Category Archives: Pirates

… and no, I’m not at Pride! Lord knows your correspondent would never have had the energy to do that. (Though she fully supports her gay, bisexual, transgendered and just-a-bit-curious friends, and indeed envies them their joie de vivre.) I’m still struggling with my exhaustion-related sore throat, tendency to wake up at 6am, and the persistent heartburn of the working woman.

However, astonishingly, I am in a Place That is Not London, and I can tell you it is very nice indeed. When you go outside in the evening it is eerily quiet. Once in a while, very small planes buzz over. There are hedges, and cows. If a car goes past the house, you look. I was sitting at the kitchen table yesterday with a large window to my back, and a double door opposite, leading out to the large, calm garden, watching the cabbage whites flutter among plants, any one of which would have not fitted on the rather cramped Baroque balcony.

Inside, the house is miraculously free of dust, but there is the odd dead fly or bee on a windowsill. For some reason you don’t get that in London; maybe the flies are killed by the fumes before they can get inside. (Though my flat is certainly full enough of flies at any given time. I’m sure it’s connected to the propensity of my neighbours to leave their rubbish out front all weekend, in the knowledge that the caretaker will take it to the bins on Monday.  You don’t get THAT in the villages around Arundel.) No; here is all comfy furniture, actual floor space, and light coming from more than one direction when you’re inside.

Well, let’s see. There’s been quite a lot of jazz playing, and I had a one-and-a-half-hour bath yesterday morning. It is unspeakably wonderful to be out of rancid little Baroque Hovel, after five months of what felt like being under house arrest. There’s no space there – either physical or time – it’s all margins and slots. I feel like throwing out half of my possessions just to get some room to breathe – but now, when even to be able to do that?

Down here is all different: airy and light and clean and quiet and nice, and I’ve been going through the Horizon Review submissions (along with a definitive collection of Punch annuals from the seventies), with a lovely breakfast cup of coffee by my side, and am very pleased to say it’s all looking good. I’ve also been reading a lot of essays on poetry and various assorted poems.

In short, it is that very thing I’ve been missing so badly: a little bit of summer. And in that very vein, amazingly, we came across a gem in the 1974 Punch annual – “The Great Summer of Harry Secombe.”

Well, Harry says that the key ingredients of a really memorable summer can accrue from even one really memorable day; and they are: “sunshine, good company, freedom from care and a touch of the unexpected to add excitement.” He says, “I suppose it is the relief from responsibility which goes to make a Great Summer.” I’ll add: and a kid (even though he immediately goes on to say, “There’s not much enjoyment to be had lying in a deckchair at the seaside, wearing your knotted handkerchief, if you have to sit up every five minutes or so to count the kids”; I think he’s wrong there). It’s been Pirates of the Caribbean, Up, and Looney Toons all weekend, with swords and pieces of eight galore.

Anyway, I’ve been given permission to quote, so I will:

There was one such day just after the end of the North African campaign which makes the summer of 1943 a contender for greatness. Our unit had been withdrawn from the mopping-up operations and we were camped near the beach at Carthage. The relief of not having to fight anybody, at least for a while, was remarkably heady and I foudn myself on that first day with time on my hands, a sandy beach, plenty of sunshine, free fags and permission to stand up on the skyline.

So, stuffing my German phrase book into my kitbag, making sure to turn down the corner of the page containing the declensions of the verb “to surrender” – I was obsessed by the idea that if I were to find myself in a tight spot I might say “I am about to surrender” rather than the more urgent “I surrender,” which could have meant the difference between life in a Stalag and a paragraph in the Swansea Evening Post obiruary column – I headed towards the sea, wearing my drawers cellular short in lieu of a bathing costume.

As I approached the beach I was surprised to hear the sound of a military band. To my astonishment, there on the sands of Carthage stood a complete German Regimental Band in a roped-off enclosure guarded by military police and surrounded by various members of the British First Army, most of whom were completely nude. They stood in the blazing sunshine for more than an hour playing selections from operettas, tunes of the ‘thirties and even Tipperary and Pack Up Your Troubles, all the time encouraged by cheers, applause and cries of “Good old Jerry!” There was no animosity on either side, and appart from some good-humoured attempts by some naked lads to conduct the band with improvised batons, the whole dream-like incident passed off peacefully.

The sensation of utter contentment as I lay back on the sand smoking free cigarettes, shorn of responsibility, secure in the knowledge of a job well done, and being serenaded by the end-product of that task, is something that has remained with me all my life. So much that whenever I hear a military band I have an urge to strip off my trousers and lie down in my underpants to recapture that magic moment.

Mine may be the summer I was about 15, when I lay on a huge old brown velvet sofa in a wooden room with whitewashed walls in Woodstock, New York, watched over by a framed set of Hogarth’s Marriage a la Mode, reading – oh, delight unbounded – Evelyn Waugh.