Life At The Top by John Braine

After recently re-reading John Braine’s Room at the Top, I went On Chesil Beach, courtesy of Ian McEwan. Without doubt the latter is a masterpiece, whereas the former seems to be a little too reliant on its contemporary setting, its social mores, its finely tuned appreciation of social class to be considered more than “of its time”. Concatenating the two books, however, has made me think a little more about the underpinning thesis of Ian McEwan’s book, that the early 1960s remained an age when sexuality was not discussed, dealt with or even experienced in the more open, liberal manner of just a decade later. In the context of Ian McEwan’s setting and for his characters, this was undoubtedly the case. Memories of John Braine’s 1950s, however, remind me that there might have been room for a different reading.

And so I approached a re-discovery of Braine’s Life At The Top with more than just an interest in the narrative. Of course the book is a sequel, an attempt to recreate the success that had eluded its author in the intervening years. But it is based in the early 1960s, precisely the time when Ian McEwan’s fumbling lovers marry.

Life At The Top is ten years on from its germ. Joe Lampton and Susan are married and have two children. Joe is also firmly ensconced in his father-in-law’s firm, has made a moderate success of his career and, certainly relative to others around Warley, has plenty of money. But as those for whom success seems to be a given, it is necessary to be reminded that, “It’s one thing to get there, and quite another thing to stay there”. And so it is with Joe Lampton. He becomes a councilor – a Tory one at that – and all seems to be made. But then, but then… he’s still our Joe. He still likes his pint, though now it’s more likely to be a scotch, and perhaps Susan is still as naïve as she was a decade before – naïve, that is, until she decides what she wants.

So, obviously, in Life At The Top Joe and Susan’s life together turns sour, even a little bitter. But John Braine’s plot and style always keep the process above soap opera, where character only exists to fuel plot. In some ways, the pair of novels, Room and Life At The Top, is a loose allegory of the experience of the author, himself. In Room he’s an upstart successfully staking his claim, but at a cost in terms of pigeon-holing and confinement to a genre. In Life he’s a known success and is clawing on to its retention.

But after finishing the book two points stand out. The first is a reminder of the apparent sexual liberty enjoyed by its characters. Not only Joe, but also Susan and eventually Norah, not to mention the ailing Mark, are apparently free-loaders. Only Mark’s wife seems to possess the frigidity, perhaps aridity, that Ian McEwan seems to associate with the era. I can remember when Life At The Top was a much watched film. It was seen as racy, even a bit risqué, but not because of what it portrayed, only that it was portrayed. It wasn’t the content that shocked; it was the fact that the content was made public.

On the other hand, if John Braine’s mission had been purely to shock, then the ultimate morality of the outcome would be incongruous at best. Life At The Top is the kind of novel where what happens is crucial, so to reveal the finishing point would detract from the experience of reading the book. Suffice it to say that, in its own way, Life At The Top becomes an affirmation of a given set of values, even if those who want to live by them do not always live up to them.

So I return again to On Chesil Beach and conclude that there may be a greater element of social class – or even stereotype – involved in Ian McEwan’s reading of the mores of that age. A shortcoming it might be, but it detracts in no way whatsoever from the quality of the book. The imagined rules applied to those described, despite the fact that, as John Braine’s Life At The Top reminds us, they might not actually have been rules and certainly didn’t apply to everyone, especially the imagined.

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Life at the Top

Master Georgie by Beryl Bainbridge

At first glance Master Georgie by Beryl Bainbridge suggests it might be quite a light book, an easy read, a period piece set in the mid-nineteenth century. This would be wrong. Master Georgie is no safe tale of country house manners, of marriages imagined by confined, embroidering young women. Beryl Bainbridge’s Master Georgie is anything but a tale of such saccharine gentility.

