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Michael Frayn

Collected Columns
Author’s Note

Most of the pieces in this book first appeared in a

newspaper column I used to write, first three times a week
in the Guardian, from 1959 until 1962, and then once a
week, from 1962 to 1968, in the Observer. Although I’ve
entitled them ‘collected’ they are in fact a rather discreet
selection – 26 from the 359 columns I originally wrote for
the Guardian, and 96 from the 277 I did for the Observer.
I’ve added a further 32 that I wrote for the Guardian much
later, in 1994, together with another four pieces of varied
provenance.
All but one of them have appeared in book form before,
in various permutations under various titles, and selections
of them have also been recorded, by Martin Jarvis, and
broadcast. The present selection was originally published
by Methuen in 2007. Faber & Faber, who have long been
publishing all my other books (apart from plays), and who
had already done two of the pieces in Matchbox Theatre,
have now taken it under their wing to follow their reissues
of my early novels.
The pieces are arranged in alphabetical order because
… because I couldn’t think of any more rational system.

Michael Frayn
Contents

Title Page
Author’s Note
Welcome aboard!
A
Almost too utterly common entrance
Among the funny bones
And Home’s son’s father is Hume’s father’s son
Another little job for the cleaners
At bay in Gear Street
At the sign of the rupture belt

B
The bar sinister
The battle of the books
Black whimsy
Bodbury: the nation waits
Bodbury speaks out!
Brought to book
Business worries

C
Can you hear me, mother?
Chez Crumble
Child and superchild
Childholders
Cleveland Suede Accuses
The cogitations of the Earl of Each
Comedy of viewers
Composition for ten hands
Cottage industry

D
D.Op.
Destroy before reading
Dig my dogma
Divine news, darlings!
E
East of Suez
Eating for others
Eternity in a tube of toothpaste
Every day in every way

F
Facing the music
The faith of a snout baron
A farewell to arms
51 to Blangy
57 types of ambiguity
Firm friends of ours
Fog-like sensations
From the Improved Version
Frox ’n’ sox
Fun with numbers

G
Gagg speaks
Gentle reader
Gift to the nation

H
H&C
Hamlet OBE
A hand of cards
He said, she said
Head to head
Heart-cry from beautiful Yvonne Romaine
H.I.5
Housebiz

I
I said, ‘My name is “Ozzy” Manders, Dean of King’s’
I say Toronto, you say Topeka
I think I’m right in saying
In Funland
In the Morris manner
In the superurbs
Inside the Krankenhaus
Ivan Kudovbin
L
A letter from the publisher
Listener sport
The literature of coexistentialism
Lives and likenesses
Lloyd
The long and the short of it

M
The Magic Mobile
The mails must go through
Major minor
Making a name for yourself
The manual writer’s manual
The meteorological school
Money well changed
The monolithic view of mirrors
My life and loves
My nature diary

N
Never put off to Gomorrah
New man coming
Night thoughts
No one could be kinder
The normal fifth
Now then
O
Oh, un peu, vous savez, un peu
On the receiving end
On the subject of objects
Our pleasure, Captain!
Outside story

P
Pas devant les enfants
Plain speaking on S’Agaro
Please be seated
A pleasure shared
A princess in disguise
Private collections
Q
A question of character
A question of downbringing

R
Ready steady … no
Return match
Ron Number

S
The sad tale of P-t-r B-nnykin
Sandra sesame
Save it for the stairs
School of applied art
Scrapbook for 1964
Service with a smile
Services rendered
The sleepy sickness
Smoothe’s law
Songs without words
Spock’s Guide to Parent Care
Strain cook thoroughly before serving
Substance without soul
T
Tell us everything
Tête-à-tête-à-tête
That having been said
Through the wilderness
Total scholarship
Twelfth Night; or, What Will You Have?
V
A very quiet car
A very special collection
W
We all say the same
What the mice foretell
What the peepers see
What the stars foretell
Whereas
A wisp of azure
Word sanctuary
The words and the music
The world: week two

Y
Your inattention, please
Your quick flip guide
Your shameful secret

Z
A good stopping place

About the Author

Also by the Author
Copyright
Welcome aboard!

Hi! My name’s Mike, and I’m your author today. Welcome

aboard, and thank you for choosing to read me. It’s a
pleasure for me to write for you, and I shall be doing my
best to make your trip with this article a happy one.
I have twenty paragraphs of in-article entertainment for
you today, and I shall be starting the service of meaningful
sentences just as soon as I’ve finished with all these
introductory announcements. Thank you.
We’ve a slight delay, I’m afraid, in getting Paragraph 1
under way. This is because we missed our place in the
queue at the beginning of the article, due to essential
announcements. I’m now expecting Paragraph 1 to run
immediately after Paragraph 6. I apologise to readers for
any inconvenience this may cause. Please bear with me.
Thank you.
Just to keep you up to date: Paragraph 5 has been
cancelled, due to the non-arrival of Paragraph 4. Rest
assured that I’m doing everything in my power to rectify
the situation. Thank you.
No, hold on. That was Paragraph 4. With any luck we
should be getting away round about Paragraph 7. We shall
be routing through Paragraph 8, with onward connections
to Paragraphs 9 to 24, just as soon as we’ve found
Paragraph 6.
In the meantime you might like to have advance warning
of delays between Paragraphs 14 and 19, due to major
grammatical works which are expected to last until the
summer of 1997.
This is a call for readers of delayed Paragraph 6. This
paragraph is not now expected to depart until after
Paragraph 18.
Still waiting for clearance on Paragraph 7. I think we all
need a bit of a break here, so I’m going to come round
serving free asterisks.

I know how frustrating all these delays and cancellations

are, but bear with me. What I’m trying to do is to bring
Paragraph 9 forward, and see if we can make a start with
that. There are an awful lot of words here that have got to
be organised into paragraphs, and an awful lot of
paragraphs all trying to go somewhere. They can’t all get
there at once! So bear with me. Thank you.
This is a staff announcement. Will whoever has the
words for Paragraph 9 please go to Paragraph 8
immediately.
Just to keep you in the picture: Paragraph 10 has been
withdrawn after complaints by religious leaders. Last-
minute talks are going on between management and staff
to save Paragraph 11. Paragraph 12 is covered by the
thirty-year rule. Paragraph 13 has failed to meet the
standards laid down by the European Commission.
Still having trouble with Paragraph 9, I’m afraid. I’ve
been badly let down by my suppliers. Bear with me. Please
accept another round of complimentary asterisks.

Right, Paragraph 9! Here it is at last, and this is what it

says: ‘Paragraph 27 …’ What? I don’t believe this! They’ve
given me the wrong paragraph! Bear with me just a little
longer, will you?
Will readers of delayed Paragraph 6 please go
immediately to Paragraph 13, and extinguish all hope,
ready for immediate disappointment.
 Yes, I know you’ve been waiting a long time! You think
I’m enjoying this? Look, I’m on my own here – I’ve no staff!
I’m trying to write this entire article single-handed! All
right? Just bear with me, will you!
Correction to my previous announcement: Paragraph 3
is running. Paragraph 3 has come in! I’ve got Paragraph 3
right here! Anyone here still waiting for Paragraph 3 …?
No? No one interested in Paragraph 3 …? Is there any
wonder I can’t get staff? Is it surprising that morale in the
industry is so low?
Look, I’ve had cutbacks, just like everybody else! I’ve no
paper to write on! I’m struggling with a lot of obsolete
equipment! Sitting on a broken chair – writing at a desk
with three legs …!
Hold on … Right – we’re ready to go at long last!
I’ve now used up my maximum permitted space,
however, so I shall be leaving you at this point. It only
remains for me to say thank you for bearing with me today.
I hope that next time you’re bearing with anyone, you’ll
bear with me.

(1989)
Almost too utterly common entrance
‘A most unusual seminar,’ says the heading on an advertisement which has been appearing
in undergraduate magazines recently. The advertisement is issued by a firm who describe
themselves as ‘the most brilliant of all the advertising agencies,’ looking for ‘the most
brilliant of all this year’s graduands.’
‘They propose to invite up to twenty of you,’ it continues, ‘after a long interrogation in
London, to spend a weekend with them during the Easter vacation. The hospitality at this
weekend will be almost vulgarly profuse. Continual distraction will be offered. But there
will also be one written paper of the most taxing kind. It will need great stamina to endure
it all.’
It certainly will if this is anything like the weekend which Harris-Harris, the brighter
than brightest agency, hold each year at Wosby Hall, the ancestral home of the Selection-
Board family. Here the daiquiris flow like water, served by top models in fishnet stockings,
while fashionable dance bands play softly among the Picassos.
‘The ambience here,’ says Garth Peacock, one of the agency men assigned to the job,
waving an odoriferous Balkan cigarette at the time-hallowed setting, ‘is almost, comment
dit-on, vulgarly profuse, don’t you think?’
‘Er, yes,’ mumbles R. Slodge, former President of the Oxford Union. Garth Peacock
presses a tiny pocket transmitter key which registers at headquarters the damning
comment ‘This man considers himself superior to popular cultural values.’
‘Have another cigar, Nubbs,’ says Peacock to the former Cambridge stroke. ‘Er, no
thanks,’ replies Nubbs, and Peacock signals ruthlessly ‘Deficient in phallic motivation’.
Nubbs passes the solid gold humidor on to Cropper, once editor of the Isis, but Cropper,
who has smoked five cigars already, shakes his head queasily. Peacock adds another
comment to the Nubbs report: ‘Complete failure to persuade in face of difficult market
conditions.’
‘I hope,’ says Peacock, ‘you’re not all finding the weekend too utterly boring?’
‘Not me,’ replies Potkin, the noted Oxford actor, gesturing for another bottle of
champagne. ‘Can’t soak the stuff up fast enough.’ (‘A certain lack of moral fibre’, signals
Peacock.)
‘Oh, far from it,’ adds Mark Smoothe, undergraduate son of the Minister of Chance and
Speculation, also ordering another bottle. ‘I think the amenities we are enjoying here are
a fitting background to the sort of seminar which, today more than ever, plays an
absolutely vital part in the progressive development of the free world.’ (‘A brilliant
creative mind’, transmits Peacock.)
‘Where’s the lavatory?’ demands Cropper urgently. (‘A poor ability to choose language
that brings out the most attractive aspects of a subject’, notes Peacock.)
By the time Cropper has hacked his way back through the almost vulgarly deep pile of
the carpet, bowing footmen have ushered the whole party on to the luxuriously appointed
assault course, where Roscoe is waiting to put them through an almost disgustingly
elegant initiative test.
‘What we should like you to do,’ he explains, ‘if it’s not too almost utterly tedious, is to
imagine that this ditch is full of synthetic raspberry jam. You have to get the synthetic
raspberry jam over this wall of consumer resistance without touching the real raspberry
jam made by the same firm. To do it you’ve got nothing but four feet of tarred twine, two
empty oil drums, one model in black lace underwear, and £100,000 …’
When the fleet of Rolls-Royces takes them back to the almost sickeningly exquisite
house, they face the most testing moment of all. One by one they are shown into the
presence of J. B., the head of the agency himself, as he sits in the Sheraton Room
surrounded by Cellini champagne-coolers and Fabergé foot-warmers.
‘Sit down, Mr Nubbs,’ he murmurs in an almost insupportably aristocratic tone. ‘Tell
me, Mr Nubbs, do you believe in God?’
 ‘Er, well, I, er …’
‘Of course you do. Take a cigar and then sell me the idea in fifty punchy, easy-to-read
words.’
Yes, it certainly demands stamina. And remember, stamina demands Fub, for only new
wonder Fub has magic Zub!

