AN ASSEMBLY OF AUNTS

They told me that John Harris, my grandfather on my mother’s side, was tall and strikingly handsome, with brown wavy hair and Delft blue eyes. They said women found him witty and charming. They also agreed that he was a blackguard, a rake and womanizer.

He may well have been as mesmerizingly good-looking and charming as they all claimed, but there’s no doubt that, in the British lingo of those days, he was also a cad and a bounder. He married my grandmother, May Twitchen in the 1880s, and bought a big, elegant house in the city of Winchester a dozen or so miles from England’s South Coast. Here she delivered him seven children – Margot; John; Elna; Issie; Kate; Peace, my mother, and Andrew. Not long after Andrew was born, John Harris senior deserted the family, leaving them not a penny, and they never saw him again.

Remarkably, John Harris’s father, a wealthy man of some standing in the city, came to the rescue. He was fond of May and her children, and must also have been publicly shamed by his son’s behavior. He, and his estate when he died, provided enough money to support May for the rest of her long life, and to raise all seven children, educating them at private schools.

May was a fine, tall and graceful woman. When I was small she seemed possibly regal, sitting as though in state, all dressed in black like a widowed queen holding court. Most women born at the end of the 19th Century had not been prepared to make their own way in life and earn a living. May was a competent painter in oils and watercolors, an accomplished cathedral organist and piano player and even, later in her life, published an acceptable novella based largely on her own story.

Life was an ordeal for May and her family. Three years after her husband deserted her, Andrew, who was born deaf, was run over and killed by a runaway horse and carriage. By that time the family had left the Winchester house and moved to a more cramped and humble home in Broadstairs, a seaside resort on the South East Coast where, on a clear day, you could see across the twenty or so miles of the English Channel to France.

A decade or so after she and the family were abandoned, May became a Catholic with the fervor and devotion that only converts seem to achieve. Margot, her oldest child, followed her into the church, as did Kate and Peace. Catholicism bestowed an almost saintly calm and benevolence on May, but Margot’s new religiosity spawned a blend of dogmatism and a disagreeable bigotry. Some people felt that her personality was transformed not so much as a result of her change of faith as the tragic end of a love affair, when she fell for a young infantry officer who died in the trenches in Flanders during World War I Flanders. She never married, and for the rest of her working life looked after two wealthy spinster sisters in a nearby village as their companion and chauffeur. When they died they left her a modest pension.

I never met John and his family, who was no more than a whispered topic of conversation in the family by the time I was old enough to take notice. He worked all the way to the top in the Civil Service at the British Passport Office headquarters in London, and married a woman named Winifred. They had a son, Ian, and shortly afterward John, following his father’s example, left Winifred for another, younger woman. He turned his back on his mother and his five remaining siblings, and they never saw or heard of him again.

Elna, christened Eleanor, had polio (then called ‘infantile paralysis’) as a teenager, and spent most of her fifty odd years on a contraption like a gurney. She was a kindly, affectionate and remarkably brave and lovable person, with a mane of beautiful auburn hair and a sad smile. I never saw her stand on her feet, and she died shortly before her mother in the mid-1940s.

Then there was Issie (Isobel), a plain, bespectacled, bone thin, indomitably cheerful woman. She was an avid reader, had an infectious giggle and an unexpectedly bawdy sense of humor. It was her burden for decades to look after her mother and Elna who, because of her disability, had no choice but to lie down for the rest of her life. After Elna and her mother died, Issie bought a pretty flint-stone cottage, looking forward to a long and well-deserved rest in retirement. For a year or two her garden, with its Flintstone walls, was a riot of color, alive with bees and butterflies. She spent her days working voluntarily for the ancient 11th Century church next door, and developed a talent, envied by her friends and neighbors, for discovering valuable antiques at rummage sales in surrounding villages.

Isabel’s peace was shattered when Margot, after her employers died, decided to move into her sister’s cottage. As her mother had done in her own home, Margaret took to her bed and her rosary beads, making no effort to help with the chores. The other sisters likened this to an invasion of a sparrow’s nest by an overfed cuckoo. Soon, Issie, by now frail and in her sixties, died from a heart attack. It is no stretch of the imagination to believe that her death was at least accelerated by her everlasting journeys up and down the steep stairs in response to her older sister’s demands, and to her daily rounds of shopping, cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, darning and mending, not to mention the gardening.

Kate was a husky-voiced, strikingly handsome woman, with bold black eyes that were the downfall of many suitors. During the first war, at least two years before the law allowed, she left home and worked in an armaments plant, wearing rubber boots and up to her shins in water, making artillery shells. Between the wars she made a career of nursing, and in World War II was a colonel as the matron of a hospital ship on the Irrawaddi River in Burma. She was in her forties when she married an RAF wing commander, who turned out in peacetime to be an abusive drunk. In the closing years of their lives, she and my mother, both widows, found themselves back overlooking the sea at Broadstairs where they had spent their youth together. They were close neighbors and inseparable friends, and Kate died in the late 1970s, followed not long after by Peace.

