Bwana Pook

ONE

Naturally enough, the idea of a man marrying for money is abhorrent to everybody except the mercenary bridegroom who has hit the jackpot. Nevertheless let us examine this distasteful subject a little further in order to see if we can make it in any way palatable, and, above all, analyse the technique in the hope that it will lead me to a rich bride with a minimum of delay. Amen.

(An extract from Pook’s diary, written at a time of dire need.)

As you will recall, I fought Fireman Tucker once and Bandsman Bangle twice, and they would be the first to tell you I never ran away from anything in my life except Roberta. Looking back, it seems ludicrous that a creature as attractive as Roberta could send me scuttling out of the country faster than a business tycoon beating it for Israel, but anyone who has had trouble with girls knows only too well that hell hath no fury like the women I seem to meet.

As with the rest of her sex, Roberta was different. Far from wanting to get married, her aim in life was the good time and the Bohemian mode of progressing from twenty to thirty. Now this is the funny thing about women—they lay down their terms, make you agree to them, then start suing you for breach of promise, rather like a soldier being court-martialled for failing to disobey an order.

Exciting as it was, wooing Roberta reminded me of providing aid to underdeveloped countries—all give and no gratitude. Roberta was so scared of money that she solved the matter by not having any. Even her weekly salary was by some mysterious process mortgaged in advance.

Consequently, despite her burning zeal for the equality of the sexes, she sank her pride and let me pay for everything.

Roberta never smoked or touched alcohol unless she was in my company, when she would suddenly turn from teetotaller to addict.

May I have another cigarette, darling? she demanded one night as I returned from the bar with her fifth gin-and-pep. Lately I had been driven to lighting a cigarette only when I was up at the counter buying more gin, then returning to Roberta with the story that the barmaid had given me one, generous soul. My worst enemy would not call me mean but I was having a very sticky patch at this time because, whereas everybody thought I was in the money, I was skint.

Don’t you smoke heavy, dear, I told Roberta, producing the filter-tip Woodbines I now kept specially for her. I bet these were five for tuppence last time you bought any.

Oh, Peter, I do believe you’re getting mean, she cried, as if previously I had been the town’s wastrel. I glanced at the enormous handbag she never opened and said, Well, Roberta, it’s not exactly being mean, but we’ve been going out together three months and the only time I ever asked you for money was at Southend, remember? I wanted a penny for the fortune-telling machine to find out if you were born under the Sign of the Workhouse, but you said you weren’t going to make yourself cheap by lending money to men.

Roberta giggled nostalgically. But I was only joking, Peter. I was absolutely broke—honestly.

But how is it you’re always broke, day after day, week after week? Does your firm send your pay straight to the Salvation Army or something?

This always annoyed me—this vague dispersal of £8.12s. 6d. a week which one could never nail down.

Oh, of course not, Peter. It just goes somehow.

Well, I’ve never seen it coming, let alone going.

One thing was certain—it wasn’t going in the Post Office because I had seen the book. The account had been opened with 5/-, and apart from the accumulated interest over the years of eleven pence, not another entry. Roberta tossed her long mousy hair defiantly. Oh, very well, Peter, if that’s your attitude we’d best part company. I don’t want to go out with a fellow who’s only after me for my money. You’re the mercenary type, that’s what you are. There’s not much future in knowing a chap who can’t support a wife.

Support whose wife, Roberta? I inquired, startled by this new development.

Your own wife of course, silly.

But I’m not married.

That’s obvious, but we soon shall be, I presume?

We? Why, you’re always telling me you stick to me because I don’t keep harping on about wanting to marry you like the other fellows do. ‘Let’s have a good time and not worry about weddings and children and a home of our own and all that guff,’ you said all along.

This was true because Roberta never tired of telling me how modern she was, didn’t want to be tied down, didn’t want to get married, didn’t want a white wedding, didn’t want a house, didn’t want an engagement ring, and so on. In fact, apart from this zest for freedom, Roberta’s conversational prowess was not remarkable. Another odd thing about her was that despite her protestations that sex didn’t interest her, she was always ready to make love morning, noon or night. Kissing Roberta was quite an experience, not to be undertaken lightly because it gave you the feeling that you were being sworn into some secret society by ordeal, from which there was no escape except death at a great age.

