Percy said later that evening to Willie, “So the old man cornered you.”
“He said you were a landlord.”
“I've had to do lots of things, little Willie. They wanted West Indian chaps to drive the buses here. But there was the problem of accommodation. People don't want to rent to black people. I don't have to tell you that. So one or two of the island governments encouraged people like me to buy properties and rent to West Indians. That was how it started. Don't get any fancy ideas. The houses I bought were full of people and cost about fifteen hundred pounds. One cost seventeen hundred and fifty. I used to fit in the boys in the spare rooms. I would go around every Friday evening to collect the rent. You couldn't get better people than the boys from Barbados. They were very grateful. On those Friday evenings, just off the London Transport shift, you would find every man Jack of them washed and clean and kneeling down beside the bed in their little rooms and praying. Bible on one side, open at Leviticus, rent book on the other side, closed over the notes. And the notes showing. The old man heard about me and decided to buy me out. I couldn't deny him. It was his manor. He offered me the job in the club. He promised me a piece of the business. When I asked for the piece he said I was being boring. I took the hint and got the college scholarship. But he wants to be friends with me still, and it is better for me to be friends with him. But it worries me, Willie. He wants me to go back to work for him. It worries me.”
Willie thought, “How strange the city is! When I came to look for Speakers' Corner and saw Krishna Menon walking and thinking out his speech about the Suez invasion, I never knew that the club and Debenhams perfume counter were so close on one side, and Percy's old manor, and the old man's, so close on the other side.”
*
IT WAS AT ONE OF those bohemian parties that Willie met a fattish young man with a beard who said he worked for the BBC. He edited or produced programmes for some of the overseas services. He was new in his job, and though personally modest, was full of the importance of what he did. He was a bureaucrat at heart, honouring convention, but in tribute to his job he felt he should put on bohemian airs in a place like Notting Hill, and to extend patronage to people like Willie: lifting unlikely people up from the darkness to the glory of the airwaves.
He said to Willie, “You have become more and more interesting to me as the minutes have ticked by.”
Willie had been working hard at his family history.
The producer said, “Over here we don't know much about your kind of Christian community. So old, so early. So isolated from the rest of India, from what you say. It would be fascinating to hear about it. Why don't you do a script about it for us? It would fit nicely into one of our Commonwealth programmes. Five minutes. Six hundred and fifty words. Think of it as a page and a half of a Penguin book. No polemics. Five guineas if we use it.”
No one—leaving aside the scholarship people—had ever offered money to Willie before. And, almost as soon as the idea, and the angle, had been given to him by the producer, the five-minute talk had sketched itself in his mind. The beginnings of the faith in the subcontinent rendered as family stories (he would have to check things up in the encyclopaedia); the feeling of separateness from the rest of India; no true knowledge of the other religions of India; the family's work, in the British time, as social reformers, people of Christian conscience, champions of workers' rights (a story or two about the firebrand relation who wore a red scarf when he addressed public meetings); the writer's education at a mission school, and his discovery there of the tension between the old Christian community and the new Christians, backwards, recent converts, depressed people, full of grievances; a difficult experience for the writer but in the end a rewarding one, leading to an understanding and acceptance not only of the new Christians, but also of the larger Indian world outside the Christian fold, the Indian world from which his ancestors had held aloof.
He wrote the talk in less than two hours. It was like being at the mission school again: he knew what was expected of him. A week later he had a letter of acceptance from the producer, on a small, light sheet of BBC paper. The producer's signature was very small. He was like a man happy to sink his own identity in the grander identity of his corporation. About three weeks later Willie was called to record his script. He took the Underground to Holborn and walked down Kingsway to Bush House. For the first time, doing that long walk, with Bush House at the end of the mighty vista, he had a sense of the power and wealth of London. It was something he had looked for when he arrived but hadn't found, and then, moving between his college and Notting Hill, he had forgotten about.
He loved the drama of the studio, the red light and the green light, the producer and the studio manager in their sound-proof cubicle. His script was part of a longer magazine programme. It was being recorded on disc, and he and the other contributors had to sit through the whole thing twice. The producer was fussy and full of advice for everybody. Willie listened carefully and picked up everything. Don't listen to your own voice; try to see what you are talking about; speak from the back of the throat; don't let your voice fall away at the end of a sentence. At the end the producer said to Willie, “You're a natural.”
Four weeks later he was asked to go to an exhibition of carving by a young West African. The carver, a small man in embroidered, dirty-looking African cap and gown, was the only person in the gallery when Willie went. Willie was nervous at pretending to be a reporter, but the African talked easily. He said that when he looked at a piece of wood he saw the figures he was going to carve in it. He walked Willie round the exhibition, the heavy African gown bouncing off his thighs, and told him with great precision how much he had paid for every piece of wood. Willie built his script around that.
Two weeks later the producer sent him to a literary luncheon for an American hostess and gossip-writer. Her talk was about how to arrange a dinner party and how to deal with the problem of bores. Bores had to be put with other bores, the hostess said; fire had to be fought with fire. Willie's script wrote itself.
He found himself a little bit in demand. After recording a script one afternoon he bought a typewriter on hire- purchase from a firm in Southampton Row. He signed a long agreement for the twenty-four pounds' loan and (like Percy's West Indian lodgers with their rent books) he was given a little account book (with stiff covers, as though for long use) in which his payments were to be entered week by week.
He wrote more easily on the typewriter. He began to understand that a radio talk wasn't to be overloaded. He got to know just how much material was needed for a five-minute piece—three or four points were usually enough—and he didn't waste time looking for material he wasn't going to use. He got to know producers, studio managers, contributors. Some of the contributors were professionals. They lived in the suburbs and came in by train with big briefcases that held many little scripts for other programmes and outlines for other little scripts. They were busy people, planning little scripts for weeks and months ahead, and they didn't like sitting through a half-hour magazine programme twice. They looked bored by other people's pieces, and Willie learned to look bored by theirs.
But he was charmed by Roger. Roger was a young lawyer whose career had hardly started. Willie sat through a hilarious script of Roger's about working on the government's legal-aid scheme, representing people who were too poor to pay lawyers' fees. The poor people Roger had to deal with turned out to be querulous and crooked, and great lovers of the law. The script began and ended with the same fat old working woman coming to Roger's office and saying, “Are you the poor lawyer?” The first time Roger had been solicitous. The second time he had sighed and said, “Yes, that's me.”
