‘Humpty, I hardly like to mention it but you once met Alice, I believe.’
Humpty pretended not to hear. He had his head in a book. I couldn’t quite see the title but I caught sight of ‘Hadrian’s …’Eventually he looked up and said: ‘That was most provoking.’
No, I thought. That’s what comes of being turned into an egg.
‘Most provoking,’ he repeated. ‘I tell you what, though,’ he went on. ‘It would have been a different matter if Thelwell had drawn me, say, as a rider on a pony.’
‘Yes,’ I said. And I thought, supposing he had fallen off the pony? I changed the subject. ‘And Ronald Searle would have produced something original. He once drew a cartoon for me – or rather for the publication I edited – as an un-birthday gift.’ (I borrow Humpty’s words as Lewis Carroll (C.L. Dodgson) recorded them.)
I could see that Humpty was wanting to change the subject. He had a far away look in his eyes. He said he actually liked Tenniel’s drawings.
‘The Cheshire cat for instance?’
‘Could be,’ he replied. ‘That’s better than an egg. And I used to enjoy Fougasse’s [C.K. Bird’s] drawings in ‘Punch’.
That caught me out. I didn’t know Humpty was a connoisseur of such things. ‘I like Peter Brookes’s cartoons in “The Times” too,’ he said. Humpty never ceases to surprise me.
I half-expected him to come up with the name Philip Zec and the uproar he caused in 1942 with his savage cartoon of a seafarer clutching a makeshift raft – at a time when petrol was going up by a penny a gallon. But no. He had something else on his mind. ‘Tell you what: I like the drawings on our blog.’
‘Name of Timothy King,’ I said.
‘Did he do that drawing of me?’
‘No. That was somebody else altogether.’
And there we left it. They say we learn more from our hymns than from sermons. And they also say a picture is worth a thousand words. Cartoonists know this. So does Humpty.
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