(1962)

Among the funny bones

The evolution of man has not ceased. By the inscrutable processes of natural selection
there is evolving from homo sapiens a new and more complex species of anthropoid: homo
jocans, or Joky Man.
Homo sapiens has been defined as a tool-making animal. Homo jocans is a gag-making
machine. Just as homo sapiens became ashamed of his urge to copulate and sublimated it
into a culture of solid complexity, so Joky Man has become ashamed of his urge to
communicate and is sublimating it into a culture of elaborate facetiousness.
I think Joky Man will prove to be the dominant form. Pre-Joky Man will be made to feel
smaller and smaller by Joky Man for failing to see the joke, until he becomes entirely
extinct. By the end of the Uranium Age, Joky Man will cover the whole of the Western
Hemisphere. The archaeologists will find his tumuli everywhere, and the remains of Joky
Man inside will be instantly identifiable; the skulls will all be trying to keep a straight face.
Our literature does not do justice to the subtlety of our culture. In books people say
what they mean, in the sapiens style. (‘Don’t you see, Lisbet, that my feeling for Paul is
only a desperate counterpoise to Mark’s instinctive rejection of Anna?’) In life Joky Man
speaks almost entirely in irony, sarcasm, understatement, hyperbole, and parody, and I am
going to have a fresco painted inside my tomb that will bring home to archaeologists
something of the staggering intricacy of life in Joky times.
It will show Joky Man at work, sitting for hours rubbing gag against gag in the hope of
producing a spark. It will show Joky Man at leisure, still chipping one gag against another.
A frieze round the margin will display the huge variety of gags a man might have at his
disposal – cutting gags, gags that grind the nerves, gags that scrape the bottom of the
barrel, gags for falling in love, gags for ending marriages, gags for dying – as well as how
a man of small resources might make one or two durable basic gags do for everything.
A further series of panels will show Joky Man speaking in funny voices – joke adenoidal
voices, joke television commentator’s voices, joke Prime Minister voices, joke Queen
voices.
In one of them he will be seen speaking in what he takes to be a joke working-class
voice, to show his rejection of bourgeois values and his solidarity with the masses. The
panel will include a representative selection of the masses, showing their touching
gratitude for this compliment by talking in what they take to be a joke Joky Man’s voice.
In a big tableau, Joky Man will be shown speaking in his most important funny voice –
what he conceives to be the voice of a low-class theatrical agent. A frieze running round
the edge of this scene will make it clear that since he has never actually met a low-class
theatrical agent, but only a man whose elder brother’s friend does a very amusing
imitation of Peter Sellers impersonating Sidney James playing the part of a low-class
theatrical agent, this causes no offence to low-class theatrical agents.
The funny-voice series will be surmounted by a tablet depicting Joky Man’s larynx,
showing typical enlargement and inflammation caused by the strain of speaking with all
the voices of men and of angels except one’s own. Elsewhere in the fresco there will be
scenes from Joky Man’s everyday life, with balloons coming out of his mouth reading
‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you,’ ‘What we in the trwade call a nice bit of crwumpet,’ ‘How
very different from the home life of our own dear Queen!’ ‘And now – a big hand for
someone we all know and love,’ ‘My husband and I …’, ‘What we in the trwade call one of
our own dear queens,’ ‘Don’t call us, my husband and I will call you …’
One whole wall of the tomb will be occupied by a scene representing the spiritual core
of Joky Man’s life. On one half of the wall – Joky Man appearing on television, saying
satirical things in his theatrical agent voice, his Prime Minister voice, and his
commentator voice. On the other half of the wall – Joky Man watching the television,
mimicking the performers and maintaining a stream of witty observations about them in
no less funny voices. The balloons will make it clear that it is the less joky specimens of
Joky Man who appear on the screen, and the more joky specimens who watch. Or that at
any rate the ones who appear never seem to manage to answer any of those devasting
sallies back.
In one corner of the tomb there will be a small picture illustrating a rather sad aspect
of Joky Man’s life. It will show him trying to say something straight, in his own voice. He is
red in the face and glassy-eyed with the effort, but, as the archaeologists will see, the
balloon that is emerging from his mouth is completely empty. In the last picture Joky Man
is being carried off, deceased from an excess of humours. As the headstone movingly
records:
‘Here lies what we in the trwade call dead funny.’

(1963)

And Home’s son’s father is Hume’s father’s son

What a dynamic start! In the first six days of his ministry Sir Alec Douglas-Home has got
rid of an earldom, three lordships, and two baronies; and the new Chancellor of the Duchy
of Lancaster and the New Minister of State at the Board of Trade have acquired a
viscountcy and a barony respectively.
Meanwhile, at the Conservative Central Office Lord Spoon is trying to drop the Barony
of Spoon and pick up the Barony of Bosworth, to complete a set of ‘Battle’ class titles he is
collecting. ‘If I can send in the full set, together with the backs of three old Burke’s
“Peerages”, I shall win an electric blanket,’ he told a Press conference late last night.
This vigorous programme cannot, of course, be carried through without some hard
rethinking of fundamentals.
At the request of the Garter King-of-Arms, according to the Daily Telegraph, the
Queen’s advisers have been ‘urgently’ considering the question of style and precedence of
the former Lord Home’s family. A spokesman for the College of Arms told the Telegraph:
‘The question is, for the purpose of precedence, whether the children of peers who have
disclaimed are still children of peers.’
How the College of Arms faced the problem I don’t know, but its rather more venerable
rival, the College of Arms and Legges (the name is a corruption of armorum leges, the
laws of arms), responded with great promptitude. As soon as the urgency and gravity of
the question was fully understood, an emergency meeting was called. Members of the
College were rushed to London with police escorts, and a jet airliner was specially
diverted to bring the Dexter Lord of Legges back from Southern Rhodesia, where he was
inspecting pre-war baronetcies for signs of wear.
‘Gentlemen,’ said the Dexter Lord of Legges, ‘the question is this: Are the children of
disclaiming peers still children of peers; and, if not, whose children are they? Would you
like to kick off, Rouge Garter Extraordinary?’
Rouge Garter Extraordinary: Well, let’s put this question another way. Can commoners
whose children are peers’ children be in any meaningful sense fathers?
Morte Puissance: Ex nihilo nihil fit. Vide Tollemache v. Tollemache on the strong
presumption of non-paternity in the case of an ox that was cited as putative sire of a pig.
 Swart Beast: Could not the difficulty be very easily surmounted by requiring peers
renouncing their peerages to disclaim the paternity of their children?
Twicester Herald: Then the wife could apply to the courts for a paternity order made
out in the name of the extinguished title.
Rouge Garter Extraordinary: The important thing is that these unfortunate children
should not be take away from their homes and put in orphanages unnecessarily.
Morte Puissance: What we must establish here and now, surely, is whether the son of
Lord Home (as he then was) is Lord Dunglass (as he now is) or Mr Douglas-Home junior
(as he may well be).
Vray Halidom: Or indeed whether either of them is the son of Sir Alec Douglas-Home,
or the Earl of Home, or Lord Home, or Lord Hume of Berwick, or Baron Hume of
Berwick, or Lord Dunglass, or Baron Douglas of Douglas. As he then was. Or as they then
were.
Dexter Lord of Legges: Douglas spelt ‘Douglas’ of Douglas spelt ‘Douglas’?
Vray Halidom: Precisely so, Legges.
Dexter Lord of Legges: Dashed funny way for a fellow to spell his name.
Swart Beast: Anyway, the permutations are endless.
Rouge Garter Extraordinary: There must be some way of telling. There must be some
birthmark or other one of them could produce.
Dexter Lord of Legges: What we must ensure above all is that this unhappy young man
is not deprived of someone to call. ‘Father.’ Or ‘Lord Father,’ or ‘Lord Father of Father,’ or
‘Baron Father of Berwick,’ as the case may be.
Twicester Herald: But my dear Legges, surely Sir Alec (as he now is) could register the
titles as a public company – Home, Home, Hume, Hume, Douglas and Dunglass Ltd. – and
appoint himself and his son co-directors of it?
Morte Puissance: Would it not be an equally satisfactory solution if the young man’s
name was spelt ‘Mr Douglas-Home’ and pronounced ‘Lord Dunglass’?
Rouge Garter Extraordinary: How about a new title altogether? After all, we must
move with the times. I suggest ‘Lord Dunglass-Home.’
Vray Halidom: I like the note of freshness it strikes. And it’s obviously an immensely
practical little title for running around in. But – well, frankly, it doesn’t speak to me.
Dexter of Legges: Beast?
Swart Beast: Well, for my money I don’t think you can beat ‘Lord Douglas-Dunglass.’
There’s a tremendously rugged integrity about that title. It’s a valid response – a nexus of
creative outgoingness – what I might call an essentially dynamic act of awareness. Also
the hyphen takes out for cleaning.
Morte Puissance: I’m prepared to go some way with Beast. But when it comes to sheer,
solid craftsmanship, give me a good old-fashioned title like ‘Lord Douglas, or, As You Like
It.’
Rouge Garter Extraordinary: Preferably pronounced ‘Lord Dunglass, or, What You
Will.’
Vray Halidom: Well, I think, you’d have to go a long way to beat Lord Home Number
Fifteen, in B Flat Minor.
Swart Beast: Or the sheer sensual awareness of ‘The Rokeby Douglas.’
Morte Puissance: May I put in a word for ‘On Hearing the First Dunglass of Spring?’
Dexter Lord of Legges: Well, there we were, then. The team can’t make up its mind
whether former peers’ children are peers’ children or not. But we’re all agreed that a
rose by any other name smells just like a rose, a ruse, a rouglas, or a runglass, as the case
may be.

(1963)

Another little job for the cleaners

We’re not asking for much (said Miss Modula MacPlastic, secretary of the ‘Clean Up the
Bible’ campaign). We simply want the ecclesiastical authorities to agree that an advisory
body composed of ordinary young agnostics-in-the-street like myself should have some say
in the planning of new scriptures, so that we can help them to avoid giving unnecessary
offence.
Believe me, we have solid backing from the ordinary mass of decent young people in
this country, such as the Bishop of Twicester, who writes: ‘I am absolutely horrified and
disgusted to discover exactly how much unnecessary and gratuitous sex does go on in the
Bible.’
It’s not even as if readings from the Bible could be confined to Religious Knowledge
classes in school. Extracts are deliberately and knowingly read out at church services
when there is a strong likelihood that impressionable adults are present. Copies of the
Bible are sold openly in back street bookshops, with nothing to prevent highly suggestible
men and women of 50 and even 60 from buying them.
One can only shudder at the effect it must have on them. I know of one case where an
ordinary middle-aged man read Leviticus, and next year went out and committed a serious
traffic offence. I am absolutely certain that if research were done among middle-aged
people convicted of crimes of violence it would be found that a very high proportion of
them had at one time or another in their lives been exposed to the influence of the Bible.
As soon as our advisory council started reading the book we came across scenes
involving nudity in the first few pages. We protested about these to the Archbishop of
Canterbury, but he refused to see us. Since then we have come across descriptions of
every possible form of sex, including homosexuality, bestiality, incest, and self-abuse. On
each occasion we have tried to take them up with the ecclesiastical authorities. But each
time the result has been the same; the little men in the Church did not have the courage to
meet us and listen to the voice of decency.
Some people try to argue that this continual harping upon sex is not corrupting. What
rubbish! Our whole sexual ethos has been affected by the Old Testament: if Sodom and
Onan had never been mentioned, for example, should we ever have heard of sodomy or
onanism?
One cannot but be sickened, too, by the endless violence. With monotonous regularity
the characters smite and are smitten, slay and are slain. In one particularly unsavoury
incident, a woman is turned into a pillar of salt. Whole cities are wiped out. Violence is
made to seem a commonplace part of life.
And scarcely a page goes by without some mention of sin. Sin, sin, sin – it’s dragged in
obsessively. Anybody reading the Bible naturally gets the idea that an obsession with sin is
a smart thing to have. Is it a coincidence that the middle-aged generation has got sin on
the brain? Or is there nothing less than a gigantic conspiracy at work all over the world to
make us sin-conscious?
Some silly people argue that writers must have ‘freedom’ to express themselves. But
could anyone honestly maintain that disgusting incidents such as the mass rape of the
concubine by the Gibeonites are artistically necessary? Great storytellers like Agatha
Christie and Denise Robins are able to entertain and delight a middle-aged audience
without descending to such cheap forms of titillation. Are the faceless men behind the Old
Testament frightened of being beaten in the bestseller lists?
We shall be asking our members to monitor the lessons read in their local churches, and
to complete a questionnaire about what they heard. One of the questions will be ‘Was
womanhood respected, or was it degraded?’ I think it’s pretty plain what the answer will
be for episodes like the presentation of the concubine to the Gibeonites, or the one in
which Lot offers his daughters to the Sodomites.
Another of the questions will be ‘Was authority represented as something worthy of
respect, or as something to be feared and hated?’ It seems to be the fashion in many parts
of the Bible to make people sneer at divine authority by showing it always as capricious,
cruel and unjust. A particularly horrifying instance of this is the episode at Nachon’s
threshing floor, when David is bringing back the Ark of the Covenant on an ox-cart. The
Ark wobbles, and one of the cart-drivers, Uzzah, puts out his hand to steady it –
whereupon God instantly strikes him dead.
We pointed out to the ecclesiastical authorities that this could only encourage lorry-
drivers to break the law regarding the proper securing of loads, and we suggested that
the text should be amended to show Uzzah receiving some small award for his
contribution to road safety. Again, our views were not taken into account.
We feel that in general the Bible concentrates far too much on the sordid side of life.
Plagues, famines, oppression – all right, we know they happen, but is it really necessary to
dwell upon them so insistently? The picture of life that is presented in the Bible is simply
not typical of this country today. The great majority of middle-aged people in Britain are
not bearded, unkempt tribesmen who go round living with concubines and strumming
psalms on the harp. They’re soberly-dressed men and women living in decent two-and
three-bedroomed houses, who believe in proper sanitation and life insurance. They should
be represented as such in their religious literature.
Honestly, we’re not asking for much. Just that the scriptures shouldn’t fall too far below
the ordinary standards of decency maintained in public life by bodies such as the BBC.

