McAuslan in the Rough. George Fraser MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ human being now alive could tell you (or would want to, for that matter), all in one breath, that the woman in whose coal cellar Guy Fawkes hid his explosives was called Mrs Bright, that Casanova, Charlemagne, and Hans Andersen were all born on 2 April, and that Schopenhauer couldn’t abide carters cracking whips beneath his bedroom window. And add, for good measure, the names of the Oxford batsmen who succumbed to Cobden’s devastating hat-trick in the University match of 1870.

      You get no marks for knowing these things, as people were always telling me at school. Other children knew the subjunctive of moneo, and exactly where to drop the perpendicular in Pythagoras, how to dissect an adverbial clause (I didn’t even know what an adverb was, and don’t push me even now), and how to do volumetric analysis. They absorbed these matters without difficulty, and poured them out on to paper at examinations, while I sat pathetically, having scrawled my name, and the number “1” in the margin, wondering if the examiners would allow me anything for knowing that the ice-cream Chico Marx sold in A Day at the Races was “tutsi-fruitsi”, and that there was an eighteenth-century buccaneer who became Archbishop of York, that the names of the Bounty’s quartermasters were Norton and Lenkletter, or that Martin Luther suffered from piles.

      It wasn’t even respectable general knowledge, and heaven knows I tried to forget it, along with the identities of the playing cards in Wild Bill Hickok’s hand when he was shot, the colours of all the football teams in the old Third Division (Northern Section), and the phrase for “Do you surrender?” in the language which Tarzan spoke to the apes. But it still won’t go away. And an exhaustive knowledge of utter rubbish is not a social asset (ask anyone who has been trapped next to me at a party) or of more than limited use in keeping up with a television quiz show. Mr Gascoigne’s alert, glittering-eyed young men, bristling with education, jab at their buzzers and rattle out streams of information on Sumerian architecture and Gregorian music and the love poetry of John Donne while I am heaving about in my armchair with my mouth full, knocking over teacups and babbling frantically: “Wait, wait!—King’s Evil! No, no, dammit—the other thing that Shelley’s nurse died of—didn’t she?—No, wait—Dr Johnson—or Lazarus—or, or what’s his name?—in that play—not bloody Moli$eGre!—hang on, it’s coming! The … the other one—with the drunk grandee who thinks he’s somebody’s father …”

      And by then they are on to Hindemith or equestrian statues at Sinigaglia. It is no consolation to be able to sit growling jealously that there isn’t one of them who could say who it was that Captain Kidd hit over the head with a bucket, or what it was that Claude Rains dropped into a wastepaper basket in the film Casablanca—and then memory of a different kind takes hold, and I am back in the tense and smoky atmosphere of the Uaddan Canteen, sweating heavily on the platform with the other contestants, and not a murmur from the Jocks and Fusiliers packed breathlessly waiting in the body of the hall, with a two-pound box of Turkish Delight and the credit of the regiment to play for, as the question-master adjusts his spectacles, fixes me with a malevolent smile, and asks:

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