Not that I would admit to myself that Roberta drove me out of the country. I found better reasons than that. Such as missing the sunshine I could still remember despite my long sojourn in England—where Providence let the British invent television in order to compensate them for their weather.

Perhaps in some former existence my family had been migratory birds, because every autumn an overpowering desire filled me to desert the nest and fly south, lest the cold wet blizzards we call the Yuletide Season should cause me to topple backwards on to my wings with my frozen claws up in the air, and wipe out the last of the Pooks. Sometimes I fled to the south of France, but as you can’t go without food longer than a fortnight I had to leave the main flock and return home. As this usually happened during the merciless Yuletide I sheltered at Brighton, in the secret hope that a friendly bloodless war would break out against the Australians, causing the Government to despatch me on a free trip to the Pacific as it had done before in 1941—only then we weren’t fighting the Australians officially but the Japs.

On that occasion we had been issued with the regulation Conan Doyle pantaloons and topee, and sailed for the Pacific via the Arctic Circle in order to avoid U-boats. There the sun hung anaemically in the sky day and night like an ice-lolly, but as we steamed slowly southwards the sun rose higher and higher in the firmament until it seemed the whole grandiose plan of the solar system was revealed to all mankind except me. My lack of any sense of direction outside of Fulham was notorious. In Fulham itself I took my bearings from the pubs, as though the cardinal points of navigation were entirely in the hands of the brewers.

So it came to pass that, suffering more than usual under the complete security blanket of war, I announced to Sergeant Canyon that I was extremely glad to see land at last after two months in an iron-lung with funnels, named S.S. Contritia, and particularly the sun-drenched coast of Australia. Whereupon I stretched out my arms in dramatic pose through the bars of my cell and uttered a bored cry of Land ahoy, all cobbers down under.

Actually it’s South Africa, Pook, not Australia, but just forget the whole thing because it won’t make any difference to you—prisoners don’t see much of it, Sergeant Canyon had explained, with reference to my being incarcerated in the bowels of the ship on the serious charge of getting sunburnt without permission, and a lesser one of mutiny on the high seas. The sunburn was the result of my falling asleep over the rail of the bridge whilst duty signalman to the convoy and exposing my naked back to the sun for over an hour. As a result of this they tell me that of all the thousands of troops who passed through South Africa during the war I was the only one to be issued with a parasol by the Welfare Committee, to enable me to venture out during daylight.

Despite Sergeant Canyon’s prediction that I wouldn’t be allowed ashore in South Africa, Lieutenant Titterton let me leave my cell for a whole day under escort in order to exercise me, as he put it. As a result of this magnanimous gesture I was returned to ship on a third charge of desertion, having been unable to see eye to eye with Sergeant Canyon over the terms of my limited freedom, which he interpreted as marching me up and down Durban docks like a sentry outside Buckingham Palace. Gradually I extended the length of my appointed beat until I was marching to and fro between the ship and the dock gates with a smartness which drew admiring gasps from the Zulu dockers. As a climax to this little performance I marched with ringing boots right through the dock gates; and into a taxi, to go off on three of the most enjoyable days and nights of my life.

This spree in Durban with an extraordinarily hospitable girl I met at the Athlone Gardens stamped the place in my memory as a good one to revisit after the war, when one’s excursions about the town could be enjoyed without peering round every corner to check for Sergeant Canyon and his press-gang.

Gradually the idea formed in my brain that returning to South Africa would not only put a lot of mileage between Roberta and me but also I might be able to eliminate the normal forty years’ graft attendant upon making a living and take the short cut by marrying money. In a lurid magazine I found on the Underground the whole routine was depicted with impressive thoroughness in a picture-story.

In the first picture handsome Trent Lanter is shovelling clay out of a trench in Kensington High Street, preparatory to laying a new sewer-pipe, and it is evident from the murderous frown on his face that he savours the task about as much as you or I would. Picture two shows Trent more clearly because the clay has been removed from his features and black plastic hair in order that he may attend a ball given by his Union, the Amalgamated Society of Subterranean Outfall Engineers. However, Trent soon tires of dancing with the daughters of his fellow navvies, so he strolls idly outside—perhaps to see if a rival gang of traffic-blockers is filling in his trench under cover of darkness. So intent is his concentration that he is knocked down by a horse, to tumble headlong down his own sewer.