My mother was a kindly, warm and serene woman, with laughing eyes and a ready laugh. She was named Peace because she was born on the day in 1901 when Britain signed the peace treaty after the South African War with the Boers. By the time my mother was twenty-one, none of May’s five daughters were married, and they all lived with their mother in the house at Broadstairs. Little wonder that, thirty-six years later, while we were walking together, she confessed that her main reason for marrying my father had been to escape from the suffocating atmosphere of that sorority of spinsters.

Peace was the last survivor of that generation. In some ways, her married life turned out to be lonelier than if she’d stayed with her family. While she and my father were fond enough of each other, he was a much older, kindly but cautious and none-too-ambitious man. Theirs was a passionless marriage that lasted thirty-one years until he died in 1958 at the age of seventy. She lived for about thirty more years in her house by the sea before she herself died in the 1980s, at 89.

There was indeed something tragic about May Harris, and the largely unfulfilled lives of my mother and that assembly of aunts. Between them all, the six sisters and their brother John brought only three children into the world. How different might the story have been had May and her husband John stayed together? But asking “What if?” is a futile exercise. Life deals us a hand of cards, and we have no choice but to play it as best we can.

oo0oo

Not for sissies

I’m 88 this month, an average-looking old guy of medium height, with all my own hair and pretty much all of my own teeth. You wouldn’t look at me twice if we met in the street, and if you needed to ask a passer-by for directions, you surely wouldn’t pick me. No, you’d choose someone who looks more approachable and genial, or more user-friendly, as they say these days.

     It’s not that I look menacing or anything. It’s just that, with my face in repose, advancing age – okay, let’s be honest, advanced age -- has given me a decidedly stern and somber look. In fact, you might take me for a curmudgeon. My mouth turns down and, with the lines on my face, you might reasonably suppose me to be bad-tempered and humorless, even sour.

     Of course, the exact opposite is true, I smile at babies and small children, I brake for squirrels, and feel guilty when I have to kill even a moth or an ant. So you might well say I’m a have-a-heart kind of guy. And when it comes to humor I can be almost funny on occasions. Well, at least amusing.

     They say that growing old’s not for sissies. They’re right. This gruff exterior makes me sad and wistful. I know you only have my word for it but once, as a soldier, a bridegroom, a soccer dad, and even on the first rungs up the corporate ladder (something by which we foolishly tend to measure success and failure) I was – I blush to say this – pretty good looking. What happened to that dashing young captain who sits in a silver photo-frame on my wife, Lynn’s, writing desk?

     Time happened, that’s what. Okay, we all change with age, but in varying degrees. A lot of friends who are older than I (yes, there are still some around) have nice, open faces and pleasant smiles. So why don’t I?

     My wonderful Lynn, normally a paragon of kindness, jokes about my glum appearance. She laughs aloud at the pictures in my passport and driver’s license.

     “Why didn’t you smile?” she says. “I was smiling,” I tell her.

     I really was. Inside me, I could feel that cheery upturned mouth and the warm twinkle in the eye but, somehow, when the pictures come out, all that’s missing is a prison uniform, or a string of numbers hanging on a board around my neck.

My late mother-in-law, a lovely old lady with a Giaconda smile and handsome dark eyes, was a fountain of wise saws and sayings. One of these was that the living’s on the inside. By that she meant that many plain pug-ugly or unprepossessing people, and inanimate things, too, are often beautiful on the inside. She applied this especially to homes in mean, run-down streets, and to homely people, but the message was clear: never take anything at face value; instead, search for the beauty within.

     She was right, wasn’t she? All the same, we still go on making judgments based on external appearances. More than in most countries, we Americans put an impossibly high premium on good looks. Not so elsewhere. In my native Britain, and elsewhere in Europe, many relatively plain men and women have made it right to the top on stage and screen. They wouldn’t even have landed a walk-on part on Broadway, or in Hollywood. 

Don’t laugh, but behind my fossil-like façade I still believe that, physically and mentally, I’m that young man in the silver picture frame. Lynn and I published a novel a few years ago, a thriller set in exotic South East Asia. Mark Gregson, the hero (they call heroes protagonists these days), is a young ex-Army officer. In my head and heart I’m still thirty-two year old Gregson, chasing heroin traffickers through the jungle; racing up three hundred steps in pursuit of thugs; saving his lovely girlfriend from drowning and, in the nick of time, disarming a booby trap under the hood of his hired car. The flesh may well be a little weaker, but the spirit’s still willing and, yes, the living really is on the inside.

     King Duncan, in Macbeth, knew just what he was on about when he said: “There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.”

So if you’re in your thirties, or even much older than that, kindly remember this when you pass some old geezer in the street.  Go on, smile at him, he might be me.

oo0oo

A Taste of Sherri

"You’ll like Sherri,” Pat said, “she's really something. "

Nigel smiled. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?  I saw that picture of her in Advertiser’s Weekly.  Hasn’t she’s just won something?”

