‘She’s got the sniff on you, mate.’
(18-year-old working class Bessie to 36-year-old, middle-class Andrew who she’s having an affair with, pointing out that Andrew’s wife, Audrey, is starting to suspect him of infidelity)

This was Lesley Thomas’s ninth novel. In it he takes the comical sex farce approach he developed in his novels set abroad and applies it to sleepy, snobbish, quietly sad London suburbia. The quiet desperation of suburbia was very much in the air: 1974 was the year of the TV show ‘Rising Damp’, 1975 saw the first series of ‘The Good Life’ and ‘Fawlty Towers’, along with David Lodge’s brilliant campus comedy Changing Places which mocks life in suburban Birmingham. 1976 saw the first TV series of the desperately sad The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, along with the first of Tom Sharpe’s series of novels about the sad demoralised academic Henry Wilt. Every Dad Rock fans knows the Pink Floyd lyric ‘Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way’ from 1973’s Dark Side of the Moon’. As I say, damp depression was the spirit of the times.

The novel accurately records the quiet desperation and seething desperation of suburbia – seething with ‘unsatisfied demands and emotions’ (p.139) – and what people these days call ‘micro-aggressions’, the countless little aggravations between husbands and wives who are sick of each other and neighbours who politely loathe each other (p.172).

Plummers Park

Thirty miles northwest of central London, Plummers Park is a middle-class estate set on a hill. The hill slopes down to the embankment which carries the railway and on the other side are the terraced houses of the working classes (p.12).

At Plummers Park you do not quarrel with your neighbours. Hate their guts but don’t quarrel. Be nice to them, admire their roses, pat their dog, smile, but don’t leer, at their wives. (p.43)

Thus we are introduced to:

Cast

Andrew Maiby (pronounced ‘maybe’) is a local journalist for the Watford Journal, who is the court reporter at Bushey Crown Court, a job he loathes. He is 36 (p.224) and owns a big, smelly, tragic-faced Bassett hound named Gladstone which his wife hates. All the houses in Plummers Park have fake names. Maiby’s house is on a road called Upmeadow and is called ‘Bennunikin’ which is allegedly Navajo for ‘the Wigwam on the Hill’. Maiby knows he’s living, like he’s working, at 25% capacity. Two years ago he had a mad 6-week fling with an American woman, moving into her flat and feasting on sex every minute of every day. Then it was over and he moved back in with his wife and nothing more was said about it.

Audrey Maiby, once a wild child, now settled wife of Andrew, during the bored days she remembers their nights of naughty nakedness out of doors, by the lake, drinking and making love, all a long, long time ago. He had an affair. She forgave him. Life goes on.

Lizzie Maiby, teenage daughter of the above who spends too much time at a canal with other teenagers, fixing up’ an old canal boat.

Simon Grant, married for just 8 months to Ena, who has the most magnificent breasts for miles around, so that Simon can’t help boasting about them or telling the jaded men how he’s just had sex that morning etc (p.13). She is miserably unhappy.

‘Earnest’ Ernest Rollett, always fiercely angry about some local issue (p.15).

‘Gorgeous’ George, the hole-in-one-man, who practices golf and talks about it obsessively and yet, ironically, never has scored a hole in one (p.17).

Herbie Futter, the uxorious Jewish taxidermist (p.19), the smell of whose chemicals drive all the neighbourhood dogs wild (p.86).

‘Hercules‘, nickname of the mentally disturbed man who pushes a pram packed with junk around Plummers Park during the daytime.

Cynthia Turvey, stay-at-home wife who Audrey often gossips with (p.23), wife of Geoffrey Turville who’s having a passionate affair with unhappy Ena Grant.

Mrs Burville, dishevelled neighbour, alcoholic, drunkenly doing gardening in a nylon overall and white knee socks (p.27).

The onion man, tall, slim, black-haired, dark-faced foreigner who cycles round the estate once a month, festooned with onions and setting the bored housewives’ hearts a-flutter (p.27).

‘Big’ Brenda Perry, the fat court correspondent of his rival newspaper, the Chronicle (p.41).

Bessie White, 18-year-old working class granddaughter of a 70-something old man who’s convicted for shoplifting, including stealing a live eel from a fishmongers’. Later she phones Maiby and offers him £5, then sex, if only he can keep his story out of the local paper. Maiby turns her down.

Burton, Maiby’s editor at the Journal, a ‘street born North Londoner’ who Maiby never bothers arguing with (p.42).

