Remembering Paul Jennings: a blast from the past

A great British humorist who delighted in words and their meaning

Girl on a platform. Photo by Terry Freedman

I am republishing this post from a while ago, when I had very few subscribers. I hope you enjoy reading about my earliest influence as far as writing is concerned.

When I visited Golders Green in November 2019, I forgot to go to the men’s toilet. Ah, I think I’d better explain. Golders Green is an area in London. I went there, for the first time in years, in order to buy shoes because there were two shops there which sold the ones I wanted. (Not something flashy like red patent leather or blue suede, just something with a very wide fitting.)

As a frequenter of Golders Green in years gone by I sometimes had occasion to use the Gents in the station. My friends and I, with the silliness of youth, always used to chortle at a sign there that read:

“Gentlemen, please adjust your dress before leaving”

So, I’d meant to visit the gents when I found myself there in the November before the pandemic, in order to take a photo. (Come to think of it, maybe it’s just as well I forgot: “Good afternoon, Officer…”).

It’s really interesting looking at signs, because they either tell you so much, or you can use them to light a fire under your imagination. I used to love reading Paul Jennings’ articles. He had a column in The Observer newspaper called Oddly Enough, and in some of them he would describe a name he saw on a sign, or on the side of a lorry, and launch into a flight of fancy about it.

In one, for example, he sees a window reading “Annual Lamp Company” facing another stating “Glass Benders”, and imagines a connection between the two:

Yes, see them [the glass blenders] proudly carrying it [the lamp] across the road to the Annual Lamp Co. 'H'm, thought you'd never make it this year,' grunts the Lampmaster, 'still, it's a beautiful job. Now we can get on with our lamp. Well, see you next year. Let's have your invoice, won't you?' And the deputation goes back, walking through the silent-roaring traffic, back up the wooden stairs into the formless tide of music, into the undreamable dream of the infinite city."

It made me laugh because all he had to do was look up each company in the phone directory and ask them what they did! Or he could have popped into the shops as he passed them. It’s beautifully written too. That last part brings to my mind Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, although Jennings penned his piece at least five years before Invisible Cities was first published. (Perhaps that’s an example of what the Oulipians call “anticipatory plagiarism”.)

Even English place names were fair game, possessing, in Jennings’ view, an onomatopoeic quality:

pershore adv. (arch.). Certainly, for sure. "Pershore thou'rt damn'd' (Webster).

priddy adj. Neat.

rickmansworth n. (legal). Ancient nominal rent paid to lord of manor for hay. Always paired, in mortgage documents, with stevenage n. (legal). Ancient nominal rent paid to lord of manor for stones.

thirsk n. A desire for vodka.

wembley adj. suffering from a vague malaise. I feel a bit w. this morning.

I first came across Jennings when I was idly browsing the shelves of my local library, when I was 14 years old. An odd-titled book called Idly Oddly caught my attention. It turned out to be a collection of humorous or whimsical articles on all manner of subjects, all of which had in common Jennings’ vivid imagination.

For example, on one occasion he phoned passenger enquiries at Euston Station. This used to be a very Victorian building, full of archways. It’s been greatly modernised in the years since Jennings was writing, but at the time it proved a marvellous inspiration for one of his flights of fancy.

What happened was that when Jennings was finally put through to passenger enquiries, a voice answered “Euston sleepers”:

I couldn't have been more awed if it had said: 'Delphic Oracle, at your service' or 'Vestal Virgins, good morning.’ So that's what they've got upstairs in that central hall at Euston, with its pillars and statues; the Seven Euston Sleepers, the tutelary deities of British Railways. How extraordinary that we should not have guessed; for we have all been faintly troubled by the feeling that in some way Euston is more than a station.

He wrote about the “loss force”, a supernatural phenomenon whereby something you had just a few minutes ago has simply vanished, and how we tend to react to that:

But after this awful, this magical disappearance, we resort to methods of discovery which mere intellect tells us are mad. We look under large articles of furniture that have not been moved for months. We telephone our friends and ask if they've borrowed it. We look in the bathroom, under the bed, more and more wildly. These are not rational acts; they are a kind of possessed ritual, to propitiate the Loss Force.

In some articles he talks about his friend Harblow. I have never been able to ascertain whether Harblow actually existed. But it’s a wonderful device.

Some years after discovering Jennings, and having devoured his Oddly books (with great titles such as Oddly Bodlikins, I Said Oddly, Diddly I?, Next to Oddliness), I modelled some of my own writing on his. My very first article for the student newspaper at my university — the initial column of a regular slot that came to be called The Terry Freedman View — was loosely based on his style.

More than that, his articles demonstrated that one can write beautifully about ordinary, everyday, things and events.

Over the years I have returned to Jennings time and again. Although all of his books are now out of print, a publisher had the foresight some years ago to reissue a collection of his articles in a book called Golden Oddlies, and I bought it. As I re-read the articles, I realise more and more the degree to which his lighthearted humour hid the most extraordinary erudition. They continue to serve as a model of great writing.