Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

The lurid continental fashionably prurient paperback romance, by the way, was The Castle by Franz Kafka. A Man.

Unless it was by Milena Jesenská Pollak.

* * *

I couldn’t have been given more clues. Rubella was unable to put his fallen cherub’s lips around any word that had a Cheer in it, and the hearties were unable to get their mouths around anything else.

‘Cheers, Oliver.’

‘Cheers, Oliver.’

‘Cheers, Oliver.’

Friends!

Friends who weren’t silent, or lofty, or doomed, or bashful as a matter of intellectual and moral principle, or who didn’t walk off in the middle of a conversation.

Cheerful friends!

‘Cheers, Ollie! Cheers, cheers, cheers, cheers …’

But they were the wrong sort of friends.

They were already rampaging when I caught up with them, leaving the college by the rear gate and heading for the Market Tavern. Singing songs. Rugby songs. Rowing songs. What did I know what songs?

Someone recognized me. ‘Here’s Ollie Walzer!’

A few of them looked around. A name to conjure with in sporting circles, Ollie Walzer.

‘Ping-pongers Walzer?’

‘None other,’ I said.

And I let myself be swept up by them.

‘What about a ping-pongers song, Ollie?’

‘There aren’t any,’ I said.

And then suddenly, I had no idea how, but without doubt emboldened by sherry, I thought of one. Or rather I saw my way to one, since first of all I had to write it. Adapt it, at any rate. ‘Ilkley Moor Bah’t ‘At’, I gave them, changing the refrain to ‘Ilkley Moor Bah’t Bat’, which struck them as demonstrating so much inventiveness and cunning, so astounded and bedazzled them each time the refrain came around, that had it not been for the presence of bulldogs in their bowler hats on the opposite side of the street I might well have been chaired into the Market Tavern as a hero.

The dimness of recollection that makes a waste of the ensuing years begins about now. That we drank a lot in the Market Tavern, my new hearty friends and I, drank a lot and drank it noisily and quickly, I have no doubt. That they asked for further proof of my lyric genius and that I obliged them, I also have no reason to disbelieve. A bastard version of ‘The Good Ship Venus’, to wit ‘The Good Ship Golem’, lingers with me still, though I retain no more than the opening lines, which in all conscience write themselves —

’Twas on the good ship Golem

That all our balls got swollen;

We cooled ‘em down

In Newcastle Brown

And still no one would hold ‘em —

and a couplet from a later stanza —

The Master Neville-Hacket,

A devil with a racket

which had the merit not only of naming names — a strategy which never fails with hearties — but also of bringing us full circle back to sport.

Otherwise I remember only that we spilled beerily out into the market at closing time, shouting Olly! Olly! which is Cambridge rowing hearty for ‘Come on, the next five, the next four’ — a chant modified, once someone saw the possibility, to ‘Olly, Olly, Ollie!’; joked ungraciously about totty and I fear abused one or two; frolicked around the fountain; fell in; pissed against a college wall (not ours); ran back pursued by proctors; and returned by the gate we’d left by, only this time up it rather than through it.

At thirty seconds past twelve I was back in my room. Day One — the last day of verdant boyhood — was finally over.

* * *

When I woke sadder but no wiser on day two I was still in my clothes and still wet from the fountain. I had ruined a good Kardomah suit. I had ripped my gown climbing in. I had a thumping headache. And my throat was sore.

Why would my throat be sore? Ah, yes. Olly! Olly! Oh, God! I’d been showing off, hadn’t I, bawling plebeian roundelays for the behoof of public school Yahoos, composing ditties which lacked even the merit of rude invention, proving I could piss higher up the walls of Peterhouse than any soft sod from the South.

I’d never pissed up a wall in my life. What gave me the idea that I might be good at it?

Olly, Olly, Ollie!

I had been tsatskying again, hadn’t I?

I had hit the town footling.

And what’s more I had run the risk of being picked up and arrested by the University Police. On Day One! Some way of saying thank you to my family that would have been. He goes to Cambridge and he’s arrested! For five thousand years we had managed to stay out of trouble. Five thousand years in five hundred countries and not a single violation of the civil code. Not even a parking ticket. And now this one goes to Cambridge and ends up behind bars!

Yes, I had hit the town footling. Footling with intent.

In a fit of self-disgust I opted for Yorath and Rubella.

‘Do you think because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?’

Jane Eyre

, Brontë Charlotte

‘Yes.’

Walzer, Oliver

NOTICE ANYTHING, NOTICE anyone , missing from the preceding?

Totty.

We had the word. We loved the word. We wrapped our tongues around the word. ‘Nice piece of totty, that, what!’ We even had their words. Shelves upon shelves of them. For what were Austen Jane and Eliot George if not totty?

What was Dido? What was Isolde?

But the flesh and blood thing, that which the word denotes — not to be seen.

Yes, there were colleges for totty. Totty-only colleges. But somehow it was never really totty that you got there. It was something else. Not everybody felt as I did. There were some, among the hearties and even among the Unmanned, who had no complaints whatsoever about the contents of these totty-only colleges. They wooed them, fell in love with them, married them, betrayed them, just as if they were perfectly normal totty. But they didn’t look like perfectly normal totty to me. I was spoilt, I’ll admit that: I’d slept on a bed of sugar bags with my arms around Lorna Peachley, I’d habituated the KD, I’d eyed off the best there was; but all KD comparisons apart, who they most reminded me of were my aunties.

Not in appearance, of course. They weren’t Sowalki drowsy with little fish-ball cheeks. In appearance they resembled the Brontës. They had that distrait look about them, that air of affecting not to hear the agonizing cries, the sound of souls rending, coming from the other room. In the face of the mayhem they tied back their hair and stared sideways. Governesses fallen from high estate — that was who they looked like. Governesses with family secrets, whose voices wobbled and sawed like silk tearing. But in matters of simple social adeptness they reminded me of my aunties. There was that same fear of dogs and shadows. That same alarm when anything moved suddenly. And that same incompetence with respect to brassieres.

I actually taught one how to dance once. Imagine that. Imagine the measure of the ineptitude that could make me feel relaxed enough to show the way on a dance floor. True, it was only a small dance floor at a small party. And true the dance was only the twist. But even so!

‘Now come down,’ I remember saying. ‘That’s it, but keep revolving. Good. Now come up again. Yes, but still revolving.’

My aunty Dolly would have been proud of me.

I must have put a hand out to help with the angle of torsion, a light touch of encouragement on the hip, because I remember leaping back from the lumpiness as though I’d hit a tumour. Haberdasher’s swelling. Did they shoplift, these S for spinster, ‘T for totties? Were they thread and tape kleptomaniacs? Was that what my aunties had been up to for all those years, was that why they’d feared shop assistants — because they’d dreaded someone discovering the half mile of elastic they’d stuffed inside their bloomers?