His reaction to this accident provides some odd language which the picture-story reproduces as What the b—— @ $ + ! = @ $ - ! presumably to indicate either that Trent swears in Chinese or that the printer has been on the booze. Nevertheless, Trent climbs out of the earthworks and— unpredictable fellow that he is—smiles. As this is the first time we have seen his smile we are dazzled, as though we had been peering into a lighthouse until the keeper suddenly switched the thing on. Trent has good reason for smiling.

Fancy meeting a girl out here on a horse, he exclaims artlessly.

"I’m terribly sorry for knocking you clean over the Road Up sign like that, but I’m in a frightful tear to get to a party in Chelsea," the girl replies, to account for the fact that normally she does not ride down Kensington High Street dressed as Good Queen Bess. We observe that her long hair frames a face Good Queen Bess would have given her throne for. Her name is Stella.

Fancy you going to a party on a horse, Trent declares simply. Never heard of a girl going to a party on a horse before.

Well, usually I don’t of course, but this happens to be one of those fabulous arty parties by the river where. . . . Stella’s voice trails off as Trent’s smile tracks on to her eyes like a ground-to-air missile.

The next picture shows Trent and Stella jogging along Kings Road towards the party, with Stella holding on to the horse for dear life. Trent is holding on to Stella with equal intensity of purpose but for a different reason. She says, The least I can do to make up for the accident is to take you along to the party. You can come as my page.

Trent replies, Fancy me up on a horse going to a party as a page and a queen’s page at that. We gather from his expression that our hero lives in a world of perpetual bewilderment, wherein his conversation merely reflects his surprise at each turn of events.

Apparently Trent went to work on Stella far more eagerly than he did on South Kensington’s sewage system because the final picture discloses the confetti-covered couple waving goodbye at London Airport. Neither speaks a word. The bride is too happy, and Trent knows it is not necessary to open his mouth at all from now on except to expose his luminous teeth occasionally. His main chore is to count his wife’s money and keep clear of her dad. The latter gentleman is to be seen waving farewell to Trent with his fist.

Although I could sense the improbability of this picture story, the moral was plain to see, so weighing up my own position I figured that a spell in South Africa would solve several of my problems.

The small merchant ship S.S. Koepeck sailed from Birkenhead so bogged down with exports that the passenger-list was limited to six, all depressingly male, and one of them merely a beard surmounting a suit. I sat next to this human bush at the captain’s table, watching fascinatedly how he conveyed soup from the plate to an aperture located deep in his whiskers, and wishing I had had enough money to travel on a real liner with people.

His name was Arthur, he informed me over a game of chess, and an engineer by profession—which led me to idle speculation as to how he managed to work near machinery without being caught up in it beyond extrication. Moreover he was not in his seventies as I had supposed by his appearance, being merely twenty-five.

Let’s finish this game of chess before that railway locomotive breaks loose and takes us all to the bottom with it, I told Arthur gloomily, with reference to the rolling-stock which occupied all deck space, thus reducing our recreational facilities to chess and ludo.

Check and mate, Peter, Arthur declared triumphantly as he surrounded my king with nine men. If my records are accurate, that brings the score of games to 103-5 in my favour. How glad I am that fate threw us together on this ship so I could meet you and pass the hours thus in innocent pleasures. Just think, Peter, we have at least another three delightful weeks of each other’s company to look forward to.

I thought about it and wished I were dead. Already I had thought a lot about my plan to marry money, but if a good start is half the battle then I was doomed to failure. The remaining four passengers were young novices of a religious order whose tenets were so strict that they weren’t even allowed to play chess, while ludo was simply a short cut to hell. In the mess, they dined at a separate table because Arthur and I ate meat, and if we smoked they all coughed and opened portholes till we froze. In our communal cabin they prayed from seven to nine in the evening, then put the lights out in order that we might grasp sufficient sleep to prepare us for matins at 5 a.m. next day. Whenever they thought I wasn’t awake their leader rang a bell and all four chanted a fearful proclamation warning mankind of the fate awaiting those outside the fold. The terms of this offer were detailed in the literature they gave me to