Hilary Spume By Firelight

What is more wonderful at this time of year, than sitting by a crackling fire in the library of ones ancestral Cotswolds home, licking crumpetty butter from ones fingers, and casting ones eye over a few recent volumes? Well, a run up to Town for one thing, but Mrs Cutler our fearsome housekeeper has confiscated my wallet after an admittedly ill-judged Skittles night at The Turks Head in the village last Thursday week. Until my brother Sir Leslie gets back from his annual reading party in Tunis, I am terribly low on funds, and yours truly is forced once more to turn in a few book reviews in order to earn an honest crust.

The lovely thing about reviewing is that you get paid twice, once when your piece appears, and then again when you flog your review copies. We’re still lucky enough to have a proper second-hand bookshop here in Botolph St Otto, run by a parsimonious old skinflint called Arnold Hamble, but even he might cough up decent money for my copy of Phillip Larkin; On The Buses, edited by Fred Dibnah. It really is hard to think of a more comprehensive account of Larkin’s travels by bus and I doubt that Dibnah’s book will be superseded for many years.

Using a collection of tickets saved at Larkin’s death by his ‘loaf-haired secretary’ Betty, Dibnah shows that the omnibus was second only in importance to the sit-up-and-beg bicycle in Larkin’s life. There are bus tickets which chart Larkin’s rides to school in Coventry, tickets from the Oxford Corporation which reflect his growing intimacy with dear old Kingsley, and tickets from the years when Larkin was working on his novels and commuting by bus into Wellington. Sadly, Dibnah has been unable to find many of the Belfast tickets, so the bulk of the book is based on tickets which record Larkin’s bus journeys in and around Hull.

I was touched to see two eight penny returns from Hull to Goole, dated from 1965, a poignant reminder of a delightful day out which Larkin and I shared. After our bus ride, we walked around Goole, (not a terribly attractive town, if memory serves aright), before sharing a fish tea; I had the haddock, while Larkin nibbled at a piece of rock salmon, as it was known then. Huss, they call it now, but it's dogfish, really. In the war we had much worse, and Larkin told the story of how he hid a piece of snoek inside his knickerbockers. I never had it, as Bedales was vegetarian

I’ll tell you who I never much liked, and that was old Crispin Tolby, whose Bulgarian Water Colourists of The 19th Century has just been reissued by the University of Sofia Press. He was my brother Sir Leslie Spume’s fag at Gordonstoun, and Leslie always insisted that the little puss stole a postal order of five shillings value from his pocket book. This was the inciting incident behind Rattigan’s ‘Winslow Boy’, or so Sir Leslie claims. Rattigan had a ‘thing’ about Tolby, but so did the whole Secret Service quite frankly, including my late wife Mimsy, who had a bit of a run in with him when she was working on the switchboard at Cambridge Circus between shifts at The Windmill. There were a few raised eyebrows when Tolby was revealed as Twelfth Man; not from me, I can tell you. I always knew he was a wrong ‘un.

Still, you have to admit that this present volume is the final word on the subject of Bulgarian Water Colourists, and must be good for a bob or two at the second-hand bookshop. It comes in a slip case, and retails for two hundred quid, for God’s sake! It must be worth more than a tenner! Look at the quality of the reproductions! Come on Arnold! A couple of pints, at least!

One more volume of note before I hasten to the Public Bar of The Turk’s Head, is EG Pugh’s History of the Bedfordshire Brickfields. It sounds a bit dull, I know, and it is, quite frankly, but old EG’s been working on it for donkeys years, and he’s a pal of mine from Coach and Horses days. And what, after all, are book reviews if not a chance to put in a good word for ones cronies?

Good reading!