The Wilt Alternative
by Tom Sharpe
Chapter 1
It was Enrolment Week at the Tech. Henry Wilt sat at a table in Room 467 and stared into the face of the earnest woman opposite him and tried to look interested.
'Well, there is a vacancy in Rapid Reading on Monday evenings,' he said. 'If you'll just fill in the form over there...' He waved vaguely in the direction of the window but the woman was not to be fobbed off.
'I would like to know a little more about it. I mean it does help, doesn't it?'
'Help?' said Wilt refusing to be drawn into sharing her enthusiasm for self-improvement 'It depends what you mean by help.'
'My problem has always been that I'm such a slow reader I can't remember what the beginning of a book was about by the time I've finished it,' said the woman. 'My husband says I'm practically illiterate.'
She smiled forlornly and implied a breaking marriage which Wilt could save by encouraging her to spend her Monday evenings away from home and the rest of the week reading books rapidly. Wilt doubted the therapy and tried to shift the burden of counselling somewhere else.
'Perhaps you would be better off taking Literary Appreciation,' he suggested.
'I did that last year and Mr Fogerty was wonderful. He said I had potential.'
Stifling the impulse to tell her that Mr Fogerty's notion of potential had nothing to do with literature and was more physical in its emphasis though what the hell he could see in this earnest creature was a mystery Wilt surrendered.
The purpose of Rapid Reading.' he said going into the patter, 'is to improve your reading skills both in speed and retention of what you have read. You will find that you concentrate more the faster you go and that...'
He went on for five minutes delivering the set speech he had learnt by heart over four years of enrolling potential Rapid Readers. In front of him the woman changed visibly. This was what she had come to hear, the gospel of evening-class improvement. By the time Wilt had finished and she had filled in the form there was a new buoyancy about her.
There was less about Wilt. He sat on for the rest of the two hours listening to other similar conversations at other tables and wondering how the devil Bill Paschendaele managed to maintain his proselytizing fervour for An Introduction To Fenland Sub-Culture after twenty years. The fellow positively glowed with enthusiasm. Wilt shuddered and enrolled six more Rapid Readers with a lack of interest that was calculated to dishearten all but the most fanatical. In the intervals he thanked God he didn't have to teach the subject any longer and was simply there to lead the sheep into the fold. As Head of Liberal Studies Wilt had passed beyond the Evening Classes into the realm of timetables, committees, memoranda, wondering which of his staff was going to have a nervous breakdown next, and the occasional lecture to Foreign Students. He had Mayfield to thank for the latter. While the rest of the Tech had been badly affected by financial cuts, the Foreign Students paid for themselves and Dr Mayfield, now Head of Academic Development, had created an empire of Arabs, Swedes, Germans, South Americans and even several Japanese who marched from one lecture room to another pursuing an understanding of the English language and, more impossibly, English Culture and Customs, a hodge-podge of lectures which came under the heading of Advanced English For Foreigners. Wilt's contribution was a weekly discourse on British Family Life which afforded him the opportunity to discuss his own family life with a freedom and frankness which would have infuriated Eva and embarrassed Wilt himself had he not known that his students lacked the insight to understand what he was telling them. The discrepancy between Wilt's appearance and the facts had baffled even his closest friends. In front of eighty foreigners he was assured of anonymity. He was assured of anonymity, period. Sitting in Room 467 Wilt could while away the time speculating on the ironies of life.
In room after room, on floor above floor, in departments all over the Tech, lecturers sat at tables, people asked questions, received concerned answers and finally filled in the forms that ensured that lecturers would keep their jobs for at least another year. Wilt would keep his for ever. Liberal Studies couldn't fail for lack of students. The Education Act saw to that. Day Release Apprentices had to have their weekly hour of progressive opinions whether they liked it or not. Wilt was safe, and if it hadn't been for the boredom he would have been a happy man. The boredom and Eva.
Not that Eva was boring. Now that she had the quads to look after Eva Wilt's enthusiasms had widened to include every 'Alternative' under the sun. Alternative Medicine alternated with Alternative Gardening and Alternative Nutrition and even Various Alternative Religions so that Wilt, coming home from each day's lack of choice at the Tech, could never be sure what was in store for him except that it was not what it had been the night before. About the only constant was the din made by the quads. Wilt's four daughters had taken after their mother. Where Eva was enthusiastic and energetic they were inexhaustible and quadrupled her multiple enthusiasms. To avoid arriving home before they were in bed Wilt had taken to walking to and from the Tech and was resolutely unselfish about using the car. To add to his problems, Eva had inherited a legacy from an aunt and since Wilt's salary had doubled they had moved from Parkview Avenue to Willington Road and a large house in a large garden. The Wilts had moved up the social scale. It was not an improvement, in Wilt's opinion, and there were days when he hankered for the old times when Eva's enthusiasms had been slightly muted by what the neighbours might think. Now, as the mother of four and the matron of a mansion, she no longer cared. A dreadful self-confidence had been born.
And so at the end of his two hours Wilt took his register of new students to the office and wandered along the corridor of the Administration Block towards the stairs. He was going down when Peter Braintree joined him.
'I've just enrolled fifteen landlubbers for Nautical Navigation. What about that to start the year off with a bang?'
'The bang starts tomorrow with Mayfield's bloody course board meeting,' said Wilt. Tonight was as nothing. I tried to dissuade several insistent women and four pimply youths from taking Rapid Reading and failed. I wonder we don't run a course on how to solve The Times crossword puzzle in fifteen minutes flat. It would probably boost their confidence more than beating the track record for Paradise Lost.'
They went downstairs and crossed the hall where Miss Pansak was still recruiting for Beginners' Badminton.
'Makes me feel like a beer,' said Braintree. Wilt nodded. Anything to delay going home. Outside, stragglers were still coming in and cars were parked densely along Post Road.
'What sort of time did you have in France?' asked Braintree.
'The sort of time you would expect with Eva and the brood in a tent. We were asked to leave the first camp site after Samantha had let down the guy ropes on two tents. It wouldn't have been so bad if the woman inside one hadn't had asthma. That was on the Loire. In La Vendee we were stuck next to a German who had fought on the Russian front and was suffering from shell-shock. I don't know if you've ever been woken in the night by a man screaming about Flammenwerfern but I can tell you it's unnerving. That time we moved on without being asked.'
'I thought you were going down to the Dordogne. Eva told Betty she'd been reading a book about three rivers and it was simply enthralling.'
The reading may have been but the rivers weren't,' said Wilt, 'not the one we were next to. It rained and of course Eva had to have the tent in what amounted to a tributary. It was bad enough putting the thing up dry. Weighed a ton then, but moving it out of a flashflood up a hundred yards of bramble banks at twelve o'clock at night when the damned thing was sodden.' Wilt stopped. The memory was too much for him.