Pat cocked an eyebrow.  “Won something? Where have you been, kid? She’s just won the Gold Marconi for best TV commercials.”

Nigel liked his boss, an earthy Aussie who’d been news editor of the Sydney Morning Herald back home before a long, successful stint as a big wheel on the foreign desk of the Daily Express. Nigel had been a trainee at Patrick McClusky’s public relations firm in London’s Berkeley Square since his boss left newspapers to set up his own PR shop two years earlier. He’d taught Nigel a lot in that time, and it seemed this was to be his first day as a fully-fledged account executive.

“So what’s my role?” Nigel asked.

“Your role? You’re it, mate. It’ll be your own show. Go meet her, chat her up, write the pitch and manage the account. It’s ideal for your first solo flight?”

This would be a cake walk compared with some of the big name accounts on which Nigel had been helping his more experienced colleagues – BP, Guinness, Seiko, The London Tourist Board. And they were going to let him run this one on his own!

“Any stuff about her on file?” Nigel asked.

“Yeah, lots.” Patrick pushed a wad of paper across the desk. “I spent an hour with her last week. I’ve had it typed up, plus a few clippings from Ad Weekly and some other trades. You’ll know all you need to know before you see her.”

Nigel stood up to leave. “Thanks, Patrick, I appreciate it.”

“You’re a good bloke, Nige, and you do great work. And you’re a lucky young bastard. That woman’s a peach!”

Back in his office his neighbor, Trish, asked “What was that all about?”

“New biz prospect. Woman called Sherri Beresford. She directs TV commercials. Wants to be famous.”

“Sherri Beresford, eh? Who’s taking it on?”

“Me,” Nigel said with a little surge of pride.

Tricia screwed up her face. “My! Aren’t you the lucky one?  I’d have thought that woman was getting enough publicity without any help from us.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Don’t you read the gossip columns, the scandal sheets in the tabloids. She’s quite a girl if it’s all true – sort of a cross between Joan Collins and Mata Hari.”

Nigel laughed. “You’re in the PR business, Trish! and you’re saying ‘it must be true, it’s in the papers’? Get real!”

He opened the first folder and began reading. Patrick had done his homework. He’d looked up Sherri Beresford in several sources, even Who’s Who. She was born in 1920, which would make her forty. She was raised in a small coal-mining town near Newcastle. Just before World War II she’d been a fashion model in London, and was an aircraft-woman in the WRAF in the 40s.  While there she met Air Vice Marshall Sir Humphrey Beresford, and they were married in 1946. Her husband was her senior by eighteen years. There were no children, and a news clip from the News of the World and weeklies of that ilk hinted that the marriage hadn’t entirely been made in heaven.

Patrick’s typewritten note explained that Sherri had broken new ground making commercials. They showed ‘real’ people, played by known TV and film actors, rather than the usual unknown hams playing housewives gushing about shampoos, cake mixes and vacuum cleaners.  The products’ sales had soared. Now she was about to set up a new company, Beresford Productions, and needed the help of PR professionals.

Nigel called Sherri Beresford. An elderly man answered the phone. He didn’t sound like Sir Humphrey, but some kind of servant.

“Whom shall I say is calling, sir?”

“Nigel Baxter, McClusky Communications.”

It was a while before Nigel heard the languid click of heels on marble.

“Hello.”

“Lady Beresford?”

“This is she.”

“I’m Nigel Beresford, Patrick McClusky’s colleague.”

“Oh! Mr. Baxter, I thought the butler said it was someone else. Yes, this is Sherri Beresford. Mr. McClusky’s told me so much about you!  He’s full of praise for you.”

Nigel swallowed. He hadn’t expected such instant cordiality.

“That very kind of him,” he said, “I’m calling to make an appointment for our first meeting.”

 Her voice had a smoky resonance.  “Splendid. Well now, let’s see. I’ve got an appointment at the Film Producer’s Guild all afternoon today. I’d ask you for dinner tonight but I’m going to a party. What a pity!  How about first thing tomorrow morning?”

“That’ll be fine, Lady Beresford. Would nine o’clock suit you?”

“Perfect. Mr. McClusky also says you’re really handsome. I can’t wait to meet you!”

         

Next morning, Nigel took a cab to Lady Beresford’s house in Eaton Square and arrived sharp at nine. It was an imposing and meticulously kept place. Up in a big second floor window, a slim woman in pink looked out over the gardens in the middle of the square, and seemed not to notice him when he paid the driver and headed for the door.

Inside, the butler led him up a sweeping marble staircase. On the landing was a tall, ornate double door. The butler knocked lightly.

“Come!”

“Mr. Baxter, Ma’am.”

Nigel walked in, and heard the door click shut behind him.

He couldn’t have guessed what Lady Beresford might be wearing, but it certainly wouldn’t have been what he now saw.

As far ago as his schooldays at Eton, Nigel had known he could be rendered speechless and almost hypnotized by a beautiful girl. He remembered how, on occasions, he’d been in a state of shock at a party or a debutante ball.