(1965)

At bay in Gear Street

It’s been hardly possible to get up and down Carnaby Street recently for the great crush
of American journalists observing the swinging London scene. I was practically knocked
down by a stampede of perspiring correspondents as I stepped out of Galt’s toyshop the
other day holding a doll I’d bought for the children.
‘Holy heaven, it’s Actor Terry Stamp, 26, in mini-wig and PVC spectacles!’ screamed the
reporter from Time magazine. ‘And he’s squiring diminutive dolly Cathy McGowan, 22, in
an eight-inches-above-the-knee, Campari-red skirtlet, spectre-pale make-up, and kinky
wobble-as-you-walk celluloid eyelids! I love you, Terry!’
‘Are you crazy?’ shouted the representative of Status magazine. ‘That’s Jean Shrimpton
in a trouser-suit, carrying Vidal Sassoon in newly groovy Now-We-Are-Six gear! Swinging,
Shrimp, swinging!’
‘No, listen!’ cried the Esquire man, reading the label round the dolly’s neck. ‘This is
some new couple altogether called Non Toxic and Fully Washable! Hey, these are two
totally unknown faces making the scene, boys!’
At this they all came crowding round, gazing at me and the doll as if they were going to
eat us.
‘Look at his trousers!’ breathed the Chicago Tribune. ‘Two and a half inches above the
shoe!’
‘Two and three-quarter inches,’ said Associated Press, getting down on his hands and
knees with a pocket rule.
‘But only on the right leg!’ pointed out NBC excitedly. ‘The left trouser leg’s practically
trailing on the ground! Boys, this is the newest thing since yesterday, if not this morning!’
‘And how about this – bags under the knees!’ cried the Daily News. ‘Zowie! Back in
New York they’re still wearing their bags under the eyes! I tell you, these kids’ll drive us
into the sea!’
‘Central button of jacket hanging on three-inch thread!’ noted someone else.
‘Two inches of shirt-tail worn outside bellyband of trousers!’
Well, they all started shouting questions and trying to photograph me up the leg of my
trousers. I gazed at them, stupefied.
‘The guy can’t understand,’ cried the Wall Street Journal. ‘Where the hell’s the
interpreter? Where’s Jonathan Miller?’
 ‘Leave it to me!’ shouted Time magazine. ‘I know these people’s patois.’
He turned to me and the doll.
‘Greetings, British bird and British Beatle!’ he said very slowly, waving his hands about.
‘You – with it, yes? You – making scene, no?’
‘I’m not making a scene,’ I replied nervously. ‘I was just suddenly set on by all you lot.’
‘He says he’s set-on,’ reported Time magazine to the others. ‘That’s the now-now-now
phrase for switched-on,’
‘“Set” spelt S-E-T and “on” spelt O-N, Henry?’ they asked him, writing it all carefully
down.
‘Hey, listen, boys! The dolly’s saying something! What’s she saying, Henry?’
‘She’s saying “Mama.”’
‘“Mama” spelt M-A-M-A, Henry?’
‘Right. What she’s trying to get across is that today she is able to lead a deeply fulfilled
life, thanks to the ready availability of artificial eyelashes and the policy of successive
British Governments in granting independence to the country’s overseas possessions.’
They wrote it all down. I took advantage of the pause to explain that unfortunately I had
to go.
‘“Go”, is short for “go, go, go,” of course,’ explained Time magazine. ‘I think what he’s
trying to say is that in this swinging new meritocratic young Britain the handsome young
son of a peer can breeze up to the chemmy tables and lose a cool four or five hundred
thousand dollars in a night as easily and naturally as the humblest mill-girl in Bolton.’
‘Where’s he go-go-going to, Henry?’ asked the St Louis Post-Dispatch. ‘Annabel’s? The
Scotch?’
‘British Beatle,’ translated Time magazine to me, ‘Where you make the scene along
towards?’
I said I was on my way to Oxford Circus Tube Station. They all looked it up on the map
of The Scene in Time.
‘It’s not marked, Henry!’ they cried.
‘Don’t worry, fellers – I know all about it. It’ll be on the next edition of the map.
‘What is it, Henry – a boutique or a discotheque?’
‘It’s a Tube station, men – “Tube” meaning “groove”, of course. It’s a sort of
groovotheque.’
‘What kind of set does he meet down there, Henry? Gamine Leslie Caron, 34? Ace
Photographer David Bailey, 27? Or daughter of former Ambassador to the US Lady Jane
Ormsby-Gore, 23?’
I explained that the circle I moved in (though on the whole not in Oxford Circus
Underground Station) consisted of Christopher and Lavinia Crumble, Horace and Doris
Morris, and people like that. There were gasps of astonishment from the Press corps.
‘Suffering saints!’ they cried. ‘This is clearly some inner scene not as yet made by US
newsmen, which opens up entirely fresh dimensions of fabness, and brings within the
reach of long-suffering mankind the hope of a whole gear universe of prime-quality
grooviness!’
But just at that moment they saw Peter O’Toole coming by in bell-bottomed lederhosen
and aluminium Boy Scout hat, and my fashionable career was over.
The dolly’s been right off her food ever since.

(1966)

At the sign of the rupture belt

There’s the shop with the rupture belt outside! (said Nicolette). Now we’ve driven
halfway to Granny’s, haven’t we, Daddy?
Father: Halfway exactly.
Nicolette: I always remember we’re halfway when we get to the shop with the rupture
belt outside, don’t I, Daddy?
Dominic: And I always remember we’re three-quarters way when we get to Acme Motors,
don’t I, Daddy?

Mother: I wish you two would stop your silly pestering. I don’t know why we bring you out
in the car to Granny’s.

Father: It’s good for them to travel, Eileen. They see new things. They get something
fresh to talk about.
Dominic: There’s the factory with the rusty bike on the roof!
Nicolette: There’s the advertisement for Viriloids Rejuvenating Pills!
Dominic: There’s the Tigers!
Mother: The what?
Dominic: The Tigers! That’s what we always call the Lyons there, don’t we, Daddy?
Father: We certainly do, son. And there’s the brewery where they brew the Adam’s ale.
Nicolette: Daddy always says that now when we pass the Wemblemore waterworks,
doesn’t he, Dominic? He never used to, did he?
Father: What’s this place on the right, children?
Dominic: I know! I know! It’s the site for the new eye hospital.
Nicolette: Say your joke, Daddy, say your joke!
Father: It’s a proper site for sore eyes.
Nicolette: Did you hear Daddy say his joke, Mummy?
Mother: Are we in Sudstow yet, John?
Dominic: Mummy, you never know where this is. You always ask Daddy if we’re in
Sudstow when we get to the site for sore eyes.

Father: Where are we then, Mr Knowall?

Dominic: We’re just coming to the place where we saw the drunk men fighting –
Nicolette: – where Daddy always says: ‘Can you imagine a more godforsaken hole than
this?’
Dominic: And Mummy says she can’t.
Father: We’re just coming into Surley, Eileen.
Dominic: And you’re not sure, are you, Daddy, but you think Wemblemore ends and Surley
begins just after Wile-U-Wate Footwear Repairs, don’t you?
Father: Look at it, Eileen. Scruffy people, cheapjack stores, rundown cinemas. I wonder
how many pubs there are in this street alone?

Dominic: There are nine, Daddy.

Nicolette: We always count them for you.
Father: Can you imagine a more godforsaken hole?
Nicolette: Daddy said it, Dominic.
Dominic: Now say you can’t, Mummy.
Mother: Oh, do stop pestering. Can’t you think of some game to play as we go along?
Dominic: We are playing a game, Mummy. But you’re not playing it properly.
Nicolette: You haven’t said you can’t imagine such a godforsaken hole, has she, Dominic?
Mother: Those children! They’re enough to try the patience of a saint!
Father: There’s Acme Motors, anyway – we’re three-quarters of the way there now.
Dominic: Daddy! That’s what I say! I’m the one who sees Acme Motors and says we’re
three-quarters of the way there!

Nicolette: Yes, Daddy, that’s Dominic’s thing to say!

Father: Well, I’ve said it now.
Nicolette: But that’s not fair, Daddy! You say: ‘I hope to God there’s not going to be a
holdup in Sudstow High Street.’
Dominic: You’ve spoilt it, Daddy, you’ve spoilt it! You’ve said my thing!
Nicolette: Now you’ve made Dominic cry.
Father: Calm down, Dominic. Be your age.
Dominic: How would you like it if I said your things? How would you like it if I said ‘A site
for sore eyes’?

Mother: Don’t be disrespectful to your father, Dominic.

Dominic: I don’t care! A site for sore eyes! A site for sore eyes! A site for sore eyes!
Mother: If you don’t stop this instant, Dominic, I’m going to …
Nicolette: Daddy, Daddy! We’ve gone past Cook and Cook (Wholesale Tobacconists) and
you haven’t said your joke about spoiling the breath!
Father: Oh, dry up.
Mother: Now they’re both howling. It’s all your fault, John. They just copy you.
Father: That’s what you always say.
Mother: And that’s what you always say!
Father: Well, all I can say is, I hope to God there’s not going to be a holdup in Sudstow
High Street.

(1963)
The bar sinister
According to usually reliable gossip columns, considerable efforts are being made to clean
up the Hotel Petersberg, outside Bonn, where the Queen will stay on her visit to Germany.
Apparently they’re taking down ‘all the usual hotel signs, such as bar and toilet’.
Experts have long known about the suggestiveness of the word ‘toilet’, of course. Which
of us, indeed, has not crept past the sign in some lewd five-star hotel, his eyes averted, a
crimson blush mantling his cheek for very shame?
The obscene connotations of the word ‘bar’ for the moment elude me, I must admit. Bar
… BAR … No, I don’t quite get the full lascivious frisson. I see the objections to ‘public
bar’, of course; the L might drop out of ‘public’ just as the Queen walked by. There’s
something vaguely indecent about ‘saloon bar’, too – I think it’s the combination of the sal
of ‘salacious’ with the oon of ‘spittoon’.
I’m sure there’s no need to mention what the ‘private’ parts of ‘private bar’ call to mind
for a person of sensitivity. As for ‘c-cktail bar’, I’m astonished that it has ever been
allowed, even in places where only commoners would see it. How many perfectly common
folk must have staggered back in astonishment and disgust from the ‘c-tktail bar’ sign,
only to find themselves among the tasteless liberties of the Off Licence?
I’ve just seen what’s wrong with ‘BAR’. Heh, heh, heh! Hnuh, hnuh, hnuh! Got it? No?
Boys, there’s a feller here who can’t see anything dirty in the word ‘BAR’! Shnuh, shnuh,
shnuh!
No? All right, I’ll take pity on your simplicity. Stand well back from the page. Close one
eye, and screw up the other until everything begins to look fuzzy. Now, look at the word
‘BAR’. Got it? The A and the R appear to change places, so that the word seems to read
‘BRA’! If that’s not an indecent announcement I don’t know what is. Some member of the
royal party, returning after a hard day’s hand-shaking, screwing up their eyes in the
sudden twinkle of lights behind the Campari bottles, might easily get it smack across their
consciousness.
Did I say C-mpari bottles? Correction; all the alleged C-mpari bottles will have been
hidden in the cellars. On display in the bar there’ll be nothing but a lot of Bols. Sorry – a
lot of B-ls is just what there won’t be. I mean brandy. What? Brandy spelt b. randy?
Curaçao and curaçao! They’ll be shouting for large highballs next.
Now, wait a moment. You may think it doesn’t matter all that much what the Queen sees
or doesn’t see. Do you know the story about the Labouchère Amendment, which first
made male homosexual behaviour a criminal offence? According to the reforming journals
I read, it was originally drafted to include female homosexuality as well. But when they
showed it to Queen Victoria she objected on the grounds that female homosexuality was
impossible, and since no one had the courage to enlighten her, the amendment became
only half as brutal as had been intended.
Now had the Queen enjoyed a really pure upbringing, and not been allowed to catch
glimpses of signs saying ‘Public Conveniences’ as she forayed forth among her people, she
wouldn’t have known that male homosexuality was on the cards, either, and the whole
amendment would have been frustrated.
But back to the Hotel Petersberg. Did I tell you that the word ‘service’ is being deleted
from the Queen’s bill, in view of its connotation in the field of animal husbandry?
They’re taking all the numbers off the doors, too. They started with the sixes, since ‘six’
in German is sechs (they’re much more outspoken about these things on the Continent).
Afterwards the Palace said they weren’t too happy about elf, zwölf, or zwanzig, either.
Just a feeling that there might be something a bit off-colour here if they’d known more
German.
Then they admitted frankly that they weren’t entirely easy in their minds about fünf,
acht and neun. And then they thought, hell, in for a penny, in for a pound – why have naked
figures prancing about the corridors at all? By the time the royal party arrives the whole
hotel will be in a very decent state. All through the livelong night gentlemen will be
stealing along the passages trying the anonymous doors, searching for the t--l-t, and
bursting instead by mistake into the rooms of unchaperoned single ladies.
The unchaperoned single ladies, I trust, will scream in discreet tones about their h-n--r,
and flee in their delectable diaphanous nightgowns to seek sanctuary in the M-n-g-r’s
Office. By a pardonable error in the circumstances, they will almost certainly rush
headlong into the G-ntl-m-n’s L-v-t-ry, where a merry party will be in occupation already,
leaning their elbows on the wash-basins and knocking back glass after glass of water,
shouting ‘Set ’em up again, b-rm-n!’ and selling each other potash concessions in Eastern
Bohemia.
Meanwhile, sitting round the extraordinary vast green table with six pockets in what
they erroneously take to be the R-st--r-nt, the royal party waits patiently for dinner to
appear …

(1965)

