Pretty Girl In Crimson Rose

Sandy Balfour

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781782394792
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

A little gem of a memoir... The book adds up to more than a sum of its parts and lingers in the memory long after the final page. -- Sunday Telegraph Half a million people a day do it in the Telegraph. The Times claims almost as many, and the Guardian 300, 000. Most people remember their first time, and everyone has a favourite. You can do it in bed, standing up, or on a train. You can do it alone, with a loved one or in groups. The Queen does it in the bath. It is not illegal, immoral or fattening. In fact it tops the Home Office list of approved entertainments for prison inmates. Crosswords are a very British obsession. Crosswords are a very British obsession. Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose is a personal reminiscence and a guide to solving crossword puzzles. But it is much, much more than a 'how-to' book. Each chapter is starts with a clue, and uses anecdote, history and autobiography to solve it, in the process describing something of what it means to love England. In the process, we encounter The Best Crossword Clue Ever, The Most Beautiful Clue in the World 'Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose' and the eccentric personalities behind such legendary compilers as the Guardian 's Araucaria and The Times 'Ximenes.

CONTENTS

Prologue

I: TRAVELS WITH MY PAST

CHAPTER 1: Maps and Dreams

CHAPTER 2: Two Hearts

CHAPTER 3: Thumbs in the Wind

CHAPTER 4: Arrivals

CHAPTER 5: Departures

CHAPTER 6: Cracks in the Wall

CHAPTER 7: Rumours of Rain

CHAPTER 8: Spit and Patience

CHAPTER 9: Moscow Rules

II: THE BIRTH OF AN ENGLISHMAN

CHAPTER 10: Potty Training

CHAPTER 11: Betwixt and Between

CHAPTER 12: Wellington, Texas

CHAPTER 13: Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere

CHAPTER 14: Charades

CHAPTER 15: A Form of Closure

III: A BIOGRAPHICAL PUZZLE

CHAPTER 16: The Game

CHAPTER 17: The River

CHAPTER 18: What Lord Archer Ever Did For Me

CHAPTER 19: Falling in Love Again

CHAPTER 20: The Story of My Life

Prize Puzzle Number 22445

Postscript

Solution to Puzzle 22445

Acknowledgements

Notes

PROLOGUE

I remember cities by their skylines at night.

Below the green crest of Primrose Hill, London is a sparkling sprawl. The buildings seem to be talking to each other, like parents over the heads of their wayward children. On a clear winter’s night you can see all the way across the city to Crystal Palace where the flashing lights on the radio tower answer those on the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf. Perhaps it is a conversation in a bus queue; you can listen in if you want.

Manhattan, by contrast, is too loud to hear. I was never so alone as when I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge just before dawn, to be swallowed whole by the canyons.

And I remember once flying into Kai Tak, in Hong Kong. There was a powerful wind as we broke through the cloud cover and swept in below the high-rise buildings of Kowloon. From my window seat I watched a woman hang out her washing in silhouette against the window of her apartment. I wanted to help her, to hold her sheet’s flapping corner while she took the peg from between her teeth.

A cityscape doesn’t have to be tall to linger in the memory. From the Havana Libre, the broad sweep of the Malecon reaches round to the harbour entrance. Low-wattage lights cast soft shadows on the peeling stucco façades. The last time I was there I made a deal with a moneychanger sitting on the rocks. He wore ersatz Raybans and Levis, and, since I have no Spanish, we got by in ersatz German. We had to read the numbers on the faded banknotes by moonlight, while behind us the Florida Straits pounded the sea wall. I remember the modest skyline as a cardboard cut-out movie set. I expected Gary Cooper to appear and rid the town of people like me, once and for all.

Then there is Johannesburg, the place where I was born.

Johannesburg is a city on a hill, built on the ‘white water ridge’, the Witwatersrand, where the settlers first found gold towards the end of the nineteenth century. You can see it from miles around.

On a particular night in the southern winter of 2000, a friend and I sit looking at the city’s impressive and inviting skyline. We have an unusual vantage point, because, on a whim, we have driven to the Top Star drive-in cinema, one of Johannesburg’s landmarks. It has been built on top of a mine dump, one of many eyesores that line the southern edge of the city. The dumps are steep, and by day are a pale yellow colour. But by night all that disappears and they stand as pools of darkness in a street-lit world.

It is late and there is nobody about, but my friend and I have a sense of being illicit. We had to remove a barrier to get in and we drove up the steep access road with the car lights switched off. We laugh to find ourselves whispering. Our voices are, in any case, swallowed by a chill wind from the south, which carries the smell of the coal fires of Soweto.

To escape the wind, we pick our way through razor wire and climb the metal and wood frame of the movie screen. We sit with our backs to it, facing north, towards the city.

Individual buildings hold memories. There we did a piece to camera for a CNN film. There I negotiated football rights with a man subsequently jailed for stealing the money I paid him. There I fell in love. There is the building I smashed into when a drunk driver’s car hit mine as he sped through a red light. I fainted face down in the pool of his blood that dripped via my windscreen onto the tarmac.

Further north, in the tree-lined suburbs near Zoo Lake, my uncle lives in the house my grandfather bought. I remember Easter egg hunts in the garden and the early frost on the lawn.

To the east the skyline flattens out. Beyond the rugby stadium at Ellis Park it quickly gives way to the poorer suburbs of Bezuidenhout Valley. Further south are the small hills of Kensington, which is where I was born.

‘I’ve come full circle,’ I say, pointing in the general direction. ‘I was born there, in the Marymount Maternity Hospital.’

‘Like a good Catholic,’ my friend says.

‘Well, Catholic anyway.’