Barney Rogers, landlord of The Case Is Altered pub, exaggerating its historic interest to two Americans, Harry Solkiss who’s an officer at the US Air Force base and his wide-eyed wife Jean (p.53).

Gomer John, keeper of the Plummers Park sub-post office and fantasist about the South Seas.

Freddy Tyler, the Plummers Park station-master, ‘an amiable, olding man’ (p.61).

The Reverend Malcolm Boon, vicar of St James the Less (p.128), a figure of fun who makes every situation embarrassing.

Miss Dora Jankin, a short rude woman, headmistress of Plummers Park Primary School (p.140).

Group Captain Fernie Withers, secretary of the Plummers Park gold club (p.189).

Miss Mappin, headmistress of the local grammar school (p.205).

Kids

Lizzie Maiby, Andrew and Audrey’s 12-year-old daughter.

Billy Reynolds, 14 and Tom Reynolds his 12-year-old brother.8

Events

On their walk to the station together Rollett tells the other chaps he’s got wind of council plans to build a home for maladjusted kids on some waste land in the posh estate.

Maiby covers the usual Monday morning court cases, a sequence of sad losers, including the old man done for shoplifting an eel, described above.

We learn that Stuart Turvey is having an affair with sexy Ena Grant while her husband’s at work. They drive out to Dunstable Downs and have sex in the warm summer open air, until they’re discovered by four small girls who taunt and tease them.

Maiby is having a midday drink outside The Case Is Altered pub when a funny procession passes, the local station-master pushing an old lady in a wheelchair piled with bric-a-brac accompanied by a woman carrying bags. Maiby offers to help and accompanies them to the house they’re moving into. The youngish woman is named Joy Rowley, she’s a widow and used to be a TV star.

Maiby’s editor told him to gather opinions about the new home for maladjusted children, which is the very simple narrative pretext for Maiby visiting and chatting to local characters.

He visits Gomer John’s sub-post office and is astonished when the shy Welshman invites him into his room behind the shop and reveals that it is decked out like the captain’s cabin of a commercial clipper to the South Seas. More than that, Gomer has maps of the Pacific, charts and tide timetables and knows every island inside out. Of course he’s never actually been abroad but…in his imagination.

Then Maiby visits the large old rambling home of Bohemian artist Mrs Polly Blossom-Smith who he discovers sunbathing in her bikini but quickly disarms him of all sexual thoughts by being so frank, straightforward, blunt and odd (for example dropping the ice for his gin and tonic on the floor and hoping he doesn’t mind the carpet hairs and cat hair in his drink). She takes him to her bedroom where he’s astonished to discover her latest sculpture, being a statue of a naked man, visibly made from the face and body parts of various men in the neighbourhood.

At some point early in the novel, it’s mentioned that there’s a flasher on the loose in Plummers Park. The police are informed and comedy is made of their ham-fisted search for him. And the local artist Mrs Blossom-Smith tells Andrew she’ll use the flasher’s penis as a model for the missing member on her sculpture. But this is one of those areas where social conventions have moved on a lot. Most modern people (I think) refer to it as ‘indecent exposure’ and it is regarded as a serious sex crime and no laughing matter.

Cut to Andrew and Audrey walking along the canal to visit the old canal boats their daughter Lizzie is ‘doing up’ with some of the neighbourhood kids. The kids come out all squeaky clean and, with some misgivings, Andrew and Audrey withdraw to the pub across the road, telling them to lock up and join them. But then in a comic stroke it’s revealed that the kids were not doing up the boat and were up to no good, in the sense that the older boy, Billy, was just in the middle of showing Lizzie his willy, and in exchange she was going to show him her front bottom. When the adults withdraw, this is what they proceed to do in a very funny scene. Well, I found it sweet and touching but I appreciate this is the kind of thing which nowadays gets books banned.

The riotous party of loud, beaded Susie Minnings, with her over-makeup, tactlessness, and three brats. At which Gerry Scattergood, a burly contraceptive salesman who lives opposite Andrew and Audrey, entertains the crowd for a while by blowing up weird and wonderful shaped coloured condoms. When the Frank Sinatra album comes on, the lights go down and couples pair off with people not their spouses. Suburban titillation.