The battle of the books

The literary quiz game on BBC2 ‘Take It or Leave It,’ is driving me into the depressives’
ward.
They read extracts from well-known books to a panel of four, some of them apparently
ordinary people much like you and me, who try to identify the extracts and then discuss
them. So far, since I’ve been watching, it’s turned out that almost all the panel have read
almost every book which has come up, not to mention all the author’s other works as well.
But I haven’t read a single one of them. Not a solitary book that’s been mentioned on
the programme since I’ve been watching have I read.
I sit in front of the darkened set long after the programme has finished, sunk into a
melancholic trance, waiting for my wife to talk me back to a state of reason.
‘You may not have read the books,’ she says, ‘but you guessed some of them. Or at any
rate, you almost guessed some of them. Now that really is an achievement, almost
guessing a book you haven’t read.’
I groan faintly.
‘That bit of Kafka that none of them knew – as soon as the word “Kafka” came up on the
screen you shouted “Christ! I was going to say Capek! I got the right country!”
‘I shouted that, did I?’
‘Certainly you did, I’m sure you’d have got a lot more right if you hadn’t had to jump up
and shout it out so hurriedly before the title came up on the screen.’
‘What about the time I shouted “Charlotte Brontë” and it turned out to be Rider
Haggard?’
‘Everyone makes mistakes. But what about the time you shouted 1984 and it turned out
to be Brave New World? That was very close.’
‘I meant to shout “Brave New World,” as a matter of fact.’
‘So you kept shouting afterwards.’
‘I got over-excited. Shouted the wrong word.’
‘Exactly. You were terribly good. And even if you hadn’t read any of the books, you’d
read reviews of some of them.’
‘Oh, I’d read reviews of some of them.’
‘Anyway, there’s reading and reading. I expect this lot just skim through books at great
speed, without really taking them in at all. Now when you read you really read. You frown.
You breathe hard. You take an extremely long time to get through a page.’
‘Don’t tell me.’
‘It took you nine months to read War and Peace,’
‘I was an old man by the time I’d finished.’
 ‘And six months of travelling back and forth between London and Manchester, with
sleepless nights on the sleeper and interminable hours waiting for delayed planes, to get
through Ulysses. Now that’s what I call reading.’
‘Have I read Ulysses?’
‘Certainly you have.’
‘Ah. That’s one that might well come up on the programme.’
‘Exactly.’
‘About a man in Dublin, is it? Kind of stream of consciousness?’
‘That’s right – with a green cover. That’s what I mean. All that lot tore through Ulysses
one wet games afternoon in the fourth form. But when you read a book it really gets right
down into your subconscious like some infantile trauma. You can’t remember a word of it.’
‘That’s true.’
‘Anyway, you know all about all sorts of things they don’t. You know about Wittgenstein,
and – well – Wittgenstein …’
‘Oh God, so do they!’
‘That lot? Know about Wittgenstein? Don’t make me laugh.’
‘You really think they don’t?’
‘They don’t know the first thing about him.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Seriously.’
‘No, they know about Wittgenstein all right. You can’t get away from it – I simply don’t
read enough books.’
‘You’ve read at least four this year.’
‘They were only paperback.’
‘They were the paperbacks of the hardbacks everyone said were the best books of the
year.’
‘Yes – of the year before last.’
‘You’re only two years behind.’
‘I’m slipping further back all the time. At this rate I won’t be reading this year’s books
until 1970.’
‘Why don’t you miss out a year or two? Otherwise you’re only going to be getting round
to books just as everyone realises how bad they are after all. You know how that
depresses you.’
‘But what about the backlog from earlier years?’
‘You mean Defoe and Smollett and Richardson?’
‘Exactly.’
‘And Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, and Boswell’s Life of Johnson and Carlyle’s essay on
Boswell, and Froude’s Life of Carlyle …?’
‘That’s enough. Don’t run on about it.’
‘Couldn’t you skip, like everybody else?’
‘Skip? Me? With my completion neurosis?’
‘Well, couldn’t you possibly start reading now, instead of just talking about it?’
‘What? With my depression syndrome?’
‘Oh well, never mind. One of these days they’ll do a book you’ve read.’

(1964)

Black whimsy
The Fabulous
£EARN-TO-RITE
Postal Course
£earn now, then earn £s!
 Lesson 7 – £EARN-TO-RITE
BLACK COMEDY!

So-called ‘black’ comedy is much in demand these days, and anyone who has the knowhow
to provide the right sort of goods has a first-rate chance of hitting the jackpot. Of course,
as any seasoned writer will tell you, there’s nothing new under the sun. For many, many
years now West End comedies have touched humorously upon such subjects as death,
senility, insanity, prostitution, and sexual assault. But in the old days plays of this sort were
known as ‘saucy comedies,’ ‘whimsical comedies,’ and ‘comedy-thrillers.’ To serve these
subjects up in their modern guise as ‘black’ comedy a few simple rules must be learned.
But first – a word of warning. We are on dangerous ground here. One wrong step, and
we shall find ourselves guilty of the sort of tasteless work which could appeal only to a
perverted sense of humour, and which could be put on only at private theatre clubs of the
less desirable sort.
Be daring, yes. Be shocking, by all means. But never, never, never be disgusting. The
line is a fine one. Your job is to get as close to it as you can, without once crossing it. Be
naughty – but don’t be nasty!
Remember what we learnt in Lesson 4, £EARN-TO-RITE COLOUR NUDIES!, and
Lesson 5, £EARN-TO-RITE GOLDEN-HEARTED WHORE PLAYS! The audience are
paying to be teased, not to be shown anything indecent, or to be read a lecture on the
sociology of prostitution. Remember, teasing demands a £IGHT TOUCH!
All right? All right, then. The key to black comedy is our old friend
PARADOX!
Remember PARADOX? We came across it in Lesson 3, £EARN-TO-RITE A
SHAFTESBURY AVENUE PLAY! We decided that once you’d got the knack, there was no
easier way of filling three acts than a generous supply of paradoxes. We used them in
comedies (‘You can’t imagine how hard it is to be a woman of easy virtue!’ ‘Oh, this life will
be the death, of me!’). We used them in Shaftesbury Avenue serious plays (Paul: But don’t
you see! Only by living in the world can we withdraw from the world! Only by rising above
ourselves can we truly be ourselves! Only by stating the self-evidently false can we tell the
truth! Leonie: Oh, Paul, we belong to each other, utterly! Now I shall go and tell Xavier I
will marry him).
But in modern black comedy verbal paradox is unfortunately more or less ruled out.
Among the lower and lower-middle classes, where black comedy takes place, people do
not, alas, have the education to talk in paradoxes. Instead we use character paradox and
action paradox. At first sight these may seem strange and difficult. But as we look at some
examples, you will see that they are knacks which anyone can quickly pick up. The trick is
to think of the stereotype – to think of the cliché character, the cliché action – and then

WRITE EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE!

You have a father and. son in the play? All right, then, how do stereotype sons behave?
They respect their fathers, right? So you make your son devastatingly rude to his father!
The father’s a widower? Stereotype widowers speak tenderly of their dead wives, so make
yours refer to his as a bitch! Got used to the idea of his calling her a bitch? Make him start
calling her an angel!
Get the idea? Try this one.
Favourite son returns home after six years in America to introduce his charming young
wife to his old father. What’s the father’s reaction? Obviously, tears of joy, speeches of
welcome. So put a minus sign in front of it! Have Dad launch into a blistering tirade,
telling his son to get himself and his filthy whore out of the house!
Easy enough for you? There’s easier to come.
Suppose one of the characters suddenly, without warning, drops dead (and why not?).
Do the other characters show astonishment or concern? They do not. Do they show relief
or malicious pleasure, then? Certainly not – this is black comedy, not ‘The Curse of the
Vampire.’ Their reaction is the £EARN-TO-RITE Black Comedy Special –

NONE!
It’s as simple as that! Everyone just goes on talking as if nothing had happened. Perhaps
they have a brief, desultory discussion as to whether the corpse is still breathing or not.
Otherwise –

NOTHING!
The audience will gasp!
Another example. Someone starts making love to a woman whose husband is present.
How does the husband react? Does he hit the intruder, become embarrassed, storm out of
the room? All these reactions are tired and obvious. We want something brand-new, the
£EARN-TO-RITE Special –

NO REACTION!
Let’s take it further. The wife (mother of three; husband a university professor) is
invited by her father-in-law and two brothers-in-law to set up as their joint mistress, and
to keep them all by becoming a prostitute. Gasp, gasp – titter, titter. But wait! How does
she respond? With horror? Embarrassment? Prurient curiosity? Not if she’s done the
£EARN-TO-RITE Black Comedy Course! She responds with NOTHING, apart from
insisting that as a prostitute she’ll need a flat with at least three rooms!
Fantastic, you say? Fantastically simple! This is nothing less than BUILT-IN
ORIGINALITY! Now work through these exercises on your own:

1. Fred, a foreman welder, stumbles and drops his father’s coffin on top of his bedridden
mother. Does he (a) make desperate attempts to free her, or (b) begin to apply rust-
remover to the lavatory cistern?
2. René, a middle-aged pessimist, comes downstairs to fill her hot-water battle and finds
her slow-witted sister Lou helping herself to one of the family’s Rich Tea biscuits.
Does she (a) go on into the kitchen, muttering, or (b) beat Lou’s epicene husband to
death with the hot-water bottle?

(1965)

Bodbury: the nation waits

Any moment now (said Brian Bright, the well-known television personality), any moment
now the candidates and the returning officer will be appearing on that small balcony there
on the front of the Town Hall, and we shall hear the result, we shall hear the result of the
Bodbury byelection. There’s been a series of delays – the announcement was expected
much earlier than this – but I think, we think, we’ve had word that the result of the
Bodbury byelection, the result, here, in Bodbury, of the byelection, the Bodbury
byelection, should be coming through very shortly.
When it does, the returning officer will come through that door, at the back of the
balcony. With him will be the three candidates. All three of them, with the returning
officer, will come on to the balcony, through the door at the back. And it’ll be on that
balcony, the one you can see there, on the front of the Town Hall, that he, that the
returning officer, will announce the result, the result of the Bodbury byelection.
I think there must be another delay. There’s no sign of them. We heard, we learnt a few
minutes ago that the returning officer would be coming out very shortly, but there’s still no
sign of him, so I think we must conclude – because we did hear he was on his way and he
hasn’t come – I think we must conclude that there’s some delay.
I’ll take the opportunity to remind you that we’re in front of the Town Hall at Bodbury,
waiting for the result of the byelection, the Bodbury byelection. There’s great speculation
here about the result among the very large and cheerful crowd in the square – or there
was, until they all went home to bed. It could be a Conservative victory, if the Liberal and
Labour candidates haven’t done as well as they might. It could be a win for Labour, with
the Conservatives at the bottom of the poll – depending on how well the Liberals have
done. Or, of course, the Liberal swing could have put the Liberal in, if it was strong
enough, if it was strong enough to put the Liberal in.
Well, here we are, then, still waiting for the result, for the result of the Bodbury
byelection. If the swing to Labour is more marked than the trend to Liberal, or vice versa,
then there’s a chance, I think there’s a fair chance, that he, whichever one it is, may profit
from it – that’s to say, from the swing. Or the trend, of course. If not, then, of course, not.
And if the inevitable midterm dissatisfaction with the Government means, as it may, that
the Conservative gets fewer votes than other candidates, then I think there’s a pretty
strong possibility he won’t get in.
We spoke to a Conservative voter earlier in the evening, here in the main square, and
asked him which way he had voted, and he said Conservative. I think that may be a
pointer, it may be some sort of indication. I think it may go to show that if the trend shown
at Bodbury is followed throughout the rest of the country, then the result here may be a
guide to the way the trend is going. But if the result here is not going to be repeated in
other constituencies, then it’s no use, no use at all, taking it as any sort of guide.
We shall know, of course, when the results are brought out, in the traditional way,
through that door at the back of the balcony, by the returning officer, who will open the
door at the back of the balcony, and come out with the candidates, through the door, to
read the results, from the balcony.
Still no sign. If the absence of swing, either to the left or to the right, shown by the door
at the back of the balcony, is any pointer at all, it points, it points to a natural midterm
dissatisfaction among returning officers with bringing the result through the door at the
back of the balcony, and indicates a growing trend, a fast-growing trend, to the sort of
situation where all three of the candidates are left to swing from the front of the balcony,
there, on the Town Hall, and we can all go home and have breakfast, have breakfast in a
beautiful totalitarian silence …

(1962)

Bodbury speaks out!

