Notes From a Small Island Read Free Page A

programme that unfolded on the television was called Jason King. If you're of a certain age and lacked a social life on Friday evenings in the early Seventies, you may recall that it involved a ridiculous rake in a poofy kaftan whom women unaccountably appeared to find alluring. I couldn't decide whether to take hope from this or be depressed by it. The most remarkable thing about the programme was that, though I saw it only once more than twenty years ago, I have never lost the desire to work the fellow over with a baseball bat studded with nails.
Towards the end of the programme another resident came in, carrying a bowl of steaming water and a towel. He said, 'Oh!' in surprise when he saw me and took a seat by the window. He was thin and red-faced and filled the room with a smell of liniment. He looked like someone with unhealthy sexual ambitions, the sort of person your PE teacher warned that you would turn into if you masturbated too extravagantly (someone, in short, like your PE teacher). I couldn't be sure, but I would almost have sworn that I had seen him buying a packet of fruit gums at Suburban Wife-Swap that afternoon. He looked stealthily at me, possibly thinking something along the same lines, then covered his head with the towel and lowered his face to the bowl, where it remained for much of the rest of the evening.
A few minutes later a bald-headed, middle-aged guy - a shoe salesman, I would have guessed - came in, said, 'Hullo!' to me and 'Evening, Richard,' to the towelled head and took a seat beside me. Shortly after that we were joined by an older man witha walking-stick, a dicky leg and a gruff manner. He looked darkly at us all, nodded the most tinily precise of acknowledgements, and fell heavily into his seat, where he spent the next twenty minutes manoeuvring his leg this way and that, as if positioning a heavy piece of furniture. I gathered that these people were all long-term residents.
A sitcom came on called My Neighbour is a Darkie. I suppose that wasn't its actual title, but that was the gist of it - that there was something richly comic in the notion of having black people living next door. It was full of lines like 'Good lord, Gran, there's a coloured chappie in your cupboard!' and 'Well, I couldn't see him in the dark, could I?' It was hopelessly moronic. The bald-headed guy beside me laughed until he was wiping tears from his eyes, and from under the towel there came occasional snorts of amusement, but the colonel, I noticed, never laughed. He simply stared at me, as if trying to remember what dark event from his past I was associated with. Every time I looked over, his eyes were fixed on me. It was unnerving.
A starburst briefly filled the screen, indicating an interval of adverts, which the bald-headed man used to quiz me in a friendly but confusingly disconnected way as to who I was and how I had fallen into their lives. He was delighted to find that I was American. 'I've always wanted to see America,' he said. 'Tell me, do you have Woolworth's there?'
'Well, actually, Woolworth's is American.' 'You  don't  say!'  he  said.   'Did  you  hear  that,   Colonel? Woolworth's is American.' The colonel seemed unmoved by this intelligence. 'And what about cornflakes?' 'I beg your pardon?' 'Do you have cornflakes in America?' 'Well, actually, they're American, too.' 'Never!'
I smiled weakly, and begged my legs to stand me up and take me out of there, but my lower body seemed oddly inert.
'Fancy! So what brings you to Britain then if you have cornflakes already?'
I looked at him to see if the question was serious, then embarked reluctantly and falteringly on a brief resume of my life to that point, but after a moment I realized that the programme had restarted and he wasn't even pretending to listen, so I tailed off, and instead spent the whole of part two absorbing the heat of the colonel's glare.

When the programme finished, I was about to hoist myself from the chair and bid this happy