The Wilt Alternative

Chapter 4

He didn't much want what he found on his desk on Monday morning. It was a note from the Vice-Principal asking Wilt to come and see him at, rather sinisterly, 'your earliest, repeat earliest, convenience'.

'Bugger my convenience,' muttered Wilt. 'Why can't he say "immediately" and be done with it?'

With the thought that something was amiss and that he might as well get the bad news over and done with as quickly as possible, he went down two floors and along the corridor to the Vice-Principal's office.

'Ah Henry, I'm sorry to bother you like this,' said the Vice-Principal, 'but I'm afraid we've had some rather disturbing news about your department.'

'Disturbing?' said Wilt suspiciously.

'Distinctly disturbing. In fact all hell has been let loose up at County Hall.'

'What are they poking their noses into this time? If they think they can send any more advisers like the last one we had who wanted to know why we didn't have combined classes of bricklayers and nursery nurses so that there was sexual equality you can tell them from me...'

The Vice-Principal held up a protesting hand. 'That has nothing to do with what they want this time. It's what they don't want. And, quite frankly, if you had listened to their advice about multi-sexed classes this wouldn't have happened.'

'I know what would have,' said Wilt. 'We'd have been landed with a lot of pregnant nannies and '

'If you would just listen a moment. Never mind nursery nurses. What do you know about buggering crocodiles?'

'What do I know about... did I hear you right?'

The Vice-Principal nodded. 'I'm afraid so.'

'Well if you want a frank answer I shouldn't have thought it was possible. And if you're suggesting '

'What I am telling you, Henry, is that someone in your department has been doing it. They've even made a film of it.'

'Film of it?' said Wilt, still grappling with the appalling zoological implications of even approaching a crocodile, let alone buggering the brute.

'With some apprentice class,' continued the Vice-Principal, 'and the Education Committee have heard about it and want to know why.'

'I can't say I blame them,' said Wilt, 'I mean you'd have to be a suicidal candidate for Krafft-Ebing to proposition a fucking crocodile and while I know I've got some demented sods as part-timers I'd have noticed if any of them had been eaten. Where the hell did he get the crocodile from?'

'No use asking me,' said the Vice-Principal. 'All I know is that the Committee insist on seeing the film before passing judgement.'

'Well they can pass what judgements they like,' said Wilt, just so long as they leave me out of it. I accept no responsibility for any filming that's done in my department and if some maniac chooses to screw a crocodile, that's his business, not mine. I never wanted all those TV cameras and cines they foisted on to us. They cost a fortune to run and some damned fool is always breaking the things.'

'Whoever made this film should have been broken first if you ask me,' said the Vice-Principal. 'Anyway, the Committee want to see you in Room 80 at six and I'd advise you to find out what the hell has been going on before they start asking you questions.'

Wilt went wearily back to his office desperately trying to think which of the lecturers in his department was a reptile-lover, a follower of nouvelle vague brutalism in films and clean off his rocker. Pasco was undoubtedly insane, the result, in Wilt's opinion, of fourteen years continuous effort to get Gas-fitters to appreciate the linguistic subtleties of Finnegans Wake, but although he had twice spent a year's medical sabbatical in the local mental hospital he was relatively amiable and too hamfisted to use a cine-camera, and as for crocodiles... Wilt gave up and went along to the Audio-Visual Aid room to consult the register.

'I'm looking for some blithering idiot who's made a film about crocodiles,' he told Mr Dobble, the AVA caretaker. Mr Dobble snorted.

'You're a bit late. The Principal's got that film and he's carrying on something horrible. Mind you, I don't blame him. I said to Mr Macaulay when it came back from processing, "Blooming pornography and they pass that through the labs. Well I'm not letting that film out of here until it's been vetted." That's what I said and I meant it.'

'Vetted being the operative word,' said Wilt caustically. 'And I don't suppose it occurred to you to let me see it first before it went to the Principal?'

'Well, you don't have no control over the buggers in your department, do you Mr Wilt?'

'And which particular bugger made this film?'

'I'm not one for naming names but I will say this, Mr Bilger knows more about it than meets the eye.'

'Bilger? That bastard. I knew he was punch-drunk politically but what the hell's he want to make a film like this for?'