BODBURY BYELECTION RESULT

F. Muncher (Lab.) 14,931

J. P. R. Cramshaw-Bollington (C) 8,101
S. W. Dearfellow (L) 7,123

Labour majority 6,830

(General election:
Lab. 23,987; C 16,021; L 9,980. Lab. maj. – 7,966)

F. Muncher: It’s a wonderful result. Not only have we held the seat, but we have
increased our share of the poll – a real smack in the eye for the Government. The voters
of Bodbury have told Mr Macmillan and his friends in no uncertain terms what they think
of the Government’s record on such things as the Common Market (or will have done, as
soon as we have actually decided which policy on this question it was that our supporters
were voting for). And if you take our vote in conjunction with the Liberal vote, it’s evident
that there is a definite anti-Tory majority in Bodbury.
J. P. R. Cramshaw-Bollington:I’m absolutely delighted with the result. At a time when
the pendulum traditionally swings against the party in office, we’ve slashed the Labour
majority in this Labour stronghold. I take this as a most encouraging vote of confidence in
the Government – a message from the people of Bodbury to Mr Macmillan, urging him to
carry on with the good work, whatever it may be. And taking the increased Liberal vote
into account, its evident that there is a definite anti-Socialist majority in Bodbury.
S. W. Dearfellow: The result couldn’t be better. Our share of the vote is up sharply,
while the numbers of votes polled by both the Labour and Conservative candidates have
slumped heavily. This is Bodbury’s way of saying ‘A plague on both your houses – we want
to have it both ways with the Liberals.’ And if you take the Liberal vote in conjunction with
either the Labour or the Conservative vote, you can see that either way we’ve got a clear
anti-extremist majority.
Sprout: Thank you, gentlemen. Now, what do the commentators think about the
national significance of the Bodbury result? Haddock?
Haddock: Well, it should give real encouragement to the Liberals. But then again, it
might be said that though they have gained, they have gained much less than might have
been expected. And since anyway the gain will almost certainly disappear again at a
general election, I feel they should temper their encouragement with a feeling of
disappointment.
Trouncer: I interpret the quite noticeable fall in the Labour majority as a clear
endorsement of the Government’s position on manganese quotas. However, this fall was
accompanied by an increase in Labour’s share of the vote, which suggests to me a
movement of Conservative supporters who have become disillusioned by the
Government’s record on departmental procedure reform.
Pinn: Though since the actual size of the Labour vote fell, this movement may have
been accompanied by the abstention of Labour voters disillusioned with the Opposition’s
record on the same question. Or perhaps with Harold Wilson’s personality. Or George
Brown’s face.
Sprout: To me, I must say, the real meaning of Bodbury lies in the reduction of the
Conservative vote, which spells out in words of one syllable comprehensible to even the
dullest back-bencher that there is no support in the country for the Government’s
lukewarm attitude to Chile.
Haddock: Possibly. The permutations are endless. And when one considers the local
factors …
Trouncer: … the possibility that Fred Muncher’s local reputation as deputy chairman of
the Bodbury Amateur Weight-Lifters’ Association was cancelled out by xenophobic
suspicion of his living a quarter of a mile outside the constituency boundary …
Pinn: … and whether the Liberal gain from middle-class resentment against credit
restrictions stopping the building of a new cricket pavilion was balanced by the
propaganda effect of the Cramshaw-Bollington Dogs’ Home founded by the Conservative
candidate’s father …
Haddock: … and whether the rain in the morning hindered the Tories more than the fog
in the evening deterred the Socialists …
Sprout: … one realises that there is plenty of scope yet for imaginative conjecture
about what the voters thought they were voting for, provided no unspeakable blackleg
actually goes and finds out by asking them,

(1962)

Brought to book
The literary life, which I have largely managed, to avoid for my forty years as a
professional writer, finally caught up on me with a, rush last Tuesday afternoon. At about
two o’clock my publishers rang to tell me that my novel Headlong was on the Booker
shortlist. At about three o’clock someone announcing himself as the Arts Correspondent of
the Guardian rang to tell me that I had been accused of plagiarism.
I was shaken, I have to admit. But not entirely displeased. This is what happens to
writers in serious departments of the literary world, such as the Booker shortlist. They
get accused of things. They hurl the accusations back in their accusers’ teeth. There are
rows and fights, and people don’t speak to each other. No one had ever bothered to
accuse me of plagiarism before. I had got somewhere in life at last.
And it was all happening with such breathtaking speed. I had been elevated to the
literary peerage at two, and disgraced at three. This really was life in the fast lane.
Even more astonishing was that the accusation apparently came from one of the Booker
judges themselves. The Arts Correspondent of the Guardian said he had been talking to
John Sutherland, who had told him that my novel bore suspicious similarities to a story by
Roald Dahl.
‘In your novel‚’ he said, ‘there is a picture being used as a soot-guard in a fireplace.
Yes?’ I couldn’t deny it. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘in this story by Dahl there is apparently a piece of
Chippendale up a chimney.’
Soot-guard in a fireplace – Chippendale up a chimney. It looked black, I had to admit –
and not just the picture or the Chippendale, but the whole case against me. I did indeed
recall a story by Dahl which featured a furniture-dealer buying some valuable piece of
furniture, possibly by Chippendale, off an ignorant yokel, though I couldn’t recall the item
in question being up a chimney at any point.
‘But the soot?’ I queried keenly. ‘Was the Chippendale stopping the soot coming down
the chimney?’ Because if I could show that this crucial element in my version was original,
it occurred to me – if it turned out that Dahl’s Chippendale was stopping, say, Father
Christmas rather than soot from coming down the chimney – then I had a complete answer
to the charge.
The Arts Correspondent of the Guardian said he would find out and call me back. When
he did he reported that he had misunderstood what John Sutherland had told him. There
was no Chippendale up a chimney. The Chippendale-up-the-chimney charge had been
totally withdrawn by the prosecution. What was now alleged was some general similarity
between my plot and Dahl’s.
This was even more baffling than the Chippendale up the chimney. I could remember
the outlines of Dahl’s plot, even if not the exact location of the furniture. Dealer cunningly
persuades yokel that the Chippendale is valueless except as firewood – yokel obligingly
chops it up while the dealer fetches his van. In my novel dealer and yokel are replaced by
art historian and landowner. Art historian keeps his identification of landowner’s picture
as a missing Bruegel to himself; same story so far, I have to confess. Landowner, however,
far from chopping it up, either literally or figuratively, becomes interested in it, in spite of
art historian’s dissembling, and tries to work out its correct identification for himself.
I explained this to the Arts Correspondent of the Guardian. ‘This is the Booker,’ he said
apologetically. ‘You have to expect this kind of thing.’ He went off to take further
instruction. Half-an-hour later he was back on the line. ‘Martin!’ he greeted me, in what
sounded like some excitement. Martin? We seemed to be getting into very deep water
indeed. Martin is the art historian in my novel. The Arts Correspondent of the Guardian
was trying to phone my character to ask him whether he had been plagiarised! But this is
exactly the kind of thing that happens in the higher reaches of the literary life! Fact and
fiction turn out to be in some profound sense inextricably intertwined!
And I thought, ‘This Arts Correspondent is no fool. He knows that Martin is the
narrator of the story. He has information suggesting that it was Martin with his fingers in
the till!’
 I explained that he had got the wrong number, and that I was not Martin but Michael –
Martin’s author, certainly, but not responsible for his torts, surely, since Martin was of age
and of sound mind. I urged him to ring Martin direct.
But when I open the Guardian next morning, there are our pictures. Not Dahl’s and
Martin’s, but Dahl’s and mine. Our names, as they say, have now been linked in the press.
You can see from the reflective expression on Dahl’s face that he is busy thinking up an
original plot. You can see from the sly expression on mine that I am busy stealing it.
The pictures are illustrating John Sutherland’s column. In the text Sutherland retails the
accusation as an example of the kind of ridiculous nonsense that is probably going to be
confected about the Booker finalists. ‘Perhaps,’ he says, as if he might actually believe it
himself, ‘the story lodged forgotten, like some old Bruegel, in the attic of the novelist’s
mind.’ Though it’s just as likely, he agrees, that the resemblance is ‘purely accidental’.
So there the case rests. It may be plagiarism; on the other hand it may not be. What
John Sutherland is too modest to mention is my much clearer and even more blatant
plagiarism of him. There are glaring similarities between my book and his own excellent
biography of Mrs Humphry Ward. Mrs Ward lives in a large house; so does the landowner
in my story. Mrs Ward’s house is in the country; so is my landowner’s! Mrs Ward had
difficult relations with her son; so does my landowner! In fact he has difficult relations
with two sons, which by my calculation makes him twice as plagiarised as if he’d only had
one.
Martin has obviously been up to his tricks again.
As the headline on John Sutherland’s column says, You Couldn’t Make It Up.

(1999)

Business worries
Children and animals are always reckoned to be the great scene-stealers against whom
actors are reluctant to compete. But to my mind the greatest scene-stealer of all in films is
a corpse.
Whatever the other attractions on the screen, if there’s a corpse about I gaze at it
fixedly. I have a nagging ambition to catch the actor who plays the corpse breathing when
he thinks everyone’s forgotten about him. A small ambition for a grown man, I dare say,
but it gives me a hobby.
No luck so far, though I may have blinked just at the crucial moment. I suppose those
bodies are actors holding their breath? It’s not all faked up somehow with corpses rented
out from the mortuary and just made up to look like actors holding their breath? I must
write in and ask the fan magazines.
Anyway, it shows you how relaxed and secure one can be in the cinema, knowing
nothing can really go wrong except the projector or the air-conditioning. It’s a very
different matter in the theatre. One wouldn’t dare so much as glance at a corpse on the
stage. After that great sword-fight all the way up the set and back one knows the poor
man’s bosom must be heaving up and down like a piledriver. One wouldn’t dream of
embarrassing him by looking. Anyway, he might feel one’s eye on him and start to cough.
No doubt, for that matter, he’s fallen with one leg agonisingly doubled up – on his keys –
with his ruff tickling his nose. His whole situation doesn’t really bear thinking about too
much.
All the time in the theatre one is waiting aghast for some embarrassing disaster to
occur. Whenever there’s a pause, one starts praying they’re not going to forget their lines,
or be taken ill on the stage. It’s like walking through a minefield. Every day in the papers
one reads about actors having heart attacks in the middle of their performance, breaking
their legs, getting their heads split open in the fights, knocking themselves out against the
scenery, and generally making a spectacle of themselves. At any moment, one feels there
might be some sort of scene.
Audience anxiety reaches a peak, as all sado-masochistic directors know, whenever the
cast indulge in one of those little bits of business which depend on physical dexterity, or
the workings of some notoriously fallible machine. My heart leaps into my mouth every
time somebody offers to light somebodys else’s cigarette with a lighter. Flick – it fails to
light! Flick – and again it doesn’t light! Flick – look intently at ceiling, think about
something else.
Flick – there’s no logical reason why we shouldn’t be stuck here all night, not daring to
breathe, while he grinds away at the thing. Flick – will he give up after ten flameless
flicks? After a hundred? Flick – praise heaven, there’s a flame!
But now they’re both shaking so much they can’t get the flame and the cigarette to
meet! Yes! No! Yes – they’ve done it! ‘Ah, that’s better,’ she sighs contentedly, blowing out
a thoughtful column of smoke. But, crumbling sanity, there is no smoke! The cigarette’s
gone out again!
One’s palms sweat. Of course, one keeps telling oneself that it doesn’t really matter,
because no one nowadays expects a naïvely literal realism in the theatre. One wants to
see the figures on the stage both as the actors acting and the characters acted. In a sense,
of course, one’s consciousness of this valuable duality is if anything heightened when one
or two little things go slightly …
Oh God, he’s not going to throw her the revolver! Of course, they rehearse these things
for weeks … She’s dropped it. Now she’s picked it up – she’s carrying bravely on. Don’t
feel you need to be brave on my account, dear. Honestly, it didn’t embarrass me a bit. No,
I had my eyes shut. I mean, I know I caught my breath when he threw it, but … I suppose
you can’t possibly have heard me catching my breath, can you? I mean, it wasn’t my
catching my breath that made you …? Oh, God!
I have a haunting fear that one night when I’m present some piece of business is going
to go so completely wrong that the play as written cannot proceed at all, and the actors
will be reduced to improvising some new line of development entirely. Take the famous
Locket scene at the end of ‘Error for Error,’ when young Ferdinand shows Duke Oregano
and the assembled court the locket which proves he is the Duke’s son, carried off at birth
by a waterspout. Suppose that after the lines –
A locket sav’d I from that spoutsorne day,
Most curiously incrib’d. I have it here.
Ferdinand tosses the vital instrument to the Duke, and the Duke fumbles it and drops it out
of sight. What can they do, except make the rest of the scene up as they go along?

DUKE: Alas! Methinks I have misfinger’d it!

FERDINAND: Sire, bend thou down thine aged frame
And do thou smartly pluck it up again.
DUKE: Bend as I might, I cannot see the thing.
My lords, do you explore your cloggy beards.
No sign? Ah me, I fear it must have roll’d
Amid this mazy grove of cardboard trees.
FERDINAND: Was not one glance as it came winging by
Enough to grasp the general sense of it?
– That here before thee stands thy long-lost son?
DUKe: A fig for your problems – what worrieth me
Is how I speak my major speech, which starts:
‘Come, locket, let me kiss thee for thy pains,
And taste the savour of fidelity,’
 Without the bloody locket. Come, let’s shift
This forest. Take the yonder end and heave.
FERDINAND: Is this meet welcome for a long-lost son?
DUKE: Meet welcome for a long-lost son, forsooth!
What kind of long-lost son is this, that chucks
Essential props outside my senile reach,
And cuts his long-lost father’s longest speech?
Lose thee again, son, till thou learnst at last
The art of throwing props and not the cast.

