Let's Do Lunch

She was reading a book at the kitchen table when Frank came back.

“Who was it? I didn’t recognize him,” she said, without looking up.

“Vogel.”

She made a face. “Burt Vogel? That crook? You haven’t heard from him for years, what did he want?”

“Wants me to go in to New York and have lunch with him next Tuesday. He’s got a problem, needs advice.”

“What sort of advice?”

“Didn’t say.”

“You should’ve asked him,” she said, “ and why are you grinning? What’s so damn funny?”

“Well, don’t you think it’s weird? He could hardly wait to see me out the door on my sixty-fifth birthday, and now he wants my advice!”

“And you’re going, I suppose.”

“Sure I am. Why not?”

“Because the man’s a prick, that’s why. You owe him squat.”

She’d been like this for quite a while, with her snarky little put-downs, like a big sister to a kid brother. Lately she’d seemed actually to dislike him, and it made him uneasy. Frank didn’t tell her he was flattered by the invitation. Nor had he ever told her he’d felt ignored and shut out by Vogel, who’d never once called or written since he retired. This trip back to the office might be a chance to re-connect, to make up. Reconcile, was that the right word?

“I want to go if only to see how much the place has changed, meet a few friendly faces maybe, have a free lunch with the Vogel’s new management team.”

She raised one eyebrow in that way she did. “Come on, you know there’s no such thing as a free lunch, remember? You’ve forgotten what the guy’s like, he’s a user. Wants something – want to bet?”

“Well, I’m going anyway.”

She seemed not to have heard him, with her head back in her book. She’d always been a big reader. In the last few months she’d been reading two or three books a week from the library in Ossining. Frank wasn’t much of a reader himself, though before he retired he’d told everyone he couldn’t wait to catch up with his reading. But somehow he’d never got around to it. One day he would.

She snapped her book shut and frowned up at him. “You’ll have to wear a suit and tie, you know. You haven’t done that for yonks, not since your mom’s funeral.”

“They don’t dress up these days,” Frank said, “not unless they’re meeting a client. But you could be right, he has visitors all the time. Maybe I should dress up a bit.”

“I can’t believe this,” she said. “You’ve been out of that place for years. You always told me you hated it . . . couldn’t wait to retire. You know what? I think you’re still scared of that jerk.”

Frank had been in his workshop in the basement when Vogel called, making a love seat for the yard. He spent more and more time down there on projects for the grandchildren, a rocking horse, a see-saw, a couple of doll-houses, a dog kennel. He was most at ease here. He could do what he wanted, when he wanted, the way he wanted. His wife knew nothing about woodwork, so she didn’t criticize him.

He heard her yell down to him after the phone rang. “Someone’s on the phone.”

“Who is it?”

“No idea. Pick it up will you?”   

Vogel’s voice was friendly, almost affectionate. He said something about staffing problems. Could it possibly be that he wanted him to come back? That he’d realized over the years what a contribution his older, more experienced colleague had made – could still make? If that was it, he’d do it like a shot.

She was wrong about his hating the place. Maybe he’d complained sometimes, but over the past few years he’d yearned for the familiar routine, the challenges, the friendships. He’d even enjoyed the daily commute in the train, when he could read the paper or take a nap if he liked. True, he’d be seventy-four in a couple of months, but he had experience, more than the lot of them put together. He’d be back in the swing of it in no time.

When Frank dressed in his room on Tuesday morning his collar was a little tight, and so was the waistband of his pants. But then he put on his red suspenders and the jacket of his charcoal suit and made a rare trip into his wife’s bedroom, standing for a full minute in front of the mirror. He smiled to himself. Not bad, he thought.

Nowadays, on the few occasions when they went to the city they drove, parking the car in a fenced lot, off the West Side Highway in the mid-50s. But today he took the train from Croton-Harmon, fearful there might be some traffic holdup.

He left home a few minutes later than he’d planned, and it wasn’t until he came off Route 9 and was approaching the permit-holders’ lot that it struck him – he didn’t have a permit anymore. Hadn’t done for years. He searched for a meter, and glanced at his watch while he circled the adjacent lot. He had about four minutes, and there were no empty spaces. Soon he was driving farther and farther away from the stairway up to the station until he found a vacant meter on the farthest edge of the park. To pay, he’d have to run a good hundred yards back to the attendant’s hut, and another two hundred yards from there to the steps.

He locked the car, started to jog toward the hut and was already out of breath by the time he reached it. He almost threw the bills at the attendant and turned to lollop down the paved road past the taxi rank toward the station. Panting, with his mouth hanging open, he labored up the steep staircase. At the top he leaned against the window by the ticket booth only to see that the 10:06 was approaching Platform 2. He snatched his ticket from the agent and, wheezing now, stumbled down the other stairway to the platform, steadying himself on the hand-rail, and with a final effort leaped into the car only seconds before the doors closed. He heaved in great gulps of air and flopped back in his seat.

Through the window to his right the Hudson was gliding by. He’d brought the Times from home, but was too tense and unsettled to read. His mind was a blank while he recovered his breath and composure. He gazed out at the passing jumble of sheds and warehouses, rusting, neglected machinery, and then the Tappan Zee Bridge and later, as the line drew farther away from the river, dense trees and sudden glimpses of tidy villages with half-empty streets.

