Too Long In The Business

Tim Topps

Description

During a hilarious National Service and with university to follow, Tim Topps wonders what he can fruitfully sell to his contemporaries who will be going up to college, probably with wives and certainly with wartime memories. Disenchanted by his original idea about laundrettes, he decides upon insurance, learning too late from a rather pushy teenager called Branson that one should offer students what they want, not what they need! Nevertheless he sets up special schemes and successfully runs a student-oriented insurance brokerage, which evolves from a 1949 back street in Oxford to a nationwide business with tens of thousands of happy clients, some now famous in the media or sitting in The Lords (or even invading Iraq). But a somewhat unsuccessful venture into other student centres in Europe brought Tim into contact with COSEC, the outfit set up by the CIA, as was revealed in 1967 by the US student magazine Ramparts. Shots are fired: one by the CIA, the other by - he still can't believe - the killer of Lord Erroll in Kenya, 1941, very likely linked to Baden Powell. Both of those shots are closely explored, revealing some interesting stuff that the author grimly insists is fictionWith an exclusive article being published in the Daily Mail mid-June,Too Long in the Businessis set to be a hit with fans of humorous fiction, along with anyone who has been to a UK university, especially in the 50s-70s.

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 24 mai 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781784627249
• Langue: English

Extrait

Too Long in the Business
Tim Topps

Copyright © 2014 Tim Topps
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Cover designs by the girl in the E-type
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 1784627 249
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To all small-business owners, getting through life’s financial jungle by swinging from straw to straw.
*
And to Sarah, Olivia, the girl in the Peter Jones window, the one in the E-type, Elsa from the Oxford office, plus a few more (who know who they are); not to mention the late Freda McMurdo… **
*
… and in memory of Bobbie, who put up with a lot.
** (I said not to mention her)
Contents

Cover


Also by Tim Topps


NOTE:


PROLOGUE


Chapter I


Chapter II


CHAPTER III


CHAPTER IV


CHAPTER V


CHAPTER VI


CHAPTER VII


CHAPTER VIII


CHAPTER IX


CHAPTER X


MESOLOGUE


CHAPTER XI


CHAPTER XII


CHAPTER XIII


CHAPTER XIV


EPILOGUE


NOTES


MATTERS ARISING – 1


MATTERS ARISING – 2
Also by Tim Topps
The Paper Caper (Matador 2013)
The Bunny Run (Matador 2014)
NOTE:
This is a work of fiction, and a gross misrepresentation of the seven splendid colleagues I had the good fortune to work with in real life; fine, charming, blameless folk and good businessmen to boot: none of them swore offensively, nor licked his knife, at least not in public. I have depicted not them, but the awful people they might have been. Ron, for example, was in real life the staunchest person I’ve ever known. If any of us had faults, it may well have been myself. What is more, I still can’t believe my father was an assassin… He was staunch, too. But as regards the CIA – and their activities among our University students in the Fifties and Sixties until the ‘Ramparts’ exposure – and probably long after – well, what do you think?
PROLOGUE