Master Georgie is a surgeon and photographer, and the book is cast in six plates – photographic plates, not chapters. Death figures throughout. From start to finish morbidity crashes into the lives of the book’s characters. We begin with Mr Moody, dead in a brothel bed, his host of minutes before in shock. Later we move to the Crimean War, where the carnage is graphic, extensive and apparently random. And even then individuals find their own personal ways of adding insult and injury to the suffering.

The book uses multiple points of view. We see things Master Georgie’s way. Myrtle, an orphan he takes in, adds her perspective. The fussy geologist, Dr Potter, imprints his own version of reality. And still there are less than explained undercurrents, undeclared motives which affect them all. Thus, overall, Master Georgie is a complex and ambitious novel. Though it is set in a major war, the backdrop is never allowed to dominate. The characters experience the consequences of conflict and register their reactions, but we are never led by the nose trough the history or the geography of the setting.

But we also never really get to know these people. Myrtle, perhaps, has the strongest presence. She has a slightly jaundiced, certainly pragmatic approach to life. But even she finds the privations of wartime tough. Why the characters of Master Georgie are all so keen to offer themselves as support for the war effort is an aspect of the book that never fully revealed itself. And ultimately this was my criticism of Beryl Bainbridge’s book. While the overall experience was both rewarding and not a little shocking, I found there was insufficient delineation between the characters and their differing motives. The beauty of the prose, however, more than made up for any shortcoming. The language created the mixed world of mid-nineteenth century politeness and juxtaposed this with the visceral vulgarities of soldiering and the general struggle of life. This rendered Master Georgie a complex, moving and quite beautiful book.

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Master Georgie

The Mission Song by John le Carré

In The Mission Song John le Carré re-visits the world of espionage that we associate with his writing. He is a master of the clandestine, the deniable, the re-definable. Bruno Salvador is a freelance linguist. His parentage is complex, his origins confused, but his skills beyond question. By virtue of an upbringing that had many influences, he develops the ability to absorb languages. Having lived in francophone Africa and then England, he is fluent in both English and French plus an encyclopaedia of central African languages. His unique gifts, considerable skills and highly idiosyncratic methods qualify him for occasional assignments as an interpreter. He is trusted. He is also, he discovers, pretty cheap, and already has considerable experience of working for those aspects of government and officialdom which sometimes transgress legality. He is also, therefore, vulnerable. So when a new assignment – so urgent that he has to skip his wife’s party – drags him to a secret destination, he initially takes everything very much in his stride.

But Bruno is much more than a linguist, certainly much more than a translator and, as a result of the application of conscience, considerably more than the interpreter his employers have hired. His perception of language is so acute that it provides him with an extra sense, a means of interpreting the world, no less, not just a method of eliciting meaning. But he also has the intellectual skills to identify consequences, to interpret motives. And it is here where he begs to differ with his paymasters.

The Mission Song is the kind of book where revelation of the plot, beyond this mere starting point, would undermine the experience of reading it. Suffice it to say that Bruno’s task is both what is seems to be and also not what it seems. Bruno’s ambivalence in relation to its aims prompts him to go beyond the call of duty. And, in doing so, he learns more about his near-anonymous employers. But, of course, they learn more about him, a reality that eventually has fairly dire consequences.

The Mission Song is also a love story, or two, one on the way in and one on the way out. It’s also about privilege and power, plus their use, misuse and abuse. In many ways it inhabits similar territory to John le Carré’s Absolute Friends, but is singularly more successful, especially in the credibility of the eventual denouement.

Fans of John le Carré will need no convincing. For those who have found his other work less than satisfying, The Mission Song shows the author at his best, presenting a complex, highly credible plot in a skillful, illuminating, informative and yet entertaining way. Its eventual message about the abuse of power is subtly threaded into the very substance of the plot and makes its point with strength and relevance. We know a little more about the world by the end.