But Sherri Beresford was no girl. She glided towards him in a robe of pink silk that was only loosely tied round her slim waist by a woven gold cord. Under the robe she wore a full length, all but transparent nightdress.

“Good morning Nigel,” she said.

Nigel had seen scores of beautiful girls and women in his twenty-four years, first during vacations from his boarding school, then at Oxford, and in his first two years at McClusky’s. But Sherri Beresford eclipsed them all.  Although she was seventeen years his senior – or maybe because of it – he was mesmerized.  It wasn’t just her liquid blue eyes, her leonine head of auburn hair and her uninhibitedly displayed bosom, but a combination of these and other things. When she smiled, her full lips had the slightest hint of lasciviousness, and her sheer sophistication and self-confidence totally disarmed him.

Gently she took his hand, leading him into the big room. “You must forgive me for being dressed like this,” she said, “I overslept. I was at a dinner party last night, and didn’t get to bed until past three.”

Nigel mumbled something inaudible about it not mattering.

The room was lavishly furnished in French Empire style, and what looked like a portrait by Gainsborough or Reynolds hung over a huge marble fireplace. A movie screen and a projector had been set up.

While a uniformed maid poured coffee, Nigel managed to recover his composure.

“So you’re going to show me your commercials, Lady Beresford,” he began, but she interrupted him.

“No, no! Please. Just call me Sherri, Nigel.”

“Oh, right – er – Sherri. Let’s see the films first. Then we’ll talk about your plans, and what you hope we can do for you. We’ll agree some objectives. Then, in the next day or two we’ll send you a formal proposal.”

“Fine,” Sherri said. She pressed a bell push, and within seconds a manservant appeared through a side door.

“This is Perkins,” she said. “He knows how to work this projecting machine thing, don’t you, Perkins?”

“Indeed, Ma’am.”

She eased herself into a love seat next to the projector and, smiling, patted the narrow space next to her. “Now, come here and sit by me, and we’ll go to the pictures!”

Nigel took his seat beside her, sensing the growing warmth of her thigh against his, and inhaling her heavy perfume. She may have been forty, Nigel thought, but even as close as this she was ravishing.  The lights went down and, with the heavy drapes that Perkins had drawn over the tall windows, they were momentarily in darkness.

“Isn’t this fun?” she whispered. She elbowed him with a breathy little giggle, and her lips were so close to his ear that it made him shiver.

There were three short films, each produced for a different client. They were little masterpieces, quite unlike anything he’d ever seen before. There was no hard sell, the photography was startlingly imaginative, and the characters convincing.

The lights went up. Sherri turned and gazed into his eyes.

“Well, what do you think?” she asked.

“They’re unique,” Nigel said. “I’m not surprised you’ve won this year’s Marconi.”

“Thank you!” She rested a warm hand on his knee, and squeezed it lightly.

Disturbed by Sherri’s apparent inability to stop touching him, he repositioned himself on a couch next to her, but within minutes she had slipped beside him again. For the next hour they talked, and the elements of an action plan began to form in his head, so that when Sherri said, “Do you already have a rough idea of what you can do for me?” he was ready.

“Well, there’s no doubt your key audience must be creatives in advertising agencies across the country,” Nigel began. “The strategy will be about finding events and opportunities to show your work.”

Sherri’s eyes had been so fixed on his that he wasn’t sure she was listening. But then she asked, “So how will you do that?

“Well, my colleagues and I must thrash that out, but there’ll be several ways. One would be by helping you write regular features about making commercials, and we’d place them in leading advertising trade weeklies and monthlies. But above all – ”  Nigel felt the blood rush to his face, “ – since you’re, well, such a magnetic and attractive personality, we’d find you audiences to address at events such as the annual convention of the Advertising Association and other national and regional get-togethers.  But there are a lot of other things we can do.”

Sherri took his hand and intertwined her fingers with his.

 “What a sweet thing to say! Do you really find me magnetic and attractive?” But he was lost for words, and cursed himself for having been so fulsome.

When the meeting was over, she led him down the marble staircase to the front door, her arm locked in his.

“You know, Nigel,” she said, almost in a whisper, “I think we’re going to become really good friends.”

Back in his office, Nigel wrote a proposal, calculated a budget, checked it with Patrick, and sent it by messenger to Sherri Beresford.

She called him first thing next morning. “I’m on, Nigel, dear,” she said. “You’ve done a lovely job. But then I knew you would. Let’s start right away. Listen, I’ve got a question for you.”

“Go ahead,” Nigel said.

“I see you recommend a day’s training in public speaking,” she said. “Well, I’m making a big presentation at the Northern Focus conference next week on Wednesday. Pretty well every significant advertising agency in the North and Midlands will be there.  Can you set up your media training session this week?”

“No problem, all we need is six clear hours and a big room. Can you keep all day Friday free?”

