Insufficiently honoured here

‘Next time it’s full buggery!’ said Christopher Hitchens as I helped him onto a train at Taunton station after a full luncheon of Black Label, Romanée-Conti, eel risotto and suckling pig.

‘Next time it’s full buggery!’ said Christopher Hitchens as I helped him onto a train at Taunton station after a full luncheon of Black Label, Romanée-Conti, eel risotto and suckling pig. His jaunty remark was overheard by a little old lady standing next to me on the platform. ‘Gentlemen, honestly!’ she said, reaching for the train door. But it was locked. Hitchens stuck his torso out of the window and called to the platform manager to let her in. ‘Too late’, said the uniformed attendant in a flat voice. ‘Stand back from the door, madam’, Hitchens exploded. ‘You’re job is to help this poor woman not to hinder her’, he thundered. ‘Listen to me, you fish-faced, pettifogging baggage man, open this door immediately and let her on the train. What kind of fat-kidneyed cretin are you? Why haven’t you been sacked, you aborted rooting hog, parasite tosser, you…?’ This stream of neo-Shakespearian invective continued as the train drew from the station, and was still faintly audible to those remaining on the platform as the last carriage passed from sight on a bend half a mile down the track.

Neither the old lady nor the station master had the faintest idea who this furious figure was, and yet all the most interesting and memorable features of Hitchens’s larger-than-life personality were plainly manifest in this single episode. He is a courageous, passionate and outspoken defender of human rights, a man of ready wit, rich vocabulary, smutty mind and sharp literary intellect. Born in Malta in 1949, brought up mainly in Portsmouth, and Oxford educated, Hitchens emigrated to America in 1981 and took US citizenship in 2005.