'No names, no packdrill,' said Mr Dobble, 'I don't want any trouble.'

'I do,' said Wilt and went out in pursuit of Bill Bilger. He found him in the staff-room drinking coffee and deep in dialectics with his acolyte, Joe Stoley, from the History Department. Bilger was arguing that a truly proletarian consciousness could only be achieved by destabilizing the fucking linguistic infrastructure of a fucking fascist state fucking hegemony.

'That's fucking Marcuse,' said Stoley rather hesitantly following Bilger into the semantic sewer of destabilization.

'And this is Wilt,' said Wilt. 'If you've got a moment to spare from discussing the millennium I'd like a word with you.'

'I'm buggered if I'm taking anyone else's class,' said Bilger adopting a sound trade-union stance. 'It's not my stand-in period you know.'

'I'm not asking you to do any extra work. I am simply asking you to have a private word with me. I realize this is infringing your inalienable right as a free individual in a fascist state to pursue happiness by stating your opinions but I'm afraid duty calls.'

'Not my bloody duty, mate,' said Bilger.

'No. Mine,' said Wilt. 'I'll be in my office in five minutes,'

'More than I will,' Wilt heard Bilger say as he headed towards the door but Wilt knew better. The man might swagger and pose to impress Stoley but Wilt still had the sanction of altering the timetable so that Bilger started the week at nine on Monday morning with Printers Three and ended it at eight on Friday evening with part-time Cooks Four. It was about the only sanction he possessed, but it was remarkably effective. While he waited he considered tactics and the composition of the Education Committee. Mrs Chatterway was bound to be there defending to the last her progressive opinion that teenage muggers were warm human beings who only needed a few sympathetic words to stop them from beating old ladies over the head. On her right there was Councillor Blighte-Smythe who would, given half a chance, have brought back hanging for poaching and probably the cat o' nine tails for the unemployed. In between these two extremes there were the Principal who hated anything or anyone who upset his leisurely schedule, the Chief Education Officer, who hated the Principal, and finally Mr Squidley, a local builder, for whom Liberal Studies was an anathema and a bloody waste of time when the little blighters ought to have been putting in a good day's work carrying hods of bricks up blooming ladders. All in all the prospect of coping with the Education Committee was a grim one. He would have to handle them tactfully.

But first there was Bilger. He arrived after ten minutes and entered without knocking. 'Well?' he asked sitting down and staring at Wilt angrily.

'I thought we had better have this chat in private,' said Wilt. 'I just wanted to enquire about the film you made with a crocodile. I must say it sounds most enterprising. If only all Liberal Studies lecturers would use the facilities provided by the local authority to such effect...' He left the sentence with a tag end of unspoken approval. Bilger's hostility softened.

'The only way the working classes are going to understand how they're being manipulated by the media is to get them to make films themselves. That's all I do.'

'Quite so,' said Wilt, 'and getting them to film someone buggering a crocodile helps them to develop a proletarian consciousness transcending the false values they've been inculcated with by a capitalist hierarchy?'

'Right, mate,' said Bilger enthusiastically 'Those fucking things are symbols of exploitation.'

'The bourgeoisie biting its conscience off, so to speak.'

'You've said it,' said Bilger, snapping at the bait.

Wilt looked at him in bewilderment. 'And what classes have you done this... er... fieldwork with?'

'Fitters and Turners Two. We got this croc thing in Nott Road and...'

'In Nott Road?' said Wilt, trying to square his knowledge of the street with docile and presumably homosexual crocodiles.

'Well, it's street theatre as well,' said Bilger, warming to his task. 'Half the people who live there need liberating too.'

'I daresay they do, but I wouldn't have thought encouraging them to screw crocodiles was exactly a liberating experience. I suppose as an example of the class struggle...'

'Here,' said Bilger, 'I thought you said you'd seen the film?'

'Not exactly. But news of its controversial content has reached me. Someone said it was almost sub-Buñuel.'

'Really? Well, what we did is we got this toy crocodile, you know, the ones kiddies put pennies in and they get the privilege of a ride on them.'

'A toy crocodile? You mean you didn't actually use a real live one?'

'Of course we bloody didn't. I mean who'd be loony enough to rivet a real fucking crocodile? He might have been bitten.'

