Lewis Playing for Time

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-28115-2
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

The humour of self-deprecation is peculiarly English. Few people do it better than Jeremy Lewis. His first two autobiographical volumes - Playing for Time and Kindred Spirits - are being reissued in Faber Finds to coincide happily with his third volume - Grub Street Irregular - being published by HarperCollins. With a sharp eye for the absurd and a fond sympathy for life's eccentrics, in Playing for Time, Jeremy Lewis treats us to uproarious tales from his time in Dublin in the 1960s, mad escapades in Europe and America, life amidst the snares and delusions involved in growing up in middle-class England in the 1950s, and of his ever unrequited passion for the ever unattainable ffenella. Richard Cobb enjoyed this book so much he managed to review it twice, a quote from one will do.'I like books that make me laugh, and Jeremy Lewis's Playing for Time kept me laughing every night in my local for a week'.

Jeremy Lewis worked for many years in publishing after leaving Trinity College, Dublin, in 1965. He was a director of Chatto & Windus for ten years, and the deputy editor of the London Magazine from 1990 to 1994. A freelance writer and editor since 1989, he has been the commissioning editor of the Oldie since 1997, and the editor-at-large of the Literary Review since 2004. He has written two volumes of autobiography - Playing for Time and Kindred Spirits (both now available in Faber Finds'), and a third, Grub Street Irregular was published in 2008. He has written biographies of Cyril Connolly, Tobias Smollett and Allen Lane, and a book about the Greene family - Graham Greene's siblings and first cousins - Shades of Greene.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lewis, Jeremy

Leseproben

CHAPTER ONE

Unholy Trinity

In the weeks – and even months – that followed my dismissal from the world of advertising I don’t remember giving a moment’s thought to my future prospects: we lived in a tiny, perpendicular cottage within a wave’s break of the front, and I happily reverted to my familiar and vastly preferable habits of reading in the sun, swimming enormous distances and striding about the Downs while the golf balls whizzed about my head like a barrage of enemy fire. I did, however, stir myself to the extent of writing a rather vague letter to Trinity College, Dublin, asking them if they would like to offer me a place to read history.

According to an authoritative-looking book I discovered in the Seaford Public Library, the college of the Holy and Undivided Trinity had been founded towards the end of the sixteenth century by Queen Elizabeth, was loosely modelled on its Cambridge namesake and closely associated with the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, whatever that might be, and numbered among its old boys a gaggle of playwrights including Congreve, Goldsmith, Synge, Wilde and Samuel Beckett and assorted literary men like Swift, Burke, Bishop Berkeley and – for some curious reason – both Sheridan le Fanu and Bram Stoker, the originator of Dracula. I knew, too, that it was considered very ‘wild’ by those in the know, that it was inhabited by the tweedier type of English public schoolboy, much given to blowing hunting horns and being sick out of windows from a great height, and that it was possible to gain admission on the strength of ‘O’, let alone ‘A’, levels. It sounded like perfection; but I received no acknowledgement from this ancient seat of learning, and after a week or two I gave it no more thought.

As summer turned to autumn, and the sea began to get too chilly for more than the occasional dip, I began – in a torpid, gloomy manner – to bend my mind once more to the horrid business of earning a living. Perhaps the Brighton Argus would take me on as a cub reporter? What could I offer the British Council? (Nothing, it seemed.) Should I have followed the advice of the retired major doubling up as a careers advisor and sought employment in the wine trade, or as a chicken farmer? With every day that passed I lowered my sights still further, and I was scanning the small ads for possible employment as a trainee clerk when, in early October, a letter arrived bearing an Irish stamp. Inside was a letter from someone who signed himself off as the Senior Tutor of Trinity College, Dublin; he informed me that he would be delighted to offer me a place, that term began next day, and that I should report for duty at once if I wanted to take advantage of his kindly offer. Redemption was suddenly at hand; I need worry no more for at least four years; I hurried away to have a bath and wash my hair, for it was well known that the Irish were an insalubrious people, and it might be my last opportunity for many weeks to come.

That afternoon I set off for London in the train, heavily encumbered with luggage and feeling not unlike a Victorian traveller en route for darkest Africa. I took a taxi from Victoria round to my aged Auntie Annie in Onslow Gardens, where I refreshed myself with a cup of tea and took note once more of the carefully pasted-up instructions to unwary occupants of her diminutive bathroom (‘Pull Chain down STRAIGHT’) before setting out to find a travel agent who might be able to shed light on the mysterious regions to which I was bound, and advise me on how best to get there in order to meet the Senior Tutor’s deadline. Despite my Geography ‘A’ level and the Irish stamp, I wasn’t altogether sure whether Dublin was in the North or in the Republic. Which part of the island was I heading for? Would I be needing the passport my mother had so carefully packed beneath my underpants?

