The Exploits of Engelbrecht Page 3

  We broke camp at dawn. Our ball was lying quite free grinning up at us. The undercaddies who had been guarding it all night stepped back and saluted. Engelbrecht took his spoon. I whispered: “For God’s sake! Not wood and sand!” But he waved me away. “It’ll be blood and sand,” he said, “if you don’t shut up.” However, he caught it a nice clean clip that sent it flying straight and true, and we watched it disappear into a mirage of the Imperial Hotel, Russell Square.

  “Well begun is half done,” said the Chief Caddy smugly. But when we got up to where he calculated the ball lay there was a terrific hiss and a queen cobra reared up, spread her hood and put out her forked tongue at me. Inside the embrace of her coils I saw a clutch of eggs and among them—our ball.

  “My God, Engelbrecht,” I said, “you don’t half leave me some little white lies.”

  The White Hunter raised his elephant gun but the Chief Caddy struck up the barrel and the charge exploded harmlessly into the firmament breaking all the windows in a mirage of Elm Park Gardens that had just appeared. “Mon! ye maunna do that,” he said, whipping out a hefty omnibus volume. “Listen to this:

  ‘Rule 108, Section 16, Subsection 24, Living Hazards, Animal: Under no circumstance must violence be used to dislodge a living hazard… Paragraph 98, Sairpents: only one of the club’s registered snake-charmers may be employed to dislodge a sairpent. Any infringement whatsoever of this rule forfeits the match.’”

  “To hell with that,” I said. “It’s only a friendly game and anyway our opponents are dead.”

  But Engelbrecht wouldn’t hear of it. He insisted on playing by the rules and the Chief Caddy backed him up. They called down the line for the snake-charmer. The idea was that as soon as he’d piped the cobra off her nest I was to rush in with my niblick. I was in such a sky-blue funk that instead of hitting our ball I hit one of the cobra’s eggs. By this time the cobra was waltzing on her tail to the strains of Pale Hands I Loved, on a wheezy clarinet, and she didn’t seem to notice. But she noticed all right when Engelbrecht, with his usual combination of sangfroid and rashness, took his number six and sent the ball and most of the eggs flying a good hundred and sixty yards. And for the next hour it was tip-and-run again until we managed to shake her off in a sandstorm.

  We had some quite peaceful golf after that. One or two incidents but nothing out of the way. We encountered a wounded sepoy and were able to remove the golf ball, one of the old gutties, and patch him up. He was pathetically grateful and told us his grandmother’s remedy for superfluous hair. We thanked him and hoped it might come in handy for getting out of the rough. Later, a brush with the Senussi, when Engelbrecht drove into them just after their Muezzin had sounded the Call to Prayer, threatened to become nasty, but we formed a square and beat them off. The worst moment was the nick-of-time when the Foreign Legion arrived; then we thought we really were going to lose our ball.

  The score was now 12173. Still in the bunker and our water running out. But Engelbrecht found water with the last shot of the day, a powerful slice into the well of an oasis. That evening we drove into a caravan and heard a strange story that was going round the bazaars of a new record for the course, though whether it was a record high or a record low, we couldn’t make out.

  Next morning I played our 12174th stroke, exploding with my niblick from a camel’s hoof print, and as the cloud of sand cleared away the Chief Caddy gave a great shout. We had reached the fairway. By way of celebration we issued a sniff of benzedrine all round and I wrote the White Hunter a post-dated cheque. Then we held our breath while Engelbrecht addressed the ball.

  You’ve probably gathered by now that Engelbrecht over-swings. There’s no doubt about that and I’ve often begged him to hold himself in check. Even so I was not prepared for the deathly slice that followed. Leaving the clubhead at an angle of 45° the ball curved across the fairway in a vast drooping parabola.

  The Chief Caddy put his head in his hands and rocked to and fro. “Lord save us,” he moaned, “plumb in the middle of the Butlin Holiday Camp.”

  Caddies, bearers, psychiatrist, snake-charmer, and all gave vent to a deep groan.

