They Like to Think Things Over

Charles made the application without telling either Mother or Father. He’d seen a documentary on the television and thought it would be interesting to be a host. You had to be twenty one or over to make an application but Charles used our father’s name and date of birth on the form. He forged Father’s signature. He was good at forging. He’d been doing it for years.

As hosts, we were an ideal set up. There was a spare room for the Thinker and access to Father’s study which was unoccupied during the week. Mother rarely left the house and was on hand from early morning to cook and provide whatever refreshments the Thinker required. The programme paid for the Thinker’s travel to our house from anywhere in the UK. It also offered a small stipend to cover the expenses of the host family. So really, Charles argued, when the acceptance letter appeared in Father’s mail, there was absolutely no reason why we should not host a thinker. “It would be educational,” he said.

Father could have called up the programme and explained what had happened. But Father did not like a fuss. It would’ve been embarrassing to admit that his nine year old son had duped such a venerable institution. He read the small print on the letter. It was couched in the most reassuring terms. We would hardly notice the Thinker’s presence. He -for it was only male thinkers whom the programme dealt with- would arrive and establish himself in our home. Then maintain a kind of solitary distance until he’d thought through whatever was bothering him. The letter stated that the average length of a thinker’s visit was between ten days and a fortnight at most. During this period we would not be expected to do anything except provide room and board for one of Britain’s sharpest minds.

“It’s something of an honour,” Charles explained to Father. “The chaps in your club will be suitably impressed to hear you’re hosting a thinker. The selection process is reasonably rigorous.” Having heard this and ascertained that he definitely would not be out of pocket, Father finally agreed to take receipt of a single Thinker. We were assigned Thinker 23. He arrived by train on a Wednesday morning. He was a taciturn looking man of fifty or so. He carried nothing but an umbrella and a brown, leather briefcase. He did not offer us his name. He handed my mother a carefully printed timetable of when his meals should be deposited on a tray outside his door, then retired to his bedroom, only emerging at intervals to use the bathroom and scurry back behind closed doors.

We had no idea what Thinker23 was considering in his room. Charles said some thinkers were contemplating philosophical quandaries, whilst others were in the employ of the Government and charged with solving more practical problems of a political or economic nature. We would probably never discover what our thinker was thinking about, but we could rest assured that his work was vital and, in hosting him, we were doing our bit.

All went well for the first ten days. We hardly ever saw the Thinker though each time Father or Mother answered the phone, they’d make a point of insisting that they could not speak above a whisper, because there was a thinker resident in their home. On the third week of the Thinker’s residency, Mother began to ask how long we thought he might stay. By the fifth week, Father was on the phone to the programme complaining that we’d been sent a defective thinker. He’d now been thinking for over a month and had yet to come to any conclusions. The programme apologised but admitted that on rare occasions, some problems simply needed a little more time.

After nine weeks our father had had enough. The stipend had long since run out and the Thinker was eating us out of house and home. He approached the spare bedroom with a determined step, knocked brusquely and opened the door before the Thinker could cut him off. He found the Thinker supine upon the bed, fast asleep and clearly not thinking of anything worthy or particularly complex. Further investigations would reveal that he’d been paying the cleaner to keep him in cheap whiskey and chocolate biscuits and had been dozing, on my father’s dime, for the better part of three months.

Inspired by a line from Agatha Christie’s 1976 novel, Sleeping Murder: Miss Marple’s Last Case