An Audience with an Elephant (19 page)

The tiny garden in front of his house is so neat that even before you meet him you appreciate that the man is a perfectionist. He has three hobbies. One is gardening. Another is to follow the fortunes of Arsenal FC with his grandson. The third is exams. It is the neatness about these that appeals to him (‘You pays your money and you get a result’). If there is no result, then his inclination is to turn away, as he did when he failed chemistry at O level, but maths brought out a doggedness in him: he sat and re-sat A level Maths until he got ‘the buggers’. And once Terry Tyacke, in June 1987, got an A. This was in Business Studies.

‘I remember when we came out, we were talking about the exam papers and all the others were groaning about things we hadn’t covered. I didn’t say anything for I’d sat Accountancy the year before and I’d covered them in that. Things spill over from one subject to another when you’ve sat as many exams as I have.’ In fact, he knows more about exams than any man living, having sat more of them than any man living, and under more examining boards. Oxford, Cambridge, the Associated Examining Board. He didn’t think he had sat London, said Mr Tyacke, but he couldn’t be sure.

‘I remember Young Sir. . .’. This is how he refers to his various tutors who, like his classmates, are getting alarmingly younger. ‘I remember Young Sir suggesting we switch boards for Accountancy and, of course, we were all up in arms. But then he brought in some past papers and I thought, “Hello, this is for me.”’ Mr Tyacke got B for Accountancy under the Oxford board. Playing the field, he subsequently sat Land Geography, Sociology, Economics and Geology under Oxford.

He does not do well in everything; no man could. Six of his ‘A level’ grades are E, eight of them D, but they are passes all the same. ‘Never mind the quality, feel the width,’ said Mr Tyacke, enlarging on his philosophy of education. ‘I gets most of my books at Oxfam. You go down there in June and July, and Oxfam’s full of books thrown away by people who never want to sit an exam again.’

I began leafing through the British and European History paper he sat in 1993. ‘Why, despite the granting of Catholic Emancipation in 1829, was there still an Irish Question?’ Mr Tyacke had ticked that. ‘Oh, there’s always an Irish Question,’ he said vaguely. ‘But don’t ask me anything about it. I revises at the last minute and when the exam is over I forgets the lot.’

Here you have the professional examinee at his most ruthless, jettisoning knowledge like Sherlock Holmes as soon it has no relevance. For, whatever supporters of the system might argue, exams in the end are not about education. They are about exams. Terry agrees. ‘I don’t think it’s the right system. I can sit and swot and pass an exam, but it doesn’t make me clever, just crafty. I watch TV news and I see these kids getting their results and it’s terrible, the pressure on them. There’s no pressure on me. I can go into an exam and I’ve got no nerves, it’s a game. But you should see them . . . and what prospects have they got? If they can do a job, what does it matter how many A levels they’ve got? It’s all wrong to put on a job advertisement, “Don’t apply unless you’ve got four O levels.”’

Asked whether he had any tips for those taking exams he said he had two. The first was to get hold of as many past papers as possible. The second was to read the questions carefully.

‘I remember Sociology. This Young Sir said he was sure a question on divorce would not come up this year, but I had a feeling it might. Yet when I looked at the paper it wasn’t there, not in any of the fourteen questions, of which we had to answer four. Then, when we came out this Young Maid. . .’, this is how Terry Tyacke refers to the girls in his class, so it sounds that he and they are part of a Nursery Rhyme, ‘she said, “You were right, you were right. . .”’. Then Terry realised that there
had
been a question about divorce, although they hadn’t used the actual word. So, ‘Read the questions. . . I’d been waffling on about trade unions. Blow me, I could have got a C.’

His age has long ceased being an embarrassment, having become a joke. ‘I’ve seen a fair few librarians and a few caretakers off in my mind, I can tell you.’ He likes the young and they, sensing that this is one grown-up who knows what they are going through, like him. ‘Outside college, you could say I was antisocial, but I have had some good laughs with the other students. Perhaps it’s because I’m just a big kid myself, but the young chap next door, he’s been at the college, said, “Blimey, Terry, don’t you realise you are God to them?”’