  Next to the Native Reserve the Butlin Holiday Camp is reckoned to be the fiercest Hazard of them all. The committee leased the site to Butlin after Salvador Dali played his exhibition round on the course and complained that the last half was too easy. Since then many a surrealist golfer who’s sliced into it has preferred to play his way quietly out to sea rather than face the prolonged stay which is often required.

  It took us six weeks to play out of that Camp but my recollections are very vague because I went down with a severe go of sand-fly fever and was delirious all the time. I remember a fierce argument over the identity and ownership of the ball between the Chief Caddy and the Superintendent of the Children’s Play Pen, and being chased between two endless beds of flaming geraniums by a 200-lb blonde in an American sailor’s cap with Kiss Me Quick on it. I remember the camp chaplain trying to make Engelbrecht put five hundred pounds in the “cuss box”, and the torture of being got out of bed every other minute to play my stroke. The rest is a merciful blur, and I did not recover the priceless gift of consciousness which distinguishes us from the brutes until long after we had played our way out.

  But our troubles were not yet over. The psychiatrist crocked up with a severe nervous breakdown and Engelbrecht’s slice had to go untreated. There followed a succession of awkward lies from each of which I was too feeble to play out. Dr. Edith Summerskill’s Shopping Bag; Gandhi’s Loin Cloth; Molotov’s Desk in the Kremlin; the Lincoln Imp Tea Rooms; a salon de décrottage in old Marseilles; at each of them I foozled hopelessly and appealed to Engelbrecht: “You got us into this, chum, and you got to get us out.” And little Engelbrecht grinned cheerfully back and swung his niblick. There was no daunting that indomitable dwarf.

  It was eleven more months and ten more days after we had driven off the first tee and I had just played our 2674321769th, a tricky little pitch out of the window of the 3.30 from Waterloo, when the Chief Caddy let out a yell and started dancing a reel. We had reached the green.

  We took all Engelbrecht’s wooden clubs away from him lest he should be tempted to press, because the green at Mooninghill is the size of an English county and proceeded to foozle our way smoothly and quietly towards the huge hole. We should have done a lot better if the psychiatrist had been functioning to treat us for the anxiety neurosis which is one of the special features of that green. At last, after several hours of being too short, too far, and upping the rim, we managed to tie up the ghostly hands that had been pushing our ball back from the hole and Engelbrecht sank a six-incher for 2674322269.

  The clubhouse was en fête. We could see its lights blazing from miles away in the inky night. And who should be the first persons we saw as we stumbled into the bar but Charlie Wapentake and Nodder Fothergill. Not only were they not dead, but by a strange combination of circumstances, the legitimacy of which is still being debated hotly by the committee to this day, they had done the hole in one. It appears that before Charlie had a chance to play their second out of the Valley of Dry Bones, a huge vulture swooped down and flew off with the ball. Nodder and their White Hunter opened fire and winged the vulture who eventually dropped the ball down the vest of one of the competitors in a Japanese Women’s Cross Country Race. She lost her way round the world while being chased by a Zen Buddhist monk and ran across the green and the ball slipped down the leg of her track shorts and rolled into the hole.

  The celebrations lasted far into the century. My last recollection is of little Engelbrecht taking a header into the loving cup of flaming rum punch. “Come on in,” he said, as he swam round and round, “it’s gloriously warm.”

  A THICK NIGHT AT THE PLANT THEATRE

  I shall always remember the time—and a damned long time it was, too, as you’ll realize in a minute—when Engelbrecht, the dwarf surrealist boxer, and I were slung out of the Old Plant Theatre of Varieties. It was during th
e first night of an arboreal epic entitled Ash Before Oak. We’d looked in there after dining with the Id and some of his chums at a new Black Market Restaurant that had opened next door to the Royal College of Surgeons’ Museum.

  The dinner was by way of celebrating the close season for Man-hunting. Anyway, by the time we’d eaten our way through the menu of recherché Unmentionables, and drained the Ether decanter, I don’t suppose there was a single one of us who was anywhere near in his right mind. So when Nodder Fothergill suggested dropping in at the Plant Theatre we, that is those of us who still retained the priceless gift of consciousness, were inclined to be enthusiastic. We bundled into the Id’s huge black Fly and bowled off, whooping and shrieking like fiends.