'Might?' said Wilt 'I'd have said the odds on any self-respecting crocodile... Anyway, do go on.'

'So one of the lads gets on this plastic toy thing and we film him doing it.'

'Doing it? Let's get this quite straight. Don't you mean buggering it?'

'Sort of,' said Bilger. 'He didn't have his prick out or anything like that. There was nowhere he could have put it. No, all he did was simulate buggering the thing. That way he was symbolically screwing the whole reformist welfare statism of the capitalist system.'

'In the shape of a rocking crocodile?' said Wilt. He leant back in his chair and wondered yet again how it was that a supposedly intelligent man like Bilger, who had after all been to university and was a graduate, could still believe the world would be a better place once all the middle classes had been put up against a wall and shot. Nobody ever seemed to learn anything from the past. Well, Mr Bloody Bilger was going to learn something from the present. Wilt put his elbows on the desk.

'Let's get the record clear once and for all,' he said. 'You definitely consider it part of your duties as a Liberal Studies lecturer to teach apprentices Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-crocodile-buggerism and any other -Ism you care to mention?'

Bilger's hostility returned. 'It's a free country and I've a right to express my own personal opinions. You can't stop me.'

Wilt smiled at these splendid contradictions. 'Am I trying to?' he asked innocently. 'In fact you may not believe this, but I am willing to provide you with a platform on which to state them fully and clearly.'

'That'll be the day,' said Bilger

'It is, Comrade Bilger, believe me it is. The Education Committee is meeting at six. The Chief Education Officer, the Principal, Councillor Blighte-Smythe '

'That militaristic shit. What's he know about education? Just because they gave him the MC in the war he thinks he can go about trampling on the faces of the working classes.'

'Which, considering he has a wooden leg, doesn't say much for your opinion of the proletariat, does it?' said Wilt warming to his task. 'First you praise the working class for their intelligence and solidarity, then you reckon they are so dumb they can't tell their own interests from a soap advert on TV and have to be forcibly politicized, and now you tell me that a man who lost his leg can trample all over them. The way you talk they sound like morons.'

'I didn't say that,' said Bilger.

'No, but that seems to be your attitude and if you want to express yourself on the subject more lucidly you may do so to the Committee at six. I am sure they will be most interested.'

'I'm not going before any fucking Committee. I know my rights and -'

'This is a free country, as you keep telling me. Another splendid contradiction, and considering the country allows you to go around getting teenage apprentices to simulate fucking toy crocodiles I'd say a free fucking society just about sums it up. I just wish sometimes we were living in Russia.'

'They'd know what to do with blokes like you, Wilt,' said Bilger. 'You're just a deviationist reformist swine.'

'Deviationist, coming from you, is great,' shouted Wilt, 'and with their draconian laws anyone who went about filming Russian fitters buggering crocodiles would end up smartly in the Lubianka and wouldn't come out until they had put a bullet in the back of his mindless head. Either that or they would lock you up in some nuthouse and you'd probably be the only inmate who wasn't sane.'

'Right, Wilt,' Bilger shouted back, leaping from his chair, 'that does it. You may be Head of Department but if you think you can insult lecturers I know what I'm going to do. Lodge a complaint with the union.' He headed for the door.

'That's right,' yelled Wilt, 'run for your collective mummy and while you're about it tell the secretary you called me a deviationist swine. They'll appreciate the term.'

But Bilger was already out of the office and Wilt was left with the problem of finding some plausible excuse to offer the Committee. Not that he would have minded getting rid of Bilger but the idiot had a wife and three children and certainly couldn't expect help from his father, Rear-Admiral Bilger. It was typical of that kind of intellectual radical buffoon that he came from what was known as 'a good family'.

In the meantime he had to finish preparing his lecture to the Advanced Foreigners. Liberal and Progressive attitudes be damned. From 1688 to 1978, almost three hundred years of English history compressed into eight lectures, and all with Dr Mayfield's bland assumption that progress was continuous and that liberal attitudes were somehow independent of time and place. What about Ulster? A fat lot of liberal attitudes applied there in 1978. And the Empire hadn't exactly been a model of liberalism. The most you could say about it was that it hadn't been as bloody awful as the Belgian Congo or Angola. But then Mayfield was a sociologist and what he knew about history was dangerous. Not that Wilt knew much himself. And why English Liberalism? Mayfield seemed to think that the Welsh and Scots and Irish didn't exist, or if they did that they weren't progressive and liberal too.