She makes no response. It’s an old joke, and in any case she appears lost in her own thoughts, wondering, perhaps, why she has chosen to leave England and live in a place like Johannesburg. At other times she has spoken of the narrowness of England, of the way it defines her. ‘I can’t choose who to be,’ she once said, ‘when I’m at home.’

She and I know each other well enough to sit in amicable silence and watch the lights. Downtown Johannesburg dies at night; there are few pedestrians, and fewer cars. One particular building in the middle of town grabs my attention. A surprising number of illuminated windows are arranged regularly like the squares on a crossword puzzle. If I start on the tenth floor, I can get a nine-letter word for one down and another for one across. I fill in ‘Marymount’ and ‘Maternity’, and wonder what I am going to do about ‘Hospital’. Perhaps it will be easier if I call it a ‘clinic’? It bothers me that there are only enough lights on for a four-letter word at two down. ‘Rate’, I decide arbitrarily. In that case, two across – although in a real 15 x 15 puzzle it would be seven or eight across – is a six-letter word beginning T blank T. ‘Six letters,’ I say, ‘T blank T.’

As it happens, my friend knows how to do crossword puzzles. She is English, after all, and went to an impressively expensive school in the Home Counties. Her father has a gratifying number of initials after his name, and her mother has worked for many years on the national newspapers. Although football is her passion, she understands the rules of cricket. It would be surprising if she did not know how to do crosswords.

‘What are you on about?’ she asks.

‘That building there,’ I say, ‘to the right of the Carlton, and back a bit. It looks like a crossword puzzle.’

With much pointing I show her the particular building and explain why I have filled in the first two words. I do not need to explain to her about ‘checked’ and ‘unchecked’ letters. She already knows that in any crossword the checked letters are those that are shared with another word.

Just then a light goes out.

‘Hah!’ I say, ‘it’s five letters now. Five letters, T blank T.’

‘That’s easy,’ she replies, ‘Totti.’

‘Totty? I’m not having a word like “totty” in my puzzle. I read the Guardian for heaven’s sake.’

This is code for a sort of pseudo New Man, the kind who may or may not like ‘totty’ in his newspaper, but certainly won’t admit it if he does.

‘And anyway,’ I add, ‘the Y is only going to give us trouble when we find something for three down. I mean what’s that? Five letters again, and it’s M blank Y.’

I am really quite passionate about this and my voice rises until I realise that my friend is looking at me in the way people do before they send for the men in white coats.

‘I was talking about the Italian footballer,’ she says coldly. ‘Totti, with an I.’

‘Oh. Well, you can’t have that either,’ I reply. ‘Not enough people know who he is. I mean, how would you clue it? What’s the definition going to be? Five letters. Italian striker gets the bird, we hear? No, we need something better than that.’

‘Well then,’ she says, ‘you find your own word.’

I experiment in my head. Total? Tithe? Titan?

‘It’s not a real puzzle,’ my friend says. ‘You do know that, don’t you? It only exists in your head.’

Somewhere far off a police siren sounds.

‘Can I ask you a question?’ she says, then pauses. ‘Like, how did you get this way?’

‘It’s a long story,’ I say.

I

TRAVELS WITH
MY PAST

CHAPTER 1

MAPS AND DREAMS

Let me take you back to December 1983.

My girlfriend and I leave South Africa at Beit Bridge, crossing the Limpopo River into Zimbabwe. Since early childhood I had thought of the Limpopo as described by Rudyard Kipling in the Just So Stories, as ‘grey, green and greasy’. But now the whole subcontinent is in the grip of a terrible drought, and the river contains barely a trickle of water.

Picture, therefore, a brown bridge over a brown river set in a brown landscape. A brown soldier in a brown uniform inspects our papers. We wear bright colours and carry rucksacks.

‘Where are you going?’ he asks.

‘London.’

‘In England,’ my girlfriend adds helpfully.

‘That’s nice,’ he says turning my papers over in his hand. He puts them to one side and looks at me expectantly. ‘Do you have some cigarettes?’ he asks.

‘I don’t smoke,’ I reply.

‘That’s not what I asked.’

He is right. It is not what he asked. As it happens, I do have a pack of cigarettes for just such an occasion. I reach into my bag to find them, but something in the border guard’s expression tells me that things are not that simple.

‘You can give me money,’ he says, catching my eye.

I hand him some money.

My girlfriend looks studiously at the riverbed below us.

‘How far is it to Harare?’ I ask.

‘If you are going to London,’ he replies, ‘what does it matter how far Harare is?’

It is just my luck to get a border guard with a degree in philosophy.

At this point in my life I have no knowledge of crosswords.

I am twenty-one years old.

On 9 December 1983 my girlfriend and I leave Cape Town to travel to London. Our plan is to hitchhike. My plan is never to return; her plan is to spend six months travelling, another six months earning some money in London, and then to return to South Africa. We have, in effect, given ourselves twelve months.

This obvious fault-line in our relationship is not mentioned.

There is an assumption that things change.

There is an unspoken assumption that twelve months will just about do it.

I am not entirely comfortable with this assumption.

In preparation for the trip we have practised hitchhiking. Two weekends previously we made the 70-mile trip from Cape Town to Betty’s Bay to meet a man who had just driven through Africa on a motorbike. Perhaps, we think, he can give us some pointers. Perhaps he can tell us what to look for.

We hold up our thumbs, as though testing the wind. Betty’s Bay is a resort-wannabe, an area of empty plots and holiday homes near the southern tip of Africa. When we get there a wind is whipping up the dunes, and white horses dance on the ocean. The Indian and Atlantic oceans meet somewhere near here and there ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents