Once Upon A Time in the West . . . Country

  TV and radio comedian Tony Hawks regularly pops up on shows like Have I Got News for You, QI, Just A Minute and I'm Sorry I Haven’t A Clue. He is the bestselling author of five books including Round Ireland with a Fridge and Playing the Moldovans at Tennis which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. His books have sold over 1 million copies around the world. He now lives in Devon with his partner, Fran.

  Follow Tony’s latest adventure on Twitter @thefridgeman, or visit his website www.tony-hawks.com.

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Tony Hawks 2015

  Illustrations © Kate Sutton

  The right of Tony Hawks to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him

  in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

  without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published

  and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 444 79479 3

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London

  EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For Fran

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  I woke suddenly, not sure where I was. Strange – a fan fixed to the ceiling above my head was gently turning. I looked around me. The surroundings were unfamiliar; a spacious, plain, impersonal room. Ah yes, we were in a hotel. Abroad somewhere. Yes, I remember, the Philippines. Puerto Princesa, to be precise.

  This town had been a little disappointing and, like quite a few of the places we’d visited before, was not as picturesque as it had appeared in the tourist guides. Perversely, holidays often end up feeling like hard work and this one had been no exception. Stifling heat and stomach bugs had further marred the enjoyment of touristic excursions that had already begun to feel voyeuristic and superficial. Three weeks into our trip and Fran was still struggling to find a connection with her roots and we were both looking forward to getting back home.

  It would probably have been much more fun had we met up with Fran’s mother and her friends who were holidaying in the country at the same time, but the proposed rendezvous in the capital city of the island of Palawan had not taken place, for complicated logistical reasons that I didn’t fully understand. Spending time with them could have brought a more personal perspective to the days. Fran’s mum Yolanda, or Yollie, as she liked to be called, could almost be called a Londoner these days, but she’d been born in the Philippines and had come to England in the 1960s seeking work, where she’d met Fran’s English father and produced a beautiful daughter. The same beautiful daughter who was lying next to me on the hotel bed.

  I checked the time. 3.09 a.m. I wondered if I should wake Fran. I had something to tell her, but I knew how much harder she found it to get back to sleep than I did, so I reconsidered.

  The bedclothes rustled as she began to toss and turn. Maybe I should tell her. Had it been a dream? A voice in my head? A message from the subconscious, perhaps?

  Another toss. Another turn. She seemed to be almost awake. Finally, I decided I would tell her.

  ‘Fran?’ I offered tentatively.

  ‘Yes?’ she replied sleepily. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’ve had an epiphany.’

  ‘Oh no! Shall we call a doctor?’

  ‘No – an epiphany. A thought. A realisation. A revelation of truth.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  Fran heaved at the covers and turned away.

  ‘Tell me in the morning,’ she said.

  No sense of occasion, that girl.

  1

  A Change Is as Good as a Rest

  How had I come to be sharing my life with a kind, gentle and loving person such as Fran?

  Ah, now that is the kind of question it is customary for the author to offer up in stories like these. The authorial voice is required to be a modest one, for fear of alienating the reader. He doesn’t want to appear a cocky bugger. He ought to be writing things like ‘I don’t deserve Fran’. But that wouldn’t be true. I do deserve her. I’m an OK chap. I would be as bold as to say that I’m really quite a reasonable catch. Bucking the trend of many in my profession, I am not morose or moody, instead I’m jolly and fun-loving. I am over six foot, not bad looking, I lead a relatively stress-free life and, if I may borrow a rather ignoble term often used in singles ads, I’m financially solvent. I’m far from perfect, but I make a pretty good fist of being kind, as much as I can. And so does Fran. So that makes us well suited. Opposites only tend to attract when there are demons at play, and we both hoped that they had all been exorcised years before.

  I’m not really a believer in fate, but it could so easily be argued that Fran and I are meant to be together. On 1 July 2010, I went along to the ceremony for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction. Ten years previously, my book Playing the Moldovans at Tennis had been one of the five books that made the shortlist, and every subsequent year I had been invited as a special guest. This year I hadn’t intended to go. I was single and had been unable to identify a suitable consort as my chaperone, but on the evening of the event the invitation on the kitchen worktop stared up at me, as if to ask what was so attractive about a dull evening at home. On the spur of the moment, I changed my mind, got ready, and headed for the door.

