It has been said that Dobson, the out of print pamphleteer, bestrode the 20^th century like a colossus. This claim was first made by Dobson himself, when still a young man. At the age of twenty, he published a pamphlet resoundingly titled Why I Shall Bestride This Century Like A Colossus. It is a curious work, out of print of course, a thin tract with a picture of a whooper swan on the cover. It begins thus:

I shall bestride this century like a colossus. My name will ring out like a clarion. In years to come, whenever two or three are gathered together to discuss pamphleteers, there will be but one name on their lips: Dobson!

Such self-belief, in so callow a youth, is touching. Looking back, in his dotage, Dobson found it touching too, and he took to sitting with his one remaining copy of the pamphlet clutched to his chest, sobbing uncontrollably for hours on end. When Marigold Chew found him thus, she flung open the windows, whatever the weather, and stamped around the room singing loud, tuneless sea shanties, ones that involved pirates, cutlasses, bilgewater, tattered sailcloth, salt, seaweed, hard tack biscuits, foghorns, sirens, rigging, anchors, and shipwreck. Invariably, Dobson’s self-pitying lassitude would be broken, and he would hurl the curiously pristine pamphlet towards the fireplace, wipe away his tears, don his Bolivian military boots and his Stalinist cardigan, and crash out of the house to go on one of his jaunts.

Dobson’s jaunts, in the latter part of his life, usually took him to the nearest pig sty, but there was one occasion when he headed off in a different direction. He walked so far that day that he came upon a shining city on a hill, a city where all the streets had two names, one both illegible and unpronounceable, and the other devised by Yoko Ono as part of an art project to promote world peace. Postal delivery persons in that city were required by law to learn all the double street names by heart, or to face summary dismissal if they failed. Often, those who did fail – and there were many – would flounce around on the outskirts of the city warning travellers away. It was a paltry sort of revenge, and seldom succeeded, for the delights of that shining city on a hill attracted wayfarers from near and far, daily, in their thousands. It is a wonder that Dobson had never been there before this particular Tuesday.

A dismissed postal delivery person stopped the out of print pamphleteer as he was about to cross a pontoon bridge that would take him in to the most boisterous quarter of the city.

“Go no further, old man,” said this vengeful figure, whose yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath. His hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion, and his straight black lips. His voice was booming and monotonous, empty of human expression and lacking any variation in tone or cadence. “This city you approach is no place for out of print pamphleteers.”

Ever sensitive to warnings from spooks and wraiths, Dobson turned around and went home. He found Marigold Chew in the back garden, drilling holes in an enormous sheet of corrugated cardboard.

“I was warned away from a shining city on a hill,” he said, “Is it a city you have visited?”

Marigold Chew stopped drilling, reset the safety catch, and removed her protective goggles.

“You are a foolish old man in your dotage, Dobson,” she said, though there was kindness in her voice, “And it is well you were warned away, for that city you think you saw is illusory. Some say the hill it sits atop is hollow, and harbours within it heaven, and some say hell. Either way, I am pleased to see you home. Let us clear the nettles from the vegetable patch.”

That was what happened on that Tuesday towards the end of the 20^th century. Did Dobson indeed bestride it as a colossus? He was not the only person to think so, but the names of the others escape me for the time being. When I remember them, I will tell you.

*

That piece, an earlier version of which first appeared last year, has been chosen as a set text for the entrance examinations to Bodger’s Spinney Infant School. Here are some sample questions likely to be faced by the tiny candidates:

1. Imagine you are the dismissed postal delivery person who encounters Dobson by the pontoon bridge. Would you have handled the situation in the same way? Think about what you would have said to the out of print pamphleteer, then translate it into Latin.

2. Do you think Yoko Ono’s unnecessary double-naming of the streets in the shining city on the hill would make a significant contribution to world peace? Give reasons for your answer in terse, cogent prose, then translate that into Latin too.

3. Give a brief account of the career of David Blunkett, with special reference to his second resignation speech and tearful use of the phrase “the little lad”. Or was that the first resignation speech?

4. If you could bestride a century like a colossus, which century would you choose so to bestride, and why? Extra marks will be awarded if you turn pale, gnaw the end of your pencil in desperation, and crumple to the floor, twitching and shattered.

Dobson was an excessively tidy man. He firmly believed the old saw which insists there is a place for everything, and everything in its place. Thus, he kept sweets in jars, and jars on shelves in cupboards. This despite his loathing of confectionery. When asked why he stored so many sweets, including humbugs, toffees and jammy teardrops, in labelled jars on labelled shelves in labelled cupboards, Dobson blustered and tried to change the subject.

