Tom Sharpe - Grantchester Grind

Hartang said he didn't know any Dick Whittington. 'What's in it for them?' he wanted to know.

'What he said, your expertise. First, money. Information highway stuff costs. You've got to hand it to Kudzuvine. He's done you a favour.'

It was a risky statement. Hartang wasn't ready to think of Kudzuvine doing him any favours yet.

'And one thing is certain,' said Bolsover. 'Dos Passos will be on a flight out the moment you officially accept. They've got him under surveillance now.'

It was a convincing point. Hartang agreed to become Master of Porterhouse.

'It is amazing how things work out,' Schnabel said as they drove away. 'I won't say he's at all civilized yet but the process has begun. In two years I daresay he'll be house-trained.'

'Porterhouse-trained,' said Bolsover.

The Praelector sat on a seat in the spring sunshine and watched some children fighting on the grass. It was a great many years since he had indulged in such an enjoyable activity, rolling over and over and trying to get the upper hand in a tussle with another boy but he could remember vividly what fun it had been even when he had lost. And now for the first time for many years he was having fun again though this time it was the fun of genuine conquest. Of course there would be more battles to come. For one thing Hartang would have to be tamed and-even in these gross days it would never do to have a Master using the word 'motherfucker' at High Table too often. But the Praelector intended to leave that aspect of Hartang's development to the other Fellows and to the atmosphere of the College with its many little formalities. His more immediate problems were quite different. He had to persuade the College Council to ratify Hartang's appointment and he had never faced a more difficult task in his life. Even the most brilliant Cambridge academics had no grasp of the political implications of finance and industry. Brought up in a Welfare State they had not lived through the Twenties and Thirties when the poor had been genuinely hungry and men and women and children had pinched white faces and there had been Salvation Army soup kitchens. Some of them had read about such things but they had never experienced them. Instead they indulged in nostalgic charades and mock hunger-marches, their plump comfortable faces glowing with health and their feet shod in warm well-soled shoes, and went home afterwards filled with a sense of self-righteous concern and satisfaction to congratulate themselves on their moral stance over smoked salmon and coq-au-vin in centrally heated houses. And everywhere television and glossy magazines insulated and to some extent inoculated them from real pain and misery. The Praelector had lived too long to forget the world before Beveridge and the need to produce manufactured goods for export. Now Porterhouse had to come to terms with his decision or it would go under. It would be his last struggle. He got up and walked back to the hotel relishing the thought of the Dean's face when he heard the news.

Purefoy Osbert and Mrs Ndhlovo sat in the sunshine too on a bench under the wall of Peterhouse with the old river gate behind them. It was blocked up now and the river over a hundred yards away but it had been from that gate that the Masters and Fellows had stepped into boats centuries earlier to travel down to their colleges and avoid the mud and filth of the streets.

'I had to come and explain,' she was saying. After all it was only a joke, and all right it wasn't in the best taste but really good jokes so seldom are.'

Purefoy scowled at some horses browsing in the grass in front of them. He still hadn't made up his mind about Mrs Ndhlovo and her sister. And he was no longer sure he believed a word she said. On the other hand he was secretly pleased she had never been the third wife of the late Mr Ndhlovo.

'It was the only way I could get into the country,' she had explained. Purefoy said he didn't understand.

'How do you imagine someone without a birth certificate or a passport can pass through Immigration Control without any papers? It is impossible.'

'But you must have had some sort of identification. You must know who you are.'

'I know who I am now, but I didn't then. Nobody knew. You have never lived in a country like Argentina under the Generals where people quite literally disappeared. That's what happened to my mother and father. Brigitte and I were found one morning on a picnic table on the bank of the Rio Plata in a town called Fray Bentos. We had labels tied to us with the word "Unknown" in English written on them. So we went to a Catholic orphanage where the nuns called us Incognito. That was a joke too, to begin with, but the name stuck and I became Ingrid Natasha Cognito and Brigitte was more fortunate. All the same we hated the orphanage and the nuns and we ran away and went to Paraguay. And that wasn't nice at all because we had to live with some very poor Germans in a really strange settlement. We had blue eyes and fair hair and spoke English.'

Purefoy listened with a drowsy fascination. The River Plate, Fray Bentos and the meat-packing factory which had closed, the Golf Club with the Coronation Plaque for George VI on the wall and the distances of the holes still in yards, Paraguay and Stroessner's German-helmeted troops goose-stepping in a dusty plaza, the dilapidated farmhouses of the descendants of nineteenth-century German settlers, strange South African sects in modern buildings, heat and insects, and then back through Uruguay to Montevideo, a city which was frozen in the 1950s and where Anglos still gathered in the English Club with its cracked and pasted dining-room window and the plaster ceiling in the bar broken and partly fallen and its bound copies of the _Montevideo Times_ piled in the library next to the ancient and unused fencing gallery. From there to Africa, this time with the help of the South African sectarians.

The white horses grazed on the meadow grass and Purefoy's imagination followed the story of Miss I. N. Cognito's wanderings with the growing conviction that she must be telling the truth. All the same he was still suspicious. In the modern world everyone in faintly civilized society had to have some means of identifying themselves even if it was only some nuns in an orphanage or someone who had known them for a time.

'That doesn't help you get into the UK,' Ingrid said. 'You try coming into Heathrow with no passport or birth certificate and no one to vouch for who you are. It's weird. Those immigration officers don't even pretend to think you're telling the truth. We tried it one time on a cargo flight from Lusaka. That was a mistake. It got the crew into terrible trouble and they gave us the most gruesome body searches. And laxatives in case we'd swallowed condoms of drugs or diamonds. Not nice.'

'What on earth were you doing in Lusaka?'

'I told you we had become born-again members of the Benoni Sect. Some woman had visions or something back in 1927 and the people thought this was a good time to move out of South Africa with some money to build missions in South America.'

'They could have given you some means of identification…'

'Could have. Didn't because we told them the religion was a phoney and it's amazing how intolerant religious people can be when you refuse to believe. They cast us out into outer darkness, in this case Brakpan, and we had to make it on our own.'

'So how did you get into this country?'

'By making friends with a nice Greek who had a corner store and two sisters who didn't mind losing their passports. We had to give them back to him in Athens. After that it wasn't so difficult. We worked our way along the Mediterranean to Spain, on yachts mainly, and a sweet old man in Palamos needed crew. His wife didn't like crossing the Bay of Biscay in winter and went home by air. So one day we sailed into Falmouth and came ashore when no one was looking.'