(1964)
Can you hear me, mother?
I enjoy the woman’s page of the Guardian. Unlike the men’s pages of newspapers, where
Interdepartmental Committees are Set Up, Machine Tool Prospects Look Brighter, and
Proposals Deserve Careful Consideration, it seems to be concerned with individual human
beings.
One has an impression of particular women, struggling with children and consciences
and loose doorhandles; wondering gloomily whether it’s God or madness tapping on their
skulls: getting some strange illogical pleasure out of misconceived holiday ordeals with
family, van, and tent through Wester Ross …
The other day the page made an even more striking excursion into the world of the
personal and the particular; and I must say, the knife seemed to me to be getting a little
near the bone.
It was an article by one Mair Thompson about mothers-in-law. Or, rather, about her
own mother-in-law. One of the kindest and most generous people she knows, apparently,
and she loves her.
‘Yet she drives me crazy. Her mannerisms irritate me, her elderliness irritates me. I
don’t like her face, and her feet are silly-looking. Her conversation infuriates me. I let off
steam by mimicking and muttering silently when she talks to me from another room. When
she tells the same story for the umpteenth time it is with great difficulty that I restrain
myself from either giggling or saying it along with her, word for word; I am amazed at my
husband’s ability to look interested and ask prompting questions.’
I must admit, I felt the beads of nervous sweat start forth when I read this. I’m all for
the unvarnished truth; I’m all for delivery by candour from inhibition and frustration. All
the same – poor old mother-in-law! I take it that ‘Mair Thompson’ is a pen-name … I take
it that mother-in-law never reads the Guardian … But, all the same …!
Of course, once you’ve got the problem into the open like this, everyone wants to help.
Barbara Nuttall, of Leeds, writes to the Guardian to say that Mair Thompson’s mother-in-
law ‘ought gently to be told to come less often to her children’s home.’ (Mrs Nuttall’s own
mother-in-law ‘has never failed to help when needed,’ but at the same time ‘has never
forced her attention’ on the family.) But it’s all the fault of the husband, according to Mrs
E. M. Selby, of Loughborough, who writes to say that ‘the weakness in the family structure
mentioned lies more in the mother–son relationship … The fact that the husband can sit
patiently and listen to repetitive stories of his mother shows a childish dependence on her
approval.’
So poor old husband, too! It really is group therapy on the heroic scale, this candid
assessment of one’s relations’ shortcomings in the public prints. Perhaps the impersonal
abstractions of the men’s pages have something to be said for them after all. I should
certainly hate to pick up the paper one morning when my children are grown up and find
some son-in-law of mine holding forth about me in the middle of the business news.
‘A finer man than my father-in-law never drew breath,’ I can imagine the young puppy
declaring sententiously, ‘when it comes to washing-up, carrying messages, waiting at our
dinner-parties, and looking after our pet ocelots while we go on holiday.
‘But ye gods, the price one pays for these small services! Take one’s eye off him for an
instant and he’s poured himself a generous measure of one’s best Scotch, and sprawled
himself out at his ease in one’s favourite armchair with the evening paper.
‘Like as not he’s also taken his shoes off to aerate his feet. Moreover, he hums to
himself endlessly, with a strange, infuriating shushing noise, which I believe is supposed to
represent the sound of a symphony orchestra. We all make fun of him behind his back, of
course. But somehow that no longer seems enough.’
After a lead like this, I should think, the floodgates would open, and the Letters to the
Editor column would be full of brutally candid letters from everyone in the family.
 ‘Sir, – May we say how heartily many of us ordinary aunts and uncles agree with your
correspondent’s remarks about our nephew? It is high time that the conspiracy of silence
about his personal habits was broken. – Yours, etc., Arthur Wroxby, Millicent Wroxby,
Clara Frayn Steadfast.’
‘Sir, – I regret to add to the melancholy tale of my cousin’s shortcomings, but I have
been present on at least two occasions when he has told deliberate untruths, Indeed, I
have often been struck by his inability to look one straight in the eye. I wonder if this is an
experience which has been shared by any other of your readers? J. N. G. Portly-Walker,
Godalming.’
‘Sir, – Your readers may be interested to know that Michael’s indifferent social
behaviour was the despair of his parents from an early age. But many of us in the family
felt that they had only themselves to blame. They should have been much stricter with the
boy, as I myself told them on more than one occasion, though small thanks I got for it. If
only they could have foreseen what their thoughtless indulgence would lead to! – I am,
&c., (Mrs) Louisa Ironmaster, Southsea.’
‘Sir, – When he comes to our house, our granfather wissles through his teeth and makes
boreing jokes which bore me and my brothers and sisteres. He is a tall man, but boreing
to have as a granfather. – (Miss) Phyllida Frayn (aged 4).’
‘Sir, – I was interested, to see Mr Portly-Walker’s reference to my cousin’s dishonesty. I
am myself only a second cousin once removed, but on the few occasions we have met, Mr
Frayn has invariably breathed into my face and attempted to borrow money, saying that
he has left his change in his other trousers, or got to the bank too late. It is high time that
this man was hounded out of private life. – Yours faithfully, T. Wesley Topples, Stroud.’
I don’t like it, men – I don’t like it one little bit. Let’s stick with those grand old
Interdepartmental Committees after all.

(1967)

Chez crumble
One of the principal benefits that matrimony confers on the young professional class is
that it enables us to give up that tiresome pretence of being interested in spiritual and
cultural matters – forced on us by our education and our courtship rituals – and lets us
settle down to a frank and total absorption in our financial and material circumstances.
When, for instance, you call on the newly married Crumbles – formerly socially
conscious Christopher Crumble and sensitive, musical Lavinia Knudge – do you talk about
the problems of secondary education, or English choral music of the sixteenth century, as
you would have done back in the good old days of Crumble and Knudge? You do not.
Because Lavinia says …

Lavinia: Before you do anything else, you must come and look over the flat!
Christopher: … that’s right, just take your coat off – I’ll hang it on this automatic coat-
rack …
Lavinia: … which Christopher made himself, didn’t you, darling?
Christopher: Got a kit from Rackkitz of Wembley – costs about half the price of an
ordinary automatic coat-rack …
Lavinia:… and it’s fire-resistant, too …
Christopher:… now this is the hall, of course …
Lavinia:… which we made ourselves by partitioning off part of the bedroom …
Christopher:… with half-inch Doncaster boarding, at a shilling a foot, if you know the
right place …
Lavinia:… Christopher got it from the brother of an old school-friend of his, didn’t you,
darling? Now – mind your head on that steel brace – this is the bedroom …
 Christopher:… we picked up the bed for a song in a little shop I know in Edmonton …
Lavinia:… and fitted it out with a Dormofoam mattress. They’re so much the best, of
course. In fact there’s a waiting-list for Dormofoams, but we had tremendous luck and got
one ordered for someone who died …
Christopher:… and this is the kitchen opening off in the corner here. It was really the
handiness of having the kitchen opening directly into the bedroom that made us take the
flat …
Lavinia:… you should have seen it when we first moved in! But Christopher had the
brilliant idea of covering up the holes in the floor with some special asbestos his uncle
makes …
Christopher:… so we got a discount on it. We’re frightfully proud of that stainless steel
bootrack, by the way. I don’t know whether you saw it recommended in Which? last month
…?
Lavinia:… it’s so much more practical than all those silver-plated ones you see in the
shops. According to Which? they pounded it with 140 average boot-impacts an hour for 17
days before it collapsed …
Christopher:… I’d take you out to show you the lavatory, but it is raining hard. Remind
us you haven’t seen it next time you come, won’t you, and we’ll make a point of it …
Lavinia:… and here we are in the living-room …
Christopher:… have you seen this Plushco plastic carpeting before? We think it’s
awfully good, don’t we, darling? Half the price of ordinary carpet, and terrifically hard-
wearing. We’ve had it down, what, two weeks now? Not a sign of wear on it …
Lavinia: … I see you’re looking at all those old books on music and education. You won’t
believe it, but we had those shelves built for five pounds, timber and all …
Christopher:… by a marvellous little man we found by sheerest chance in Muswell Hill.
Remind me to give you his address …
Lavinia:… though I think he did it specially cheaply for us just because he happened to
take to us …
Christopher:… by the way, would you like a glass of Sardinian sherry?
Lavinia:… we’ve developed rather a thing about Sardinian sherry, haven’t we darling?
Christopher:… we get it by the gallon from a little shop in Sydenham. Found the place
by sheer chance …
Lavinia:… tremendously practical, and it works out at six-and-four a bottle …
Christopher:… incidentally, what do you think we pay for the flat? No, go on, have a
guess … Well, I’ll tell you – five pounds a week …
Lavinia:… it’s an absolute bargain, of course. We only found it through a friend of my
mother’s, who just by sheerest chance happened to be …
Christopher: I say, you’re looking rather groggy. Lavinia darling, run and fetch him
some Asprilux. I don’t know whether you’ve tried Asprilux, but we think it’s much better
than any of the other brands of aspirin … No, sit in this chair – it’s got a rather ingenious
reclining back – we just got the last one to be made. Comfortable, isn’t it? What do you
think of Lavinia, by the way? Such practical, easy-to-clean hands and feet. You won’t
believe it, but I picked her up by the sheerest chance at a little bookshop I know down in
Wimbledon …

(1962)

Child and superchild

It’s terrible to think of the manpower the world has wasted up to now by failing to
commence the education of the young in earliest infancy. Children have been allowed just
to throw away the first five years of their lives; when all the time they could – as
researchers, journalists and anxious parents all over the world are now coming to realise–
have been learning to get ahead and lay the foundations of successful careers.
Now all that’s a thing of the past. These days, the mother who has her child’s future at
heart sets to work before it’s even born, and spends part of each day during pregnancy
inside a decompression suit to increase the supply of oxygen to its brain, with the result
that it subsequently learns to crawl and walk (and presumably also to graduate and get a
peerage) earlier than less fortunate children from underdecompressed homes.
The privileged infant has not long opened its eyes upon the world, of course, before its
loving mother is holding up Teach Your Baby to Read cards in front of it, and developing its
‘need for achievement’ (the n Ach rating, as identified by Professor McClelland of
Harvard) by setting ‘moderately high achievement goals’ and helping the child to reach
them in a ‘warm encouraging and non-authoritarian’ way.
And now, I see from the series of articles on ‘Success before Six’ in the Sunday Times,
it’s been discovered that parents have ‘a potent chance to accelerate the intellectual
development of their children’ by the way they talk to them. The helpful parent should
speak to his child in a rich vocabulary, using ‘modelled’ conversation techniques rather
than ‘systematic expansion,’ and an ‘elaborated code’ rather than a ‘restricted’ one.
According to a book called ‘Educating Your Baby’ which is quoted in the series, ‘a
parent can help the child by repeating consonant and vowel sounds, slowly and
deliberately … by letting the baby see lip movements, and pausing to let him imitate them.
One compresses the lips into a thin line and parts them with the sound, “ba”. Smiling at
the baby may induce him to smile in return; lips parting then produces the syllable and
mother and child laugh gleefully. The syllable can be made repeatedly; “ba-ba-ba” until the
child is ready for something else.’
The next part of the training course, according to the article, is the Naming of Parts. ‘If
this is started early enough then by the time he is 12 months old he will be able to point to
parts of his body when asked. “Can you touch your mouth? Touch your mouth.” Show him
how. “Good boy. You’re touching your mouth.” Not: “You are doing it.”’
Certainly not! With that kind of teaching he could fail his one-plus! Anyway, from the
age of 18 months the object is to get the child to repeat after his mother or father the
names of familiar objects. Then we get on to the more severe disciplines involved in
advanced studies.
‘Once the child can talk,’ says the article, ‘it is best to ask for complete responses to
questions. “How many days are there in a week, Alice?” “Seven.” “Good. But it could be
better. The correct answer is ‘There are seven days in a week.’ Say for me, ‘There are
seven days in a week.’”’
It sounds to me as if they’re having trouble with this Alice child. Isn’t this casual,
slipshod approach to academic work, this lackadaisical mumble of ‘Seven,’ only too typical
of youth today? I bet Alice has a sugar cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth
during lectures – I bet she tries to cut compulsory hopscotch! The next thing you know,
she’ll be sprawling on the floor with a banner outside her father’s study, demanding
another threepence a week pocket money and a bigger say in planning her syllabus.
Where did Alice’s parents go wrong? Was the pressure in her mother’s decompression
suit not low enough? Did her father hurry her on to ‘dad-dad-dad’ before she’d fully
mastered ‘ba-ba-ba’? In any case, she’s sadly retarded in her development compared with
Algernon, a child of my acquaintance whose intellectual life was accelerated in accordance
with really modern methods.
In the first place, Algernon’s parents took care to conceive him during the first hour of
his mother’s fertile period, in accordance with a survey by Progel and Hergstrom which
showed that early-fertilised ova have the highest chance of A/B class membership in later
life.
Next, his parents began talking formatively to him by the use of deep-penetration sonic
waves while he was still in the womb. By the time he was born he could recite the
subjunctive of most irregular French verbs reasonably reliably, and his parents felt free to
address him thenceforth, as they croodled encouragingly over his cot, entirely in
mathematical equations, to which the delighted infant would reply by gurgling the solution,
with many a gleeful laugh.
He spent a year travelling to broaden his horizons after leaving school, and therefore
did not go up to Cambridge until he was nearly four. He took his PhD at six, after two very
fruitful months at MIT, and entered the Mashmaestro Corporation on the research side,
where he enjoyed a brilliant career, rising to become head of his department at the age of
seven, and joining the Board in the following year.
And there he will remain for the next 57 years. His hobbies are conkers and marbles,
and he is writing what is likely to be the standard work on the after-effects of precocity,
entitled ‘The Problems of Teenage Senility.’
Get older younger, that’s the aim, and come fresh and unspoiled to second childhood.