Mind-bogglingly, in the middle of the party Mrs Blossom-Smith appears in the French windows dramatically announcing that ‘the blackies are coming’! This turns out to mean that Susie Minning is married to but separated from a West Indian and he has unexpectedly turned up with a crowd of his friends. But there’s one more gag. Susie’s rowdy kids roam among the drunk guests in the dim light with a tray of small glasses containing a thick grey liquid and the shout goes round that they’ve pinched a bottle of crème de menthe and are handing it out, so the sozzled guests quickly grab and down the drinks…only to discover the kids have filled the glasses with fairy liquid and adults run for the toilet, bathroom or throw up in the garden.

A few days later Andrew is at the pub with all the neighbours when Bessie, the working class girl from the court, arrives with her dad, a stocky menacing figure, who says he’s got ‘something to discuss’ with Andrew and demands he ‘step outside’. In the event he wants to force £20 on him in gratitude for keeping the thieving granddad’s name out of the papers but Andrew is a) embarrassed in front of all his friends and b) he didn’t keep the name out of the papers and didn’t even know the story wasn’t printed. So he tries to refuse the money, but the working class man forces it into his hands.

Worse, Bessie insists on coming into the lounge bar and loudly buying him a drink in front of everyone and forcing Andrew to lie about everything, for some reason not telling the truth about the grandad shoplifting but saying he was in court because of some misunderstanding about his bicycle lights. Gerry, Geoff and George, the other chaps, none of them believe him, they just see him acting embarrassed by quite a good looking young woman from the council estate and draw their own conclusions. Somehow Andrew finds himself walking her back down to the hill to the tunnel under the railway embankment i.e. to the border of the council estate, and realises she is really quite attractive, young and slender with her cocky confident manner and before he realises, he’s made a promise to meet her at Watford cemetery where she usually goes for her lunch break.

The vicar, a ceaseless figure of fun in English comic writing going back at least as far as Henry Fielding in the 18th century. In this novel it’s the Reverend Malcolm Boon, vicar of St James the Less on the wrong side of the tracks i.e. in the council estate. He has decided today is the day to go on a missionary expedition to the posh side and so he sets off wearing a clerical collar, shorts, socks and sandals.

Once, a while ago, he compered an art show with Mrs Polly Blossom-Smith. Now, as he feels his way into her overgrown estate, she pounces on him, thinking (and hoping) that he may be the Phantom Flasher I referred to above. Once the misunderstanding has been sorted out she gives him a pen portrait of the kind of nouveaux riches people who have moved into Plummers Park which is an interesting slice of 1970s social history.

The vicar then goes on to meet Miss Dora Jankin, headmistress of Plummers Park Primary School, and makes a fool of himself, surprised at just how much Miss Jankin hates parents and hates their children even more.

Simon Grant has just persuaded sad Ena to put on the bodystocking he’s bought from a Sunday supplement when there’s a ‘coooeee’ from the hall because the vicar’s let himself in. Ena throws on a dress to meet him then comes sniggering back to the bedroom to tell half naked Simon that the vicar wants him to become a church leader, maybe a lay preacher. To Ena’s dismay, Simon is genuinely taken with the idea, telling her about all the social contacts they can make. Good for your career!

Unexpectedly, improbably, insanely, Andrew commences an affair with the shameless chav 18-year-old Bessie. She meets him in a churchyard, makes him put on a gas inspector’s uniform so the neighbours won’t talk then screws him on her narrow bed in her parents’ pokey house. They have sex twice. Andrew can’t believe he’s taking such a risk.

Later, that evening, Andrew is fending off Audrey’s questions when there’s an explosion of barking and they look out the window to see the old Jew being Futter being engulfed by a pack of deranged local dogs, really biting and attacking him. Andrew rushes out with a broom and tries to kick and punch them off, himself getting bitten, before Geoff rescues them both with a hose. Odd scene.

Earnest Ernest hosts a meeting for all the concerned neighbours about the threatened home for maladjusted children only for Andrew to mockingly announce that he rang a contact at the local council who told him it’s been called off.

Andrew takes Bessie to the canal barge which his daughter’s restoring, for sex. He pumps up a rubber dinghy for them to lie on in the narrow cabin. It sounds sordid, and it is, but Thomas describes their changing feelings at length and it comes over as sweet and melancholy and exciting and sad as adulterous sex. She asks him to spank her which he does, reluctantly, though it excites them both.