The train stopped only at 125^th Street. After that it was minutes before it rumbled through the shadowy underground passages on the last few hundred yards of track outside Grand Central, the lights in the car flashing on and off. People were already standing up, reaching for their coats.

When the train drew into the platform a sudden attack of panic gripped him in the chest. This wasn’t going to work. He couldn’t possibly go back to that place. He’d be an anachronism, a dinosaur. Vogel was nearly thirty years his junior, while most of the staff would be half his age. The daily routines had changed since he was in business. Communications were hugely more electronic. He’d never used a cell phone and knew nothing about things like i-Phones, networking and video conferencing that his young neighbors talked about incessantly. There’d be new buzzwords, unfamiliar jargon. How could he hope to catch up?

But after he walked up the slope through the archway and came out into the airy concourse he felt much better. He gazed up into the renovated galaxy in the ceiling, awed by the transfiguration that had taken place since he was a daily commuter. It was almost like a spiritual awakening. Now, in contrast with the clutter of scaffolding, the ear-shattering machine-gun fire of jackhammers and pneumatic drills, it seemed in a way like some consecrated place, with its polished marble walls and lofty, majestic windows. A cathedral, even.

He was in perfect time. More relaxed now, he emerged from the station onto the wet sidewalk of 42^nd Street under a black, overcast sky, heading up to Madison Avenue and down the few blocks to the office. There were new faces behind the security desk in the echoing entrance hall. Once they’d have hailed him by name with a grin of recognition. Today there was only a mumbled request to sign the register.

Alone in the elevator he smoothed his hair and straightened his tie. Things had changed on the 46^th floor. Gone was the Regency wallpaper he’d chosen, in harmony with a reproduction Louis XVI reception desk with its matching chairs. The style was now minimalist. A young woman seated behind a cantilevered steel and glass table smiled up at him. A tiny black bud microphone like an astronaut’s seemed to hover near her lips.

She beamed at him. “You’ll be Mr. Bradford, right?”

He nodded. “Yes. I’m seeing Mr. Vogel at eleven.”

“He’s expecting you.”  She touched a button. “Mr. Bradford’s here to see Burt . . .”

The receptionist seemed to be listening for a few seconds and then turned to him.

“He’ll be a minute or two.”

The minute or two passed and the young woman turned to him again and smiled. “I’m afraid Burt’s, like, behind schedule. His assistant axed me if you’d mind waiting for a few moments. Would you like a cup of coffee or something?”

He thanked her, but declined. These days he was careful not to drink much coffee or tea, since he tended to have problems finding a bathroom when he was away from home. He’d be embarrassed if he had to leave the room while he was talking to Burt Vogel.

There were papers and magazines on the coffee table, but he was still too much on edge to read them. Instead, he stood up, hands in pockets, and paced about the reception area.

He looked up at eight spot-lit clocks on the wall, marked New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, London, Buenos Aires, Frankfurt, Hong Kong and Sydney. They weren’t there in his day. It had always been Burt’s ambition to have a network of wholly-owned offices, and it looked as though he was getting there. When Frank retired, the name of the firm had been Focus Public Relations, but now it was Focus Worldwide in ultramarine neon. On another wall were framed awards and, in showcases, Oscar-like trophies, including a cluster of Silver Anvils and some awards he didn’t recognize.

Presently a handsome gray-haired woman in a black pants suit appeared through a glass door and shook his hand, introducing herself as Suzanne, Vogel’s assistant.

“I’m really sorry for the delay, Mr. Bradford. Burt’s been having a bad day, but he’ll be out very soon.”

He sat down again. The clock marked New York said twenty after eleven. The receptionist caught his eye and smiled at him reassuringly, showing faultless, seemingly incandescent teeth.

“What happened to Aleesha Brown?” he asked her.

“Aleesha? Oh, she left way back. She’s had three babies . . . brought them all in a few days ago. Cute kids.”

“So you took her place?”

The young woman laughed.  “No way! There were two other girls after her. I’ve only been here a few months.”

“Like it?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Sure, like it’s a job. Know what I’m saying?”

Frank sat down again, and waited.

What the hell was Vogel up to? A few more minutes passed, and then the glass doors burst open. Burt Vogel stood, his arms raised in greeting.

“Frank Bradford, you old bastard! Good to see ya’!”

Vogel hadn’t changed much. The crew cut, the shifty eyes, the oddly pointy face. No wonder the staff called him ‘the ferret.’ He wore what Frank’s younger neighbors in Westchester would have called casual chic – an open neck under a Polo sweater, tailored chinos and loafers. He bounded forward and grasped Frank firmly by both shoulders, and Frank couldn’t help wondering whether Vogel was about to kiss him.

“Dunno what you’re doin’ to keep in trim, Frankie, but keep doin’ it. You're’ lookin' great! Come on in.”  

They settled in armchairs, facing each other in a corner of Vogel’s office.

“So how’s business?” Frank asked.

“Pretty damn good. Mind you, it’s very different now.”

“Different?”

“Yeah, we, like, changed course a couple of times. No more of that consumer crap. Not much corporate, neither. We’re really into environmental stuff, healthcare and medical these days. A lot of product and issue-oriented public affairs stuff.”

There it was, the jargon. Well, he could cope with that.

“We – that is, you – were moving into hi-tech,” Frank said, “What happened to all that? It was big.”

