Something Wholesale by Eric Newby Read Free Book Online Page B

properly with your right.’ This was not at all surprising as I was left-handed and my father had made me change from left to right-handed writing on the grounds that left-handed men, ‘Cack-handers’ as he called them, were not acceptable in the world of commerce. Because of this for three months I wrote inside out and the results could only be deciphered with the aid of a mirror.
    A minor obsession was his preoccupation with my respiratory system. ‘You should sniff up a little salt and water each morning in order to clear your passages,’ was an injunction that was never absent from his correspondence with me. For more than thirty years I religiously avoided practising this disagreeable operation but after his death some inward voice impelled me to follow his advice. As a result I contracted sinusitis and I was told by the specialist whom I consulted that this was an outmoded exercise that led to acute inflammation of the nasal cavities.
    But however sombre the counsels contained in his letters he always ended them with a little joke or two to cheer me up. He was never at a loss for a little joke. He used to keep them, or rather the bones of them in neat columns on the backs of envelopes, of which he had an inexhaustible supply, which bore the letter heading of the Hotel Lotti in Paris.
    This collection was one of his few legacies to me. The envelopes give the beginning of the joke, some of the attendant circumstances but nothing that would make it possible to deduce the joke itself. ‘Three men in a Turkish Bath – One Fat – It’s Pancake Day.’ Even now no one knows what was intended. To future generations they will prove as tantalising as the Rosetta Stone once was.
    But not so tantalising as the visiting card which reads: Thos. W. Bowler (and an address at Walton-on-Thames) and on which my father had written in pencil in his neat handwriting ‘Met on train. Originator of the Bowler Hat?’
    Another legacy was a set of dumb bells, weights and chest-expanders. At one time in the Nineties my father had been a pupil of Eugene Sandow, the strongest man in the world, who had opened a school of physical culture in the Tottenham Court Road. Sandow really was immensely strong. Eventually, at a time when motor cars were extremely heavy, he destroyed himself by lifting his own motor car out of a ditch into which he had accidentally driven it.
    My father’s capabilities at the beginning and end of the course were embalmed in a small, morocco bound volume. Records of Development, Etc., Obtained During Three Months’ Course at Sandow’s Residential School of Physical Culture . Although the units of measurement employed are not recorded, the numerical increases are so impressive that it seems certain that my father must have graduated with honours.
Harness Lift:
200
After Three Months:
800
Double-handed Bar-Bell Press:
80
After Three Months:
120
Arms:
20
After Three Months: (Can this be length?)
30
Wrist Exerciser:
3
After Three Months:
8
    What would he have emerged like if he had been a ‘resident pupil’?
    All these instruments were made from a rustless, golden-coloured metal. The dumb bells were so heavy that when I inherited them after his death I found that I was unable to lift them in the manner prescribed by the instruction book. The compression and expansion of the springed instruments was also beyond me. This in spite of having myself been prepared for the business of being an ‘all-rounder’. Long before the age when English boys are subjected to this kind of treatment I was made to have cold baths and taken for what my father described as a ‘jog-trot’ along the towing path from Hammersmith to Putney and back early in the morning when no sane person was about. Sometimes for a change we would punt a football down deserted suburban streets, ‘passing’ to one another. As a result I too acquired a strong constitution but the outcome was not what my father intended. I secretly resolved that I would not