  As I sat, suitably suited, on the busy, hot London underground, I convinced myself that it would not take me long to bump into someone I knew at the drinks reception. However, half an hour into the proceedings I discovered a more painful truth. I found myself still milling around a large reception area, glass of white wine in one hand, canapé in the other, with eyes darting around the room, urgently seeking out a familiar face. Surely someone from my publishers would be here? Or another author whom I’d met along the way? Even one of the organisers from one of the previous years. But no, I could not spot a single soul with whom I could dock conversationally, and I remained stuck in an embarrassing social wilderness. The guests looked smart, bright, engaged, and switched on. The men wore clothes that I took to be trendy, which probably weren’t, and the ladies wore lovely summer dresses, fussed about their appearances and petted their hair. This was the London literary circle? Probably, because circles were what they had automatically formed themselves into, huddling together to discuss what they’d read recently and what they hoped to read next – leaving me on the outside, surplus to requirements, like a book they seemed to have no interest in reading. Something by Andy McNab.

  Being a pleasant summer’s evening, many of the guests had sat down at tables outside on a spacious terrace, and on one of my sad, acquaintance-foraging circuits I did see a coup
le of TV presenters who had once interviewed me, but they were seated and deep in conversation. My eye was drawn quickly to an Asian-looking lady at the head of one of these tables. She stood out from the crowd. Yes, she was exceptionally pretty, but there was a freshness about her too – almost as if she didn’t belong here in this competitive atmosphere, but perhaps, I imagined, laughing and playing with children in a playgroup. She sparkled. Such a shame that she would now glance up and see this sorry bloke milling about on his own, looking lost. If I could only have been at her table now, sitting next to her, giving her the benefit of my enormous charm – which was currently going horribly to waste.

  ‘Hello Ian!’ I bellowed, at last spotting a new arrival who was known to me.

  ‘Hello Tony!’ Ian replied, looking – to my great relief – rather pleased to see me, ‘You know Victoria, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, we’ve met before.’

  I shook hands with Ian and Victoria Hislop. Ian and I had met in the 1990s when I’d appeared a few times on the BBC TV topical comedy show Have I Got News for You.

  ‘I’m so pleased to see you,’ I said, ‘I didn’t bring anyone and I’ve been feeling like a lemon for the last twenty minutes, wandering around on my own. Do you mind if I latch onto you?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Ian, my social saviour. ‘Latch away.’

  At that moment we were ushered into a seated auditorium, where we were told the prize-giving ceremony would begin shortly.

  ‘Let me get you guys a drink,’ I said.

  ‘OK, we’ll go through, and we’ll save a seat for you.’

  When I returned minutes later, walking with great care as I struggled with three glasses of wine, Ian and Victoria turned, waved and indicated the vacant seat alongside them. To my astonishment, next to that empty chair sat the beautiful girl from earlier. An adrenalin rush. My heartbeat skipped with excitement.

  ‘Calm down, Tony,’ I said to myself. ‘She’s bound to have a boyfriend.’

  I’d learned to give myself this kind of emergency pep talk. Getting one’s hopes up too high had been a regular failing of mine when it came to the opposite sex. Lowering expectations, I had since found, moderated the pain upon rejection. Marginally.

  Perhaps unwisely, I allowed my hopes to rise again as I squeezed my way up the aisle towards Ian and Victoria and noticed that there was a female sitting on the other side of the lady of my interest.

  ‘Aha! Good, no boyfriend,’ I thought.

  I was at it again. How could I jump to that conclusion? The boyfriend could have myriad reasons for not being there. He might be working late, or be on an overseas trip, or he may even be one of the authors sitting on stage hoping that he was about to be presented with the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction. As I got closer to my seat, I became very nervous. I would have to be careful not to spill the drinks. I was a clumsy man even when sober and, because you sip more often when you haven’t got anyone to talk to, I’d been consuming wine faster than usual. But no, it didn’t happen. I didn’t make a fool of myself and spill wine all over the girl I wanted to impress. Instead, I calmly passed the drinks to a grateful Ian and Victoria and sat down, desperately trying to come up with a decent opening line to initiate a conversation with the girl beside me. To my delight, it wasn’t necessary.

  ‘You must be Tony,’ she said, with a heart-melting smile.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I am.’

  What a lucky break. She knew who I was. Perhaps her colleagues had spotted me and had been telling her about my books. She could even be a fan. This would make things so much easier. I wouldn’t have to impress her or prove myself in these opening exchanges because to some extent, the groundwork would have already been done.

  ‘How did you know that I’m Tony?’ I enquired.

  ‘I tried to sit in your chair and Ian said that it was Tony’s seat. So that must be you.’

  Ah. It was Ian whom she knew, not me. Never mind, I wasn’t complaining. This was a first for me. At last, compensation for all those times I’d longed for pretty girls to be allocated seats next to me on planes, coaches or trains, only to be presented with a fat bloke with body odour. There looked to be three hundred people or so at this event. That I should end up randomly being seated next to the person I most wanted to meet was finally my reward for having lived a relatively good life free from any involvement with international drug rings.

  Whilst we waited for the formal proceedings to begin, I did what any self-respecting single male would do in a situation like this. I completely ignored the people who had kindly come to my rescue. I had no need for Ian and Victoria. They had served their purpose and should now drink their wines alone. I had more important business afoot. A foot away, in fact.

  The object of my excited attention turned out to be called Fran. She was a mature student completing a PhD in biomedical imaging. Blimey, a bit too brainy for me, I thought. She told me about her passion for books and literature, and I remember spurting some rubbish about how I felt science, one day, would be able to measure the force of love. Anyway, whatever happened – and it’s something of a white-wine blur – things went well, because at the end of the evening we exchanged email addresses, and a courtship followed in which I was charmed not just by her obvious beauty, but by her giggles, her gentleness, compassion, astuteness and most impressively of all, her determination and desire to grow and improve herself as a person. It wasn’t a whirlwind romance because it was more measured – more of a ‘strong breeze romance’ – and within a year we had dated, made love, holidayed and moved in together.

  I keep Ian posted of each landmark.

  ***

  What I had eventually said to Fran over breakfast at our hotel in Puerto Princesa, on the penultimate day of our trip, was this:

  ‘We no longer need to live in London.’

  ‘What?’

  Fran was relatively unsurprised by this, being used to the randomness of my thoughts.

  ‘We no longer need to live in London.’

  ‘That’s what woke you in the middle of the night?’

  ‘Yes. I had it all worked out. You’re finishing your PhD soon. I can write wherever I am, and I have to travel round the country for various shows anyway, so I’d just be doing that from a different starting point, that’s all. There’s nothing holding us to the capital anymore.’

  ‘Where were you thinking of moving?’

  ‘I don’t know. At three a.m. this morning, the South West was in my head.’

  ‘Perhaps that was your inner voice. I read this article a while back saying that we should try to listen to our inner voices.’

  ‘So, what do you think? Should we move? What does your inner voice say?’

  ‘Mine says I should have another breakfast pastry.’

  ***

  My mind was particularly active as we sped down the A303 towards Devon. Actually, those of you who know the A303 will realise that very little speeding is done on that road. There are sections where this is possible, but with this particular road the Department for Transport prefer to offer greater variety, and there are plenty of opportunities to take a rest from speed to practise dawdling, queueing, and steering the car through meandering hilly sections.

  The reason for our visit to Devon was twofold. Shortly after the Philippines trip, friends had asked me to make an appearance at a small village in the southern reaches of the county, and we’d decided that we could make this trip the beginning of a house-hunting process that might take months, maybe even years. It might not be Devon where we settled, but it seemed as good a place as any to start. Neither of us had any particular connection with the area, but we’d always loved our visits to our friends Kevin and Donna and had stayed with them on quite a few occasions, just as we would this time. However, this visit would be a little different. We would take a couple of days to scour the area, to see if it could provide the change that we had discussed over a breakfast on the other side of the world.

  By the time the road was leading
us through Salisbury Plain, the nature of ‘change’ was preoccupying my mind. There has been plenty of evidence to show that a lot of us don’t like it very much, and I reckoned this was mainly because of fear. Fear of loss of face, fear of loss of control, fear of what will come next, fear of our competence to cope, fear that change will bring more work, and fear that everything will be different. It seemed to me that the only kind of change most of us like is the stuff that gets handed back to us in the supermarket after we’ve handed over our twenty pound note.

  Be the change you want to see in the world.

  Such had been the message from Gandhi, the indomitable and yet benign freedom fighter from Gujarat – a phrase that was always ready and waiting in the wings to shine a spotlight on one’s hypocrisy. What this phrase meant was that if you wanted peace in the world, then it was no good getting angry about that unjust parking ticket. It meant that if you wanted better education for your kids, then you’d better start taking time out to teach them; and it meant that if you wanted to see the planet’s resources preserved for future generations, then you might need to do a tad more than buy one energy-saving light bulb.

  At least that was my interpretation of what Gandhi had meant. As it happens, there is no reliable documentary evidence that Gandhi actually uttered the words ‘Be the change you want to see in the world’ in the first place. It’s far more likely that he said, ‘Blimey, that doughnut looks nice.’ The closest verifiable remark we have from Gandhi on the subject of change is this:

  If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him . . . We need not wait to see what others do.

  But let’s face it, ‘Be the change you want to see in the world’ is snappier, which is probably why someone who sought a simpler world had paraphrased the little man’s words.