The Exploits of Engelbrecht (4 page)

The celebrations lasted far into the century. My last recollection is of little Engelbrecht taking a header into the loving cup of flaming rum punch. “Come on in,” he said, as he swam round and round, “it’s gloriously warm.”

I shall always remember the time—and a damned long time it was, too, as you’ll realize in a minute—when Engelbrecht, the dwarf surrealist boxer, and I were slung out of the Old Plant Theatre of Varieties. It was during the first night of an arboreal epic entitled
Ash Before Oak.
We’d looked in there after dining with the Id and some of his chums at a new Black Market Restaurant that had opened next door to the Royal College of Surgeons’ Museum.

The dinner was by way of celebrating the close season for Man-hunting. Anyway, by the time we’d eaten our way through the menu of recherché Unmentionables, and drained the Ether decanter, I don’t suppose there was a single one of us who was anywhere near in his right mind. So when Nodder Fothergill suggested dropping in at the Plant Theatre we, that is those of us who still retained the priceless gift of consciousness, were inclined to be enthusiastic. We bundled into the Id’s huge black Fly and bowled off, whooping and shrieking like fiends.

We didn’t realize just what we were in for. The fact is Plant Drama is apt to be a bit slow. All the parts are played by real plants, and plants, as you know, like to take their time about it. You can always rely on them for a sincere performance, but for a good deal of it you just have to sit there and watch them grow. It’s a bit agonizing now and again, especially during love scenes. You’d scarcely credit the time it takes some of these diffident vegetables to make a pass at one another. Why, even a relatively fast worker like mistletoe, convolvulus, or bamboo, playing in a light Coward type comedy, can take three months over a proposal. As for the hardwood trees, well all I can tell you is that the curtain went up 5000 years ago on the famous New Forest Production of
King Lear
with an all-Oak cast and the audience are still there to this day.

Of course the Old Plant Theatre of Varieties isn’t quite as slow as all that. They go in for Revue with choruses of cannas and herbaceous borders and orchids as stars, insects to carry the pollen about and an occasional bird to drop the seed from the O.P. side to the wings. But even so the tempo is a good deal slower than most people are used to.

The theatre itself is a cross between the Hollywood Bowl, Kew Gardens, and the old Leicester Square Empire. A good deal of it is in the open air, but the whole place is tangled up with gilt and greenery, plush and moss.

We arrived just before the curtain went up. The “thing that was scarcely a thing” at the Almighty Whirlitzer was coming to the end of
Trees,
which is more or less the National Anthem, as you might say, of the plant world, and the atmosphere was vibrating with the intensity that invariably betokens a Plant’s first night. Engelbrecht and I were sitting just in front of the Editor of the
Fly Paper,
and I remember Engelbrecht saying sharply over his shoulder: “If you don’t stop buzzing, you Goddamned blue-bottle, I shan’t be able to hear the rustling of the leaves.”…

That shows you he was a bit lit. Engelbrecht would never have spoken to an editor like that if he’d been stone cold sober. His sense of publicity is far too keen. Lizard Bayliss, who was sitting on his other side, was dreadfully upset. “You didn’t ought to have done that, kiddo,” he kept saying. “You know how touchy he is. See! There goes one of his ruddy little correspondents buzzing off back to the office now. Now you mark my words, there’ll be a nasty little bit of dirt about you spread all over his sticky front page tomorrow. Engelbrecht drunk again, I shouldn’t wonder. Drunk again the night before a fight... And there’ll be an inquiry and we shall lose the purse.” Just then the lights went out, the rain came down and the curtain went up on the first scene of:
Ash Before Oak.

Now this, only we didn’t know it at the time, represented a new venture on the part of a couple of old cowslips with more dew than sense who planned to strike a blow for the homely English Flora as opposed to all the exotic tropical blooms— orchids, frangipani, bougainvillea, date palms, sandalwood— that had been monopolizing the plant variety stage for so long. The star of the show, if you please, was a floppy hollyhock that the old cowslips had got a crush on at the last horticultural show. The whole thing was set in an English spring and summer— a wet one of course as you can tell by the title. The plot turned on a lot of cosy friendly rivalry between the Oak and the Ash as to which should be out first, with an idiotic garden party where the exotic tropical plants were made to look cheap and flashy beside the cottage garden brigade, attended by a ballet of cabbage whites.

The first scene was “Somewhere In February”. The rain came down like a grey steel curtain, week after week, and nothing happened except a drip, drip, drip, plop, splash, plop. By the time it got round to March, and one or two green shoots were supposed to appear, most of us were beginning to get a bit restive. And when something went wrong with the wind machine so that it started blowing the March gale slap in our faces instead of back stage, we all turned as one man on Nodder Fothergill and asked what the hell he thought he was doing bringing us to our deaths of pneumonia in this hell hole. Nodder said how could he know it was going to be such a confounded flop, and we’d better turn it in and head for home.

But when we got up to go we had a nasty shock. Every exit was barred by oaks and ranged behind us was a dense row of whacking great thorn bushes, and when Charlie Wapentake protested, one of them bore down on him and lashed him to his seat with withies. Seems there’s been a conspiracy on the part of the British Plant Council to make certain that British Plant actors and actresses should get a fair hearing.

Just then Engelbrecht gave me a nudge. “Look over there,” he said. “That’s one consolation anyway.” I turned my head gingerly, expecting any moment to be pranged by a thorn, and was just in time to see the Editor of the
Fly Paper
foiled in a phoney attempt to leave the theatre by way of the skylight. The thing that was “barely a thing” shot him down with a blast on the Vox Humana, and he crash-dived into a spider’s web.

