AFTERTHOUGHT

Wally and Ted

JOHN WELLS

It was in 1936 that Ted Windsor, a simple, unassuming Cockney, made the decision of a lifetime. Faced with the hair-raising choice of catching the post with what he believed to be a winning pools coupon or missing his own wedding to his lovely wife Wally, Ted plumped for romance. As it later emerged, his big win would have enabled him to live like a king for the rest of his natural life. How does he feel about those electric days when the balls rattled in the roulette wheel of fate, and about the world in which he now finds himself, an old man with his memories, his dreams of what might have been? For the first time, Ted Windsor has consented to talk to Friend of the Famous, Frank Harris.

HARRIS: You have always been an out- spoken critic of these who enforce, too rigidly perhaps, the postal regulations con- cerning certain games of chance. Would you say that the atmosphere today was more permissive in such matters? TED: Well I sometimes WALLY: I like it, the permissive atmosphere. And I think your young people today have a right old time if you ask me.

HARRIS: More specifically ...

WALLY: All the glad rags and dancing about and throwing their money down the drain. I tell you, I stand outside the Boots in Marly Street under the red light there and I see some lovely ones.

HARRIS: Postal regulations have not per- haps ...

WALLY: Young people I mean. Lovely ones. Crushed velvet and the fuzzy-wuzzy look. I think it's lovely.

TED: Lovely they may be poncing up and down the pavement in Marly Road but you're not having them in here.

WALLY: I would not imagine they would wish to come in here with the cigarettes burning holes in the leatherette and great crude mugs of tea leaves standing on the mantlepiece. I would not imagine they would even wish to stick their noses through the door.

TED: Sorry dear.

WALLY: I love young people. They teach me to do their little dances, smoke their little . .

HARRIS: What of the mini-skirt, Mr Windsor.

WALLY: Well, you can see right up, can't you?

TED: I think they're a bit of all right. HARRIS: YOU were a leader of fashion, of course, in your own day.

WALLY: He used to have to get his trousers on with soap. Hair down to here he had. Did rude things with his guitar. Very with- it he was.

HARRIS: Do you remember the first words your husband ever said to you?

WALLY: No, what were they?

HARRIS: I'm afraid I have no idea. The researchers . . . I was really wondering what your first impressions were.

WALLY: Well, like I said, splitting out of his trousers, hair down to here, with a funny lope.

HARRIS: In 1936?

WALLY: Oh yes, he's always been ahead of his time.

HARRIS: But did he look like a man who might win a fortune on the pools? WALLY: Oh yes, unquestionably.

HARRIS: Mr Windsor. What were your impressions of Winston Churchill?

TED: I never did impressions of Winston Churchill. I used to be able to do 'In a Monastery Garden' with Ronnie Ronalde but that was before I had my teeth done. HARRIS: But you admired him? rED: Oh yes. I remember once I was hav- ing a cup of tea during the War, or it could have been a bar of Ex-Lax, and I heard old Winston talking on the wireless. I said to Wally, 'Apparently when he's making a speech he stands a pla•e on top of a fingerbowl and a glass on top of that and lays his notes on top of that. I hope they don't fall over.'

HARRIS: In conclusion I believe you are reminded of an amusing anecdote. TED: Am I?

HARRIS: About Lord Montgomery of Alamein.

FED: Oh yes. He went into a shop. HARRIS: And he asked them, didn't he, whether they had any pepper.

TED: That's right.

HARRIS: And they asked him, I believe, whether he wanted black pepper or white pepper- TED: That's it. And he said no he didn't. HARRIS : And what did they say then?

TED: I don't know. You're making the money out of this caper, matey, not me. If you want your amusing anecdotes I suggest you tell them yourself. Something about writing paper as I recall it, but I remember thinking it was daft when you told me the first time. Now you do your hushed sensitive bit about have I any re- grets, I look soppy and wistful, and you grab your cheque and bundle up your cameras and pull your sticky tape off the ceiling and scarper. And as for you, one more rewrite of the weepy memoirs and I'm doing my flaming nut.

The film stock used is from this point on- wards too badly torn and damaged to be t ranscribable,