“Oh look,” he might say, pointing out of the window, “A mother shrike with her shrikelets,” or “What would you say were the chief causes of the Boxer Rising?” In the latter example, he would not bother pointing out the window, but might furrow his brow, as if he had been pondering the topic for some time.

This sneaky yet transparent technique worked surprisingly often. Few people, other than Marigold Chew, felt confident enough in the pamphleteer’s presence to challenge Dobson. The explanation for this lies not in any personal magnetism or force of personality. In fact, for the life of me I cannot think why he got away with his preposterous behaviour.

Cutlery alignment in cutlery drawers was another type of tidiness which exercised the great man. At particularly fraught times he was known to align and realign the cutlery in the cutlery drawer ten times an hour. Sometimes he would be halfway along the path to the pond to commune with swans, then turn on his heel and stamp back into the house to attend to the knives and forks. Nowadays, of course, some pop psychologist would make a television documentary asserting that Dobson suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder, but I think we can safely reject such a notion. It is not as if he was washing his hands every five minutes, or going doolally at the sight of glitter. Indeed, he ought probably to have washed his hands more often. They were invariably ink-splattered and grubby in other ways, particularly if he had been down by the pond with the swans. No, I think we can rely on Dobson’s own account of the cutlery issue, which he addressed in a pamphlet entitled Keeping Cutlery Aligned Tidily In The Cutlery Drawer As An Absolute Imperative If One Aspires To Be Fully Human (out of print). For reasons I need not go into here, hardly anybody has ever bothered to read this middle-period work. The prose is clogged and clunky, the views expressed idiotic, and when typesetting it Marigold Chew chose so tiny a font that the average reader needs an extremely powerful magnifying glass to decipher the text.

Oh, forgive me, I just went into the reasons why hardly anybody has ever bothered to read this middle-period work. Dobson would ascribe that little slip to the fact that the cutlery in my cutlery drawers is chaotic and askew. Am I not, then, fully human? And if not, what am I? Partly ape? Perhaps I would be able to answer those questions if I myself had read the pamphlet, but I confess I have not done so. My eyesight is not up to it. I could, perhaps, employ some bright-eyed literate youngster to read it to me, a perky little brainbox uncowed by Latin tags and arcane references and paragraphs that go on and on and on for twelve pages or more, by clogged and clunky prose and idiotic views, but where would I find such a creature? I suppose I could take a stroll in the rain down to the nearest community hub, but that would be the act of a desperate man. Better by far, surely, either to accept my semi-human status, to give vent to my inner ape and to stuff my face with bananas and nuts, or conversely to go and align the cutlery in the cutlery drawer with Dobsonian precision and thus destroy the ape that lurks within me. It is a simple choice, and one I shall not shirk from making.

If you spend a bit of time thinking about the matter, it becomes apparent that human ingenuity has created a myriad of pastes. At one end of the spectrum are thick pastes, tacky to the touch, and at the other are pastes so runny that they are akin to goo. There are other ways of thinking about the variety of pastes other than the thick-to-thin or tacky-to-goo spectrum, but they have less appeal. Why is this? Not surprisingly, it is a question to which Dobson once turned his magnificent pamphlet-writing brain.

It has to be said that the resulting fourteen-page essay is one of his less engaging works. Fancying that he might win some kudos with the scientific community, Dobson splattered his text with technical terminology of which he had no grasp whatsoever. It has been reported that up and down the land laboratory cafeterias rang with laughter as boffins digested a Gestetnered draft of the pamphlet which Dobson had circulated ahead of publication. In the event, Tacky To Goo : Some Frightfully Complicated Thoughts On The Consistency Of Manufactured Pastes was only ever issued in this scrappy format, cranked out in the potting shed by Marigold Chew as an act of kindness to the increasingly beleaguered Dobson.

A pauper with a barrow was employed to trundle copies of the pamphlet around various market squares, but he lacked the mouthy bumptiousness required of a true salesman, and returned with the entire print-run intact. Downcast and hopeless, the pauper trudged along the winding lane towards chez Dobson & Chew heaving the pamphlets in a filthy frayed sack. His barrow had been stolen by cutpurses.