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The Mission Song

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

I read A Thousand Splendid Suns having just finished Kite Runner. I would like the opportunity to live life again (who wouldn’t?), if only to have a chance of reversing the order of this experience. I suspect that had I read A Thousand Splendid Suns first then none of the criticisms I raise about the book would even have been imagined, let alone expressed. A Thousand Splendid Suns is a wonderful book, a compelling and gut-wrenching story of two women, Mariam and Laila, who share a husband throughout the years of Afghanistan’s tragedy and turmoil. The fact that Khaled Hosseini can sustain expression, narrative, emotion and interest across two novels with ostensibly similar themes in the same territory is testament both to his supreme skill and the depth of the country’s despond.

Where Kite Runner tells the story of two boyhood friends approaching maturity, separating and reuniting, A Thousand Splendid Suns presents two women who are forced together by arrangement. As in Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini presents ethnic and social class differences as the givens of the story. Similarly, Afghanistan’s turbulent thirty years from the mid-1970s is more than a backdrop: it is the very substance of the idea, eventually revealed as the flesh on the story’s bones, the driving force of circumstance that creates the inevitability of the characters’ fate.

And this is why I wish I could read both books again in the different order, because too often in A Thousand Splendid Suns I felt I had been there before. The backdrop came just too much to the fore, in some parts so much so that I felt Mariam and Laila became puppets of its detail and demands.

That, I suppose, may also be part of the point. Whereas Kite Runner concentrated on male experience, A Thousand Splendid Suns focuses on women and, given what happened in Afghanistan over those decades, it may be that the sense of subservience to the turn of events is the very essence of these women’s experience. Thus, it is almost true to say that they were not, themselves, protagonists. They were done unto.

Mariam and Laila differ in age, ethnicity, birthright and social class. They both, and for different reasons, finish up unhappily married to the same man, Rasheed, older than both combined, brutish, bigoted and sadistic. Rasheed is thus a symbol for the traditional male role without declaring himself as such. In Western terms, we read this “tradition” as misogyny, however, and it is here where I find the book’s weakness. In my opinion – for what it’s worth, and not much at that - A Thousand Splendid Suns would have been an even greater novel had Rasheed been cast as a more liberal figure and had he also suffered as a result of his own conflict with the requirements of changing times. But Khaled Hosseini made A Thousand Splendid Suns from the women’s stories and a more complex role for their husband might have deflected attention from them.

The two women had quite different experiences of youth, and demonstrate quite different capacities to relate to others and even to life, itself. But they have enough in common to need to act together, to need to form a relationship, less than an alliance, more than acquaintance. Pragmatism might have been easier, but the two women develop a real bond, a relationship that shares out the pain, disappointment and unfulfilled dreams of their marital confinement. There is tragedy aplenty and ultimate resolution of a kind.

And then it was the eventual similarity between Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns that prompted me to take my eye off the ball, to lose a little bit of interest in the story at mid-point. But if this is a criticism then it is an extremely minor one. As I suggested at the start, had I read the two books in the opposite sequence, I would probably have levelled my criticism differently. But having also said in a review of Kite Runner that I would not criticise the book for a lack of explicit position on the politics, I feel that in A Thousand Splendid Suns Khaled Hosseini ought to have said more about the status and role of women. Mariam and Laila live a tragedy, but they are also offered as icons for something bigger, which is women’s position in the society at large. In A Thousand Splendid Suns I thus wanted the author to offer explicit comment on the plight of his characters, at least some general comment, even a dose of polemic to merely label absurdity. Alternatively, as I stated earlier, he could have made Rasheed, their aging husband, a little more complex, a tad more endearing in order to offer a source of the social attitudes without the need to justify them.

But these are all minor points. A Thousand Splendid Suns is, in its own right, another supreme achievement by Khaled Hosseini and a further reminder to all of us that ideology imposed blindly can be a blunt and dangerous instrument.

