Afterthought
By ALAN BRIEN FRANKLY, I never thought this day would come— March 12, 1965. It still looks highly improbable to me, much further off than, say, April 1, 1984. But they've printed it at the top of every page, so presumably there's general agreement that it has arrived. March 12, 1965, eh? My fortieth birthday.
To think I should actually live to admit it. Still in some ways (please say 'yes') it sounds younger than thirty-nine, doesn't it? `Alan Brien, forty, described as a self-employed journalist, told Kentish Town magistrates yesterday that he had not been well for some time. Due to overwork and financial troubles, he was in a highly nervous state on the night of the incident. The mixture of half a pint of Drambuie, three egg-flogs and eleven light ales on top of an overdose of pep pills led to a temporary black-out. . . No, I'm afraid it doesn't come under the heading of a boyish prank, at forty. More likely, in view of the prisoner's advanced age and enfeebled physique, the Bench will take a lenient view of the barbarous outrage he perpetrated and, with remission for good behaviour, he'll be out in five years. Still forty is youthful for a Controller of BBC-2, or a life peer, or Editor of The Times, or a self-made millionaire, or a Cardinal, or a novelist whose books have sold twenty million copies in seventeen languages. The trouble is— this forty-year-old is none of these. And he has only an outside chance of achieving even the first by March 12, 1966.
There must be some comfort in this balding, obese, seedy number of forty. You are as young as you feel? Not really—that only means I've felt forty for the last ten years. Perhaps there is reassurance in remembering that I have lasted forty years—which is more than David Frost, Prince Charles, the Beatles and Lionel Bart can say.
I recall putting this argument once to a man on the Tube in 1938. 1 was thirteen and on one of my first visits to London. Naturally, I was shouting at the top of my voice, running up and down the carriage, swinging on the leather straps, putting my foot in the sliding doors for the joy of seeing them open again, and generally behaving like a hooligan. An ancient fellow of about fifty, with a grey face like a screwed-up wash-rag, accosted me with a melancholy, veiny hand. 'You have your life before you, boy,' he said, sounding as if he were speaking down a long subterranean pipe. 'I am going to be dead in three months of cancer.' And for the first time
I saw in an adult's eyes the awful, vulnerable, self-pitying, melodramatic mawkishness of a spoilt child. But we weren't brought up to think of our senidrs as superiors in Sunderland, so I gave him the benefit of my mature philosophy. I repeated what I had often heard my father say, that doctors were always wrong and invari- ably had the decency to die before the patients they had condemned. The old chap would not be consoled by such easy optimism. He had con- sulted so many specialists that it would need a holocaust in Harley Street to clear out in three months all those who had written full stop to his life. He seemed about to weep, so I hastily lowered the bucket for another helping of the milk of human kindness. What about this? Had it ever occurred to him that he had already been per- mitted to clutter up this planet for fifty years, with three months still.in hand, while I might die in all my beauty, youth and vigour tomorrow? There was also a war coming up (or else we Left Book Club readers would know the reason why) and already several hundred thousand young men had their names entered in the diary of the Re- cording Angel. There was a good case for indict- ing him as a lucky war-dodger who had con- sumed more than his ration of existence.
I .don't know whether this cheered him up much. Certainly his face lightened to a muddy shade of beige and he shook me warmly by the hand. 'It was fate that I should talk to you,' he said and he strode out, martially, at Piccadilly Circus. I do know that my own syllogism frightened me. I set thirty as the time I should know that I had passed through the Valley of the Shadow of Death and emerged on to the Plateau of Safe Middle-Age. I decided then to be a survivor and began to practise the sort of protective techniques such as thriller heroes adopt when they are on the run both from the police and from the underworld, with every man's hand against them. I rehearsed in my bedroom drop- ping flat at the whistle of a bomb. I would go for a day without liquid, only occasionally moistening my lips with a damp handkerchief. I carefully read all the books in the library about disasters by sea, fire, earthquake or air raid and marked those passages which seemed to contain some lesson in escapology. I' particularly noted the example of the' man who was picked up twenty- four hours after the sinking of the Titanic, healthy, cheerful, singing and drunk, having swallowed a neat pint of gin before jumping over the rails. I determined, when I could afford it, never to cross water without carrying alcohol to keep off the ill-effects of the fatal liquid. In cinemas, 1 memorised the enwrgency exits and elaborated ingenious plans for quick getaways— such as unrolling the fire hose to slide down from the Circle to the Stalls if the stairs were blocked. I worked on the assumption that the world was full of secret agents of the enemy who might at any rime drop slates from roofs, swerve cars off the road or elbow me in front of a bus. Others might think me a coward, but, like Sir Percy Blakeney, I would steel myself against their jeers by my devolion to my undercover mission.
When the war did come, and the RAF finally prodded me into the air as the only gunner who was more frightened of being behind his guns than the enemy were of being in front of them, I disguised my fears behind a remarkably well- fitting mask of slug-like apathy. I was the most safety-conscious airman on the squadron and even made a habit of carrying my knife, fork and spoon pointed downwards between the mess and the hut. Today I still look both ways along a one-way street before crossing. Against all odds, in a hostile universe full of madmen, sadists, fools, butter-fingers and bunglers, surrounded by germs and accidents and H-bombs and poisons and radiation, in the centre of a class war and a sex war and an age war and threats of a war war, I am still alive on the eve of my fortieth birthday. I don't want sympathy—dammit, I deserve a medal.
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