But his career may soon be over, PE had been a shock, though not the written exam. ‘What is blood pressure. How can it be measured?’ At 70 a man knows exactly what blood pressure is and how it can be measured. No, it was the practical, during which he surfaced like the Ghost of Christmas Past. ‘We were playing hockey and I tackled one chap who said, “God, who are you and where did you come from?” I hadn’t encountered anything like that before. I remember my daughter saying, when I told her I was sitting A level English, ‘But you don’t read books.’ I told her you didn’t have to read them for exams, just the beginning, the middle and the bit at the end. But when my grandson heard I was doing PE and had to do all this running and that, he just couldn’t stop laughing.’

As I write, a man in Trowbridge is trying to make up his mind. Should he call it a day? Or should he go for one last A level? Somewhere out there, beyond reason and what most call common sense, lies Philosophy, which could blow the fuses in a man’s mind. . .

And soon a new term starts.

Glutton for Punishment

HAD FOR A LONG
time been curious to meet Peter Dowdeswell but, although living just 15 miles away, I had not been to see him. It was probably fear. ‘Ah,’ said Doug Blake knowingly, ‘the Muncher.’ ‘Animal,’ said Tony Hackett down at the pub. ‘The man’s an animal.’ Over the years an image had formed of a cave knee-deep in bones beyond which sat a hunched and terrible shape in the shadows.

‘Excuse me,’ I shouted brightly. It was a house on a council estate and beyond the privet hedge a snarling Alsation dog kept pace as I walked up and down the pavement. ‘Hello, anybody home?’ The front door opened. It was a cold, wet night but the man who stood there was naked to the waist, a huge man with more tattoos on him than a Pict. The Blue Man of Earls Barton. The Muncher.

He was not in a good mood. A national newspaper had taken his picture a week before, promising him £100 for his co-operation in eating eighteen fried eggs while sitting with live chickens on his lap. He had not received the £100. ‘
Wild chickens
,’ he roared, waving his arms so that the eagles and the panthers writhed. ‘They shat all over me suit.’

It was like one of those dreadful moments at school when you can feel the laughter boiling up in you until your eyes bulge, and dare not laugh. ‘And the eggs already three hours fried. And them chickens pecking and shitting all over the place.’ At that point I knew that I could not hold it any more, but then there was an explosion inside the room. Mrs Dowdeswell was laughing behind her paper.

‘And they didn’t even pay for the dry-cleaning.’

Peter Dowdeswell is a Londoner, born in Peckham, who moved to Northamptonshire 27 years ago. Formerly a bricklayer’s labourer, he is 6 feet 1½ inches tall and weighs 16½ stone, not a fat man but with enough loose flesh on him to make the tattoos quiver when he is in a temper. What had he weighed as a young man?

‘Sixteen-and-a-half stone.’

‘Were you good at sport?’

‘Nooo.’

They were wonderful noes; huge, arched and emphatic, each one a little longer than the one before. And with each his eyes got bigger.

‘Do you drink much?’

‘Nooooo. I’m teetotal.’

‘Do you eat much?’

‘Noooooo. I’ve just had me supper. Three sausages and chips. First meal I’ve had today.’

‘Mr Dowdeswell, how do you spend your time?’

‘Bingo.’ But then a gap in his front teeth was there and he was grinning. ‘I’ve never been anything in my life. I’m ordinary.’

But in 1974 there was a carnival in Earls Barton, and a contest for the fastest time in drinking a yard of ale, one of those long glass things with a bowl at one end which holds three pints of beer, and out of which, if you pause while drinking, the beer pours all over you. The record for this had been 1 minute 20 seconds. ‘With spillage,’ he said. Pressed into taking part, he drank it in 11 seconds. No spillage. As he was not a drinking man, he was unaware he had done anything out of the ordinary until he set the yard down and then there were all these faces staring at him in the square outside the church.