A curious thing to admit, right at the start, but if you were at a British university in the 1950s, 60s or 70s, I know where you went to the lavatory. Don’t tell anyone, but I dream about it all the time.
I am walking along endless Hall corridors, looking on scrawled cards for the residents’ names, looking also – and urgently – for an unoccupied loo. Always there is either a queue outside it, or if it is surprisingly vacant, I find, when I sit down, that all four walls are made of glass, or that people are strolling through and talking to each other a little too loudly about insurance, or I am doing it crouched in a laundrette, which is worse… Worst of all, where has the bogstrap gone? Usually, that’s enough to wake me up. It sure did, this time.
Downstairs in the darkness, the hall clock chimed apologetically, the fourth note a bit flat as always. It was half past something.
I was due downtown this morning for probably the most important meeting of my life. Also here in Cambridge, back at that happy start to the Sixties before, under The Stones and their ilk, it all went so wrong, this was Poppy Day, the annual Rag Day, so my clients would be everywhere and the traffic would be sluggish; I’d better get up.
Little wonder that my nights so often found me roaming in my twitchy dreams countrywide around those Halls of Residence. My work with students had taken me everywhere from Aberdeen to Exeter, repeatedly, over the past fifteen years, and when you’ve an appointment every thirty minutes right through a long day you really do need to know where the facilities are. No problem here in Cambridge itself (the basement in Trinity’s Whewell’s Court; King’s Hostel behind the Arts Theatre; that weird place at the far end of Downing) nor in Oxford for that matter as I’d lived there for four years and favoured that cell down all those stairs at the Radcliffe Camera, or if time allowed and the bladder permitted, the less frequented and better-heated loos at Rhodes House (the Americans like to be cosy); but when I was touring my clients at other Universities, all those Wilmslow Road Halls in Manchester used to worry me a bit, (except St Gabriel’s where I knew the Warden). And as for Loughborough, to reach some bogs in places like Hazelrigg you needed to be an athlete – as of course they were, most of them, on their ‘Athletics Scholarships’.
Mind you, I am writing about the early days, as I had already been in this business a long time: advising students about things they didn’t want, but ought to have, made it seem even longer sometimes. But this was now 1964, second week of November. My highly unpleasant but momentous and prematurely-named Board Meeting loomed ahead, yet in all other ways this was an enjoyable occasion. I had experienced many Rag Days at other Universities, which usually brought with them a feel of slight embarrassment: a bit contrived, a bit intrusive, with the general public in Edgbaston or Clifton, or the folk along Woodhouse Lane, Leeds, or even around Aldwych (with both King’s and the LSE hamming it up) as somewhat reluctant outsiders, paying up with a thin smile and wishing it was tomorrow. But for some reason, Cambridge was always different. The town willingly joined in, in those days as I still remember them: where else, anywhere at all, would the Banks in a Market Place consent to be raided by masked young men and girls, everyone around looking on with a smile? A good theme for an unmade Ealing comedy?
Nothing else was going to be comic, though, today. How was I going to keep control of the company I’d been building up across the UK ever since 1950? Countrywide, every undergraduate knew of us and our endless insurance circulars; thousands were our clients, covered for their flutes and trumpets, cycles, books – and above all, their lives. But now the seven men I’d carefully chosen to be my associates were beginning to come together against me – well, certainly some of them – just when I’d managed to detach us from the hidden disasters of my late Senior Partner and the others in the shadows…
The only real consolation I had today was that those seven were in two groups, and I would have to try to play one against the other. That would be one in the eye for them… If only it worked…
And, as it strangely turned out, one in the eye for Moscow too.

* * *

I rolled over and spreadeagled across the big bed like some ecstatic Saint Andrew, corner to corner without impediment. Someone – was it Thurber? – once wrote a piece ‘You can’t sleep with women’ and he was so right. There had been many marital years of that well-known but so little mentioned syndrome: clinging to the cliff-edge at my ordained half of the bed after long, tense business days, my free arm dangling to the carpet and the accumulated tiredness dripping out of my fingers… Years tinged by a reluctance to cause offence by even hinting a wish to sleep alone.
It is only as we grow older that we start to appreciate that blessed self-indulgence of aloneness. While young and unattached, we become obsessed by the desire to be merged with someone else: the animal need to share, on which of course Life depends. Then we have, unavoidably, those actual ‘sharing’ years with a half-bed… Only after that fraught stage, which can end jaggedly in tears or providentially in a mutual understanding, can we hope to achieve the nirvana of being alone when we want to be: a truth neatly put recently, was it by the writer Zoe Heller: ‘Solitude is wasted on the lonely’.

* * *
Heading for the car an hour or so later, I was reminded by the wheezing hall clock how careful I would have to be today, how easy it is to make a fatal mistake. There was a rather pushy girl who fancied her vocal skills in a Durham pub once, who marched up to sing ‘My Grandfather’s Clock’ and confused her joy and pride very rewardingly for the rest of us:

“It was bought on the morn of the day that he was born
And was always his pride and his joy;
But it stopped short, never to go again,
When the old man – er – ”

My Jaguar was a recent indulgence, but I was taking care round corners because this was the old Mark One with the narrow wheelbase which, they muttered, had let some good drivers down somewhat. To be honest, I still missed my beloved old Sunbeam Talbots, HCE 577 and then KER 602, both blue-and-grey, that used to glide me across country on my regular Oxford to Cambridge bunny-run in an aerodynamic cocoon, so that on that slope just outside Newport Pagnell (the hilly hiccup between the Chilterns and the Northampton Uplands, where the weather always seems to have changed as you go through) your ears would pop. I had the student President of Cranfield with me once on that stretch, and he offered to buy her on the spot. Mind you, I had bought her from the top Rootes man at Herbert Robinson’s and he had fitted some esoteric Alpine accessories, whatever that meant, so she had been a bit special.
I turned down past Girton College towards the centre of town. A police car doppled past, so I assumed Poppy Day had started. That side entrance to Girton, framed by its pines, always clicked my memory back to a girl’s face: I never kne