“Yes,” she said, “if I move a few other dates around. By the way, my session’s at ten in the morning, so I’m staying up in York for the convention. I’d be lost if you weren’t there to encourage me. Please say you’ll come, and will you book rooms for us on the Tuesday night at the Royal York?”

On Friday, the training session – run by an outside specialist – went well. Sherri was a natural. She was articulate and relaxed, and handled her slides like a veteran. The trainer called in a dozen of Nigel’s colleagues, and they barraged her with tricky questions. Her responses were masterful, and she seemed ready for anything. During the following Monday and Tuesday not many hours passed without her calling him for the lamest of reasons, and Nigel asked himself whether most of her calls were remotely necessary.

Alone on the train to York, he was deeply disturbed, and couldn’t get Sherri out of his mind. The relationship was getting far too intimate.  He found her alluring, and tantalizingly seductive, and had to admit that she was the most entrancing woman he’d ever met. However, she was married, and more importantly, so was he. Lisa, his wife of just a year, was in her third trimester with their first child, and he suddenly felt deeply ashamed that, if only in his mind, he’d just compared Lisa less favorably with this woman.

But then, hadn’t his behavior been beyond reproach? He’d never once responded to her blandishments. Also troubling him was the question of professional ethics. Think of the shame, the dishonor, of committing adultery with a client!  Lisa’s pregnancy had been an endangered one for several months, and his physical frustration was by now barely tolerable. Whatever the provocation, he told himself, he must never let anything happen. He’d taken the first preventive step when Sherri had called to suggest her chauffeur should drive them both to York in her car, and she’d seemed quite upset when he’d concocted a plausible excuse to take the train instead.

It was still light when he checked in at the hotel, an hour before Sherri said she planned to arrive.

“The name’s Baxter,” he told the receptionist. “Nigel Baxter, and there’s a reservation for me and my client, Lady Beresford.”

“Oh yes,” Mr. Baxter, we’ve got you both here. Actually, Lady Beresford called us only this morning.”

“She did?”

“Yes, she asked for adjoining rooms. She said you’d be doing some homework together tonight. Something like that. Anyway, you’re in 702, and she’ll be in 704.”

My God, he thought, she’s closing in.

In his room, Nigel turned on the television, hoping for some distraction from his growing anxiety about Sherri Beresford’s impending arrival. But nothing could hold his attention, and he turned it off.

Now he was certain of her intentions. Hour by hour since they’d met, she’d deliberately wound up the tension. It had been an insidious step-by-step process, beginning with a harmless touch of the hand that later became a more prolonged fondling, leading to stroking and more intimate gestures. Her body language had changed, too, with that breathy whispering in his ear, the steady, searching gaze of her blue eyes, and her ability to position her body and face enticingly close to his, making his heart pound and his blood flow faster.

So now she’d arranged adjoining rooms? What else could he deduce than that she was hell bent on enticing him into her bed?  Good God. He was shocked that, while his first thoughts were about his young wife and their unborn child, the prospect of making love to this beguiling woman both thrilled and terrified him.

There, bolted on his side, was the connecting door, and he had a sudden, uncontrollable urge to see what was beyond it. With the slow-motion care of a cat burglar he slid back the brass bolt and drew the door open. Inside was another door, with no bolt on his side. He took a deep breath and turned the knob, but it didn’t budge.  

He jumped when the phone rang, quickly closed his door and bolted it.

“Nigel, darling. It’s me.”

“Hello, how was your drive up?”

“Fine, but I’m thirsty. Come down to the bar and buy me a drink.”

“Good idea. I’ll be down in a couple of minutes.”

He checked his hair in the bathroom mirror. Then, for reasons he couldn’t have explained to himself, he brushed his teeth and put on a dab of the expensive after-shave that, he reminded himself, was a gift from his wife. In the elevator he realized that he was humming a tune to himself, something he only did when he was nervous, excited or on edge.

She was perched on a bar stool, and when he had eased himself onto another beside her, she leaned forward and kissed him lightly on the cheek.

“Oooh! You smell delicious,” she said. “I’ve been dying to see you. I’m afraid I’ve already got myself a drink. This is a martini – it’s good. Why don’t you have one?”

Anxious to stay in control of himself, Nigel ordered a glass of wine. Sherri was in a short black dress, with a single string of pearls. Her neckline was invitingly low. He raised his glass and touched hers. “To success,” he said, and added, “Not that you need any, of course. You’ll be just fine.”

Sherri put down her drink, leaned over and laid her hands on his thighs. “Oh, but I do need it. I’m petrified. I’m going to lean on you heavily for moral support.”

Nigel had begun asking the barman to keep a table for dinner in the restaurant when Sherri announced that she had a better idea.

“I know the sweetest little place in a village a few miles down the road. You’ll just love it.  Actually, I’ve asked my chauffeur to get us a table there. He’ll be outside at 7:45.”

The restaurant was in a 14^th Century inn called The Stag at Bay, and they were led up to a quiet room with only a few other diners. When their main course arrived, Nigel noted that, while Sherri had drunk two martinis back at the hotel, she’d had two more here.