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A Thousand Splendid Suns

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

This is a book that will live for ever. In it Khaled Hosseini has accomplished what many writers, most unsuccessfully, try to achieve. It’s the big stories, those turning points in history, which often attract us. They automatically have something to say, we might believe, something that needs to be aired, perhaps explained. So wars, revolutions, social upheavals, periods of turmoil, internecine struggles, ideological conflicts, all of these are the natural territory for the story teller. They are the backdrop that adds potentially unlimited drama, the context that can involve, inform and enlighten.

But often writers are not up to the task. The attraction of that big issue is greater than the powers of judgment needed to create the right balance when the smallness of the story’s detail is pitched against the vast potential dominance of its setting. The balance, therefore, is often a fine one and, because of the power of the setting, the story is often belittled or, more usually, appears merely trite against the overbearing importance and significance of the backdrop. In recent times I have read several books which have revealed the limitations of the writer’s concept by falling into one or other trap. Not so with The Kite Runner.

The plot is important, so suffice it to say that Amir and his family are in Afghanistan before the Russian invasion. Their life is described. The Kite Runner of the title is the label for the role of the kite handler’s friend, who runs to retrieve the kites that have been cut from the sky in combat. Finders are keepers and it is this booty that is mutually fought over.

With the arrival of the Russians, part of Amir’s family flees to the United States, Amir among them. He grows up there and we rejoin him years later, by which time he is well on the way to becoming a creative writer and is about to marry. But his life in the US has its imperfections, some of which are sourced in the guilt of memory. And so Amir returns to his homeland to rediscover some of those he left behind. But now it’s an Afghanistan destroyed by war and dominated by the Taliban. Amir desperately tries to uncover his past, to trace those he seeks, and he succeeds, but sometimes in ways that he least expected, ways that further complicate an already tangled tale.

As Amir’s country descends into chaos and then into new war, with the only hope apparently continued uncertainty, his personal experience becomes both painful, taxing and trying. He stumbles upon much that is unexpected, some of it perhaps not so surprising, but some of it terrifying in its threat. But, despite the suffering, there is hope, even if eventually it might arise out of the spoils of renewed conflict, perhaps just another severed kite to retrieve.

Where Khaled Hosseini succeeds in a simultaneously engaging and informative way is the blending of his drama with its context. His narrative takes the reader on a journey of self-discovery, where actions, memories, guilt are experienced at first hand, but also a journey where history unfolds in a way that includes, never merely instructs.

The Kite Runner is not a work of politics, and neither is it a history. It’s a novel, so any thought of criticism on the grounds that it lacks analysis or completeness would be misplaced. The novel does give a keen insight into the horrid and horrifying consequences of war without ever really trying to confront why it arose, or the motives of those who perpetrated the conflict. But this, again, is not in any way a criticism of what the novel achieves, merely a criticism in the literary sense, an attempt at description and contextualization of the work. If there is still anyone out there who thinks that conflict is about winning or losing, about one side fighting another until victory, then I would recommend The Kite Runner as a both essential and essentially moving experience that would both inform and educate.

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The Kite Runner

Strangers

We arrived more than two hours later than planned, but the west of England summer light had not yet faded even to dusk. A soft golden glow was just growing across the sunset, which had just tinged a flat-calm sea beyond this tumbling village. We were tourists here, strangers in this small, tightly-knit place.

For us it was just part of a tour, a long weekend snatched in common from the clutches of our combined, ever demanding careers. I felt utterly liberated, that beautiful evening, as we walked the quarter mile or so down the steep dry cobbles from the obligatory car park into the car-less village, the deadlines and demands of advertising for once confined outside the limits of this small place. And I could tell from the spring in Jenny’s step that her battles with bottom sets in Lewisham were now further distant than our three days on the road.

There was a small gift shop, a tourist-trap trinket place, just a hundred yards along the lane. I bought the newspaper our early departure from St. Ives had denied me, my daily fix of political gossip now long established as an essential feature of my adoption into London life. I explained that we were strangers here, had driven down the side road in the hope of finding something interesting and had nothing booked.

The shopkeeper said we had just three options – the Old Hotel just down the lane, a bed and breakfast at the bottom by the harbour or the farm near the junction with the main road, back where we had turned off.

