An Evening with Johnners Read Free Page A

‘There you are. See what you get for two hundred dollars!’

    I was in India last winter for two of the Test matches. It is a very strange country. Do you know, I still don’t know whether they drive on the left or the right. They steer very well, even around the cows lying in the middle of the road, but it is all very frightening.
    And, of course, the food is very tricky. But they have got a new dish especially for Englishmen. It’s called ‘Boycott Curry’.
    You still get the runs, but more slowly!

    N ow the theme of this evening is really to let you know how lucky I have been in life and how much fun I have had. I started off by having a wonderful family: a mother and father, a sister, two brothers – a very close family.
    My wife has put up with me for forty-five years, which is very sweet of her, and we have five lovely children, and they have produced seven [now eight] grandchildren. And it is, quite seriously, very important if you are doing a job like mine, rushing around and meeting a lot of people, to come back to a home in which you know there is love and happiness and comfort. So that’s my luck Number One.

    I got lucky in my education, because I was sent to the oldest preparatory school in England. The food matched the age of the school! It was in Eastbourne, Temple Grove it was called, and I only remember two things about it really. The matron had a club foot, which was unusual, but the headmaster had a glass eye. It was a very well disguised glass eye and I said to someone, ‘How do you know it’s a glass eye?’
    ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘it came out in the conversation.’
    I then went to Eton and again I am lucky, because it’s the best trade union in Great Britain. There are so many Old Etonians around the place; you meet them and it helps and I have lots of happy memories there.
    My late friend, William Douglas Home, the playwright, did something which amused me. He was sitting an exam and they brought the questions to his desk and one of them was: ‘Write as briefly as you can on the future of one of the following subjects.’ The first was socialism and the second was coal. So he thought for a moment and chose coal. He wrote one word: ‘Smoke’.
    And he got seven out of ten, which wasn’t bad!
    We used to go to a housemaster’s house for our history lesson and if the telephone rang in his study he would say to one of us, ‘Go and answer the telephone.’ At the time he was very keen on the film actress Anna May Wong. She used to come and have dinner with him and he rather fancied her.
    One day the telephone went and he said to this chap, ‘Gilliat, go and answer the telephone.’
    Obviously he hoped it was Anna May Wong and when Gilliat came back two minutes later the master said, ‘Yes, yes, who was it?’
    ‘Sorry, sir,’ said Gilliat, ‘Wong number!’

    T hat was Eton. Then I went to Oxford, where I read history and P. G. Wodehouse and played cricket about six times a week, which was good fun. And I only achieved one thing there which I don’t think anybody else has ever achieved. I actually scored a try at rugby wearing a macintosh. I’ll tell you how it happened.
    I was playing for New College against Trinity and someone tackled me and pulled my shorts off. I went and stood on the touchline while they went to get another pair and someone said, ‘You’d better put this macintosh on to cover your confusion,’ which I did.
    The ball came down the line and when it got to me on the left-wing I said, ‘Outside you!’ and took the ball. The referee should have blown his whistle because I hadn’t got leave to go back on, but he was laughing so much that he just went pffftt and couldn’t blow and I touched down between the posts!

    T hen, like so many people of that age, I wasn’t sure what career I wanted to follow. So I was lucky, in a way, because we had a family business. We used to export coffee from Brazil. We had an office in London and so, reluctantly, I went in there.