My Uncle Oswald(23)

“But they cost two hundred and fifty francs each.”

“I don’t care about that. All my girl friends want them. I told them what happened to me yesterday and now they all want them.”

“I can give you a hundred, that’s all. The rest later. Do you have money?”

“Of course I have money.”

“May I make a suggestion, madame?”

“What is it?”

“If a lady takes one of these pills on her own, I fear she may appear unduly aggressive. Men don’t like that. I didn’t like it yesterday.”

“What is your suggestion?”

“I suggest that any lady who intends taking one of these pills should persuade her partner also to take one. And at exactly the same time. Then they’ll be all square.”

“That makes good sense,” she said.

It not only made good sense, it would also double the sales.

“The partner,” I said, “could take a larger pill. It’s called the men’s pill. That’s simply because men are bigger than women and need a bigger dose.”

“Always assuming,” she said, smiling a little, “that the partner is a male.”

“Whatever you like,” I said.

She shrugged her shoulders and said, “Very well, then, give me also one hundred of these men’s pills.”

By gum, I thought, there’s going to be some fun and frolics around the boudoirs of Paris tonight. Things were hot enough with just the man getting himself all pilled up, but I shuddered to think what was going to happen when both parties took the medicine.

It was a howling success. Sales doubled. They trebled. By the time my twelve months in Paris were up, I had around two million francs in the bank! That was one hundred thousand pounds! I was now nearly eighteen. I was rich. But I was not rich enough. My year in France had shown me very clearly the path I wanted to follow in my life. I was a sybarite. I wished to lead a life of luxury and leisure. I would never get bored. That was not my style. But I would never be completely satisfied unless the luxury was intensely luxurious and the leisure was unlimited. One hundred thousand pounds was not enough for that. I needed more. I needed a million pounds at least. I felt sure I would find a way to earn it. Meanwhile, I had not made a bad start.

I had enough sense to realize that first of all I must continue my education. Education is everything. I have a horror of uneducated people. And so, in the summer of 1913, I transferred my money to a London bank and returned to the land of my fathers. In September, I went up to Cambridge to begin my undergraduate studies. I was a scholar remember, a scholar of Trinity College, and as such, I had a number of privileges and was well treated by those in authority.

It was here at Cambridge that the second and final phase of my fortune-making began. Bear with me a little longer and you shall hear all about it in the pages to come.





7





MY CHEMISTRY TUTOR at Cambridge was called A. R. Woresley. He was a middle-aged, shortish man, paunchy, untidily dressed, and with a grey moustache whose edges were stained yellow ochre by the nicotine from his pipe. In appearance, therefore, a typical university don. But he struck me as being exceptionally able. His lectures were never routine. His mind was always darting about in search of the unusual. Once he said to us, “And now we need as it were a tompion to protect the contents of this flask from invading bacteria. I presume you know what a tompion is, Cornelius?”

“I can’t say I do, sir,” I said.

“Can anyone give me a definition of that common English noun?” A. R. Woresley said.

Nobody could.

“Then you’d better look it up,” he said. “It is not my business to teach you elementary English.”

“Oh, come on, sir,” someone said. “Tell us what it means.”

“A tompion,” A. R. Woresley said, “is a small pellet made out of mud and saliva which a bear inserts into his anus before hibernating for the winter, to stop the ants getting in.”

A strange fellow, A. R. Woresley, a mixture of many attitudes, occasionally witty, more often pompous and sombre, but underneath everything there was a curiously complex mind. I began to like him very much after that little tompion episode. We struck up a pleasant studenttutor relationship. I was invited to his house for sherry. He was a bachelor. He lived with his sister, who was called Emmaline of all names. She was dumpy and frowsy and seemed to have something greenish on her teeth that looked like verdigris. She had a kind of surgery in the house where she did things to people’s feet. A pedicurist, I think she called herself.

Then the Great War broke out. It was 1914 and I was nineteen years old. I joined the army. I had to, and for the next four years I concentrated all my efforts on trying to survive. I am not going to talk about my wartime experiences. Trenches, mud, mutilation, and death have no place in these journals. I did my bit. Actually, I did well, and by November 1918, when it all came to an end, I was a twenty-three-year-old captain in the infantry with a Military Cross. I had survived.