(1968)

Childholders
What my wife and I have now got more of than anything else, it occurred to me the other
day, as I staggered through the front door with another armful of the stuff, is child-
handling equipment.
I mean devices for holding small children up, holding them down, moving them along,
and keeping them in one place. We must have got a hundredweight of the stuff. The only
thing we’re a bit short of is the children for all this wealth of plastic and bent tinplate to be
used upon. I keep counting up incredulously, and we’ve only got two.
We’re thinking of opening our home and making the collection public. I’ve been
compiling a catalogue. What I’ve tried to do is to provide the visitor – and indeed myself –
with some sort of catalogue raisonné; a coherent, step-by-step account of exactly how we
came to build our great collection up.
The first exhibit is

1 THE PRAM. Naturally there must be a pram. All children have prams. Where we were
rather shrewd, I think, was in choosing a special patent collapsible model which at the
turn of a nut lifts off the wheels to become a cot, or subsides into a push-chair. In which
case, why do we need

2 THE CARRY-COT? Well, you see, the patent collapsible pram’s downstairs and the
bedroom’s upstairs. And in any case, without the wheels the top of the patent collapsible
pram would have to stand among the draughts on the floor. Whereas the carry-cot can
stand on

3 THE CARRY-COT STAND. A great economy, a carry-cot and stand, because we didn’t
need a crib. All we needed was

4 THE DROP-SIDED COT. Now why the devil did we need a drop-side cot when we had a
carry-cot? Because the baby had grown too big for the carry-cot. Then why didn’t we skip
the carry-cot and get a drop-side cot in the first place? Well, have you ever walked
through the streets carrying a baby in a drop-side cot?

5 THE FOLDING WEEKEND BED. Why, you ask patiently, didn’t we take the drop-side
cot away for weekends? Because we’d have needed a larger car. A folding weekend bed
was cheaper than a larger car.
All right so far? Now,
6 THE PUSH-CHAIR. We must have forgotten, you laugh, about that patent collapsible
pram we started with which turned into a push-chair at the turn of a nut, the wrench of a
bolt, the heave of the chassis, and the couple of thumps with the starting-handle. By no
means. The fact is, the patent collapsible pram is now occupied by the second baby, while
the original infant sits on top in

7 THE CLAMP-ON SEAT FOR ELDER CHILD. What? – you scream – why isn’t the elder
child sitting in the brand-new push-chair? Now, come, come. My wife could scarcely walk
to the shops pushing the pram and the push-chair. Good God, man, you cry, make the elder
child walk! Certainly. But this the elder child would consent to do only if bought

8 THE TOY PUSH-CHAIR to push. Unfortunately, the toy push-chair turned out to be large
enough for the elder child to sit in and wait to be pushed. So we had to get her

9 THE DOLL’S PRAM, of a type so small that there was no room for the elder child.
Indeed, there was only just enough room for the elder child to cram the younger child in.
So the younger child had to be placed in protective custody inside

10 THE PLAY-PEN, from which it was released only to be sat up for meals in

11 THE PATENT ADJUSTABLE ALL-PURPOSE BABY CHAIR. Now why on earth couldn’t
we sit the child up in the clamp-on pram seat? Because the only thing the clamp-on pram
seat clamped on was the pram, and the pram was downstairs. The patent adjustable all-
purpose baby chair, however – strongly recommended by a liberal-radical woman’s page –
proved to have one small drawback; it turned upside-down if the child moved. The child
did move. The answer, we felt, was not a high chair, but – much more economical –

12 THE CAR-SEAT, because it could be used both in the car and on the back of an
ordinary chair at table. Then

13 ANOTHER CAR-SEAT, because the baby could lever the first one right off the chair.
Then

14 THE HIGH CHAIR, because the baby could lever the second car-seat right off the
chair, too. Then

15 THE SMALL CHAIR for the elder child, to stop it jealously insisting on sitting in the
younger child’s high chair.

16 THE CARRYING SLING, for taking younger child on health-giving nature rambles
(don’t tell me we should have pushed the patent collapsible pram over all those stiles and
up all those mountains). Unfortunately the sling – strongly recommended by the liberal-
radical woman’s page – exerted intolerable pressure on the top of my spinal cord, and the
agony was relieved only by the child falling out. Replaced by

17 THE RUCKSACK SEAT, a rugged structure of solid welded steel, recommended by the
same damned liberal-radical woman’s page. We hadn’t got very far up the first mountain
when it struck me that steel and child together, presumably, had the same effect on the
heart as being three stone over-weight. Came down the mountain hastily, and haven’t
tested the equipment since.
That’s as far as the collection goes at present. Just the 17 items. No doubt we shall add
to it in time.
The only other point of interest, I think, is that between them (if I have counted
correctly) the 17 exhibits are decorated with 43 frogs, 47 rabbits, 51 fairies, 108
pussycats (60 with bows), 46 pigs, 96 ducks, 48 dwarfs, 103 mice, 204 doggies (40 of
them stark naked), and one rat.
And I may say that every one of them, except the rat, is grinning fit to bust.

(1965)

Cleveland Suede Accuses

Good evening (smiled Cleveland Suede, the well-known young Bow Labour MP and
television personality). Welcome once again to ‘Cleveland Suede Accuses,’ our weekly
series in which well-known personalities come along to the studio here and try to offer me
some sort of explanation for themselves. This week, by a remarkable technological
achievement on the part of Eurovision, we have managed to set up a direct link with
Leonardo da Vinci, the well-known painter and inventor, in our Renaissance Studios. To
many millions of people throughout the world, Mr da Vinci is known as one of the greatest
geniuses of all time. Mr da Vinci, may I ask you, how have you managed to sell this line to
so many people?

L da V: Well, I …
Suede: I take it you’d agree that you’re fairly overrated?
L da V: I suppose …
Suede: After all, your pictures are pretty dull, aren’t they, compared with Veronese’s, say,
or Van Gogh’s?

L da V: Yes, well, they’re different …

Suede: I suppose it’s just a personal thing, but I don’t like all those dark colours. Look at
the brightness in a Dufy, for example. Have you made any serious attempt to catch up with
him?
L da V: Well, I’m not really trying …
Suede: I suppose you’re going to say the varnish changed colour. Did you always use
cheap varnish?
L da V: Now, look, there are several technical questions involved here …
Suede: I see it’s a sore point – I won’t labour it. What about the way you draw people, Mr
da Vinci? Is that deliberate misrepresentation or simply lack of skill?

L da V: I try to draw people as I see them. I can’t help it if …

Suede: Everyone’s out of step but our Leonardo, eh? A lot of people complain about the
quality of your exports. Someone was telling me only the other day that he’d just seen a
picture of yours which you sent over here without any paint on it at all. What have you got
to say about that?

L da V: If you mean the cartoon …

Suede: The same story as the varnish, I suppose. Mr da Vinci, we’ve heard a great deal
about the flying machines you’ve designed. If it’s not a rude question, when are we going
to see one actually in service?

L da V: Well, I simply sketched …

Suede: Or have they been refused an airworthiness certificate? Incidentally, what
qualifications have you got as an aircraft designer? Do you feel any responsibility at all for
the lives of the ordinary men and women who may one day travel in your machines?
Wouldn’t it be better if you stuck to painting?

L da V: Which question do you want me to answer first?

Suede: None of them if it would be embarrassing. Do you get any satisfaction from
painting and designing and so forth?

L da V: Yes, of course.
Suede: Then do you ever worry about the moral point of doing absolutely nothing with
your life but amuse yourself? Perhaps that’s a rather loaded question. What else do you do
besides painting and inventing and so on? Any hobbies?

L da V: Hobbies?
Suede: Isn’t it rather a narrow life? Wouldn’t it be healthier if you got out of the rut
occasionally and played the odd game of golf? I mean, there must be something unhealthy
somewhere if you agree to appear on a programme like this. Are you conscious of having
some streak of masochistic exhibitionism? Never mind, now you’re here perhaps you’d like
to say something about art as it appears to you, Leonardo da Vinci?
L da V: Well, it’s not easy to make any brief general statement. But there is one thing I
should like to say.

Suede: And so we come to the end of another ‘Cleveland Suede Accuses’. Next week – a
simultaneous exhibition match in which I shall try to cut all the Twelve Apostles down to
size at one go. Good night.

(1962)

The cogitations of the Earl of Each

Sometimes, as I sit beside the little electric fire in the morning-room, with The Times
sports pages open beside me, and Henry muttering quietly to himself in his sleep at my
feet, I fall into what I call my cogitational mood. At these moments it begins to seem to me
a matter of some wonder that things are as they are and not otherwise.
Everything! Just thus and so! When it could have been not thus and so at all! Indeed, it
could have been not thus and so in various different ways. In a thousand different ways,
when you think about it – while there is only the one single way in which things could have
been thus and so in the way that they are.
The horse has come in at a thousand to one!

And every time I begin to think like this it seems to me that the most surprising thing of all
is that I am the Earl of Each.
I. Not my brother Charles or my cousin Shandon. Not some complete stranger. Not
some Chinese fellow – and there are a great many more Chinese fellows in the world than
there are cousins of mine. Not to mention brothers, of whom there are only three.
None of these people is the Earl of Each. I am. And of me there are even fewer than
there are of brothers, let alone cousins or Chinese. Of me there is only one.
Good God.
 *

And here’s another thing which is almost as remarkable.

Not only am I the Earl of Each, but the Earl of Each is what I am.
I am not, for example, Sir Alfred Upward. Nor the Marquess of Hight. I am not my
brother Charles, nor my cousin Shandon, nor the estimable Wun Hung Lo, nor yet the
redoutable Hoo Flung Dung. I am the Earl of Each. No less. No more.
And this astonishing fact is something that everyone takes absolutely for granted.
Never has my cousin Shandon said to me: ‘Good heavens, Pot, you are the Earl of Each!’
Most of the time I take it pretty much for granted myself.
The Earl of Each. Goodness. I am. My word. The twelfth earl, moreover. Not the
eleventh or the thirteenth. The twelfth. Just so. Just exactly so.

How has this surprising state of affairs come about?

It is because my father, in his day, could say much the same.
So now we must think what it was like for him. And if it is cause for wonder that I am
the Earl of Each, then it was no less cause for wonder that he was the Earl of Each before
me. So look here, this isn’t a matter of a single horse coming in at a thousand to one! This
is the Spring Double!
Another question comes knocking at my brain immediately: how was it that my father
was the Earl of Each? It was because his father was the Earl of Each before him! And
back we go in time to the beginning of the line, wonder before wonder, each as astonishing
as the one before it. A tower of improbability twelve floors high!
What we are discussing is not simply the Spring Double. It is nothing less than a twelve-
horse accumulator!

I sometimes even wonder if we can stop at the first earl. Would Sir George Shy, as he then
was, have been created earl if he had not been Sir George? Evidently not, since it was
indeed Sir George and no one else who was so created!
Now, would Sir George have been Sir George if his father had not been the father he
happened to be? No, plainly, he would have been someone else altogether!
Back we plunge through the centuries to Adam, or the apes!
Yes, and which do I find it easier to believe? That my being the Earl of Each is the final
product of God’s purpose for the world, or that it results from the blind interaction of
chance and natural selection?
I have to confess that I find both hypotheses a little difficult to accept.

Another thing: my earldom is a perfect fit. At least as good a fit as my shirts and shoes,
and a rather better one than my suits, because that fool Stubbs insists on cutting the
bellyband of all my trousers too wide – to allow, as he says, for natural development, while
never making accommodation for any other natural development – for example, the
settling of the head forwards and away from the collar that occurs as the years go by, so
that I look like a tortoise in its shell.
I wasn’t absolutely sure about the earldom when I first came into it, I have to confess,
any more than I was with the Oxford brogues that Tapsell made me at about the same
time. It took a little while for those shoes to settle to my feet, I recall, but settle they did,
just as Tapsell said they would, closer and closer, and it’s the same with the earldom. The
Earl of Each has become more exactly who I am with every passing day. The bellyband of
my earldom, unlike the bellyband of my suits, neither sags nor presses, the collar stays
close to my shirt.
And yet it fitted my father before me, who was of a very different temperament from
me. In the first place he was not, so far as I know, given to these cogitational moods of
mine. It made no difference, though. Earl of Each he was, no less than me.
It fitted his father before him, and his father’s father before that.
An amazing garment!
Unless – a new and most striking thought – unless it is not the earldom that ever more
closely fits me, but I who ever more closely fit the earldom!
I believe the truth is this – that we have both changed. Just as Henry and I have both
changed and accommodated ourselves to each other’s ways. He has learnt not to disturb
me in my pensive moods; he opens one eye and glances up from the toecap of my shoe, and
knows at once that the toecap of my shoe is where he must remain while the mood is upon
me, that he must not think of aspiring to rest his head upon my knee. While I, for my part,
have learnt not to disturb his thoughtful moments by any sudden withdrawal of my foot
from beneath his head.
But now a different question arises: am I master or am I dog? I mean, figuratively
speaking, in the relationship between me and the earldom. Am I the one sitting by the
electric fire with the earldom drowsing on my brogues, or am I down upon the floor, with
my chin supported by the tolerance and patience of the earldom above me?