“It was different years ago,” he said, “when lots of people used to stay over, but now it’s all day trippers and holiday homes. Ten years ago we had half a dozen guest houses, but they’ve all closed down.”

The Old Hotel was just two hundred yards from the shop, at the head of the steep cove that housed the tangled triangle of the village. It was a bit beyond the price we usually paid and had AA stars framed over its reception desk, but we fell for the place and checked in, just for one night. It was the kind of mock Jacobean black and white inn, whose lack of a straight line just might have suggested it was original. But the beams were hollow and the plaque above the entrance said, “Refurbished 1958.”

“Do you have any luggage to bring from the car park?” the receptionist asked. The name tag pinned to her blouse said, ‘Hilary, Manageress’. “We have a man with a donkey and sledge who will bring it down for you.” She wasn’t joking.

I lifted our two hold-alls and said it was all we had. She smiled, offering politeness but communicating knowledge tinged with judgment. It was in an era when it was still unusual for a couple to sign in without obviously trying to appear married.

We took the key for room number six. There were only eight and the other seven keys were still hanging on their hooks when we took the lift – yes, the lift! – to the upper floor. Number six was at the back, of course, right above the kitchen extractor fan and overlooked an enclosed yard with a yellowed corrugated plastic roof. It hid an array of lidless dustbins, from which a hint of an aroma sweetened the still air when we opened the windows to encourage the previous occupant’s cigarette smoke to leave. We dropped the bags and walked down to the sea to absorb the last of the late springtime sun at its setting.

The beach was shingle and small, hard-packed against a harbour wall that extended a good fifty yards into the shallow sea. A couple of clapperboard buildings, largely rotten, clung to its prominence, their profit long past, but their structures all but remaining. There were doors missing and one structure had no interior, the uncovered entrance revealing merely sky beyond. At one time, clearly, the locals had something of a living from this place, fishing perhaps, maybe small trade, smuggling in poor times, salvage by design, who knows. And then came the tourists, the stranger trade of nineteenth century invention that evaporated when the trunk road widened and rendered the place no more than a day trip from anywhere this side of Birmingham or London.

As we walked back up the deceptively steep single track that bisected the village, we passed several open doorways seeking air on this unseasonably balmy evening at the end of May. After London everything here felt so cosy, so small, warm and unthreatening, as if the place itself were welcoming us into its embracing fold.

We saw just two other people, both descending the path, and independently both offered greeting. “Isn’t it pretty,” said Jenny. “Don’t you wish you lived here?” I declined to answer.

We ate at the Old Hotel. There was nowhere else. We ordered the grilled sole with parsley butter. Potatoes and broccoli were the ‘legumes de saison’. It took over half an hour for the food to appear. We finished the bottle of house white we had ordered to go with the fish long before even the smell of cooking wafted through from the kitchen. We got significant giggles speculating on how far out into the Bristol Channel the boat had to go to catch our order. We ate. It wasn’t bad, and then we moved across to the bar, the four steps needed to change location effectively redefining us from guests to locals. A concertina glass partition separated the areas in theory, but tonight it had been opened wide for ventilation. The rest of the evening became a tale of three women, Hilary, Sue and Sandra, all of whom have dreamt.

The hotel bar is the only place to drink, so it’s a pub, complete with its regulars. A half a dozen men are collectively and determinedly engaged in preventing the oak top from rising, their planted elbows firmly ensuring its continued sojourn on earth. They are passing the time of night with what seems to be a predictable set of platitudes. “I bought the D-reg because I thought it would work out cheaper in the long run, what with the smaller servicing bills and the like... …But you ought to do more of that sort of thing yourself and then you wouldn’t have to pay anything at all… … Yes, I know, but I just don’t have the time. Have you, these days?... …Give us another, Sandra… …You go just beyond the first turning… …Down past the egg farm where my brother used to work… …They are really cheap if you buy them by the sack… …bloody heavy, mind you…”