Did he imagine it, or did Vogel flinch?

“Most of that went down the drain last year. All those freakin’ dot-coms. Yeah, that hit us pretty hard. We had to let quite a few people go. You probably heard about that.”

Frank said no, he hadn’t heard.

“Bad scene,” Vogel said.

Frank wondered when he’d get to the point. But then Vogel changed the subject. “It’s a long time,” he said. “Remind me. How long is it since you retired?”

“Nearly nine years.”

Vogel whistled. “Enjoyin’ it?”

“Most of the time, I guess.”

“What about the rest of the time?”

Frank had decided he wouldn’t tell Vogel he'd give anything to be back at his desk. Not yet, anyway. He’d mind what he said, with no hint of the aimlessness of his life at home, his wife’s abusiveness, his bad back, the prostate thing, the memory lapses.

“Well, I confess I get a little bit restless up there,” he said. “I don’t get quite enough to keep my mind active and, well, I do rather miss the old days at Focus.”

“Don’t think we haven’t missed you too, Frankie,” Vogel said. “They don’t make ‘em like you anymore, old pal.” He paused, leaned forward and patted Frank on the knee. “I’ll be honest, if we have a problem here it’s finding senior people with the skills you brought to the place – energy, creativity, loyalty, integrity. Trouble is, everyone’s been promoted too goddamn fast. It’s the Peter Principle run amok. They’ve no real experience, you see. No precedents to apply to other clients’ problems. What we need is more experienced people.”

“Is that what you wanted to talk about?”

Vogel’s face brightened. “Yeah, you guessed it. I was broodin’ over this at home last week and I had an idea. In fact I nearly called you.”

He was sure of it. Burt Vogel was going to ask him for help. Maybe full-time, or at least as a consultant of some kind. Frank’s tension of the last hour or two had dissolved and given way to a surge of self-assurance.

“Tell me more about your idea.”

Vogel leaned back in his chair. “Ok, listen. I’ll cut the bullshit. Fact is, we’ve lost a whole bunch of good people. A lot of them have done well and moved up the totem pole. Here’s the idea – how about we hatch a plan to win ‘em back?”

“How?” Frank asked.

“Good question. S’pose we had a party,” Vogel said, “in some cool night spot we’d take over for the night. We’d ask the lot of ‘em, knowing the ones who hate our guts wouldn’t turn up anyway.”

“I get it,” Frank said, “you’d finish up with Focus alumni at every level who still had a residual good feeling about us.”

“Right!” Vogel said. “There’ll be a few who are just plain curious, but what the hell? We’ll give ‘em all a great time, lots to eat and drink, disco and stuff. Hey, we could screen some great nostalgic video, too!”

“And then, I guess, you’ll say a few well-chosen words.”

Vogel shook his head. “Nah! They’ll see what we’re up to – I’ll just make it a quickie. The real recruiting bit comes after everyone’s gone home, see? We’ll make our people really work the room, sure. But, a few days after the party’s over we’ll sit round the table and compare notes. Then we can draw up a list of people and approach ‘em one-on-one. Slowly, slowly, catchee monkey. Geddit?”

“Sounds great,” Frank said.  “So what’s the next step?”

Vogel grinned. “Aha! This is where you come in.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. Think about it, old buddy. Who knows more than you about the history of this outfit?”

Wasn’t it a certainty by now? In a minute or two Vogel would invite him to run his recruiting beano. Wasn’t planning and running events one of his specialties? It was worth a few grand. And, as well as that, he’d get a foot back in the door at Focus. Why didn’t Vogel just come out with it and pop the question?

“Ok, Burt, tell me what you want me to do?”

Vogel was talking faster. “You were here for nearly thirty years, and you’re a good judge of character. I bet you could put together a list of workmates as long as your arm,” he said, “and what I’d really like is a list like that, underlining the names of the ones you personally think were hot operators, real pro’s. Will you do that for me?”

Was this all? Just a measly list of names of former employees to ask to a damn party? Couldn’t he have asked for this in a five-minute phone call, instead of dragging him all the way into New York?

He wanted to say ‘No! Stick it, I owe you nothing. Find some other poor stiff you’ve unloaded a few days after his sixty-fifth birthday.’

But he didn’t. He said, “Glad to,” and hated himself for it.

“Jeez, you're a real pal,” Vogel said, “I knew you’d do it!”  Then he added, “When would be a good time of the year to do it?”

“To do what?”

“The party, of course”.

“Let me think about that,” Frank said.

Vogel’s secretary stood in the doorway and caught her boss’s eye.

“What's up, Suze?” Vogel asked.

Suzanne made a barely perceptible hitch of her head that said, ‘may we talk?’

Vogel excused himself and joined her in the doorway. A whispered conversation followed, at the end of which Frank distinctly heard Vogel say "No problem, tell ‘em I'll be there.”

Vogel sat down again.

“Shit! Gotta problem, Frankie . . . client in real trouble . . . wants me right now in his office on Fifth. Some kind of flap at the FDA.”

He patted Frank’s knee again. “I’m real sorry, I hoped we could have a good lunch at Giovanni’s. Just you and me together, so’s we could catch up a bit.”

He snapped his fingers. “Hey, tell you what, let's do lunch some other time. Give Suze a call and she'll fix it up. Ok?”

