This article was published in the Evening Standard on 8 May 1981.
MY WEEKEND / TOM SHARPE talking to Penny Junor
TOM SHARPE, author of a string of outrageously funny novels including The Wilt Alternative, recently published in paperback by Pan, is 53, married to an American called Nancy, and lives in Dorset with three young daughters, a dog, three cats, a rabbit, five chickens and several goldfish. . .
THE weekends are much the same as any other day for me.
I get up when Nancy brings me a cup of tea, at about 7.30 to 8.0, and I sit on the edge of the bed and hoink snuff. I’ve been hoinking snuff ever since I gave up cigarettes in 1964. I don’t think it’s an affectation. My father always used to use it.
Hoinking. Is that my own word? It might be, but I rather think it’s American. It certainly describes what I do. I’m all in favour of making up words if the one you want doesn’t exist.
I’m writing about a woman called Mrs Bain in my new book. She’s under the blankets at the moment and speaking to her husband who’s standing in the room, and I describe the way she’s speaking as “she muffled.”
I thought long and hard about whether I could say that, but there’s no other way to describe the sound a person makes if their head’s under the blankets.
Then I get myself some breakfast. I’m slimming at the moment so that’s a bowl of natural yoghurt and bran. My God, if I had my way I’d eat a real slap-up breakfast and weigh 18 stone. As it is I weigh 14 stone, and eat nothing.
And I have a quick look at The Times. I wish I didn’t, but I do. Reading newspapers is habit forming, an addiction. It would be much better if I could start writing when I get out of bed in the morning. I have my best thoughts at that time of the day.
Caravan
After that I take a cup of coffee with me and go out to the hut and sit in front of my typewriter for the morning.
I write in a hut for several reasons. Partly because I always have. When I first started writing in Cambridge I had a hut three miles away, and I used to cycle there every day, often with Dandy (the dog) sitting in a carrier on the back.
When we moved here three years ago the people we had bought the house from didn’t have anywhere to move in for a while, so they stayed in the house and we lived in a caravan in the garden, all of us, children, dog, cats and all. But I said I had to have somewhere to write.
So the chap said I could use his garden shed, and I knocked a hole in the roof to let in more light, and I’ve been there ever since.
I like the feeling of going out of the house to work. I come back to collect more coffee every now and again, but I sit there usually until my tummy gets hurting, which is at about a quarter to one.
What other word can you use to describe it? My tummy doesn’t hurt. That’s too sudden. That means one minute it’s not hurting and the next it is. Mine starts hurting gradually, and goes on hurting more and more until I go and fill it with something.
Most mornings I write three pages of clean top copy. I actually write a lot more than that—I get through a hell of a lot of paper—but I can’t bear a messy page. I find it very difficult to alter copy with a pen. If I’ve left something out I can’t write it in over the top. I have to start all over again. I’m meticulous about it.
Some of my books write themselves and I’m just hanging on to their tails. Riotous Assembly was like that, and Wilt. And they made me laugh until my stomach hurt.
That sounds incredibly conceited. But I don’t know where all this muck’s coming from. I’m just like a bit of blotting paper—it’s like doing automatic writing.
Lunch will be something like sardines and salad, which Nancy gets. I don’t cook around here. Hell no, I’m too goddam lazy.
On Saturday the children will be here for lunch too, and depending upon what sort of mood I’m in there’s either a nice chatter of conversation, or the radio’s on, or there’s a brooding silence. That’s when I’m in a foul mood.
After lunch we all take our own plates and put them into the washing-up machine. Then the children go off and play with their friends, Nancy recovers from the exhaustion of looking after us lot, and Mr MacGregor’s in the garden. That’s me.
I love gardening. The only reason I bought this house was for the garden. We’ve got about 4½ acres, and it was almost all lawn when we came here. The first year I dug three tons of manure into the ground, and the second year another three tons.
Untidy
I particularly enjoy digging. I must come from a long line of navvies.
But the only way I can garden, or do anything for that matter apart from my top copy, is to be wholly untidy. I leave things scattered about the garden everywhere.
I keep telling Nancy one should live in such a way as if one had servants, but without them. People who come here are always itching to tidy up.
On a sunny day I spend the afternoon happily gardening. On a wet day I spend it gardening somehow. Well someone’s got to keep the damn thing in order.
Then I might walk across to my sister’s house three miles away and talk to my brother-in-law who’s a keen gardener too, and a good one, which is more than can be said for me.
Then there’s tea, and if I had my way I’d eat bread and honey, but I don’t.
At 6 o’clock I either drink Perrier water, or go on to something like gin or very dry sherry. I write letters or read books on roses or gardening. I’ve got hundreds.
Then we have dinner, and afterwards I might go into my darkroom out in the old schoolhouse in the garden. [I used to be a professional photographer at one time in South Africa and it’s still a great hobby.] Or I might listen to music. I listen to a hell of a lot of 1920s jazz.
Custom
On summer evenings I might sit out in the garden with a gin bottle and spray the roses. Roses are my passion — roses and compost heaps. And I don’t just grow bloody Hybrid Ts, either.
It all began when Nancy gave me some roses for my birthday four years ago. Then she gave me a rose dictionary. I’m damn sure she knew what she was doing. It just took off from there. I packed more than 200 roses into that small garden in Cambridge. I don’t know what the poor people who bought it from us must have thought.
Sundays are much the same as any other day. We get up slightly later, perhaps, and I make the tea, and sometimes I take Nancy breakfast in bed. Breakfast, hell. It’s a bowl of Shredded Wheat. Don’t think I do any cooking because I don’t. Ask Nancy, she’ll tell you what a slob she’s married to.
I flegellate like everyone else on a Sunday. I take the Sunday Times. I can always predict what’s going to be inside it. There’ll be something that’s going to give you cancer—orange skins or light bulbs; and there’ll be people starving in some part of the world.
Then I go out to the hut. I can’t take a day off. If I’m writing a book, I’m writing a book.
Lunch on Sundays is hot, and we don’t drink unless people come. We don’t socialise much. After living in South Africa where people just drop in on each other, I still can’t get into the English custom of inviting people for social occasions. I can’t be that organised.
I never sleep in the afternoons. Most Sunday afternoons I spend gardening again. Or we might go to the cliffs or the beach with the children, and I’d take a camera along.
We have a light meal in the evening. After that I might write letters. They are like diaries. Writing’s an obsession.
Otherwise I sit and natter to Nancy, or read rose books that I’ve read before. If I watch TV once a fortnight that’s a lot.
Some evenings I spend with a Dymo making tabs for things in the garden. I put the chickens to bed sometimes, or take the dog out—all the things I do on any other day of the week.
The only way I notice it’s a weekend is that the children are around.
Photo caption: “People are always itching to tidy up”—Tom Sharpe.