The Throwback

Tom Sharpe

The Throwback

Chapter one

It could be said of Lockhart Flawse when he carried his bride, Jessica, nee Sandicott, across the threshold of 12 Sandicott Crescent, East Pursley, Surrey, that he was entering into married life with as little preparedness for its hazards and happiness as he had entered the world at five past seven on Monday, 6 September 1956, promptly killing his mother in the process. Since Miss Flawse had steadfastly refused to name his father even on the stinging nettles that composed her deathbed and had spent the hour of his delivery and her departure alternately wailing and shouting 'Great Scot!', it had devolved upon his grandfather to name the infant Lockhart after the great Scott's biographer and, at some risk to his own reputation, to allow Lockhart to assume the surname Flawse for the time being.

From that moment Lockhart had been allowed to assume nothing, not even a birth certificate. Old Mr Flawse had seen to that. If his daughter had been so obviously devoid of social discretion as to give birth to a bastard under a dry-stone wall while out cub-hunting, which dry-stone wall her horse had, more sensibly than she, refused, Mr Flawse was determined to. ensure that his grandson grew up with none of his mother's faults. He had succeeded. At eighteen Lockhart knew as little about sex as his mother had known or cared about contraception. His life had been spent under the care of several housekeepers and later half a dozen tutors, the former chosen for their willingness to endure the bed and board of old Mr Flawse, and the latter for their other-worldliness.

Since Flawse Hall was situated on Flawse Fell close under Flawse Rigg some seventeen miles from the nearest town and on the bleakest expanse of moorland north of the Roman Wall, only the most desperate of housekeepers and other-worldly of tutors accepted the situation for long. There were other rigours than the natural. Mr Flawse was an extremely irritable man and the succession of tutors who had provided Lockhart with the most particular of general educations had done so under the strict proviso that Ovid was not to be included among the classics and that literature was to be dispensed with entirely.

Lockhart was to be taught the ancient virtues and mathematics. Mr Flawse was particularly hot on mathematics and believed in numbers as ferociously as his forefathers had believed in predestination and cattle-rustling. They formed in his opinion a firm foundation for a commercial career and were as entirely without obvious sexual co

Mr Flawse made good their absence by teaching Lockhart himself. Born in 1887 at the height of the Empire, he still held those tenets to be true which had been commonplace in his youth. The British were the finest specimens of animal life that God and Nature had created. The Empire was still the greatest that had ever existed. Wogs began at Calais, and sex was necessary for procreation but was otherwise unmentionable and generally disgusting. The fact that the Empire had long since ceased to exist and that wogs, far from begi

'Damned if I will,' he said when Dr Magrew first mooted the idea of a holiday. 'And the fool who first said a change is as good as a rest didn't live in this benighted century.'

Dr Magrew helped himself to more port. 'You can't live in an unheated house without a housekeeper and expect to last another winter.'

'I've got Dodd and the bastard to look after me. And the house isn't unheated. There's coal in the drift mine up Slime-burn and Dodd brings it down. The bastard does the cooking.'

'And that's another thing,' said Dr Magrew, who rather suspected that Lockhart had cooked their di

'Not till I find out who his father is,' said Mr Flawse malevolently. 'And when I do I'll horsewhip the swine to within an inch of his life.'

'You'll not be fit to horsewhip anyone unless you take our advice,' said Dr Magrew. 'Isn't that your opinion, Bullstrode?'

'Speaking as your friend and legal adviser,' said Mr Bull-strode glowing in the candlelight, 'I would say that I would regret the premature ending of these pleasant occasions by virtue of an obstinate disregard for the weather and our advice. You're not a young man and the question of your will…'

'Damn my will, sir,' said old Mr Flawse, 'I'll make a will when I know whom I'm settling my money on and not before. And what is this advice you offer so readily?'