As they’re getting dressed she discovers a piece of paper with crude drawings of a boy with an erection, a naked girl with big boobs and another girl watching, with names scrawled next to them, including his daughter’s name, Lizzie. Suddenly sickened, as a now-dressed Bessie regains the shore, Andrew quickly drops a lighted lamp into the lower deck of the barge, quickly closes the hatch and door and joins her to stroll back along the towpath, having set it alight. Arson.

The affair of the flasher comes to a climax. He is described, including his sweaty obsession, before he exposes himself to four lady golfers at Plummers Park golf course, trouble is the police have got wind of it somehow and soon there’s a hue and cry after him, as he runs across greens and fairways, through gorse and escapes into the ample grounds of Mrs Blossom-Smith’s mansion.

Comic scene where the chairman and team captain of the local golf club try to get rid of the ancient groundsman, Fowler, who proceeds to outwit them by carefully explaining that he’s the only one who knows where all the drainage culverts and pipes are; without him, first big downpour and the course will flood. Gnashing their teeth with frustration, the golf supremos realise they have to leave him in place.

Cut to Geoff and Ena in bed at a motel when she gets serious and tells him she’s pregnant and Simon wants to move to Wimbledon. Geoff needs to do something to keep her? Shall they move to New Zealand? And she bursts into tears.

Prize giving at the local grammar school which starts out funny with the terrible junior school choir murdering some classics, but ends up upsetting and tragic as the start pupil, Sarah Burville’s mentally ill alcoholic mother gatecrashes and shouts at her in front of the assembled parents and children.

Herbie Futter, the old Jewish taxidermist, has a heart attack and dies despite the first aid attempt of the neighbours. When they carry the body into his house to await the doctor they’re all astonished that it’s decorated and furnished like a Regency palace.

Andrew persuades his contact at the local council to loan him his flat for a couple of hours during the Wednesday afternoon council meeting which he’s meant to cover, so he can have sex with Bessie. They’re going for it when the phone rings, Andrew incautiously answers it and it’s his wife! She rang the court and someone gave her this number. She hears the panic in his voice and is instantly suspicious. He is grovellingly placatory. Bessie is disgusted. When the call ends she takes the mickey out of his grovelling and goads him till he slaps her. Then she announces she’s engaged to get married to one of her own and walks out leaving him upset but also petrified of what he’s going to tell his wife.

Cut to Cynthia Turvey confronting Geoffrey, accusing him of having an unfair. He tries to brazen it out and leaves the house, so Cynthia storms over to Mrs Blossom-Smith’s house who she thinks is the other women. She’s out but the housekeeper tells her about the male nude statue in her bedroom, and when Cynthia sees it she immediately recognises its face as her husband’s. Mad with anger she punches and hits it and pulls off the clay penis and flings it at Mrs Blossom-Smith who’s just arrived and walked in.

Later, back at her house, Mrs B-S leaves and a much chastened Cynthia is forced to acknowledge the woman is a sculptor, the nude had bits of anatomy from men all over the estate, and her husband wasn’t having an affair with her. She feels silly. Geoff heaves an invisible sigh of relief at not getting caught.

Andrew has just been served a quiet pint at the Case Is Altered when Bessie’s dad turns up and threatens him, then throws him the length of the bar, through all the chairs, then kicks the crap out of the ‘medieval’ wall the landlord’s always bragging about, then threatens him not to go to the police, turns and leaves, Andrew still shaking (continued below).

Interlude: details from the 1970s

Men drink Skol lager, women drink Martinis. When Simon wants to impress his date at the pub, he offers her a lime juice or maybe a tinned shandy (p.146). The pubs closed at 3pm and didn’t reopen till 6pm. There were three TV channels. Colour TV only came in in 1967 and we didn’t get it in my house till the early 70s. Britain went over to decimal coinage on 15 February 1971. The snobbery of the professional middle classes who frequented the smarter, more expensive ‘lounge bar’ of the pub. But some attitudes never change:

‘Nothing brings out the Dunkirk spirit in the British so much as a threat to their property values’ (p.174)

So nothing new there, then. Small children play freely in the street in a way nobody does now. Modern traffic has killed childhood.

Psychology

Seeing some kids playing and laughing, Andrew has an intensely sad memory of his own lonely childhood.

As he watched them at their remote pretending, microbes in a huge world bounded by unapproachable fields, untouchable roads, and with planned trees and flat roofs holding up a sky of nursery blue, he thought briefly of his solitariness as a child; that inward tightness, a refusal of something to let go or give way; a strong and secret box he knew was still there and still locked. When he was dead perhaps they might open it and find him – crouching. (p.57)

I think that’s powerful. Modern readers may object to Thomas for the obvious reasons but his books contain a steady stream of moments like this.