Soon after that the star of the show, the floppy old hollyhock, made her first appearance as a young shoot. The Id blew a lecherous whistle but an oak boomed: “No disrespect to British planthood, if you please?” And one of the thorn bushes gagged him with a bundle of brushwood.

That sobered us I can tell you. I mean to say you don’t gag an elemental force like the Id as easily as all that. We sat dead silent till the end of the scene when they handed up a huge bouquet of raw meat to the hollyhock “from her devoted admirers”.

Presently Lizard Bayliss began to whine that his feet were taking root in the floor. “Can’t you do nothing for me, kiddo?” he whimpered. “I’m turning into a ruddy shrub. I can feel it. If I don’t get out of here soon I’ll be all privet.”

Just then the scene changed again to the night of April 1st. A streaming wet night it was and black as your hat, so black you couldn’t even see what the Ash and the Oak were supposed to be up to; the dialogue sounded to me like a lot of creaks. I was told afterwards the script called for glow-worms at this point, but the little devils had gone on strike; refused to shine while it was raining.

Engelbrecht whispered in my ear: “Come on, chum. This is our chance! Let’s try our luck back stage!” and the next thing I knew we were clambering through the branches of the Mighty Whirlitzer, heading for behind the scenes. We brushed past a lot of knobbly fungus that grew out of the oak and made it squeak, causing the Oak to muff one of his lines. He was a bit deaf that Oak; you could hear the prompter yelling at him like a foghorn: “My tough breast gladdens at the touch of spring.” Then we dodged a bramble bush and a couple of pollarded willows that were larking about waiting for their cue—funny ideas of fun some of these trees have—and suddenly we found ourselves in a part of open country right up at the back of the stage. Engelbrecht paused to kick the heart out of a lettuce. “The dressing rooms are over there,” he said, pointing vaguely into the murk.

I stumbled along in his wake, tripping over roots and shrubs and movable sods of turf waiting to come on in the next scene. I got the impression there was a good deal of discontent—more than is usual behind the scenes. The flowers were jealous of the trees and the trees were jealous of the shrubs. I heard a birch say she was damned if she would ever play a scene with a rhododendron in it again and in future she was going to have it stated plainly in her contract.

Next moment I tripped and fell flat on my face in a bed of pansies. Vicious little devils they were too; one of them bit me in the finger and they called me names I’d never even heard of. By the time I’d picked myself up Engelbrecht had disappeared.

That didn’t worry me much. Engelbrecht, as you know, can generally be relied on to take care of himself. I wandered on until I came to a row of hot houses with blinds down over the glass and chinks of light showing through. These were the dressing rooms. Then from one of them with a huge great star painted on t, I heard a voice that sounded like Engelbrecht’s yelling for help. I opened the door and peeped in.

There was Engelbrecht in the grips of a man-eating orchid; a wicked-looking brute it was: all kidney colour with great leprous looking blotches. It had got several tendrils round him and frankly I didn’t think he stood a chance. “Put me down at once,” Engelbrecht kept saying.

There wasn’t much I could do; some other tropical growths were beginning to give me nasty looks and put out some suckers in my direction. But just then help came from a totally unexpected quarter. A darned great beetle with a wingspread of two feet came whirring into the dressing room, and all the other plants began to grow towards it. They were waving their tendrils in a great state of agitation, and presently the man-eating orchid put Engelbrecht down, though it still kept a tendril round him, and bent its head closer to listen.

It appears this beetle was the agent for the orchids and while he was whirring about behind the scenes he’d managed to get a squint at the script and had realized that the whole thing was nothing but a plot to hold his clients up to ridicule, by loosing a good old English snowstorm on them in the middle of the flaming June ballet at the Garden Party. A pretty murderous wheeze, you must admit.

We held an indignation meeting on the spot. Some of the tropical growths were very keen on starting a forest fire, but Engelbrecht and I pointed out that with all that rain about it didn’t stand a chance of catching, and it was too long to wait for the one-day heat wave that was due to coincide with the Hollyhock’s Birthday Ball in the finale of the August act. Finally we persuaded them to let us organize some massed barracking behind the scenes during the May 1st twilight scene when the Oak was due to sing a baritone solo that went:

Devonshire, Devonshire,

Sometimes I think it’s Heavenshire,

Down there in Devonshire.

We spread rumours right round the cast that the Oak hadn’t been playing cricket and had been tapping the Ash’s roots, which is the worst thing one tree can do to another—tantamount to arboreal murder. The Ash got to hear of it just as the Whirlitzer was starting up the bars of
Devonshire,
and the next moment the two forest giants were locked in mortal combat.

This was the signal for pandemonium. In only a few weeks the stage of the Plant Theatre was a solid mass of fighting, thrusting, scratching, pricking, sucking, draining, plants, flowers, shrubs, trees, mosses, ferns, and liverworts. In vain did the two cowslips, supporting between them a fainting Hollyhock, call out shrilly: “Plants! Plants! Remember the traditions of the Profession! Remember your Contracts!” In vain did the thing that was barely a thing pound out
Trees
at the Whirlitzer in an attempt to drown the terrible rustling, snapping and cracking, the screams of sundered roots and plucked stalks. And behind the scenes, egging them on with subtle botanical insults, was Engelbrecht…

It was not long before the Oak-Ushers and the Thom Bush Chucker-Outs began joining in, and we were able to set about freeing the Id and the rest. A torrential downpour of rain, timed to coincide with the August Bank Holiday Flower Show Scene, was very useful in helping to loosen the soil. Even so we had to dig pretty deep to uproot Lizard Bayliss who had to put up with no end of chaff about his privet parts.

The last I saw of Engelbrecht he was staggering off back-stage again, bent nearly double under a shapeless bundle done up in cobweb from which could be heard a faint buzz. When I asked him what on earth he thought he was doing he told me he had a supper party date with a Giant Sundew.