Vogel was pulling on his raincoat and heading for the door, calling instructions to Suzanne. His mind was already somewhere else. Seconds later he was gone, leaving Frank stunned, standing in the middle of the room.

He didn’t fix the lunch date with Suzanne, who was all over him with apologies. Instead he nodded a friendly enough goodbye and sat down for a minute or two in the reception area, where the pert young woman had gone to lunch and been replaced by someone else. He had to admit it, he’d been a ninny. It was all a big mistake. His wife had been right about Vogel, he was a user and a jerk, and of course Frank had always known that stuff about free lunches.

But what to do now?  Frank weighed his options. The first was to have a bite at Grand Central and go home to face a battery of monologues peppered with sneering questions like ‘well, what did I tell you?’ – or ‘why don’t you listen to me?’ But when the second option slipped into his mind he couldn’t suppress a little chuckle, though the receptionist didn’t seem to notice. He’d play hooky – have a few hours on the loose in Manhattan! There might not be free lunches but there were certainly free afternoons. Hell, he was retired wasn’t he? He’d go to a movie at two o’clock in the afternoon – take in one of the great independent pictures they never showed at their glitzy, plastic MovieMax at home.

Frank opened his newspaper and searched the listings in the Arts section. This was going to be fun! He’d buy himself a damn great bag of popcorn drenched in butter without her nagging him about cholesterol. Why hadn’t he treated himself to a day in the city before, letting his hair down, meeting old pals? A whole new way of life was opening up to him.

Sure, he’d dredge up some names of former colleagues for Vogel’s dumb list. But it would also be a great way to start checking out a list of long lost buddies.

He had his umbrella ready as he pushed through the glass doors onto the Street, but when he stood on the sidewalk he peered up into the afternoon sky.

The clouds were clearing, and the sun was coming out.

ooo0ooo

 

Man in the Mirror

He died fifty-one years ago, yet I see him every day. Each morning, all I need to do is look in the bathroom mirror, and there he is.

            “Morning, Dad,” I’ll say as our eyes meet, though usually under my breath, for fear that Lynn, my wife, will take these mutterings as an early indication of approaching dementia.

            Even though he was maybe two inches taller than I, and had straight hair and a mustache, we still looked alike and, now that I’m nearly ten years older than he was when he died, I know that we share many quirky mannerisms. Yet in other ways we were about as different as anyone could be.     

            Sadly, it was years after he’d gone that I really began to realize what an unusual and lovable man he was. Perhaps, before his sudden death at the age of seventy, I wrongly evaluated people in terms of their material success. Now, I hope, I’m older and maybe even a little wiser, because by those criteria my father wouldn’t have measured up. Like their ancestors, doctors and surgeons for generations, his two brothers became professionals, Bill a doctor and Frank a lawyer. But after his stint at a boarding school in Somerset, my father didn’t go on to college; instead he became a clerk in a rural branch of the Westminster Bank, and spent the rest of his working life in small country towns.

            He was the most extraordinary mix of seemingly incompatible traits. On one hand he was warm and kind and generous, yet at the same time he was wracked by anxiety about money, and an irrational fear of being burgled. While he was fervent in his attempt to nurture my brother David and me, and to see to it that we were well-informed, he was one of the least tactile people I’ve ever known. I don’t think he ever hugged us, and he certainly never kissed us. From my early teens I addressed him as ‘Sir,’ and whenever we met or parted -- even later when I might have been overseas for a year or two -- we only shook hands.

            But for all his apparent remoteness, he was capable of making us laugh, bursting spontaneously into song and verse, or posing some silly riddle from his own early childhood in the 1890’s.

            “What kind of noise annoys an oyster?” he’d ask.

            “We don’t know, Dad. What noise annoys an oyster.”

            “Why?” he’d say, “a noisy noise annoys an oyster.”

            When you’re five or six that’s pretty funny, but sometimes his verses were a little too macabre for our mother, who thought we were a trifle young for some of them. In a solemn voice he’d recite:

            “Oh dear Mama, what is that mess?

            It looks like strawberry jam.

            Hush, hush, my dears, ‘tis your Papa,

            run over by a tram.”  

My father had three brothers, and a sister, Janet. All four boys were in the army in World War I, and three survived. Arthur, the youngest, a shy, fragile youth, died in the trenches in Flanders, while Frank and Bill served nearby in France. Bill won the Military Cross patching up the wounded under enemy fire during the Battle of The Somme. My father, Harold, caught a chunk of shrapnel in the stomach, and after being shipped home to hospital, finished the war running a prison camp in Belgium. He must have been the most benevolent commandant, for our house was full of strange artifacts that German prisoners had made for him out of brass shell-cases: ashtrays, a dinner-gong that hung in an oak frame, and a pipe tobacco jar with a lid, all with ‘Kapt. H. Birch’ engraved on them. 

            Father was fifty when, in 1939, the second World War broke out. He became an air raid warden, and my mother a volunteer ambulance driver. We lived in a village on the estuary of the river Thames, along which the German bombers came and went during their raids on London. Our county, Kent, was the stage on which much of the Battle of Britain was played, and it bristled with searchlights and anti-aircraft batteries. My father’s job as a warden was fairly leisurely. He and other older villagers prowled the streets and farm buildings to check that windows were blacked-out, and to watch for fires from incendiary bombs. My mother, on the other hand, found herself carrying hundreds of casualties after air attacks on the fighter and bomber bases dotted around the surrounding countryside.