She is forty going on sixty, utterly contemptuous of what she sees before her, yet utterly resigned – or condemned – to servicing its every need. She is rather large and quite square, both in face and body. She’s been like that ever since she can remember. Black hair, cut quite, but not very short and swept to a wave at the front showing that she has spent not a little time tonight cleansing and preening herself before starting work behind the bar at the Old Hotel. On the other side of the argument is a series of slobs, one of whom we only ever seem to see from the back. His head is triangular with apex at the base. A pair of key-in-keyhole ears protrude. He was probably called ‘wing-nut’ by his classmates at school. I resist the temptation to grab an ear-key and twist it to see what it might unlock. From the bar talk we can clearly hear, the answer surely is not much.

Mr Ears is something of a leader, he thinks. He rarely lets any conversation that is shared by the others to pass without his own inserted comment. He wears a boiler suit, heavily stained, and a pair of Doc Martins that have seen better decades. His skin is rough and darkened, but probably not by sun. His head is shaved, but shows a shadow at the edge of his baldness. He seems to lead with his head, which he sticks out to emphasise every voluminous word he speaks.

At one point there seems to be a lull in the conversation. Mr Ears picks up one of the wet cloth runners from the bar and throws it at Sandra. He thinks it’s very funny and nudges his neighbour in the ribs as he flings. Sandra is hardly amused. She tries to say, “Please don’t do that” just as he raises his arm, but she is only half way through the “Please” by the time he has flung it. To say that she is not amused is to understate the utter contempt that fills her eyes. But still, it’s a living.

Her son has been helping out with the washing up in the under-staffed kitchen. He is fourteen, at least that is what Sandra immediately chooses to tell us the moment he appears. She gravitates towards our end of the albeit small bar, placing the maximum distance between herself and the group that we now learn includes her husband, Mr Ears. Darren, the son, is just like her, the same shape, but with brown, not black hair. I sense Jenny concluding that the mother’s is dyed. Darren is still very much his mother’s boy, not yet his father’s threat. Knowing that she will have to put the place to rights tonight before she leaves, she has him wipe down the tables and stack the stools, destined to be unused this evening. Mr Ears, he of the triangular head and key-in-keyhole ears, smiles a mild pride a little as he drinks whisky chasers at some rate.

He orders a round of drinks for himself and his mates. He almost theatrically flips open his softened leatherette wallet and then pulls a face deigning surprise when he finds it empty. Sandra’s expression is both knowing and tired as she, reluctantly, scowling when she turns her back to him, writes out an IOU and places it in the till. It’s no doubt in her own name. She takes some pence in ‘change’ from the chit, which she offers and he pockets, rattling the coins against a set of keys in his deep pockets, as if ensuring that it has fallen to the bottom. A few minutes later he needs another refill costing eighty-five pence, but he produces only twenty-five from his pocket. Sandra makes up the rest from her purse, her lips pressing a silent curse as she operates the till.

A minute later Hilary appears from the kitchen. She hands Sandra a brown envelope. A slight smile confirms that these are wages, perhaps for the week. Sandra immediately extracts a note, places it in the till and retrieves her IOU, which, after attracting her husband’s attention, she pointedly tears into small pieces and ditches into an ashtray, an ashtray that she will have to clean out later. Mr Ears barks and growls a little, maybe sensing a put down in front of his mates, but later we are told that really wants to have the paper intact so he can read the amount to check that Sandra’s not fiddling him and arranging to keep something for herself. “Never trust people in business,” he says, loudly to his mate, “but never vote against them!” He laughs.