Thomas as entertainer

I admire authors like Thomas. He knew what his job was which was to write popular entertainments for middle-brow readers, and he did it very well, and with some style. Not as often as in his first novel but fairly often his prose lifts and sings. It has colour and surprise.

The sky was in its final shade of day, but the birds still sounded and the water had become thick with diminished light. (p.84)

The great narrow jug [of orangeade] was lifted until it was all but upside down and the final drip of the pale refreshment had riddled into his glass. (p.175)

He visibly enjoys writing and I enjoy reading him. I realised this on page 29 where Andrew is attending magistrates court, and I read:

The court had been filling and now the elevated oak-panelled door opened in a mildly dramatic way and, to the bellow of ‘Rise, please!’ from Sergeant Fearnley, the three magistrates made an entrance of modest majesty. (p.29)

‘The three magistrates made an entrance of modest majesty’ captures a scene, conveys a very English, downbeat sensibility about that scene, and has fun with alliteration into the bargain. It feels like Thomas wrote it smiling and I read it smiling and we’re smiling together.

The climax of the novel

At least that’s what I thought right up till the book’s last five or so pages, which completely transform the tone of the entire narrative and leave you with a very bad taste in your mouth.

Andrew’s birthday party

A few days after the dust-up in the pub, Audrey hosts a dinner party for Andrew’s 37th birthday. Geoff and Cynthia Turvey come, with Geoff’s father (who was a miner Up North) and mother, who’ve turned up unexpectedly and are invited to tag along; and Gerry the contraceptive salesman and his wife. It is not a successful evening: the Northerner sounds off on his Northern opinions, there are arguments, and then Gladstone the dog starts farting from under the table. Audrey hates the dog and has a row with Andrew.

After the guests have left, Andrew, by now very pissed, continues his drunken argument with Audrey until he snaps, grabs the dog, and goes off blundering off through the midnight streets of the estate. Then the novel has its shocking denouement.

Joy’s fire

Through his profound drunkenness Andrew realises there’s a funny glow over the houses. As he gets closer he drunkenly realises it’s the house of Joy, the newcomer who he’d been polite and welcoming to. It’s majorly on fire, with flames streaking out of the windows. Then Joy herself is leaning out of a window screaming, something about her mother being trapped in the room at the back.

Andrew gets burned

Andrew tells Joy to jump and makes a drunken attempt to break her fall before assuring her he’ll go into the burning house to rescue her mother. He doesn’t. Instead he blunders through the front door and up the stairs and is suddenly engulfed in a fireball of flames. Because he’s so drunk it takes seconds through the blur to realise that his hair is on fire, the skin is burning on his chest, his hands are on fire, as he blunders back down the stairs out onto the lawn and passes out.

Hospital

Cut to hospital many days later. Andrew was very badly burned and is going to need extensive skin grafts. He will be disfigured for life. Most of his fingers were burned off. Not many laughs, eh. Days afterwards he discovered several things:

One was that Gomer, the sweet sub-postmaster who dreamed of tropical climes, had gone in after him to rescue Joy’s mother and was burned to death (!)

Next, that Joy’s mother was never in the house – when the fire started she had gone wandering down the street and ended up in the house of strangers telling them there was a fire. So she was safe and sound throughout. Andrew need never have got burned, Gomer need never have died.

Audrey, of course, has to stick by him, but when she comes to visit there is no love lost. She, of course, thinks Andrew must have been having an affair with Joy, why else would he have risked his life for her stupid mother? So she visits him in hospital, and the nurses remark how brave she is to stick by such a terribly disfigured man. But their marriage is over; he and Audrey are completely sundered, separated, alienated.

It is a horrible, dispiriting, needlessly sickening ending to what had, right up to this point, been a highly enjoyable and funny book. Why? Does the world need more sickening horror?

Credit

Tropic of Ruislip by Lesley Thomas was first published by (1974). References are to the 1976 Pan paperback edition.

Leslie Thomas reviews

• The Virgin Soldiers (1966)
• His Lordship (1970)
• Onward Virgin Soldiers (1971)
• Tropic of Ruislip (1974)
• Stand Up Virgin Soldiers (1975)
• Dangerous Davies: The Last Detective (1976)