The meal was exquisite, and they talked together for more than two hours. During that time, Nigel and Sherri shared a bottle of Pinot Noir, some vintage port, their life stories and a few of their innermost thoughts. During the drive back to the hotel, Sherri, sitting very close to him, laid her head on his shoulder, took his hand in her lap, and said absolutely nothing. Nigel couldn’t help wondering whether the chauffeur could see them in his mirror.

In the elevator to the seventh floor she put both arms round his waist and pressed her body against his. “Why don’t you come in for a nightcap?” she whispered, “We can raid my mini-bar.”

Taking his face in both hands, she kissed him on the mouth with moist, parted lips. Nigel was dumbfounded, overwhelmed by a tidal wave of desire. Then they were at her door, and he had still not mustered a reply. Now her face was earnest, her eyes pleading.

“Please, Nigel, dear! You’ll never regret it, I swear.”

This was the moment of decision. He reached out to her shoulders and looked deep into her eyes. 

“Sherri,” he said. “You’re the most enthralling woman, and I’m, well, flattered. But, forgive me. . . . I  just can’t bring myself to do this.”

In a few seconds she had become a different person. The curl of her lips made her ugly, and he hadn’t seen this expression on her face before.

“I can’t believe this. Are you a man, or what? How can you do this to me?”

“We’re married, Sherri – we’re both married! And, damn it, you’re my client. How could I possibly – ”

“ No, you listen to me, who the hell would ever  know, for Chrissake?”

She had put the key in the door and now turned it. In a second she was gone.

When Nigel woke the next morning, his mind flooded with dread at the memory of the night before. Downstairs at breakfast, Sherri Beresford was coolly formal, and he soon realized that he’d be the only initiator of any words between them in the morning ahead. Neither spoke in the car on their way across the city to the conference center. Sherri’s speech at the conference was electrifying and inspiring, and closed to thunderous applause. In the afternoon they parted with an awkward, wordless handshake.

Nigel was back at his desk in London around four that afternoon when the intercom buzzed. 

It was Patrick McCluskey’s voice. “Busy, Nige?"

"I’ll be right in.”

Patrick was at his desk, his shirt sleeves rolled up, drinking his third cup of tea since lunch, and lighting his umpteenth cigarette.

"Have a chair, sport."

Patrick wasn’t his usual cheery self. Something was clearly up.

"How's the Beresford thing going?"  he asked.

There seemed no point in pretending. “Not good, Patrick. In fact it’s a bloody catastrophe.”

Patrick raised an eyebrow, “What’s up, then?”

“You may find this hard to believe,” Nigel said, “but she’s got the hots for me.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s a vamp, Patrick, a femme fatale.  I’m not kidding. She can’t keep her hands off me, and she actually propositioned me in York last night.”

Patrick didn't respond, leaned back in his chair and heaved his feet up on his desk.

"Listen, kid . . ." He paused, gathering his words.  "You won't like this, but I won't give you any bullshit. She called me an hour ago. She wants you off the account."

"For what reason?"

"Don't take it too hard, Nige. She said you don’t have enough experience for the job.”

Nigel smiled wryly.  Experience, was it?  He knew the sort of experience she'd found him lacking.  It was tough, but he'd let it go, and good luck to the next poor devil.

As Nigel rose to leave, Patrick said, "Cheer up, mate.  These things happen.  You've got a good bunch of other accounts to work on, and you do a bloody good job.  Forget about it."

At the door, Nigel turned back. "So who’ll take the account over?"

McCluskey shrugged. "Good question. I'm wondering about that.”

"How about Trish?" Nigel asked, “maybe she could handle it.”

"Well, yeah, a woman might work, but, you know . . . “ He paused. “I think I might give this account some attention myself."

A sly smile appeared on Patrick’s face. And could that have been a sly wink?

                 oo0oo

Rationing

At lunchtime on September 3, 1939 – the day World War II broke out – I clearly remember my father’s exact words as he stood at the dining-room table, his carving knife and fork poised over the Sunday roast.

“Well,” he said, “let’s enjoy this -- even if it’s the last meal we ever eat.”

I was eight at the time, and my brother, David, was eleven.  It wasn’t our last meal, of course, but that little family gathering marked the beginning of a time in our lives when food and its very availability became a daily concern.  Soon the Germans had occupied the whole of Europe, with the exception of a handful of neutral countries. With Junker dive bombers and Messerschmitt fighters based only twenty-one miles across the English Channel, and U-boats lurking off every beach, more than three hundred merchant ships had been sunk bringing food and other necessities to us in the two years before the United States entered the war in 1941.

Britain’s far-flung Empire on six continents had until that time provided much of the beleaguered country’s food supplies. Now its farmers simply could not grow enough food to feed the country’s fifty million mouths, and soon foods such as flour, meat and sugar were in short supply. The Government issued ration books shortly after the war broke out.  Butter, meat and fresh eggs were the first foods to be rationed, and the public were asked to use margarine, (available only in waxy, greasy-tasting yellow slabs half a century before I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter), canned corned beef and dried egg-powder.