            One moonless night there was an incident that typified the clown in my father, and at the same time, his serious-mindedness. For an hour or so, after hearing strange sounds in an apple orchard, he crawled on hands and knees, believing himself to be stalking a German parachutist. When he at last threw himself, unarmed, on his prey, it turned out to be a startled sheep, much to the later amusement of his fellow wardens in the village pub.

            Father was an inveterate walker, and as teenagers on our long summer vacations from boarding school, David and I would stroll with him between the tall hazel-wood hedgerows in the narrow lanes around the village. He called these excursions ‘informative walks’ and, as patriarch turned pedagogue, would quiz us about which river flowed through what city, dates of the reigns of English kings and queens, quotations from Shakespeare, and even Latin common nouns, most of which I still remember more nearly seventy years later.

            There was one poignant scenario near the end of my father’s working life about which my mother didn’t tell me until he was dead. It revealed one chronic cause of anxiety that I realize we shared during our lives – a hell that, for lack of a better word, I will call job anxiety.  For years, as far back as I can remember, he was the Number 2 at his bank in the little market town of Sittingbourne. And one day in the Thirties he was short-listed for a post as Number 1 of a bigger branch, and summoned to London.

            He was almost shaking with fear when he boarded the train for London to attend an 11:00 a.m. interview at the Westminster Bank headquarters.  Eleven o’clock passed, then twelve, and he had still not been called. At two he was sent out to lunch, and it wasn’t until nearly four p.m. that the interview began. By that time he was in such a state that he was barely coherent. He didn’t get the job.

            I’m retired now, and have two children, thousands of miles away with on two different continents with their own families. Sometimes I wonder whether, forty-odd years from now, in the distant, impossible-to-imagine 2050’s, my son will ever look into his shaving-mirror and see and speak to me. If he and his sister remember me even a fraction as fondly as I do my father, that’ll be just fine by me.

oo0oo

                                                                                                                                   

A Man's Gotta Do . . .

Devon rhymes with heaven, and for good reason. The English county of Devonshire is all green grass, chocolate-box cottages and fishermen’s coves, wedged between three equally beautiful counties: Cornwall, Somerset and Dorset. Together, these make up the farthest corner of England -- a paradisical peninsula jutting into the Celtic Sea, on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.

When an Englishman thinks of Devonshire, cider and clotted cream come to mind, and wild Exmoor, where buzzards swoop overhead, and red deer and wild ponies roam free. The very last thing anyone would associate with Devon would be the Stafford Furniture Company, Limited.

In the 1970s, the town council of Barnstaple voted quietly for the creation of an industrial park to be tucked in a woody area on the edge of the town. This would result in jobs, and in increased business and tax income, they claimed. It would be good for Barnstaple. The local weekly paper gave the story supportive splash headlines, and not a letter was written to the editor; and not a voice raised in protest. Barnstaple’s people weren’t like that. Not at that point, anyway.

Barnstaple’s elders kept a wary eye on the kinds of plant that set up shop in their industrial park. The newcomers tended to be environmentally friendly -- which was not a phrase much used in England at that time. There was a manufacturer of duvets, for whom an environmental crisis could be nothing more serious than a cloud of goose feathers  accidentally leaked into the atmosphere. There were two household furniture factories that made couches and armchairs out of local oak and imported hardwoods. Another made window shades, and others produced balls of twine, cardboard boxes, and a brand of confectionery very similar to Twinkies.

And then along came Jack Stafford, a tall, lean man in his early thirties who had bushy black eyebrows, and who, had he chosen to be an actor, would have made a perfect hero in a Bronte or Dickens movie. Jack was a furniture designer who had recently won several awards from Britain’s prestigious Design Council. However, his furniture was not comfy couches and chairs for peoples’ homes. His business was contract furniture, and his specialty was stacking chairs, for use in conference rooms, hospitals and other public places. He’d been so successful that his firm had recently been bought by the Thomas Tilling Group, a conglomerate active in everything from life insurance and laboratory glassware to engineering. Stafford’s small workshop in Norfolk could no longer cope with the demand, and Tilling agreed to invest in a new plant elsewhere.

When Stafford’s planning application reached the town council, the burghers of Barnstaple read it with care. They looked at artfully lit photographs of his award-winning chairs, and another that showed his impressive gold-plated trophy from the Design Council. The recent acquisition by the respected Thomas Tilling Group was noted, and the application was accepted.

At that time I was a public relations consultant to several Tilling Group companies, including Stafford Furniture. Jack Stafford and I drove down to Devon to see how the new building, on a site on the edge of Barnstaple Bay, was progressing. For me, the main aim of this trip was to gather enough information to write a proposal for  organizing and publicizing the official opening of the plant about a year later.

At one point we passed a rectangular building, out of which several pipes snaked toward the bay.

“What’s that going to be?” I asked.

“That? Oh, it’ll be the water treatment plant.”

“What’s it going to treat, exactly?”

Jack seemed unconcerned. “It takes the gunk out of the water we use in the plating process.”

“What kind of gunk?”

“Chromium and cadmium. They’re deadly poisons, of course. We use them to put the chrome on our chairs. The treatment plant will filter it out, so by the time it gets into the bay it’ll be as clean as a whistle.”

