PERSPECTIVE UKNORTH
People and their profiles: dukes, archbishops, actors, writers, monks, oddbods, the garish, the gregarious - here they are in single file, chosen by chance, by inclination, or by necessity ... and all reflecting, one hopes, the essential, but indefinable, spark that makes one human being interesting to many. Geoffrey Mather
Osvatweest
I awakened the other day, peering timidly over the sheets, listening for sounds in the dark, clutching at a mind in full retreat, wondering who I was. This is a recurring thing: my own form of nightmare, this panic of identity, and it is not helped by my experiences of life.
A reader wrote: "I am curious to know if you are the same Geoffrey Mather I remember. There were the Cleggs who kept the fish and fruit shop, Savages that kept the butcher's, and they had a daughter, Edna, I think. I remember you, a bit snooty but always smart like a new penny."
"I am the same fellow," I replied, snooty and smart as ever. "I think you will find that the Farnworths got the butcher's. Although a Savage could have kept the butcher's before the Farnworths because Tobias Savage, I think, lived there, and his son lived there; and Edna Savage is the daughter of Reg Savage, the cricketer, and he had a son, Kenneth, but he never lived there."
I then went for lunch and people thought I was moody. I was merely confused again. People always wonder who I am. This has the effect of making me wonder who they are, and I have to take a cold bath to steady myself..
Once in Spain our tiny Auster plane, minus fol-de-rols like radio, landed in a forbidden area and three of us, the entire crew and passengers, were hauled off, separately, by Franco guards.
"Who are you and where you from?" mine said. "Geoffrey Mather, Oswaldtwistle," I replied, expecting no sign of recognition. He called his friend, partly to inspect the dubious quality of my linen, which was neatly stacked, partly to confirm the impossible. As they fingered their revolver holsters he said, "Osvatweest?"
"No," I said, "Os-wald-twistle." "Thas is Osvatweest," he said to his satisfaction but not to mine, and licked a stub of pencil.
"Nah, Oz. How you spell?" "Oh, ess," I said grabbing for his pencil. "Nah, nah," he replied, hanging on. He wrote down "Os".
"After what follows zis," he said, "Vatweest." "No," I said, "Waldtwistle." "Near Liverpool." he cried, brightening. "Hardly," I said. He wrote down, "Goffrey Midder near Liverpool."
He produced a coin and pointed to Mr. Franco stamped thereon. "El Caudillo," he said. I took out a coin. "El Queeno," I said. Thus with friendship overflowing and cleared of espionage, I flew on.
No-one knew where Oswaldtwistle was in those days. Then a character named Mackenzie Porter, gone to a magazine in Canada, wrote pages of scintillating stuff, like, "Oswaldtwistle is the very umbilicus of the Motherland," and "Oswaldtwistle never pressed the sneck to a reigning monarch." The day copies arrived in Oswaldtwistle I went to the dentist's. "Are you Ben Mather's lad?" he said, spreading doubt again. i said I wasn't. "Read this stuff by Porter?" "Great stuff," I replied. He stabbed and hauled and rooted about and his sucking tube was lashing my tongue. "Hey," I said, "steathy on".
"Porter a friend of yours?" he said, reaching for something which he kept behind his apron. "Not exactly," I said. "Thame bithneth. Comth from down Union Road. A big fethow."
"Is he really?" said the dentist tapping deliberately at a half-submerged root that was grabbing at my toes.
"How did you get on?" my friends said. "I'll murther Mackenthie Porther," I replied. Then Porter, stung by an article of mine in a local paper replying to his, wrote: "Who are you saying if Oswaldtwistle is the umbilicus of the motherland, the motherland is deformed? Do me a profile for my magazine on Gracie Fields."
I was 16 and it seemed a kind of punishment. I shut myself away in Rochdale for two days sorting out likely tripe shops and presented a piece. "Heavens above," he wrote back, "you never even WENT to Capri."
I daren't tell him that, at that stage, I wondered whether I needed inoculations for Rochdale, not having been further than Blackburn. (I did interview Gracie Fields in Capri, mujch later on, by which time Porter was just a memory.) It turned out that he would fly to New York for a couple of sentences. He eventually arrived in person and just stared at me, puzzled, for a long time.
I suppose he was wondering who I was again. If anyone has any idea drop me a line, but leave out the Cleggs and the Savages. I've dispensed with all that.
(From As I Was Saying, a book of my Daily Express columns).
Geoffrey Mather © 2004
3 March, 2007