A couple of hours later I clambered aboard the London to Holyhead train at Euston. I settled into a dimly lit compartment and opened Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour. The spirit of adventure, never strong at the best of times, ebbed unhappily away in the half-light, and I was engulfed in the same feelings of homesickness that, only a couple of years earlier, had marked me out as the Wettest Boy in the School, sobbing into my New Statesman as the train drew out of Paddington, while all about me manly, rugger-loving boys lit up enormous cigars and hurled inflated contraceptives out of the window with cries of virile glee. My only companion was a cheerful, red-faced Irishman in a knobbly white jersey. ‘Trinity, eh,’ he exclaimed, after examining the labels my mother had glued so carefully to my impressive range of trunks and suitcases. ‘By God,’ he said, ‘they’ll have your guts for garters,’ and disappeared in the direction of the bar, chuckling to himself in a highly gratified manner. He returned shortly after, clutching several bottles of stout and a scotch egg; and as the train hurled through the Midlands on its way to Anglesey he described with a hideous relish the misdeeds of Trinity students, till my head reeled with tales of mass intoxication and the smashing of windows and undergraduates being chased across Dublin by infuriated beetle-browed Gardai wielding clubs the size of baseball bats.

At one o’clock we arrived in Holyhead, and I humped my luggage aboard the Dun Laoghaire steamer. The Celtic world lay all about me in the darkness: swarthy, diminutive North Walians in blue jerseys and Wellington boots; beefy, red-faced labourers from Roscommon or Mayo, the mud of Coventry or Camden Town still adhering to their boots, tossing down pint after pint of Guinness at the bar and singing songs of a kind I had never heard before; censorious young seminarians in black macs and homburg hats, with pursed lips and sunken eyes, thankful to be leaving behind them the tainted soil of heathen England; waxen-featured nuns looking queasy and cross-eyed, but unwisely refusing to exchange the smoky, sweaty squalor of the second-class lounge for a breath of fresh air (some years later one of these unhappy ladies was sick all over my typewriter, and I mopped it up with the weary unconcern of a veteran). I felt, as I was often to feel in the future, very large, very blond, very conspicuous and irredeemably Anglo-Saxon.

Of the four-hour crossing I now remember little. Greatly daring, I joined the red-faced labourers at the bar and ordered – in as low a tone as could possibly be mustered – the first of the several thousand pints of Dublin stout that were to pour down my throat over the next four years; I treated myself to a pork pie and a cold sausage roll, and washed this unpleasing mixture down with another pint of the same; like a true Englishman, I disdained the steamed-up lounge with its background chorus of retching and groaning, and strode round and round the deck – noticing as I did so a handsome, strong-featured girl in a corduroy coat, with auburn hair, an exciting-looking bosom and in one hand a copy of The Tin Drum, which she was quite incapable of reading in the darkness and the Force Eight gale. With her wide mouth and good cheekbones and hair lashing about her face, she looked like a duplicate Brigitte Bardot who had been unexpectedly parachuted onto the wildly bobbing deck; I fell instantly in love with this radiant apparition, and remained so for the next eighteen months at least. And at about six o’clock on a rainswept, silver-grey morning I caught my first sight of a view that would, in days to come, move me more than once to tears of joy and regret: the delicate, elegant cones of the Dublin Hills and the Wicklow Mountains to the south and, to the north, Howth Head and the great sweep of Dublin Bay.

An hour or so later I had trundled into Dublin aboard a foreign-feeling black and orange train, examined a notice in Westland Row Station warning Irish girls about the perils of London life and giving the addresses of various priests in Hammersmith and Kentish Town, and deposited my faithful cases in the left-luggage office. By now I felt hungover, underslept and ruinously indigested: the long night, the Guinness and the pork pie were taking their toll; it was still raining; and for all its seedy elegance, Dublin seemed to exude a sour smell of stale stout and old socks. I wandered into Trinity, and the graceful Georgian squares looked sombre and granitic in the chilly morning light, with here and there a broken window, and the odd unshaven figure groping its way in a dressing gown, towel over the arm and sponge-bag in hand, towards the College Baths, where enormous enamel tubs awaited it, like private swimming pools, with a claw at each corner and vast brass taps belching steam and boiling water. I spotted someone I’d known at school coming towards me and, feeling too reduced to explain what I was doing there, I dodged behind a pillar until he had disappeared in the direction of his room; I bought a postcard of the Front Square – the sky a cobalt blue, the grass a fluorescent lime – and sent home a gloomy message to the effect that Dublin seemed quite dreadful and that they should expect me home within the next day or two.

Quite how I filled in the rest of that terrible day mercifully escapes me, but some time towards the end of the afternoon I was allocated digs in a distant suburb by a brisk lady with something of the school matron about her – to my disappointment she failed to offer me a spoonful of radio malt – and bundled into a taxi of the kind I was later to spot breaking down in Guatemala City or the Jordanian desert. During my time in Dublin I never found a taxi-driver who had the faintest idea of where he...