That sounded ohttps://www.google.com/accounts/RP?c=CPDnvvropuqU2gEQ9eC68aaf9cY9&hl=enk to me, and my mind switched elsewhere.

The plant began what they called ‘pilot production’ about three months before the official opening ceremony planned for April 1971. A few days after the first shiny chrome-plated chairs came off the assembly line, Jack Stafford called me in my office in London.

“Bit of a fuss going on in Devon, John,” he said.

“Really? “ I said.

“There are people demonstrating at the gate.”

“Demonstrating? What about?”

“Some of the townspeople are in a bit of a tizzy about the plating plant. They’ve heard about the chrome and cadmium. They think our treated water could kill the fish in the bay, and find its way into the town’s water supply.”

“What’s your reaction to that, Jack?” I asked.

“It’s piffle,” he said. “Absolute bosh! That water’s as pure as the driven snow. Why? A baby could drink it."

In a day or so we’d fixed a press conference, at which the plant manager and I met the demonstrators and the local media. Armed with documents from the firm of consultants certifying the purity of the water, we took reporters on a guided tour of the plant. On the next day the noisy, banner-waving crowd was gone from the factory gates and, later in the week, stories appeared in the local paper and broadcast media assuring Barnstaple’s citizens that they had nothing to fear.

For the next few months all was quiet. Then, one day in the spring, Jack Stafford and his board of directors converged on the town’s best hotel in readiness for the opening ceremony. Later in the day came Sir Geoffrey Eley, the chairman of the Thomas Tilling Group and others of his ilk, together with Jeremy Thorpe, the popular Member of Parliament for Devon North. With my press releases, photographs, lists of invitees, name tabs and other PR paraphernalia after weeks of preparatory work, I was there checking and counter-checking, phoning and fussing.

That evening, as we all relaxed in the hotel bar enjoying pre-dinner drinks, I heard what seemed to be raised voices in the street outside the hotel. I looked out the window, where about thirty people were gathering, unfurling banners on which the word ‘Poison’ seemed to be prominent.

“They’re back,” I whispered to Jack.

“Who are?”

“The demonstrators.”

Stafford and I slipped out of the bar and into the street, where a slightly belligerent man with a red, round face asked me, “Is that Stafford bloke in there?”

“He’s right here.” I said.

Stafford strolled up to the man, for all the world like Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry. But he held out his hand. “How do you do,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

 “Well, you can shut down that bloody factory for a start!” the man said.

An argument began about the efficacy of the water treatment plant, at the end of which Stafford said, “Listen, my good man, I thought we cleared this up once and for all last year. Tell me, what do we have to do to convince you this water’s perfectly safe?”

The man thought for a moment, and his colleagues craned to hear his answer.

“There’s only one thing,” he said. “If you can get one of them high-ups to drink some of that water himself, in front of the newspapers and that. Then we’ll believe ya’”

“Bargain,” said Stafford, and they shook hands again.

Who’d impress them most, Jack and I wondered. We doubted Sir Geoffrey Eley would do it. Who better, we agreed, than their own, likeable Member of Parliament?

Back in the bar I sidled up to Jeremy Thorpe and put the question to him.

With a sly grin he said. “Why not? But there’s one condition.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“That you drink it first,” said the MP for Devon North.

In the morning I slipped out and bought an elegant crystal goblet from the nearby Dartington Glass Works, and half an hour later, the Right Honorable Jeremy Thorpe, Jack Stafford, a foreman and I stood together, alone, around a faucet in the water treatment plant.

The water ran clear and clean. I raised the goblet to my lips. It was flat, and utterly tasteless. I refilled the glass and passed it to the others.

“Not a vintage year, I ‘d say,” Thorpe said dryly.

Three hours later the band played, Sir Geoffrey Eley cut the ceremonial tape, and the VIP party meandered through the plant under the watchful eyes of the reporters and TV cameras. At the water treatment plant, true to his word, Jeremy Thorpe drank a convincing amount of the water. Then, inviting an unbiased witness to join him, he poured himself another glass, carried it to the front of the building, raised his goblet to the crowd, and downed the entire contents. Smiling broadly, the Right Honorable Member made a little bow.

The demonstrators had watched silently among the public on their tiered benches, waiting for the show, their banners furled but ready. Slowly, a ripple of applause from the audience swelled into cheers.

And we never heard from them again.

                            oo0oo

Lucy, Soapy and Dogs

It’s taken more than three-quarters of my life to realize that my best teachers and professors were the ones who taught not from their heads but from their hearts.

I enjoyed languages, and Latin, French and German came fairly easily. I also felt comfortable enough with biology, chemistry, geography and history. The people who taught these were competent enough, but what I learned about art, music and English literature has lived with me forever, simply because these were taught with a transparent passion for their subject matter.

But math? Forget it. Mr. Griffin, the math master, taught only from his head. As a result I'm arithmetically challenged. I count on my fingers under restaurant tables to work out how much to tip. I can’t read a balance sheet to save my life, and making change is always a puzzle. You’ll find more on this shortcoming in this blog, in a piece entitled “Count Me Out.”

