Bunny Run

Tim Topps

Description

The Bunny Run is the heavily anticipated sequel to the light historical fiction that was released last October, The Paper Caper. With offices in both towns, Tim Topps has for many years driven twice-weekly between Cambridge and Oxford and knows the road like the back of his (gloved) hand - but now, amid all his memories, things could be changing... He takes you in his beloved old Sunbeam Talbot, two-tone as the best ones were, along familiar routes, while frequently turning aside to disclose all manner of revelations, ranging from a schoolboy's theft in Kenya on Armistice Day 1936, and a cavalry recruit's first day on parade (first broadcast - twice - on the BBC), to an old lady's possible affair with a really horrid dictator, and a very feasible belief that ghosts come from the future, all dressed up for a visit to the past. The drive (and the read) pass smoothly and without any hanging about but when Tim reaches his destination, things change dramatically.His reminiscences end, and his problems rapidly unfold as he parks in Oxford. Tim's adventures mirror the format of a monologue. He confides in the reader and compels you to read more.

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 24 mai 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783066353
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE BUNNY RUN
A short drive with diversions

TIM TOPPS

Copyright © 2014 Tim Topps
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study,
or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the
publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with
the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries
concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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ISBN 978 1783066 353
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Contents

Cover


I.


II.


III.


IV.


V.


VI.


VII.


VIII.


IX.
I.
The road to the Lone Tree

I had to get away, I just had to.
I’d not been back home more than seven minutes – not even taken off my coat and gloves on that chilly evening – but all the futile hopelessness had been building up within me for months until I now knew, all of a sudden, that my marriage was over. Not my fault though: those endless family squabbles between their family, first about their petty little disagreements and now about money. The more petty, the more they would seem to expand until they filled my head – both our heads I suppose – but I had been on the outside, just trying not to be sucked in. The origin was not even her, I suppose, basically; more, the creeping baleful influence of the rest of that awful family I had unwittingly married into… That brother…!
So I had finally drawn a line. It was finished for me. I simply called “Goodbye”, shut the front door and jumped back into the car which was still ticking with engine warmth. I would drive once more along my old familiar route (twice a week for the last twenty years), which I have made into quite a historical study due to its familiarity, and which I simply called my Bunny Run.