Sue follows Hilary from the kitchen. We know her name immediately because Sandra greets her, as if she has not seen her for weeks. Her white, side-buttoned jacket identifies her as the person who grilled our fish. She is a very good cook. We enjoyed our sole, I tell her. She says thank you, but then immediately delivers a bout of self-deprecation, apologising for the fact that she has never had any training. Her words are like a magnet for the other women, who immediately move to our end of the bar, as far from the locals as it gets. Sue then tells us of a coffee fudge cake that prompted one guest to propose to her. The ladies laugh, including my Jenny. Her husband, however, was the one who taught her how to cook fish. It’s all in the salt. After all, they live in salt water, don’t they?

Perhaps because we are strangers, Sue wants to talk. Clearly the locals at the other end would not be interested in the fact that she often has to cook for thirty people in a kitchen that’s the size of a dog kennel. Hilary, Sue and Sandra are clearly not happy with their lot. Hilary, especially, seems tense and dispirited as Sue tries to explain the facilities at the back. When she invites us through the bar to inspect where she works, Hilary looks perturbed, even threatened. “Look”, says Sue, with a wave of an arm, “there’s one piddling microwave, a gas cooker from year dot and a freezer that wouldn’t service a family of four. And when the place is full of trippers, I have to do twenty bar meals an hour at lunchtime.”

Hilary ushers us back the right side of the bar There’s not much work around here, she tells us. Having us visit the kitchen was clearly more than her job was worth, so she changes the subject. “It’s nice here, but I feel that life is passing me by. I’m a city girl. I’m from Walsall. I’m not used to living in a small place like this. I envy you two. I’d really like to be in London, but my boyfriend is a herdsman and there’s no call for them in Mayfair.”

But she does make sure we register that Sue is slaving away in the kitchen for next to nothing. And the owner who often supervises rang in to say that he would not be around to lend a hand this evening because he was sick, when she knew full well that in fact he and his wife had been invited out to dinner by the Cowan’s at their farm.

“At this time of year, when the sky is clear and the air is fresh and the weather’s nice, you would think that this is a really nice place to live. But just go and have a look at the backs of these places. Go round the side and have a look. Give me a modern bungalow with double glazing and central heating any day. They are falling to bits. In winter you can have the heating going full blast and still have a gale blowing in around the window frame. On nights like those I’m almost glad to be working here. At least it’s warm.” The words were qualified by a nod towards the regulars. “But then you have to sit here and put up with the rubbish that lot talk about all evening… Honestly in winter, in the dark nights, there are times when you wish you were anywhere apart from here. And this is the best work in the village, despite the fact that the owners never want to put any money into the place. And the people from here can’t get it into their heads that it’s in their own interest to invest in the place, to make it more attractive.. But then you get up in the morning and the sun is shining and the sky is blue and you can see across to Lundy Island and you walk the dogs across the cliff top and everything seems fine. I don’t know.”

It was then that she changed. An overlooked duty resurfaced from a forgotten cell. A moment later she returned from the reception. She had another brown envelope for Sandra, who smiled as she took it. The word ‘bonus’ could be heard, but there was a question mark of sorts. By then we had decided to go to bed and, as we left our bar stools, we only had time to bid her goodnight.

The following morning we walked around again. There really wasn’t anywhere to go, except where we had already been. You could go up or down. Up was back to the car. Down was to the sea. We chose down. Up would come later. We walked along the harbour wall, past the dilapidated clapperboards to look at the flat calm lying below a grey but light sky There was a buzzard, an intruder, screaming as it was shepherded away by pecking gulls. We watched the pursuit for ten minutes or more as the local nesters made sure that the unwanted foreigner was well and truly escorted off their patch.

As we stepped off the rampart and back onto the shingle, a British Telecom van appeared from the town. We assumed that he must have special dispensation to drive the main street, a privilege afforded only to the corporate. At the bottom the driver sped to a halt and then engaged reverse. This was clearly only a change of direction, there being nowhere along the main street to turn once you had entered the village. A group of men to our right noticed the noise and broke off from their idiotic task of trying to move a rusty old hulk across the shingle with makeshift crowbars. It was the hint of wheel-spin that attracted them Here was someone who did not know the place. Here was potential profit. A hint of forward movement in the van dissolved into an engine race as the rear end sank as far as the body into the loose stones.