Wilt got out a ballpoint and jotted down notes. They had nothing at all to do with Mayfield's proposed course. He was still rambling speculatively on when lunchtime came. He went down to the canteen and ate what was called curry and rice at a table by himself and returned to his office with fresh ideas. This time they concerned the influence of the Empire on England. Curry, baksheesh, pukka, posh, polo, thug words that had infiltrated the English language from farflung outposts where the Wilts of a previous age had lorded it with an arrogance and authority he found it hard to imagine. He was interrupted in these pleasantly nostalgic speculations by Mrs Rosery, the Department secretary, who came to say that Mr Germiston was sick and couldn't take Electronic Technicians Three and that Mr Laxton, his stand-in, had done a swop with Mrs Vaugard without telling anyone and she wasn't available because she had previously made an appointment at the dentist and...

Wilt went downstairs and crossed to the hut where Electronic Technicians were sitting in a stupor of pub-lunch beer, 'Right,' he said sitting down behind the table, 'Now what have you been doing with Mr Germiston?'

'Haven't done a bloody thing with him,' said a red-headed youth in the front. 'He isn't worth it. One punch up the snout and...'

'What I meant,' said Wilt before redhead could go into the details of what would happen to Germiston in a fight, was what has he been talking to you about so far this term?'

'Fucking darkies,' said another technician.

'Not literally, I trust,' said Wilt hoping that his irony would not lead to a discussion of interracial sex. 'You mean race relations?'

'I mean spades. That's what I mean. Nignogs, wogs, foreigners, all them buggers what come in here and take jobs away from decent white blokes What I say is...'

But he was interrupted by another ET 3 'You don't want to listen to what he says. Joe's a member of the National Front '

'What's so wrong with that?' demanded Joe. 'Our policy is to keep '

'Out of politics,' said Wilt. 'That's my policy and I mean to stick with it. What you say outside is your affair but in the classroom we'll discuss something else.'

'Yeah, well you ought to tell old Germ-Piston that. He spends his bloody life telling us we got to be Christians and love our neighbours like ourselves. Well if he lived in our street he'd know different. We got a load of Jamrags two doors off and they play bongo drums and dustbins till four in the ruddy morning. If old Germy knows a way of loving that din all fucking night he must be blooming deaf.'

'You could always ask them to quieten down a bit or stop at eleven,' said Wilt.

'What, and get a knife in the guts for the privilege? You must be joking.'

'Then the police...'

Joe looked at him incredulously. 'A bloke four doors down went to the fuzz and you know what happened to him?'

'No,' said Wilt.

'Had his car tyres slashed two days later. That's what. And did the cops want to know? Did they fuck.'

'Well I can see you've got a problem,' Wilt had to admit.

'Yeah, and we know how to solve it too,' said Joe.

'You're not going to solve it by sending them back to Jamaica,' said the Technician who was anti the National Front. 'The ones in your street didn't come from there anyway. They were born in Brixton.'

'Brixton Nick if you ask me.'

'You're just prejudiced.'

'So would you be if you didn't get a night's kip in a month.' The battle raged on while Wilt sat contemplating the class. It was just as he had remembered it from his old days. You got the apprentices going and then left them to it, only prodding them into further controversy with a provocative comment when the argument flagged. And these were the selfsame apprentices the Bilgers of this world wanted to instil with political consciousness as if they were proletarian geese to be force-fed to produce a totalitarian pâté de foie gras.

But already Electronic Technicians Three had veered away from race and were arguing about last year's Cup Final. They seemed to have stronger feelings about football than politics. At the end of the hour Wilt left them and made his way across to the auditorium to deliver his lecture to Advanced Foreigners. To his horror he found the place packed. Dr Mayfield had been right in saying that the course was popular and immensely profitable Looking up the rows, Wilt made a mental note that he was probably about to address several million poundsworth of oil wells, steelworks, shipyards and chemical industries scattered from Stockholm to Tokyo via Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf. Well, the blighters had come to learn about England and the English attitudes and he might as well give them their money's worth.