A less determined pamphleteer may have thrown in the towel at this point, but, as has often been remarked, there was an edge of steel in Dobson. After taking a turn around the pond, and pelting pebbles at swans, he crashed back into the house and immediately fired off a letter to Rex Tint, the noted mezzotintist. Ordinarily, of course, so celebrated a mezzotintist would have had nothing to do with a pamphleteer on his uppers, but there was between the two men a special bond. It was a bond forged in childhood, in an orchard, in the teeth of a summer thunderstorm, a bond redolent of the hit single Two Little Boys by the bearded Antipodean Renaissance man Rolf Harris. Neither a wooden horse nor, later, trench warfare were involved in the Dobson-Tint Pact, but you get the general idea.

Dobson’s inspiration on this gusty Tuesday was to bind his scientific pamphlet anew, with a really terrific Rex Tint mezzotint on the cover. Sales, he felt sure, would go through the roof, even when handled by the pauper. Shoving the hastily-scribbled letter into a pre-stamped jiffy bag, and enclosing as a memento of the pact a couple of hazelnuts, Dobson roared back out and headed for the postbox at the top of Pang Hill.

There is a long-running quiz show on the BBC called A Question Of Sport. One of the regular features is a round called “What happened next?”, in which the footage of some unusual sporting event is stopped just before the crucial moment. Let us imagine that a phantom cinematographer, taking grainy black and white film of the swans of Pang Hill Pond, turned their camera on the excited pamphleteer, and followed him up the hill. Now, freeze the imaginary film with Dobson just a few paces from his goal. Why did that jiffy bag never plop into the postbox? Something happened to stop the pamphleteer in his tracks, something that meant the letter and the hazelnuts were never sent, that Tacky To Goo was never rebound with a terrific Rex Tint mezzotint cover, that not a single copy of the original Gestetnered pamphlet was ever sold, and that Dobson, in despair, never again tried to worm his way into the core of the big forbidding world o’ science.

I have had a couple of enquiries from readers asking if Hubermann’s department store (motto: a byword for utter gorgeousness) has a mail order service. Hubermann’s was mentioned in both Balsa Wood Crow and Annals Of The Frankish Kings, for those of you who need to catch up. I am slightly fretful about Tim Thurn, whose request is rather more specific.

Dear Frank, he writes, I am on the lookout for a penis-melting Zionist robot comb, not the kind of item a diffident chap like me is going to march into a shop and ask for, even in a whisper. I wonder if Hubermann’s runs a mail order service, and if so whether this is the kind of thing I might find in its catalogue?

Well, Tim, even if Hubermann’s did do mail order, this is not the kind of thing you’d find in it, for the simple reason that a penis-melting Zionist robot comb lacks gorgeousness. Only the gorgeous is to be found in that legendary department store.

The original shop was opened in 1909 by Jacopo Hubermann, and sold only cream crackers, shellac and baize. It was Jacopo’s paramour Loopy, an international woman of intrigue, who extended the range of stock to include other forms of gorgeousness. She believed firmly that the gorgeous could be found in all things, both expensive and cheap, hand-crafted and mass-produced, decorative and functional. At times, her choices – and those of the smitten Jacopo – were questionable, and stretched the definition of gorgeousness to an alarming degree. Loopy was very fond, for example, of mud-splattered gewgaws and filthy discarded things, some of which crumbled to dust when picked up. Just before the Great War, she was given the run of what became the “bargain bin basement” of Hubermann’s in its new premises, a fin de siècle monstrosity which had previously been the headquarters of a SMERSHesque cabal. There were rumours that Loopy continued the cabal’s sinister business from her hidey-hole next to the pneumatic piping system hub, but that was probably just tittle-tattle. Queer stories attached themselves to Jacopo Hubermann, too, for it was said that his limp was exaggerated, that his startling walrus moustache was counterfeit, that his penumbra of sobriety masked the looning of a madcap, and that his cakes were mere crumbs, and breadcrumbs at that. All false, of course, for the signal fact about Hubermann was that he shimmered like a saint.

Today there is no bargain bin basement, and the pneumatic piping system has been replaced by a new-fangled überpneumatic piping system, but otherwise Hubermann’s is, as it has been for nigh on a hundred years, the brightest star in the retail sector firmament. The absence of a mail order service so perplexed Dobson that he wrote a pamphlet on the subject, which is regrettably out of print. He devoted almost forty pages to worrying away at the problem, but was unable to reach a sensible conclusion. By the time he finished writing his essay, he was in such a foul temper that Marigold Chew dragged him off to the snackbar at Hubermann’s to stuff his face with lemon meringue pie.

Incidentally, the snackbar at Hubermann’s is the very same snackbar where lumbered and stalked the snackbar hooligans mentioned at the end of Cargpan And Beppo. And so we find that everything in this world is linked by loops of intricate yet unfathomable significance. Or so it seems.