That night he was asked down to the working men’s club and the barman put £10 on the counter and bet him to do it again. Ten seconds. No spillage? No spillage. The stress he puts on that is a reminder of what was to come, the stopwatches and the signed affidavits. Last year he drank a yard of ale in 4.9 seconds, in America.

He claims there is no knack, but he did grasp his gullet as though it were something quite independent of him, sinking his fingers into his throat the way a man might hold a snake, and brought it round to somewhere under his jaw muscles. The thing seemed to be flexible, and it was horrid to watch. ‘It moves. Did you see that, all my system moving? The lot opens and I can tip it down. Didn’t find that out until 1975, with the haggis.’

One curious feature has baffled doctors. He had seen his father drink 20 pints and at the end the old man was drunk. But after his yards of ale, Peter Dowdeswell was not drunk. He drank 25 pints of beer and a medical analysis showed that his blood reading recorded only one-and-a-half pints. In 1979, carefully monitored, he drank 76 pints of beer in sixteen hours, and again the blood alcohol level did not rise above a pint and a half.

‘The Alcoholic Anonymous people, I think they were, they wanted me to go into hospital and split me open. But I drew the line at that.’

‘So what happens then?’

‘Dunno.’

Mrs Dowdeswell put down the paper and took off her spectacles to deliver judgement on her mate. ‘He’s just bloody abnormal, that’s all.’

One day a letter arrived telling him that he had been accepted for the World Haggis Championship at Corby (‘Lot of Scottish in Corby’). Now he had not entered, but then neither had he ever eaten a haggis. ‘But the wife told me to give it a go, so we bought a haggis and cooked it. I spewed it straight up, just like that. But when it came to the night, with the papers and television there, a man said “Ready, steady, go” and before I’d looked up I’d done it.’

One pound 10 ounces of haggis in 49 seconds. No spillage. But then he said he had not tasted it. After that, he went on, people were on at him to try other things like gherkins, grapes, pancakes. There were contests in nightclubs. (‘I’ve seen people choke, I’ve seen them fall over’) and invitations abroad (he took out a passport). The fat and boastful beat a path to his door to challenge him and went away, chewing thoughtfully. He was hired by a German lager firm as the world’s first professional beer drinker, but this did not work out. ‘They wanted me to set records only when and where they told me, but as I said to them, “If it goes down, mate, it goes down, and that’s all there is to it.”’

In the front room he had begun playing his videos of American TV shows with frantic hosts who suddenly ran out of words as a large, unsmiling man dropped boiled eggs into himself. He began talking about the darker records, the glass. How could he eat glass? Without a word he got to his feet and went out into the kitchen. After a while there was the sound of breaking glass and he came back with the remains of an electric light bulb in a bowl.

‘Mr Dowdeswell, please. . . please don’t.’

KER-AAK.

‘I just bite ’em and chew ’em and swallow ’em. Like this. Yeah, I’ve cut myself. See this scar here, above the chin? Got a piece of a champagne glass through there, and a bloke had to get some pliers from his car to get it out. Lay on a bed of broken bottles once, face down, for 50 hours. People on me back. What do you think I ate? Soup.’

‘What kind of soup?’

‘The only sort I like, oxtail. I did 24 tins.’

He always eats a meal afterwards, and drinks water while attempting the record, but the water, he said, was only to slow him down if he thought he was going too fast. And the loose tooth? It had been a false tooth and he had lost it while attempting a record in America. He had eaten that and all. It had been an experience, he said. It had got him round the world, and his family with him. He had met a lot of people in his years as a public eating man.

‘And they write it all down,’ said Mrs Dowdeswell. ‘I said to a chap once that there was no point throwing the frying pan at him, he’d only eat it. Saw that in the paper and all.’

But it was coming to an end, said Peter Dowdeswell, though it seemed the older he was getting, the faster he was getting. ‘I go to a nightclub now and there are these youngsters with skirts up to their backsides, and there I am, sitting on my own, dressed in a suit. Sad really. I reckon I’ll retire in six months.’