PLACE OF BIRTH (Free public hospital . . . ) (Under gum tree . . . )

(Zoo . . . )

TICK ANY ILLNESS YOU HAVE HAD IN PAST YEAR (Scabies . . . )

(V.D.  . . . ) (Head lice . . . )

AT WHAT DISTANCE CAN OTHERS SMELL YOU: (800 metres . . . )

(400 metres . . . ) (100 metres . . . )

YOUR GREATEST DESIRE IN LIFE . . . . . . . . . .  . . . . . . . . . .  . . . . . . . . . .  . . . . . . . . . . (N.B. Other than a white girl.)

‘Well,’ he said, ‘what do you think?’

‘Certainly novel,’ I said.

‘Bloody funny, I reckon,’ he said.

We parted amicably, all trace of the earlier tension quite vanished. It was perfectly clear that if we’d got on to dirty jokes sooner we’d have had an easier morning all round. ‘I hope I’ve given you some useful information,’ Rod said. He still wasn’t entirely sure that he hadn’t failed us, but we had spent half an hour copying out some of his best jokes, so he could see that we weren’t exactly leaving empty-handed.

As we drove out of Derby, looking neither to the left nor to the right of us, we both noted that, whatever we had or hadn’t got from Rod Drummond, our encounter with him was the only one in this town from which we had not come away with an indigestible ball of violence in our stomachs.

One thing still worried me, though. Which one of us had been the chump – him or me?

6 Neither an Ong nor a Mo

Six
 
Neither an Ong nor a Mo

Just as Max Bygraves had stolen a march on us to Darwin, so had Jocky Wilson – the world’s no. 6 ranked darts player – beaten us to Broome. Or at least his advance publicity had. Jocky himself would be arrowing in that weekend. By then, however, we would have left. No disrespect to the pastime, but not even the world’s no. 1 – not the finicky-fingered Eric Bristow himself – could have kept us in Broome a minute longer than we had to be there.

It wasn’t so much that we hated Broome; more that we recognized it. We knew, as it were from the inside, what it was trying to be; and we knew who it was waiting for. Tintagel – that’s what it reminded us of – the mock-Arthurian Cornish seaside village just a few miles from our own. Tintagel, impatient for the season to get started, and the visitors to show. Only, instead of trading off a mythical past of blemished knights and Camelottery, Broome was peddling a real and recent history of imported oriental adventures and pearl-luggery. And, instead of offering a wild windswept Atlantic shoreline, it boasted, as every travel brochure vouched, limpid azure waters and miles of breathtakingly beautiful beach. I’ll return to the beach. I had my first ever nudist gambol there, and feel that I owe it the same sentimental fidelity due to all witnesses, animate or otherwise, of inaugural unveilings. But, for the rest, Broome was a shoddy pastiche.