Food rationing was tough. The weekly ration for one person in 1941 was one ounce of cheese, four ounces of butter, two ounces of tea (the British ‘cuppa,’ rationed, for heaven’s sake!), 12 ounces of sugar, three pints of milk, and $3.20 worth of meat by today’s price levels.  It got tougher when a further form of food rationing was introduced soon afterward for the majority of other foods. This involved a points coupon book, which allocated people a number of points which they could spend on any manufactured food they chose. Everything -- say, a can of tuna, jar of preserve, pound of dried beans, or a bottle of salad dressing -- was officially rated a certain number of points. If you felt so inclined, you could blow all your points on a sack of lentils, but the choice was yours.  Later, gasoline, clothes and even soap were severely rationed. The annual allocation of clothing coupons was sixty-six points, twenty-six of which would be needed to buy one man’s off-the-rack suit. So it was unpatriotic to be chic?

Soon rationing became so harsh that the British, once dubbed derisively as a ‘nation of shopkeepers’ by Napoleon, became a nation of vegetable gardeners. Farmers ploughed their grassland and sowed wheat, oats and potatoes, and during this effort a fresh area the size of the whole of Wales was ploughed up. Market gardens forsook their rose beds and grew onions and carrots instead, filling their glasshouses with tomatoes in place of orchids.

Householders, too, took to the land in millions in their handkerchief-sized yards, encouraged by the Ministry of Food’s successful public relations campaign to grow their own vegetables and fruits. Newspaper articles, radio programs and pamphlets and booklets and documentary movies from the Government taught the public to recognize black-fly, how to feed tomatoes and make compost heaps. Suddenly gardening had become a laudable and patriotic activity.

          Parks, village greens, and even cricket pitches and soccer fields became ‘allotments;’ small pieces of land made available to local people. Even the moat at the Tower of London and one or two tennis courts at Wimbledon became allotments. Many of our neighbors kept pigs, rabbits and chickens in their back yards. 

 Britain’s fishermen, even off the remotest coasts of Scotland, where enemy submarines watched and waited, led a risky existence. One problem the fishing industry had, even when the population was at its most ravenous, was getting people to eat the more outlandish-looking but equally tasty fish that emerged from the day’s catch of more familiar cod, haddock and herring. Housewives had the shudders when ugly, bearded, spiking-looking denizens of the deep appeared on their fishmongers’ slabs.

In a less successful campaign than their classic ‘Dig For Victory’ posters, the Ministry of Food came out with a jingle that went down like the proverbial lead balloon. It went:

Handsome is as handsome does,

and though a fish looks funny,

it’s just as good as any cod,

and value for your money.  

Somehow, it never took off.           

         

ä

OVER-PAID, OVER-SEXED AND OVER HERE

While In London a year or two ago I came across a little pamphlet called Over There.  It contained the text of a typescript that was given to American servicemen before they left home for Britain during World War II.

            It's a revealing little treatise. More than one million American troops were stationed in Britain between 1942 and the invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe in June, 1944. Most of them had never been abroad before, and so the aim of Over There -- according to a foreword by Oxford University, which has republished it  -- was to prepare them for life in a very different country, and to try to prevent any friction between the newcomers and their British hosts.

            Whoever wrote these seven pages had a remarkable grasp of simple, direct English, an impressive knowledge of psychology, and an amazing understanding of the most relevant differences between the Americans and the British. When the original leaflet was distributed, its contents created more than a few raised eyebrows across the Atlantic, because it presented an unusually frank and objective view of Britain and the British; much more telling than they could ever have written themselves. The London newspapers were fascinated. In The (London) Times of July 1942, there was a laudatory if tongue-in-cheek critique of the pamphlet, comparing it with the works of Irving, Emerson and Hawthorne, all of whom, of course, had tried to interpret Britain to their American readers. In the self-important language of Britain’s The Times of those days, an editorial said: "None of  those American authors' august expositions has the spotlit directness of this revelation of plain horse sense, and an understanding of evident truths."

            To us, seventy years on in a new millennium, the text of Over There  may seem somewhat didactic and preachy and, with 20/20 hindsight, there is too much rah-rah breast-beating about "beating Hitler on his home ground."  For example: "Hitler knows they (Britain and America) are both powerful countries, tough and resourceful. He knows that they, with other united nations, mean his crushing defeat in the end."  The more likely truth is that, only a year after America had entered a war, and when Britain and its empire had been fighting alone for more than two years, Hitler must have felt the odds were strongly in his favor. At that moment the Nazis occupied pretty much all of Europe, and were already flexing their muscles in North Africa.

            The pamphlet quickly gets down to business. Its first advice is to forget past history. If you're an Irish-American, it suggests, you may see the Brits as the persecutors of the Irish.  Forget about the enemy Redcoats in the American Revolution, and the war of 1812, "There is no time today to fight old wars again, or bring up old grievances. We don't worry about which side our grandfathers were on during the Civil War, because it doesn't mean anything now."