Such a hullabaloo there was when they discovered Dobson’s brain had been stolen! One cub reporter called it the hullabaloo to end all hullabaloos. Initially beside herself, Marigold Chew soon grew to appreciate the peace and quiet – the unhullabaloo – in the house itself, where Dobson lay perfectly still, as if asleep, on a mattress. She painted and sang and fed the squirrels in the garden. Occasionally she tiptoed into the room where Dobson lay sprawled, and examined the sutures on his skull. The police scientist agreed with her that it looked like a professional job. Detective Captain Cargpan was convinced that the pamphleteer’s brain was being kept in a jar within a ten mile radius, and waited patiently for a ransom note. There was further hullabaloo when a picture was sent to the Daily Screech, purporting to show the brain on a platter, but painstaking analysis showed that it was just a grey lump of dough. Some wondered if a heroic pooch would find Dobson’s brain while rummaging in a hedgerow, in a curious foreshadowing of the theft and recovery of the Jules Rimet trophy in 1966, a year later. Marigold Chew listened to her Xavier Cugat LPs and tended her hollyhocks and pasted cuttings into her scrapbook. Detective Captain Cargpan filled his pipe with untreated Uruguayan tobacco and paced up and down the garden path, praying for rain. He believed that a torrential downpour would flush out the brain thieves. Time passed, and the hullabaloo died down, and the cub reporter on the Daily Screech was embedded with a different police force investigating a different case. And then, despite the weather remaining balmy and sun-battered, one Thursday morning the postie came prancing along the lane carrying a package. Detective Captain Cargpan let Marigold Chew unwrap it, for she was deft where he was a butterfingers. She said “Gosh!” as she folded aside the last layer of blotting paper to reveal the pamphleteer’s brain. It was rather muddy, as if it had been kept in a ditch, but she rinsed it thoroughly under the garden spigot and handed it to the police scientist, who scampered upstairs and reinserted it into Dobson’s head. No one ever did find out who had stolen it, or where it had been stored, or whether any experiments had been carried out on it. Detective Captain Cargpan pursued the case for another month or two, but he was a maverick, so his manner of conducting his investigations was highly idiosyncratic, and passeth all understanding.

Where Eagles Dare is a 1968 film starring Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood, and Mary Ure, based on the 1967 novel by Alistair MacLean, who also wrote the screenplay. It is also the title of a late pamphlet by Dobson.

Dobson’s Where Eagles Dare was written at the prompting of Marigold Chew, who hoped that by scribbling away at length the pamphleteer could overcome his preposterous obsession with the film. Students of Dobson’s dotage will recall that he took to wearing a snowsuit and cobbled together a walkie-talkie system out of paper cups and string. For weeks on end his only communication with Marigold Chew was to stretch the string to its full extent, so that for example he was in the pantry when Marigold Chew was in the front garden, or vice versa, and to declaim “Broadsword to Danny Boy… Broadsword to Danny Boy” into his paper cup.

Dobson’s mania was given further fuel by the coincidental fact that, for many years, Marigold Chew’s party piece had been an exquisitely accurate impersonation of Michael Hordern. Her voice was of course somewhat higher pitched than that of the actor, but she used a Japanese funnel to lower it, and caught his distracted mannerisms perfectly.

As weeks turned to months, and Dobson’s foolishness showed no sign of abating – he had, for example, taken to referring to their house as the Schloss Adler – Marigold Chew became desperate. She consulted a local bird counting person who arranged for a multitude of wrens to flock around the house, thinking to simulate the conditions in The Tragedy of King Richard the third. Containing, His treacherous Plots against his brother Clarence: the pittiefull murther of his innocent nephewes: his tyrannicall vsurpation: with the whole course of his detested life, and most deserued death, where “the world is grown so bad, that wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch”.

This only served to encourage Dobson, and so, at her wit’s end, Marigold Chew reasoned that the writing of a pamphlet might be the answer. It was characteristic of Dobson that his many fads and enthusiasms sputtered out once he had written about them. And so it proved, once again. But what are we to make of his Where Eagles Dare today? It is impossible to say, for not a single copy has ever been tracked down. Indeed, some think it never existed in the first place, and is a mere chimera, although a chimera of a particularly Dobsonian kidney.

One small footnote. There is an amusing note in Marigold Chew’s diary, from the same period, where she writes: “The Great Escape is showing at the local Excelsior. I have sent Dobson to a remote seaside resort for the duration of its run. One cannot be too careful.”