Good Vibrations by Tom Cunliffe Page A

soldiers banged cracked gongs then ducked back inside their sentry boxes, and from somewhere upstairs, the deep tolling of a large bell boomed out into the dusty air.
    â€˜Is this your own collection?’ enquired Roz.
    â€˜Mother loves clocks,’ responded our man absently, before moving back unexpectedly to the subject of our Englishness.
    â€˜Did you know,’ he continued, ‘that although the 1980 US census counted fifty million Americans of English descent, forty-nine million others were of German origin and the forebears of another forty million had fled from the mess your people made of Ireland? Take me, for example, I’m a bit of most things, but I’m German and Irish mostly.’ He looked at us mischievously, waiting for a reaction to the presence not only of the old enemy, but also of the one nation the Brits have always failed to understand, and they our closest neighbours too.
    He didn’t get one. ‘I’m also at least 128th part Cherokee,’ he said with a straight face, ‘and a bit of English too, I’m afraid. So you see, I’m not anything. Nothing I can call a nationality. You guys, though, you know exactly who you are.’
    â€˜But you’re one hundred per cent American.’ I was sure he was winding us up like one of his clocks.
    â€˜And what do you think that’s about?’ he retorted. ‘Being American doesn’t mean anything at all. Haven’t you noticed that there are Irish Americans and Italian Americans and African Americans and Native Americans, but no English Americans? What do you make of that?’
    I didn’t know what to make of it, or of our host either, but he took us up to meet his mother anyway. This excellent woman was tall, thin and bore herself with a straight back. She led us into her clock-lined sitting-room and was soon discussing an antique specimen bearing the legend, Beatus qui Partitere . She had never met anybody with Latin in the fifty or so years she had owned the clock, so I gathered together the skills of a lost childhood and took a stab at the motto. ‘Blessed is he who divides,’ was the nearest I could approach to a translation, for although I could not in my life conjugate the third word, it surely had something to do with partition. It was good enough for Mother.
    Many a Latin maxim is obscure taken out of context, but I couldn’t help remarking that this one applied in perfection to the proprietor himself, a man with a truly advanced sense of the banality of nationalism, but we were now swimming in ever-deeper waters, so we pleaded the need for a shower and scuttled off to our room.
    â€˜Number 3’ proved to be an apartment straight from a black-and-white movie. Outside was its own small porch equipped with traditional wooden chairs in which to whittle, spit and to enjoy the afternoon. The decent-sized bed chamber featured Venetian blinds and an antediluvian air-conditioning unit inserted as an afterthought into the rear window. The shower room was beautifully tiled throughout and boasted plumbing fittings of a quality that today’s contractors would go broke trying to install. The fabric of the building might not have been exceptional, but the piping and the appurtenances would last a thousand years.
    Roz took a shower that gushed forth like Niagara before collapsing on the bed complaining of a bad shoulder. She had torn something straining to hold the bike up when it had slipped beyond the balance point as she dismounted after her test spin, watched by the assembled troops.
    â€˜I’d rather have ripped my arm off than dropped Betty in front of that crowd,’ she announced. I rubbed her upper back with ‘Flexall’, a sports muscle relaxant she’d discovered in a pharmacy and without which she had decided motorcycling could not be tolerated.
    Leaving Betty Boop to take a well-earned rest, we rode Madonna through a wooded darkness singing with insect