonial history from another part of the world) when you first went as guest-of-honour (I suspect) to dine at Ben Gingell’s was elegaic, highly disturbing, flabbergasting or simply bizarre! Yes, those days and times seem beyond belief now and just as well. I wonder if you ever shared one of Ben’s picnic hampers with the chilled, crisp South African white wine and Wil – son’s speciality of cold curried guinea fowl all laid out on a tablecloth as you travelled those endless miles to visit those brave, hardworking teachers at their remote schools? Enough of these memories about the good-hearted poet publishing manager from another age and country. Postscript: some of the correspondence between you and Ben in the publishing files was extraordinarily funny and I found it cheered me up no end in difficult times in trying to fulfil the publishing objectives of Pearson/Longman.
Further postscript: Alas I am no longer willowy etc.