Crowbars discarded, the blokes surrounded their captive in a matter of seconds. “He’s got that well and truly…,” grumbled Mr Ears, who was one of the first to arrive. He recognised us from the bar and actually spoke directly to us, but the words were for the van driver’s benefit. He scratched his head a few times as his mates appeared. They too mumbled as they crouched to inspect the depth of the problem. The van driver and his companion had got out of their seats, their doors scraping into the shingle. Mr Ears then said quite a lot, but I caught only an odd word. He scratched his head again. “It really isn’t my day today,” he said to me as he passed.

After a few minutes our little crowd still surrounded the prey when the Land Rover appeared. Mr Ears told us that it normally does the ferrying back to the car park for those trippers who can’t bring themselves to walk back up the hill. “It doubles as a tow truck for the boats,” he said. He tied a small thin rope to the tow bar and then selected a suitable place to attach it to the Telecom van. A whistle to the Land Rover produced a crawl. The rope broke, of course. Mr Ears scratched his head again. He was clearly having to work hard today. A mate went off to find a heavier rope, which was duly attached. The Land Rover growled as the van driver raised a scream from his engine. There was a splutter at the back end of his van and then it was free. There was a round of applause. A note was offered and Mr Ears took it, but clearly expressed a belief that it should be bigger. “The things I have to do to earn a living,” he said as he shuffled past the two of us, pulling and rewinding the rope that probably belonged to someone else. As British Telecom whined its way up the hill in second gear, we set off towards the Old Hotel to retrieve our bags, check out and get under way. Jenny and I shared a joke about Mr Ears, referring to elbows and arseholes.

Sandra was waiting for us. She had a cloth bag in her right hand and her son’s hand in her left. He really was a very young fourteen. Clasped by her thumb, and pressed against her son’s grasped fingers was a brown envelope, presumably the envelope that Hilary had passed to her just as we left the bar. The envelope was torn and a single sheet of paper flapped loose. Jenny stayed with her while I paid the bill and got our bags.

“She wants a lift into town,” said Jenny when I returned. She got the sack. They have accused her of taking money from the till. She’s leaving.” I cast a glance back down the hill, but there was no-one in sight. Mr Ears was still down there, earning, when the four of us, all strangers now, set off towards the car.

Shakespeare by Bill Bryson

At the start of Shakespeare Bill Bryson apologises for the fact that there is not much to tell. Every aspect of the bard’s physical presence on the planet seems to be shrouded in doubt and mystery. We don’t even know what he looked like. We don’t know much about where he lived, or what he did with his time, apart from write and act. And, though we think we know a reasonable amount about what Will wrote, we know next to nothing about how his works were performed, alongside zero about what role the writer, himself, performed.

So, having apologised for presenting a non-book with a non-story, Bill Bryson proceeds to fill two hundred pages with pure, unadulterated delight. The text provides context, detail and background. It is less than adulatory on the surface, apparently determined to stay within the bounds of the known and the probable. But when Bill Bryson does offer opinion, he reveals a clear and deeply felt love and admiration, almost worship, for his subject.

The book is an absolute joy from beginning to end. Perhaps there really aren’t any new facts or figures to discover, but Bill Bryson’s account of Shakespeare’s life has enough detail, biographical, critical and contextual, to offer as rounded a picture of the writer as we are likely to get. There are numerous Bryson humorous asides, of course, and these only add to the clarity of the piece.

In this slim work, Bryson offers a potted biography, snippets of literary criticism, some illuminating linguistics, much associated history - both of the era and the scholarship, and even a quick guided tour of the pretenders to the myth.

By the end the reader can only marvel at how much an assumed bedrock of national culture and identity could have been laid down by the sedimentation of so little material. But then, of course, there’s the works, which speak for themselves.

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Shakespeare: The World as a Stage (Eminent Lives)