  We didn’t realize just what we were in for. The fact is Plant Drama is apt to be a bit slow. All the parts are played by real plants, and plants, as you know, like to take their time about it. You can always rely on them for a sincere performance, but for a good deal of it you just have to sit there and watch them grow. It’s a bit agonizing now and again, especially during love scenes. You’d scarcely credit the time it takes some of these diffident vegetables to make a pass at one another. Why, even a relatively fast worker like mistletoe, convolvulus, or bamboo, playing in a light Coward type comedy, can take three months over a proposal. As for the hardwood trees, well all I can tell you is that the curtain went up 5000 years ago on the famous New Forest Production of King Lear with an all-Oak cast and the audience are still there to this day.

  Of course the Old Plant Theatre of Varieties isn’t quite as slow as all that. They go in for Revue with choruses of cannas and herbaceous borders and orchids as stars, insects to carry the pollen about and an occasional bird to drop the seed from the O.P. side to the wings. But even so the tempo is a good deal slower than most people are used to.

  The theatre itself is a cross between the Hollywood Bowl, Kew Gardens, and the old Leicester Square Empire. A good deal of it is in the open air, but the whole place is tangled up with gilt and greenery, plush and moss.

  We arrived just before the curtain went up. The “thing that was scarcely a thing” at the Almighty Whirlitzer was coming to the end of Trees, which is more or less the National Anthem, as you might say, of the plant world, and the atmosphere was vibrating with the intensity that invariably betokens a Plant’s first night. Engelbrecht and I were sitting just in front of the Editor of the Fly Paper, and I remember Engelbrecht saying sharply over his shoulder: “If you don’t stop buzzing, you Goddamned blue-bottle, I shan’t be able to hear the rustling of the leaves.”…

  That shows you he was a bit lit. Engelbrecht would never have spoken to an editor like that if he’d been stone cold sober. His sense of publicity is far too keen. Lizard Bayliss, who was sitting on his other side, was dreadfully upset. “You didn’t ought to have done that, kiddo,” he kept saying. “You know how touchy he is. See! There goes one of his ruddy little correspondents buzzing off back to the office now. Now you mark my words, there’ll be a nasty little bit of dirt about you spread all over his sticky front page tomorrow. Engelbrecht drunk again, I shouldn’t wonder. Drunk again the night before a fight... And there’ll be an inquiry and we shall lose the purse.” Just then the lights went out, the rain came down and the curtain went up on the first scene of: Ash Before Oak.

  Now this, only we didn’t know it at the time, represented a new venture on the part of a couple of old cowslips with more dew than sense who planned to strike a blow for the homely English Flora as opposed to all the exotic tropical blooms— orchids, frangipani, bougainvillea, date palms, sandalwood— that had been monopolizing the plant variety stage for so long. The star of the show, if you please, was a floppy hollyhock that the old cowslips had got a crush on at the last horticultural show. The whole thing was set in an English spring and summer— a wet one of course as you can tell by the title. The plot turned on a lot of cosy friendly rivalry between the Oak and the Ash as to which should be out first, with an idiotic garden party where the exotic tropical plants were made to look cheap and flashy beside the cottage garden brigade, attended by a ballet of cabbage whites.

  The first scene was “Somewhere In February”. The rain came down like a grey steel curtain, week after week, and nothing happened except a drip, drip, drip, plop, splash, plop. By the time it got round to March, and one or two green shoots were supposed to appear, most of us were beginning to get a bit restive. And when something went wrong with the wind machine so that it started blowing the March gale slap in our faces instead of back stage, we all turned as one man on Nodder Fothergill and asked what the hell he thought he was doing bringing us to our deaths of pneumonia in this hell hole. Nodder said how could he know it was going to be such a confounded flop, and we’d better turn it in and head for home.

  But when we got up to go we had a nasty shock. Every exit was barred by oaks and ranged behind us was a dense row of whacking great thorn bushes, and when Charlie Wapentake protested, one of them bore down on him and lashed him to his seat with withies. Seems there’s been a conspiracy on the part of the British Plant Council to make certain that British Plant actors and actresses should get a fair hearing.