At the time I thought I was a dunce at math because I was plain dumb, and later that maybe it was to do with being a right-brain person. But now I’m convinced it was because Mr. Griffin, our fast-talking Welsh math master, was all brain and no heart. Gray-haired, short and irascible, he galloped through his lessons, scrawling illegible equations and proofs on the board, laboring under the wrong assumption that everyone in the class was keeping up with him. At almost every lesson he lost his temper, shouting and hurling sticks of blackboard chalk into his bewildered audience. It was only then that he displayed any passion or emotion. Griffin died halfway through my time at the school, and for me the only sad thing about his demise was that although his successor – Mr. Hawkins – was patient and paternal, it was too late to start again. By then the die was cast.
World War II was raging for the first few years of my days at Cranbrook, a boarding school in South East England. Most of the masters were either too old to be in the armed services, or had some physical or other reason not to be in uniform. Oddly, there was not a single woman on the teaching staff. It seems it occurred to no one then that a woman might be capable of explaining the difference between an equilateral and an isosceles triangle to a bunch of fourteen-year-olds.
Mr. Lockett was one of the masters whose love of his subjects – art, fine arts and workshop – endeared him to his students. He was a gangling, bony man with hugely thick horn-rimmed glasses who we nicknamed ‘Lucy’, after the character Lucy Lockett in a nursery rhyme. He was a Communist and also a conscientious objector, but never preached about his politics or pacifism. He was impassioned about art in all its forms. In his painting and drawing classes we inherited his love of the Post-Impressionists and Surrealists. It’s no wonder that visitors touring the art room on the annual Parents’ Day were puzzled to find the pervasive influences of Cezanne, Matisse and Dali in our own efforts displayed on the art room walls.
But it was Lucy Lockett’s fine art classes that affected me for life. He'd amassed what seemed to be hundreds of color postcards of paintings. They ranged from the nativities and crucifixions from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, the Romantics, the Realists, Dada, and contemporary work that included Kandinsky, Klee, Ben Shahn and Homer Winslow.

With a contraption called an epidiascope, Lockett projected these images on the whitewashed walls of the art room. So profound was his knowledge that he held us spellbound while he explained the artist’s intent, the focus and symmetry of each picture, its balance and the minutiae of the painter’s life and environment. Sometimes we’d discuss a single picture for the entire forty-five minute period, while over a month we’d study, say, the Florentines, the Pre-Raphaelites or the Cubists. So, through the history of art, with Lucy’s help, we dissected the astonishing detail of Vermeer’s interiors, recognized the social messages in Daumier’s grim portrayals of peasants at work, witnessed Van Gogh’s craziness creeping into his pictures, and the threat of Nazism looming over the German painters of the 30s. We weren't only learning about pictures hanging on walls in dusty galleries, but also about the artists themselves, history, psychology, religion, human nature, and life itself.

It was Lockett who brought bags of broken Lucite into the workshop, fragments of the cockpit covers of enemy and friendly fighters and bombers that plunged from time to time into the farmland and woods around the school. These we cut and polished, fashioning them into useful objects – letter-openers, signet rings, paperweights and napkin holders. Later, we carved figures of humans and animals that bore an almost passing resemblance to pieces from Lockett's treasured collection of Japanese netsuke, exquisite miniature ivory sculptures.

And then there was Mr.Hudson, the music master who also, like every one else – except the late Mr. Griffin – had had a nickname. ‘Hudson’s Washing Soap’ was the best-known brand of laundry powder, and so he was labeled ‘Soapy’. A darkly handsome man with a perennial five-o’clock shadow, he played seventy-eight-speed records on an ancient phonograph. Much like Lucy Lockett and his artists, Soapy Hudson knew his composers and their lives as though they were members of his own family.

In the 1940s, the world’s greatest composers were believed to be Palestrina, Bach, Handel, Hayden, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner and Brahms. Soapy Hudson taught us their names in order of birth with an impossible-to-forget mnemonic – Please Bring Half a Hundredweight, Mother, Because Sister Wants Bananas.
These nine, and many others’ works, were played again and again during my seven years at Cranbrook. We became so familiar with the great symphonies that we could hum along with them. We felt we’d been there when Beethoven was composing his ninth and final symphony, angrily pressing his ear to the lid of the piano in a vain attempt to hear the notes, even though by then he’d been stone deaf for seven years. We all but heard Schumann, a chronic manic-depressive, whistling softly to himself, facing the wall in his favorite coffee shop before his early death in an asylum. We felt for lonely Brahms, a lifelong bachelor who, even when well off, lived in a rented room in Vienna. He rose every day at five a.m., brewed himself cup after cup of pungent black coffee from a samovar, and smoked equally strong cheroots. How, Hudson asked us, could such a man write music that was so heartfelt, so romantic? But he never told us about Brahms’ curiously profound relationship with Clara Schumann for thirty years after her husband, Robert Schumann’s death.

And then there was ‘Dogs’ Saunders, who taught English Literature. Larger than life, he was as different from Lucy Lockett and Soapy Hudson as chalk is from cheese. Since he had fought in several campaigns in the trenches in World War I, he was probably in his sixties, as much as thirty years older than his arty and musical counterparts.

Throughout the Twenties and Thirties, before his blondish hair had grayed, earlier student generations had called him ‘Sandy.’ But by the 1940s, because he could be ferocious at times, and actually bared his teeth when he was upset, he had become ‘Dogs.’ Yet it didn’t take us long to discover that his bark was worse than his bite.

