The real-ale movement was in its cradle in those days, but it was possible to pick up a few technical terms and use them knowingly. I would praise the maltiness and depth of the brew, but wonder politely if the original gravity of this batch was really the stipulated 1048. Gaining confidence, I would announce that I could detect the cannabinoids in the brew, explaining that hops are after all members of the lovely hemp family, the cannabinaceæ.
Playing to the balcony to some extent, I might point out that cannabinoids were not illegal as such, the legal maximum for possession being twenty microgrammes. This enlightened legislation was to protect real ales, and it showed admirable consideration on the part of the Government.
Perhaps Kerry and I were flirting with each other in some way. It isn’t always easy to tell. Usually we respected each other’s boundaries, though one day he surprised me by asking if I had a spare key for the car. I agreed that I had, and he asked me to bring it along on my next visit and lend it to him for a few days. I agreed, but I must have looked unhappy because he said, ‘Relax, mate — no offence, but if I was going to swipe a car I’d swipe a nice one.’ The next time I saw him he gave the keys back, but with a difference. Now there was a sort of amateurish welded flange extending the body of the key sideways by a couple of inches.
I was very touched. Kerry had seen that it was difficult for me to turn the key in the lock, and had made modifications for my benefit. Over the years lots of people had seen me struggling with the car keys, but he had actually done something about it. Many had observed but only one had undertaken an empathetic metalwork project.
Then early one evening, one spring Monday, the whole modest idyll unravelled. Half-way through the half-pint that I had (after much ritual gargling) pronounced fit for drinking, I became aware that the pub was getting crowded. It began to smell much more like a pub, as if a huge disembodied tongue of beer-breath and ashtrays was lapping our faces. A bunch of students had come in, animated though not quite rowdy. They were all talking at once, but I didn’t take too much notice of that. In any university town there are more talkers than listeners.
Alcohol the pickpocket
One of them plonked himself on the other side of my table, and then set a pint glass in front of me with a crash. ‘We’ve ordered one too many …’ he said. ‘You have it.’ His face was flushed and there was something not right about his eyes. He had trouble focusing. His hair was dark, but his skin was almost eerily pale and shiny. Like the others, he was wearing a scarf, in fact they all wore the same scarf, but I didn’t pay much attention to their tribal insignia. Their tweed sports jackets were enough to make them stand out in the public bar of the Cambridge Arms.
I tried to say that I didn’t need any more beer, since my small body weight made half a pint a sufficiently intoxicating dose for one session — and I wouldn’t be able to lift such an awkward glass to my lips in any case. The newcomer didn’t seem to be listening, though, so I stopped trying. I shot a glance over to Kerry at the bar. He was picking the appropriate coins from the helpless thrust-out hands of one of the recent invaders. Alcohol is a compulsive pickpocket, and from these lads it had already filched arithmetic, or else the ability to recognise the coins of the realm.
The man at my table took a huge gulp of his beer and frowned. ‘Haven’t seen you on the river… perhaps you’re not a wet-bob?’ To this day I don’t know the meaning and derivation of wet-bob. It may have been a specialised Cambridge word, but not one that was used in my little circles. ‘With your build you’d make a decent cox.’ My jaw has a certain amount of mobility, though dentists are always complaining, and I’m sure it dropped. It must have. He called out, ‘Benny! Come here! I’ve found us a cox!’
Benny turned out to be the helpless payer at the bar. He wore his hair in a centre parting. Choose this style and you are more or less insisting that spectators assess your degree of facial symmetry. Barely one face in a thousand is regular enough to pass such a test — this wasn’t one of the privileged few. As he came over, he was bellowing, ‘Two and tenpence a pint, Wop! Not a bad price!’ He was still thinking in shillings and pence, after more than a year of decimal currency. Perhaps the new system would always elude this group.
Benny slammed his glass down onto the table with even more force than his friend had, following it with a packet of cigarettes. The general level of noise was becoming hard to bear. He thrust his face into mine. ‘Is this your cox, Wop? I’m not sure he’s got the lungs for it. Give us a sample, why don’t you? Sing out STROKE … STROKE! … STROKE!!’ I begin to detect a whisper of sense under all the bellowing. In rowing, wasn’t the cox the compact lightweight person who sat at the end of the boat and shouted? So I was clearly in no possible sense a cox.
I didn’t sing out as directed. I made my position clear. Actually I was having a quiet drink. For all the notice they took I needn’t have gone to the trouble of speaking aloud. The one called Benny took from his pocket a stopwatch on a loop of dirty string and hung it around my neck. ‘Now you’ve got the tools of the trade at least. But you need to work on the voice projection or no one will hear a bloody word you’re saying.’
Then it was the other’s turn to speak. ‘Perhaps we should introduce you to your eight. But first, what’s your name? John? Very good, but we’ll mostly call you Cox. This is Benny — Benny the Dick. Christened Benedict, hence Benny the Dictator.’ He put on an ingratiating ecclesiastical singsong. ‘Benedicite benedicatur, Benny’s a benevolent dictator.’
This was a baffling change of gears. Might they be a gang of rogue classicists on the razzle? ‘And I’m Thomas da Silva, known as Wop on account of my dago name, at your service. Delighted.’ I wasn’t delighted but dismayed. They weren’t at my service, in fact I seemed to be at theirs.
‘Have you explained the rules to your man, Wop?’
‘No Benny, I thought you’d like to do that.’
‘Fine.’ He took a cigarette from the packet on the table, but instead of smoking it he tucked it horizontally under his nose, holding it in place by curling his lip upwards in a way that suggested hours of practice. Then he started to rattle off information at amazing speed. The restrictions placed on his vocal apparatus by the prehensile-lip trick made him sound like what Dad would have called a silly ass, giving the noun a long vowel as service protocol demanded.
‘The King Street Run. Classic university tradition. Bit of fun. Separates boys from girls, boys from men, sheep from goats, your top Wop from the regular dagoes. Basic idea: eight pubs, eight pints. Easy as pissing off a log. Refinement: time limit. Eight pubs, eight pints — in an hour. Rate of one pint every seven minutes and thirty seconds. I know — sounds easy. Reward: special tie, respect of peers and inferiors. Complication: eight separate pubs, so journey time to be factored in. Seven journeys of, say, two minutes each — fourteen minutes in all. Leaving in fact … forty-six for drinking proper. Eights into forty-six: no idea. Five and a bit, maybe. Hence importance of stopwatch. Your department.’ Effortlessly he overrode my protests, my footling squawks.
‘Further complication: peeing forbidden during event. Penalty: letter P embroidered on trophy tie. Humiliation. One chap went to the other extreme, peed almost continuously, tie almost invisible beneath embroidered Ps, comic effect. Great success. Sort of trick only works once.’ I suppose he was doing a compound Monty Python impersonation, combining every mad major and silly-walks minister from that programme. With my lack of up-to-date television awareness I thought of the Pickwick Papers.