Wilt stepped up to the rostrum, arranged his few notes, tapped the microphone so that several loud booms issued from the loudspeakers at the back of the auditorium and began his lecture.

'It may come as something of a surprise to those of you who come from more authoritarian societies that I intend to ignore the title of the course of lectures I am supposed to be giving, namely The Development of Liberal and Progressive Social Attitudes in English Society from 1688 to the present day, and to concentrate on the more essential problem, not to say the enigma, of what constitutes the nature of being English. It is a problem that has baffled the finest foreign minds for centuries and I have no doubt that it will baffle you. I have to admit that I myself, although English, remain bewildered by the subject and I have no reason to suppose that I will be any clearer in my mind at the end of these lectures than I am now.'

Wilt paused and looked at his audience. Their heads were bent over notebooks and their ballpoints scribbled away. It was what he had come to expect. They would dutifully write down everything he had to tell them as unthinkingly as previous groups he had lectured, but somewhere among them there might be one person who would puzzle over what he had to say. He would give them all something to puzzle over this time.

'I will start with a list of books which are essential reading, but before I do so I will draw your attention to an example of the Englishness I hope to explore. It is that I have chosen to ignore the subject I am supposed to be teaching and have taken a topic of my own choice. I am also confining myself to England and ignoring Wales, Scotland, and what is popularly known as Great Britain. I know less about Glasgow than I do about New Delhi, and the inhabitants of those parts would feel insulted were I to include them among the English. In particular I shall avoid discussing the Irish. They are wholly beyond my comprehension as an Englishman and their methods of settling disputes are not ones that appeal to me. I will only repeat what Metternich, I believe, had to say about Ireland, that it is England's Poland.' Wilt paused again and allowed the class to make another wholly inconsequential note. If the Saudis had ever heard of Metternich he would be very surprised.

'And now the book list. The first is The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. This gives the finest description of English middle-class aspirations and attitudes to be found in English literature. You will find that it deals entirely with animals, and that these animals are all male. The only women in the book are minor characters, one a bargewoman and the others a jailer's daughter and her aunt, and strictly speaking they are irrelevant. The main characters are a Water Rat, a Mole, a Badger and a Toad, none of whom is married or evinces the slightest interest in the opposite sex. Those of you who come from more torrid climates, or have sauntered through Soho, may find this lack of sexual motif surprising. I can only say that its absence is entirely in keeping with the values of middle-class family life in England. For those students who are not content with aspirations and attitudes but wish to study the subject in greater, if prurient, depth I can recommend certain of the daily newspapers, and in particular the Sunday ones. The number of choirboys indecently assaulted annually by vicars and churchwardens may lead you to suppose that England is a deeply religious country. I incline to the view held by some that...'

But whatever view Wilt was about to incline to, the class never learnt. He stopped in mid-sentence and stared down at a face in the third row. Irmgard Mueller was one of his students. Worse still, she was looking at him with a curious intensity and had not bothered to take any notes. Wilt gazed back and then looked down at his own notes and tried to think what to say next. But all the ideas he had so ironically rehearsed had disintegrated. For the first time in a long career of improvisation, Wilt dried up. He stood at the rostrum with sweating hands and looked at the clock. He had to say something for the next forty minutes, something intense and serious and yes, even significant. That dread word of his sensitive youth burped to the surface. Wilt steeled himself.

'As I was saying,' he stammered just as his audience began to whisper among themselves, 'none of the books I have recommended will do more than scratch the surface of the problem of being English...or rather of knowing the nature of the English.' For the next half an hour he strung disjointed sentences together and finally muttering something about pragmaticism gathered his notes together and ended the lecture. He was just climbing down from the stage when Irmgard left her seat and approached him.

'Mr Wilt,' she said, 'I want to say how interesting I found your lecture.'

'Very good of you to say so,' said Wilt dissembling his passion.

'I was particularly interested in what you said about the parliamentary system only seeming to be democratic. You are the first lecturer we have had who has put the problem of England in the context of social reality and popular culture. You were very illuminating.'

It was an illuminated Wilt who floated out of the auditorium and up the steps to his office. There could be no doubt about it now Irmgard was not simply beautiful. She was also radiantly intelligent. And Wilt had met the perfect woman twenty years too late.