I said I wouldn't...

...But I did! There follows another incident from the increasingly improbable adventures of Orwell and Pinter.


Orwell and Pinter were both very fond of flowers and cultivated them in boxes on the windowsills of their London flat. They took to keeping bags of seeds about their persons and planting these in forgotten corners of soil - at road junctions, for instance. Many died, but occasionally they bloomed, and added a splash of joyous colour to the bleak prospects of the city.

They bought their seeds from the establishment of one Donald Armstrong. He was a Scotsman by birth: his family had been a great name among the Border-reivers, those dauntless cossacks of Great Britain. Once, they had terrorised the Marches and dined at the table of the kings of Scotland; but the wild days ended, and the family settled down and became respectable landowners and keen gardeners. So keen, in fact, that each succeeding Armstrong's landscaping of the family seat began to use up the money. Donald's grandfather Pertinax had in the end sold the estate to a wealthy American and set up a rightly-praised florist's shop in Galashiels, which was flourishing when Donald came into the ownership. With a riever-like disregard for frontiers where there was loot to be made, he decided to move operations to London, and there gained a great and similarly riever-like reputation for throwing feasts on behalf of various London Scots fraternities.

But though he now ranked as a prosperous businessman, he maintained a close personal interest in his produce and was famed in particular as a breeder of tulips. One experiment of his - prosaically called the Number 4 - was thought to be quite exquisite by all, and certainly by Orwell and Pinter. Though they would chat amiably on gardening matters, Armstrong would not reveal even to his favoured customers the jealously-guarded secret of the Number 4. But he always kept a few packets of seeds behind his desk just in case his friends should call.

One day, however, their call found him absent. A flustered sales assistant explained that he had gone to attend a binge commemorating the Battle of Flodden, where his ancestors had fought. Unfortunately, this same assistant, ignorant of his employer's customs, had sold off all the present batch of Number 4s.

"Ah, well," said Pinter stoically. But Orwell's response was theatrical in the extreme.

"Och, A'm wae!," he said, affecting Armstrong's broad Scots dialect. Pinter gave him a funny look. "The fowers of the florist are aw wede awa!"