  Just then Engelbrecht gave me a nudge. “Look over there,” he said. “That’s one consolation anyway.” I turned my head gingerly, expecting any moment to be pranged by a thorn, and was just in time to see the Editor of the Fly Paper foiled in a phoney attempt to leave the theatre by way of the skylight. The thing that was “barely a thing” shot him down with a blast on the Vox Humana, and he crash-dived into a spider’s web.

  Soon after that the star of the show, the floppy old hollyhock, made her first appearance as a young shoot. The Id blew a lecherous whistle but an oak boomed: “No disrespect to British planthood, if you please?” And one of the thorn bushes gagged him with a bundle of brushwood.

  That sobered us I can tell you. I mean to say you don’t gag an elemental force like the Id as easily as all that. We sat dead silent till the end of the scene when they handed up a huge bouquet of raw meat to the hollyhock “from her devoted admirers”.

  Presently Lizard Bayliss began to whine that his feet were taking root in the floor. “Can’t you do nothing for me, kiddo?” he whimpered. “I’m turning into a ruddy shrub. I can feel it. If I don’t get out of here soon I’ll be all privet.”

  Just then the scene changed again to the night of April 1st. A streaming wet night it was and black as your hat, so black you couldn’t even see what the Ash and the Oak were supposed to be up to; the dialogue sounded to me like a lot of creaks. I was told afterwards the script called for glow-worms at this point, but the little devils had gone on strike; refused to shine while it was raining.

  Engelbrecht whispered in my ear: “Come on, chum. This is our chance! Let’s try our luck back stage!” and the next thing I knew we were clambering through the branches of the Mighty Whirlitzer, heading for behind the scenes. We brushed past a lot of knobbly fungus that grew out of the oak and made it squeak, causing the Oak to muff one of his lines. He was a bit deaf that Oak; you could hear the prompter yelling at him like a foghorn: “My tough breast gladdens at the touch of spring.” Then we dodged a bramble bush and a couple of pollarded willows that were larking about waiting for their cue—funny ideas of fun some of these trees have—and suddenly we found ourselves in a part of open country right up at the back of the stage. Engelbrecht paused to kick the heart out of a lettuce. “The dressing rooms are over there,” he said, pointing vaguely into the murk.

  I stumbled along in his wake, tripping over roots and shrubs and movable sods of turf waiting to come on in the next scene. I got the impression there was a good deal of discontent—more than is usual behind the scenes. The flowers were jealous of the trees and the trees were jealous of the shrubs. I heard a birch say she was damned if she would ever play a scene with a rhododendron in it again and in future she was going to have it stated plainly in her contract.

  Next moment I tripped and fell flat o
n my face in a bed of pansies. Vicious little devils they were too; one of them bit me in the finger and they called me names I’d never even heard of. By the time I’d picked myself up Engelbrecht had disappeared.

  That didn’t worry me much. Engelbrecht, as you know, can generally be relied on to take care of himself. I wandered on until I came to a row of hot houses with blinds down over the glass and chinks of light showing through. These were the dressing rooms. Then from one of them with a huge great star painted on t, I heard a voice that sounded like Engelbrecht’s yelling for help. I opened the door and peeped in.

  There was Engelbrecht in the grips of a man-eating orchid; a wicked-looking brute it was: all kidney colour with great leprous looking blotches. It had got several tendrils round him and frankly I didn’t think he stood a chance. “Put me down at once,” Engelbrecht kept saying.

  There wasn’t much I could do; some other tropical growths were beginning to give me nasty looks and put out some suckers in my direction. But just then help came from a totally unexpected quarter. A darned great beetle with a wingspread of two feet came whirring into the dressing room, and all the other plants began to grow towards it. They were waving their tendrils in a great state of agitation, and presently the man-eating orchid put Engelbrecht down, though it still kept a tendril round him, and bent its head closer to listen.

  It appears this beetle was the agent for the orchids and while he was whirring about behind the scenes he’d managed to get a squint at the script and had realized that the whole thing was nothing but a plot to hold his clients up to ridicule, by loosing a good old English snowstorm on them in the middle of the flaming June ballet at the Garden Party. A pretty murderous wheeze, you must admit.