I spent some time, once, in the company of Jeffrey Archer, who has recently emerged, dazzled, after a spell in prison, writes Tom O'Dea
Yes, yes; I know: that statement does not rank with the whooping reply that might have been given to Browning's question:
Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and speak to you?
Mr Archer (not yet ennobled) had just published a collection of short stories; and an editor asked me to meet the author and "see what you make of him." First, I read the stories and found them facile, contrived, formulaic, glib. So, I decided to stay with my brief: to avoid the stories as far as possible and to see what sense I might make of the man. Thus, I found him, one day, holding small court in a large mid-Dublin hotel.
Jeffrey Archer is insidiously plausible. He addresses you from a safe point just behind his eyes, crouched like a plaintive child; and he genuinely expects you to fall for his blague. He took me through his tailored version of his life - his athletic career, his university days, his yearning for politics, his financial collapse, his resort to authorship, and his multiple millions earned from published fiction of the most accessible kind. Unlike the Serjeant in Chaucer who "semed bisier than he was," Jeffrey Archer, throughout his life, has been busier than almost everyone in sight.
Before I met Mr Archer, I had seen him many times on television; and I had grown to suspect him of an abnormal capacity for bamboozlement. But as I sat in front of him, with my tape recorder switched on, I almost had to kick myself in the ankle to stop myself from liking him: such was his outrageous devotion to fakery.
When he spoke of his country address at The Old Vicarage, Grancheser, I let my switched-on tape recorder do the listening and allowed my switched-off mind to recall the time I had spent in that part of Cambridgeshire.
I was about 18 years of age when I first read Rupert Brooke's poem, The Old Vicarage, Granchester. Brooke wrote the poem in the trenches of northern France, in the First World War, in which he died. When I was 23 years old, on a long summer break, I headed off for England, to earn a little money to put into what girls with matrimony in their level eyes used to call "the bottom drawer."
I was then a boyish man, careering headlong towards marriage; and Wimpey's weekly pay-packet helped to pave the road I had chosen.
The London office of Wimpey the builders sent me to Sawston, nine miles south of Cambridge. There, I was employed as a general-purpose labourer - the lowest form of life on a building site: far below bricklayers, plasterers, carpenters, electricians, tilers, and the wily boyos from Kerry and Connemara - the hard-man sub-contractors, digging footings, laying foundations and paying their labourers 14 per cent more than we got. To say they earned it would be a fatuous understatement.
On my first Sunday there, I took the nine-mile bus to Cambridge and went to Mass at an imposing street-corner church. The preacher spoke in High Church language, remote and rhetorical in its way, yet more genial in my ear than the fearsome, grinding, anti-life sermons I had been hearing at home.
After Mass, I set off to inspect some Cambridge colleges. Along the way I met Bob Staunton, an Irish postgraduate engineering student who, later on, become boss of the Pye radio factory in Dundrum, Dublin. He turned out to be a likeable and obliging man, and he showed me far more of Cambridge than I would have found on my own. In other words, he took over my loosely-designed afternoon, disassembled it, and gave it back to me as a piece of meticulously re-engineered time.
Later, as I waited for the nine-mile bus back to Sawston (population, then 2,000), an elderly woman drew me into conversation. Was I Irish? she asked. Yes, I was. Other questions established why I was at that bus-stop at that moment. Had I visited Granchester? Yes, I had; but, while I had seen Brooke's "tunnels of green gloom," I had not managed to catch a glimpse of "the sly shade of a rural dean."
She chuckled at that. Then, taking me lightly by the arm, she walked me up and down by the bus-stop as she recited, in a beautiful voice, Brooke's poem from beginning to end. When my bus came into view, she hoped, she said, that I might return to Cambridge, one day. "And, if you do," she urged,"and you want a nice place to stay, go to my friend, Mrs Lucey of Jesus Lane. She will take good care of you."
In a plush mid-Dublin hotel, all those years later, Jeffrey Archer, present owner of The Old Vicarage, Granchester - once the home of Rupert Brooke - was still feeding his version of himself and his life into my tape recorder. He had just written a play, he said: a play whose central character sounded remarkably like himself. He was to stage the play and, at the end of each performance, ask the audience to adjudge the guilt or innocence of the character who sounded remarkably like Jeffrey Archer.
Not only that, but he had bought (not rented: bought) the theatre in which he was to stage his work and - wait for it - play the part of the character who sounded remarkably like Jeffrey Archer. That, to me, was too much. And yet, addressing me from that safe point just behind his eyes, he plainly expected me to swallow all he told me, without the least grain of salt.
Who was Jeffrey Archer? I wondered. Certainly not Falstaff, for he was neither large enough - in any sense - nor incredibly credible enough to be "sweet Jack Falstaff". Whose skin, then, had he inhabited? Perhaps that of Baron Munchausen; because only the Baron could have been the prototype of the present Lord Archer's extravagantly Germanic teller of his own operatically tall tales.