***

Breaking off a long relationship is never easy, of course, and all the gossip pages enjoy telling us how devastated this or that celebrity is when it happens to them every eighteen months. But after a twenty-year marriage, you find your true devotion, your centre of loyalty and your source of comfort, may be entirely non-sexual, non-human… It was something I had quietly enjoyed, shared secrets with, visited regularly, always been happy to share my thoughts with in good times and bad. It was so well known to me, it would never let me down: I knew that.
I had fallen in love with a road.
***
Come with me while I tell you about it, and tell you also a few of the stories I have produced over the years. Very short, won’t bore you…
I was now back in the beloved Sunbeam-Talbot that was my cocoon of joy. I relaxed within it and headed calmly into the centre of the town, past the much-loved Green Man Inn in Trumpington which was run by an old friend, Charlie Shadwell, modestly retired there after his nationwide celebrity and butt of radio jokes when he was conductor of the BBC Variety Orchestra in the days of ‘ITMA’ , exchanges directed into what one imagined to be the orchestra pit from what one imagined to be the stage. How much more vivid radio can be than television.
A turning off to the left pointed to Fowlmere. I swung away from it, purely because it was not my route; but at the same time enjoying the discomfiture of some friends who live there, when I told them that their village was not named after a lake containing wild ducks, but was actually a foul mire: a filthy marsh. I have always rather liked correcting people.
I had to drive right through the town and it was the evening rush-hour, so I tried, as so often, to switch on the car radio. It always seemed to forget it was stuck, on Radio Three, or whatever it used to be called. and had been for weeks. This means that my weekly Bunny Runs were a sort of forced induction into the sorts of music chosen for me by the wild-minded fifth-formers then running that channel. To my great fortune, that particular evening there was a Wagner concert and it was my delight to hear the ‘Mastersingers’ overture and lose myself in that fantastic chord – is it in the eighth bar? – which sends a shiver through you. I’m sure this was Sullivan’s one he lost.
I’m pretty good with so-called classical music, as I had a unique opportunity when I was at school during the 39-45 War. The BBC orchestras moved out into the country, and used our Hall as their main broadcasting studio for several years. We were allowed in, to listen to their rehearsals and also (if we got to know people like Adrian Boult’s PA, the fearsome Mrs Beckett) to the actual broadcasts. So I’m OK on the mainstream classics.
But now, so often when I start the engine, drive off, and push the button, there is some Celtic announcer telling me inarticulately that I am about to hear an hour of ethnic chants from the backlands of Mozambique, or from the depths of Stockhausen, if they can locate it; or perhaps the output of some newly-discovered musically-inclined monk from the fourteenth century keen to echo the sainted Hildegard… Or some smart new school-leaver thinking that his own five minutes of silence is as good as that other chap’s… Whoever he was. Anyway wouldn’t it be? I wrote once, to say that the announcement: “In a programme note, the composer explains…” is the biggest turn-off in radio history: instant switch-off. But of course, the Radio Times didn’t print it.
I came through the centre of Cambridge. There were few people about, as it was beginning to get dark and the only activity seemed to be around the pubs, and a few of the cheaper eating-places which opened early. The students would soon be noisily in Hall, and their Dons too, less noisy but infinitely more acid at their High Tables… High, I thought as I drove by, not just because of being elevated at the important end of the Hall, but because that perpetual sophisticated in-fighting over intellectual trifles and flights of fancy and non-sequiturs must be, for so many of them, the high point of their sad and cloistered little day. I wondered whether my dreadful brother-in-law might have been a less vicious and twisted person if he had received any real education: there must have been the seeds of intelligence, somewhere, and he was probably no more crooked than some of them were. But he would never have got to High Table, except perhaps to serve at it, and even then he would have stolen the spoons.
There is a strange mental stimulus that seeps into your head when you wander around age-old seats of learning. I have experienced it in Perugia and other ancient universities on the Continent, but only in the small hours when the past seems to resurrect itself and become more real. I still get it if I walk round Oxford very early on a Sunday. You can feel an affinity with all those crazy Victorian eccentrics, whose self-indulgent bilious attacks have left their mark on history: people like Spooner, of course, but also the lesser-knowns: who was it who came down to breakfast on a pouring wet day, tapped his barometer which read ‘Set Fair’, and threw it out of the window saying “See for yourself, you fool !”.
Down Silver Street and the punt-park over the Cam. Many of the Japanese tourists were still there, and their camera flashes were starting to illuminate the encroaching twilight gloom. When they all go home, how can they possibly bore each other with their identical snaps: me at King’s… Me at the Radcliffe Camera… Me at the Tower… Me at the Globe… Me outside the Albert Hall being beaten up by survivors of the Burma Railway…
I went right along the Backs, but gave some thought to that grim old house where Frances Cornford used to live, they tell me. She was the poet so rude about the sad “fat white woman whom nobody loves” whom she saw from a train in 1910. Why do you walk through the fields in gloves, she impudently asked. One of my heroes has always been G K Chesterton, himself somewhat overweight, who replied splendidly in defence of that poor innocent obese woman in the field. “Fathead poet whom nobody reads” he wrote. Delicious – one of the best ‘put-downs’ in literature.
Now for the last junction, turning left opposite that large and self-important house occupied by some member of the Rothschilds who had apparently been terribly essential during the war for something-or-other we knew nothing about. Was it to do with that Cambridge Spies thing from the Thirties? Unimportant, anyway, now. I went on to the point where the official Intervarsity Run used to start, at a phone-box on the Madingley Road. This was going back to 1930s history, and it brought back memories of the Americans.
More than one pre-war undergraduate from the United States has admitted that his fondest memory of his time here is that Run, the joy of the wealthier young students in their sports cars often borrowed from an even wealthier girl-friend. The Oxford starting or finishing point was also, for obvious reasons, a telephone-box – at the top of the Banbury Road. I understand that the record for the eighty-odd miles was about that number of minutes. Many of those racers moved on very soon to Hurricanes and Spitfires or to the Flying Fortresses that followed when defence changed to attack. I wondered, as I took the road that leads towards the vast US Military Cemetery, if some of those contestants lay there now, so close to their past.
I never came near that eighty-minute target, but sometimes on