Rod invited us back to his rooms. He was a considerate and attentive host, seeing to all our needs and taking us patiently through his collection of paintings and artefacts, many of them ‘presentations’ made in return for services to the community. But we could feel his discomfort mounting. ‘Am I giving you the sort of information you require?’ he kept checking. It was our fault entirely that he didn’t know what we wanted, since we didn’t know what we wanted ourselves. I made one or two more subtle essays at investigative journalism – hinting at the primeval antagonism between white and black, wondering about rivers of blood – but I never once found anything politicized in my host. ‘Derby is a great place for sports,’ was all I succeeded in getting him to blurt out.

The tension became unbearable for all of us at last, and we rose to go. ‘If you find any good jokes on your travels,’ Rod said, ‘I’d be grateful if you’d send them to me. I collect them.’

‘You collect jokes?’

‘Yeah. Got thousands.’ He went over to a cupboard and brought out a file, bulging with cartoons, clippings, jokes from magazines, obscene drawings, and those duplicated rigmaroles – parodies of official memoranda and regulations and so on – that get passed around offices.

There was material here I hadn’t seen since I’d been a schoolboy. Descriptions of horse races in which the runners had such names as Big Prick and Tight Thighs, and which ended in a close finish with Fat Tits getting up a sweat and Big Prick coming up fast on the inside. Cartoons of distended organs – ‘Why do my friends call me a dickhead?’ asked a character who had a penis where his nose should have been and testicles for cheeks. And material I had never seen before such as the following:

We don’t pay no taxes, we don’t make de goods

Just real little Abos, way back in de woods.

Dey pay us to vote, and dey pay us to sin

While dem sweet Goumint men keep de cheques rollin in.

We wait every month, for de slip wid de figures

And dat’s all we do, we dam lucky niggers.

‘How . . . ah . . . Why . . . um . . . I take it these, er, don’t cause offence,’ I said to Rod.

‘Only to people with a very narrow one-track mind and no sense of humour,’ he said. He was in good spirits now, laughing at his collection. More relaxed than he’d been all morning. ‘This is my favourite,’ he said.

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