            It's with great tact that the author tackles the legendary reserve and -- though it doesn't say it in such terms -- the stuffiness and stand-offishness of us, the Brits.  The thing to do, the booklet says, is not to deny these differences but to admit them openly, and try to understand them. "For instance," it says," the British are more reserved in conduct that we. On a small crowded island where forty-five million people live, each man (sic) learns to guard his privacy carefully -- and is equally careful not to invade another man's privacy.

            "So if Britons sit in trains or buses without striking up a conversation with you, it doesn't mean they are being haughty or unfriendly . . . they don't speak to you because they don't want to appear intrusive or rude." Those aren’t the true reasons for the Brits' starchy aloofness, but it was a pretty good attempt.

            The pamphlet takes a lot of trouble to discourage its readers from bragging or showing-off, especially about money. Saying, correctly, that American services’pay was the highest in the world, it goes on, "The British Tommy is apt to be specially touchy about his wages and yours. Keep this in mind. Use common sense, and don't rub him up the wrong way.”  This was good advice. The GI’s hosts were indeed resentful that their allies were paid tremendously more. On a more personal level they were jealous of the US forces’ uniforms, which were better-cut with higher quality cloth. Dressed in their thick, hairy, poorly cut, clunky-looking battle-dress uniforms, the Britissh “Tommies” found themselves swept aside by the local girls in the pub,  who were all over these apparently prosperous visitors who came with nylon stockings and PX goodies, and talked like Errol Flynn or Clark Gable. It’s not surprising that the British troops labeled these intruders “over-paid, over-sexed, and over here.”

            The author tried to tell readers, many of them rookies, that for all their sissy accents and soft-spoken politeness, the British were strong and resilient, and deserved a little respect for what they’d so far endured. “Sixty thousand British civilians – men, women and children – have already died under bombs, and yet their morale is unbreakable and high. A nation doesn’t come through that if it doesn’t have plain, common guts. The British are tough, strong people, and good allies. You won’t be able to tell them much about ‘taking it’” And here comes the rah-rah again: “They are not particularly interested in taking it any more. They’re far more interested in getting together in solid friendship with us, so that we can all start dishing it out to Hitler.”

            The booklet points out that comparisons are often invidious, and not a good idea; that England is smaller than North Carolina or Iowa, and that bragging about bigness – of buildings, mountains, family farms in places such as Texas and yes, money, wouldn’t go down in battered, small-scale Britain. The pamphlet says: “The British care little about size. For instance, London has no skyscrapers . . . they’ll point out buildings like Westminster Abbey . . . and the Tower of London, which was built almost a thousand years ago. They mean as much to the British as Mount Vernon or Lincoln’s birthplace do to us.”

            And so it goes on. The GIs are warned to be sensitive to the stringent rationing of food, clothes and cigarettes and other necessities, because Britain was under siege. Few civilians were allowed gasoline, and their cars were shut up in their garages “for the duration,” on bricks or railroad ties. There’s a warning that the towns and villages will look scruffy and unkempt, and that even England’s famous gardens will be growing only vegetables. Also, that many buildings will be unpainted and in disrepair, not only because there was little manpower, but also because most industries were hell bent on making tanks, guns and other war supplies for themselves, the British Empire forces and the Russians.

            A part of the booklet describes “The People and their Customs,” covering such important topics as “warm beer” and the “impossible” money system. And there’s a none too successful attempt to describe cricket, soccer and Rugby.

            Naturally, there’s advice about British vocabulary and pronunciation, which includes a caution that the natives “will pronounce all the ‘a’s in banana as in ‘father.’ However funny you may think this is, you will be able to understand people who talk this way, and they will be able to understand you.”

            On the last page of the pamphlet there are “Some Important Do’s and Don’ts,” most of which reiterate the points made elswhere. Noteworthy others are: “If you’re invited to eat with a family, don’t eat too much. Otherwise you may eat up their weekly rations. NEVER (actually in capitals) criticize the King and Queen. In your dealings with the British, let this be your slogan: it is always impolite to criticize your hosts; it is militarily stupid to criticize your allies.”

            There’s one thing wrong with that mention of bananas. Because of the ever-present threat of attack by German U-boats that blockaded the British Isles, such luxuries  were unknown after 1941, so people probably never mentioned them to their allied guests. I remember an American boy, a New Yorker, arriving as a pupil at my boarding school in 1942. His name was Lou Taylor. He was a quiet, likable boy, and we nicknamed him Long Island Lou.

            On his first day at the school, Lou brought a bunch of bananas, and I recall the hush, and then the excitement, when it was carried into the dining hall with some ceremony by the headmaster who, with help from the head boy, peeled them, and proceeded to cut them in pieces so that all the boys could taste them.

            Each piece was at most half an inch thick, and we ate them silently, and very slowly. They were the last bananas we saw until 1945.