Tom Sharpe - The Throwback

Behind them Lockhart walked happily back to the Hall. His experiment in surrogate and purely sonic warfare had worked splendidly, so splendidly in fact that as he approached the house he saw that most of the windows were broken. He would have them repaired next day and in the meantime there was something to celebrate. He went into the peel tower and lit the fire in the great hearth. As it blazed up he told Mr Dodd to fetch the whisky and went himself into the house to invite Mr Bullstrode and Dr Magrew to join him and Jessica in drinking a toast. He had some difficulty making his invitation plain to them but their sleep had been so completely interrupted that they dressed and followed him to the banqueting hall. Mr Dodd was already there with the whisky and his pipes and standing in a little group beneath the battle-flags and the swords they raised their glasses.

'What are we going to drink to this time?' asked Jessica and it was Mr Dodd who supplied the answer,

'To the Devil himself,' he said.

'The Devil?' said Jessica. 'Why the Devil?'

'Why aye, hinnie,' said Mr Dodd,' 'tis clear you dinna ken your Robbie Burns. Do ye not ken his poem "The De'il's Awa Wi' The Excise Man"?'

'In that case, to the De'il,' said Lockhart and they drank.

And they danced by the light of the fire while Mr Dodd played on his pipes and sang

"There's threesome reels, and foursome reels,

There's hornpipes and strathspeys, man; But the one best dance e'er cam to our Ian',

Was – the De'il's awa wi' the Excise Man.'

They danced and drank and drank and danced and then, exhausted, sat round the long table while Jessica made them ham and eggs. When they had finished Lockhart stood up and told Mr Dodd to fetch the man.

'It wouldna be kind to let him miss this great occasion,' he said. Mr Bullstrode and Dr Magrew, too drunk to disagree, nodded. 'He would have appreciated seeing those scoundrels run,' said Lockhart, 'it would have appealed to his sense of humour.' As dawn broke over Flawse Fell Mr Dodd flung open the gates of the peel tower and old Mr Flawse, seated in a wheelchair and manifestly self-propelled, rolled into the room and took his accustomed place at the end of the table. Mr Dodd shut the doors and handed Lockhart the remote control. He twiddled with the switches and once again the room rang with the voice of old Mr Flawse. Lockhart had been editing the tapes and compiling fresh speeches and it was these that the old man now uttered.

'Let us dispute, my friends, as once we did before the man with the sickle got the better of me. I take it you've both brought your reasons with you just as I've brought mine.'

Dr Magrew and Mr Bullstrode found the question difficult to answer. They were both very drunk and in any case recent events had moved so fast that they had tended to forget that old Mr Flawse, if stuffed, still seemed to have a mind of his own. They sat and stared speechlessly at this animated memento mori. Lockhart assuming that they were still partially deaf turned the volume up and Mr Flawse's voice filled the room.

'I care not what argument you use, Magrew,' he yelled, Til not have it that ye can change a nation's or a man's character by meddling with his environment and social circumstance. We are what we are by virtue of the precedence of birth and long-established custom, that great conglomerate of our ancestral heritage congenital and practical. The two are intertwined. What judges once pronounced we now apply; 'tis common law; and what by chemistry committed shapes our cells becomes the common man. An Englishman is yet an Englishman though centuries apart. Do you not agree, Mr Bullstrode, sir?' Mr Bullstrode nodded. He was powerless to speak. 'And yet,' continued Mr Flawse at ten watts per channel, 'and yet we have the paradox that what's called English differs century by century as well. A strange yet constant inconsistency this is that leaves the men the same and yet divides their conduct and opinions from themselves. In Cromwell's day it was religious controversy led in the field; a century and Chatham's day the conquest of an Empire and the loss of America but faith had fled the field before a clockwork model of the universe and Frenchmen dideroting on encyclopediae. Ye ken what Sully said? That Englishmen take their pleasures sadly after the fashion of their country. A century later Voltaire, that idol persifleur of France, would have it that we by and large have a most serious and gloomy temperament. So where's the influence of all ideas between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century on

Englishmen? Not that I mind what Frenchmen say of us; their observations have ill-accorded with mine own; or of my reading come to that. 'Tis Merrie England all the time to me and what have the French to equal Sterne or Smollett or yet a Surtees? I've still to see a Frenchman Jorrocks ride to hounds. With them it's wit and badinage that's aye the joke. With us 'tis ever action and that war between our words and what we be which they across the Channel have named hypocrisy. And what we be is all mixed up with alien blood and refugees from tyranny like a bag pudding boiled within this pot we call the British Isles. 'Twas ever thus; 'twill ever be; a ragamuffin race of scoundrels born of pirates on the run. What say you to that, Magrew, you who have some acquaintanceship with Hume?'

But Dr Magrew, like Mr Bullstrode, had nothing to say. He was silent before this effigy of the past which uttered words in parody of its own complex self. He gaped and as he gaped the old man's voice rose louder still. It was filled with fury now and Lockhart, wrestling with the remote control, found nothing would abate his voice.

'It was some damned scoundrel versifying American,' bawled Mr Flawse, 'would have it that he'd go with a whimper not a bang. 'Twere better for the creature had he been with Whymper on the Matterhorn and learnt the meaning of a fall. Well, I'll not do the same. Damn whimpering, sir, and being the world's whining beggar, cap in hand. I've not a forelock left to touch and wouldna raise a finger to it had I one, to wheedle pennies from a foreign swine be he an Arab Sheik or the Emperor of Japan. I'm true-born English to the core and so I will remain. So keep your whimpering for womenfolk and let me have my bang.'

And as if in answer to this request there was a dull explosion in his innards and smoke poured out of his ears. Mr Bullstrode and Dr Magrew looked on appalled while Lockhart, trying the switches, shouted to Mr Dodd.

'The fire extinguisher,' he yelled, "for God's sake get the fire extinguisher!'

But it was no good. Mr Flawse was living up to his promise not to whimper. Flailing round him with his arms and shouting incomprehensible imprecations from his clapper mouth he streaked in his wheelchair across the banqueting hall, gathered a rug over his feet on the way, bounced off an armoured figure and finally, with that practicality he had always admired in his ancestors, shot into the open hearth and burst into flames. By the time Mr Dodd arrived with fire extinguisher he was beyond extinction and had flared up the chimney in a shower of sparks and flames.

'The man was born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward. Amen,' said Mr Dodd.

And so in the great hearth old Mr Flawse, the last of his line, finally fizzled out before the eyes of his two closest friends, Jessica, Mr Dodd, and the man he had always called the bastard.

'Almost a Viking's funeral,' said Dr Magrew as the charred remains flaked to ashes and the last transistor melted. It had been made in Japan, he noted, which tended to contradict the old man's final boast that he was English to the core. He was about to point this interesting anatomical and philosophical observation out to Mr Bullstrode when he was interrupted by a cry from behind him. Lockhart was standing on the oak table among the guttering candles and tears were running down his cheeks. 'The De'il has pity in him yet,' thought the doctor but Mr Dodd, recognizing the symptoms, picked up his pipes and squeezed the bag under his arm as Lockhart began his dirge. 'The last of them all is gan fra' the Hall