Dogs Saunders was florid-faced, gravel-voiced, and corpulent, and had an oddly distinctive walk. Seeing him hurrying to a class, or heading down the village street for one of his all too frequent visits to the bar of the George Hotel, even on the calmest summer day he walked as though he were wading into a strong wind. Besides teaching English lit., he was also the school’s deputy headmaster, and the commanding officer of its highly active wartime unit of the OTC, the Officers’ Training Corps.

Dogs’ classes focused almost entirely on three playwrights, whom he called ‘The Three S’s: Shakespeare, Sheridan and Shaw. These weren’t remotely representative of the whole compass of English letters but, luckily, two other masters more than capably handled the real gamut from Chaucer, through Milton and Wordsworth, to Joyce and Woolf. There are ample reasons why Saunders belonged up there with the two other memorable teachers; he had an abiding and infectious passion for Shakespeare, and taught it superbly, if idiosyncratically. As a student himself, he must have studied the plays and sonnets with almost the same labored devotion with which an Imam learns the Koran. For me, a thorough grounding in Shakespeare turned out to be a perfect foundation for a later, broader study of English. Like Lucy Lockett and his postcards, Dogs unveiled insights that formed the beginnings of an early understanding of human personality and behavior.

It certainly wasn't the major’s ability to read aloud that endeared us to Shakespeare's plays. In fact, he read them terribly badly, with a total absence of feeling for the words. His reading of Richard III's impassioned plea for "a horse . . . my kingdom for a horse . . ." had all the fire and pathos of someone reading a telephone book. And when he read the lines of Ophelia and Cordelia – two of the Bard’s most tragic and feminine characters, he made no attempt to alter or soften his voice. His pitch and key were no different from his voice for Hamlet and Lear.
Where was the magic, then, the fascination, the thrill? Strangely, Dogs’ monotonous tone didn't matter. It was his self-interruptions, his asides and translations of the language that made him the wizard he was. There seemed to be nothing he didn't know about the characters, their motivations, the different facets of their personalities and the actual construction of the plays. But for him, when seeing As You Like It on the stage, we’d never have known that melancholy and philosophical Jaques (whom Dogs correctly pronounced ‘Jaqueez’ and not Jacques) was there to inject some gravity and reflectiveness into what would otherwise have been little more than a saccharine Harlequin romance. In the same way he explained comic relief, showing how the bawdy nurse in Romeo and Juliet, the wisecracking grave digger in Hamlet and the lewd Porter in Macbeth were inserted at exactly the right point in the plays to offset these tragedies’ stark horror. Here was one of our first lessons in the craftsmanship of writing.
There was no doubt that Saunders’ favorite play was Henry V. He was, after all, a bemedaled, battle proven veteran who profoundly believed that King and Country came before all else. Henry V is an enactment of war, courage and loyalty to the Crown, and probably the most patriotic play ever written, so it’s not surprising that the old man became watery-eyed, and his voice sometimes cracked when he read Henry’s rousing speeches. Is it too fanciful to believe that, in his mind, he was not a spectator at Agincourt, but back at war in France himself? Instead of the chaos of Henry’s battlefield in France, was he hearing the chatter of German machine-gun fire at Ypres, or on the Somme, the sudden bursts of flares in the night sky, the silence before the charge? Could he see and hear the writhing, unattended wounded, or smell the first pungent whiff of poison gas?

Dogs could become fiercely loquacious whenever anyone dared suggest that the superhuman outpourings of Shakespeare, a mere glove maker’s son and a grammar school boy, were written by someone else. He scoffed at the suggestion that more worldly, university-educated men such as Bacon, Marlowe, an earl or two or even the well-educated and studious King James I might have been responsible. He took the side of the ‘Stratfordians,’ who were equally dismissive of the theory, but whose case these days holds as little water as that of the Flat Earth Society, or the Creationists. Even then, half a century ago, I found his rebuttals over-defensive and unconvincing.

Dogs’ other playwrights – both Irishmen , Sheridan and Shaw – received short shrift compared with Shakespeare. But during our study of two of Sheridan’s plays, The School for Scandal and The Rivals, he seemed to become a different person altogether. The sheer zest of these two Regency comedies, with their racy tales about marital infidelity, fraud and mistaken identity, seemed to bring him beaming out of his shell. He was tickled by the very names of the characters such as Lady Sneerwell and Mrs. Candour in School for Scandal, and Lydia Languish and verbally-inept Mrs. Malaprop in The Rivals, and he positively chortled at their antics.

When it came to Shaw, the major unexpectedly revealed his true political colors. Who would have thought that this dyed-in-the-wool, stiff upper-lip Englishman was not a staunch Conservative but instead leaned somewhat to the left? There was no hint of this when we were immersed in Saint Joan, but when we got to Pygmalion there was no doubt he was a latent lefty. Unlike My Fair Lady, Shaw’s play is almost a political tract, a parody of the idle rich, an attack on class distinction and a billboard for the cause of feminism. Dogs made no secret, at least in the classroom, that he, too, was a champion of the working man and woman.
Lucy, Soapy and Dogs were three men with uniquely different personalities and beliefs. They shared their passions and played a part in making me whatever I‘ve become. In their way they were the lions of my boyhood – a pride of pedagogues.


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