Henry’s looking up at me now. I believe he’s a little anxious on my behalf. Yes! Deep
waters we’re getting into here, Henry!
Or is he thinking: ‘What surprises me is that I am Henry and he is the twelfth earl’?
Back to sleep, Henry!

Today, at the fresh fish counter in Tesco’s, I met Wiggy Hight, buying prawns for those
cats of his. ‘Hello, Pot,’ he said. It occurred to me that had the world been a slightly
different place I should have been the one who was saying ‘Hello, Pot’. Then I should have
been returning to that dreadful old ruin of his at Godforth and sitting in front of the fire
thinking: ‘Goodness me, I’m the Marquess of Hight!’
I was very struck by this, but kept my counsel. ‘Hello, Wiggy,’ I said. I was struck,
though, very struck.

Well, let us imagine that things were arranged differently!

I am imagining as an experiment that I am not an earl at all. Not even a marquess. I am
… Who am I? Yes, I am Fred Upward! Now, here’s a laugh.
Let’s see … I’m all skin and bone. I look down at my shoes. Are they Oxford brogues?
Not at all, they’re mildewed carpet slippers. All right so far. The telephone rings. ‘Upward
here,’ I say. Good. I’m doing rather well so far! Master of disguise!
Hold on, though. Not so fast. Is this still me or isn’t it? Is this the Earl of Each telling
the world he’s Sir Alfred Upward? No, no, everything’s changed – I’m old Fred himself in
this arrangement of things! This is Sir Alfred Upward saying he’s Sir Alfred Upward.
In which case … In which case where do we stand? Where do I stand? Nowhere,
evidently! I seem to have dropped out of the picture completely. In any case Fred’s always
answering the phone as things are and saying ‘Upward here’. So nothing’s changed at all!
Who’s on the other end of the phone, anyway? Me, in all probability!
By which, of course, I mean the Earl of Each.
 *

I realise that these reflections will be of little interest to others. I raised the matter once
with Nippy. We were sitting quietly on the terrace after dinner one warm summer evening,
enjoying the scent of the tobacco plants. I felt an unusual sense of quiet understanding
between us. ‘My love,’ I said, ‘has it ever occurred to you that if things were not as they
are, and I were not who I am, then you in your turn would not be who you are?’ She didn’t
reply. I had the impression that she was thinking about it, though. She is not greatly given
to abstract thought, so I tried to put the matter in more concrete terms. ‘Suppose, for the
sake of argument,’ I said, ‘that I were Alfred Upward. Then you, my love, would be Lady
Upward instead of Lady Each.’ Another silence ensued. But all she said at the end of it
was: ‘I think Henry needs worming.’
I tried to discuss it once with Shandon. We were in the butts at Wiggy’s, and the birds
were remarkably sparse. I put it very simply, in terms of which gun was in whose hands.
‘Well, Pot,’ said Shandon, ‘you always were the brains of the family So I don’t think you can
be this gun, because I’m pretty sure there’s not much in the way of brains lurking about
over here.’
Curious that it doesn’t strike other people, too. After all, the consequences of my being
the Earl of Each are almost as considerable for Nippy and Shandon as they are for me.
They reach out to our children, and our children’s children. They go on down the
generations, for ever and ever.

I am the Earl of Each. And then again, I am the Earl of Each. But every now and then,
when my thoughts run very deep, I find yet another cause for wonder – that I am the Earl
of Each.
Is this less surprising than the first two things, or even more so? But this deep I cannot
think for long without fear of never coming to the surface again.

Another plunge into deep waters!

If it is against long odds that I am the Earl of Each, how much longer are the odds
against the Earl of Each being me.
I’m not making a muddle here, am I? I’m not simply recogitating the same cogitation
that I’ve cogitated before?
I don’t believe so. After all, there would have been an Earl of Each sitting here in front
of the fire in the morning-room now whenever my dear mother and father had seen fit to
begin their eldest son. He might have been a month older than me, or a month younger.
He might been a completely different age altogether, and an inch shorter, with darker hair
and a less ruddy complexion. He would still have been the Earl of Each, if he was my
father’s son.
But he wouldn’t have been me.
For the Earl of Each to be me, the actual fellow who as it happens is indeed sitting here
now and cogitating these particular cogitations, then there was only one night in all the
years that my parents were married that would serve. I believe this lengthens the odds by
another five or six thousand times.
Good God, once again.
Supposing my father had gone up to the House that day, as he sometimes did when some
measure relating to land drainage or bloodstock was under discussion, and had stayed
overnight at his club! The fellow sitting in this chair now, the present Earl of Each, would
have been another fellow altogether!
I feel decidedly peculiar at the thought.
 Yes, Henry, well may you look at me like that! Well may you speculate!
Enough!
Come on, dog – a turn around the lake before lunch.
Let us hold on to one absolute and unfailing certainty, Henry, amidst all the dark seas of
speculation and conjecture. Let us plant our colours in this one thought and never strike
them: that I, old dog of mine, that I, I, am the Earl of Each.

(2000)

Comedy of viewers
Thank you, BBC Television! (runs a letter which Mrs Ada Vacancy has asked me to use
my influence to get published in Radio Times.) What a grand job you’re doing bringing
culture to people like me! (Perhaps I should explain that though my father was a
Featherhead, I am connected on my mother’s side with the Easeleigh-Boreables of
Bournemouth.)
Your production of A Comedy of Errors this week was ‘just the ticket!’ It ran for six-
and-a-half minutes by my clock before a single word of Shakespeare was spoken, and my
husband and I enjoyed every second.
Of course, all good things must come to an end, and eventually we had to face up to it
and suffer ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous Shakespeare’, to coin a phrase! But a
word of praise to the actors. Some of their amusing antics between the bouts of literature
that followed were highly diverting. They quite ‘saved’ the evening, and as I said to my
husband, ‘They may be “classical” actors, but some of them are almost good enough for
the pantomime in Newcastle!’ Which coming from me is praise indeed! (I mean of course
Newcastle-under-Lyme, where my mother was born.)
But my ‘first prize’ I reserve for the ‘back-room boys’ who allowed us to see the
audience from time to time when things got too bad. There must be many people like
myself who now switch on all the cultural programmes on BBC Television in the hope of a
glimpse of the audience. I acquired a taste for ‘audience-viewing’ during the lessons which
Mr H. Trevor-Roper gave recently on the subject of (I think) ‘History,’ and I must confess
I have become something of an addict!
Of course, addiction to anything can be carried too far! I don’t agree with some people
who complain bitterly that the ‘natural breaks’ between one picture of the audience and
the next are too long. I think these breaks give one a chance to get back to one’s ironing!
Perhaps your readers would be interested to know how we arrange our viewing in this
house. First we turn the set on in good time for it to warm up before the cultural
programme begins. We watch the preliminary antics or trumpet voluntaries – which we
love! – and then we turn the sound down. I go out into the kitchen while my husband sits
watching the set and listening to the wireless.
As soon as anything of note occurs, he calls me. ‘Quick!’ he says. ‘Breakdown!’ Or it
might be someone forgetting his ‘lines,’ or even occasionally someone who has had ‘one
over the eight!’
We enjoy all these diversions. But we like the pictures of the audience best of all. They
seem such nice, ordinary people – nothing ‘stuck up’ or ‘special’ about them at all. What I
particularly appreciate is that they’re not fussing about doing something all the time, like
the majority of the people one sees on the television! Most of the time they’re just sitting
there quietly, so that one has a chance to take them in and see them as they really are.
Of course, I’m always looking out to see if I can see anyone I know! In one of Mr H.
Trevor-Roper’s lessons I saw a young woman who looked exactly like a housemaid I had
for a time after the First World War called Susan Hargreaves. I was so surprised that I
called out ‘Well! Susan Hargreaves!’ My husband dryly pointed out that Susan would be
over 60 now!
 ‘It’s all right, she couldn’t hear me,’ I said. ‘The sound’s turned down.’
How we laughed over that!
Seriously, though, ‘audience-viewing’ does give one a chance to see how ordinary folk
can ‘keep smiling’ in the most difficult conditions. A dreary lecture seems to bring out the
best in people, just as the war did, and I often hope that some of our national Jeremiahs
are looking in and seeing these wonderful young people doing their best keep their chins
up. It always brings a lump to my throat.
Alas, there are sometimes one or two ‘black sheep’ in the audience who ‘let the side
down.’ In that scene in The Comedy of Errors in which seven people were sitting in the
stalls smiling slightly, with a gentleman on the extreme left who looked exactly like the late
Duke of Kent, there was a man in a spotted bow tie who kept laughing in rather a
suggestive way. It gave the unfortunate impression that some of Shakespeare’s poetry was
not so much ‘immortal’ as ‘immoral’!
I wonder if I might ask your advice in a personal, matter? I should like to ‘break into’
television audiences! I am 76, but still young and adventurous in outlook. I realise it is a
career which would call for great dedication and a lot of hard work, but I am not quite a
beginner – I have nearly 50 years’ experience of working in the audiences of various
provincial ‘reps’ behind me. I know enough not to expect to star in something like The
Comedy of Errors overnight!
I should add that my husband has given his blessing to the project.

Yours truly, Ada Vacancy (Mrs)

(1964)

Composition for ten hands

The admiration and respect which I feel for Kingsley Amis, John Braine, Robert Conquest,
Edmund Crispin, Iain Hamilton, Anthony Hartley, Bernard Levin, Simon Raven, David Rees
and Peregrine Worsthorne severally is as nothing to the awe in which I hold their
corporate talent. They know whose side they are on in Vietnam, and have written in a
body to The Times twice now to announce their verdict to the world.
I wish I knew which side I was on. But I don’t; and the more I read about Vietnam, the
less able I am to pick a team. No such indecision hinders Amis, Braine, Conquest, Crispin,
Hamilton, Hartley, Levin, Raven, Rees and Worsthorne. ‘When all the lesser issues are
cleared away,’ they asked themselves, ‘whose side are we on?’ And at once they replied:
‘Our answer must be that we unequivocally support America and her allies …’
There was heartfelt relief in Washington, naturally, when the State Department found
they had the unequivocal support of ten English men of letters. Weary troops in Vietnam
took heart to learn that Amis, Braine, Conquest and Crispin were right there, but a short
7,000 miles behind them, not to mention Hamilton, Hartley and Levin, or Raven, Rees and
Worsthorne.
But then another letter appeared in The Times, penned by Brigid Brophy, Peter
Buckman, Anthony Burgess, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Len Deighton, Gillian Freeman, B. S.
Johnson, Julian Mitchell, John Mortimer, Alan Sillitoe and William Trevor, deploring the
idea of unequivocal support for American policy in Vietnam.
‘… Considering the available information on this atrocious war,’ argued Brophy,
Buckman, Burgess, Compton-Burnett, Deighton, Freeman, Johnson, Mitchell, Mortimer,
Sillitoe and Trevor, ‘we do not believe that the policies of America and her allies are likely
to bring about the peace which is earnestly desired by all.’
The mood of elation in Washington slumped when this copy of The Times arrived. As the
State Department’s statistical experts can scarcely have failed to notice, they have ten
writers for them, and eleven against. And I have the impression that the writers who are
opposed to American policy have on average written more books than the writers who are
in favour of it. Which must count for something in Washington and Hanoi. Mustn’t it?
But there are other teams of writers who have yet to speak – as I discovered at a little
literary soirée the other night when I was introduced to K. D. Haddock, Walter Pinn,
Pennington Pownall, O. J. Sprout, and Thorsten Trouncer.
‘What?’ I cried. ‘Not the K. D. Haddock, Walter Pinn, Pennington Pownall, O. J. Sprout
and Thorsten Trouncer? The authors of that marvellous little letter on decimal coinage,
and that very stylish missive against racial provocation in Fiji?’
They blushed.
‘The same,’ they murmured.
Well, I told them what a terrific admirer I was of their stuff – what a deeply personal
style and individual view of the world I thought they had.
‘Whenever I come up against some rather tricky subject,’ I told them, ‘such as the
wage-structure of the Bolivian tin industry, I always think to myself: “I wonder what
Haddock, Pinn, Pownall, Sprout and Trouncer would say about that.”’
They were very bucked.
‘We think we speak for all of us,’ they said, ‘when we say that we’re as pleased as a dog
with two tails. If not five dogs with ten tails.’
I asked them if they were working on another letter.
‘No,’ they said. ‘At the moment we’re working on a critical edition of the love-letters of
Drossel, Gudney, Lidless and Nane, to Adbrow, Bantling, Cold-Brightman and Zimmer. It’s
one of the great literary romances – in the end they married, and had twenty-three
children.’
Anyway, when they found out that I was Frayn, of Barnold, Brevis, Frayn, Frowder and
Straithwaite, they were kind enough to say that they rather admired some of our work,
too – particularly our Middlesex dialect stories, and our relentless opposition to the entry
of Ireland into the Common Market.
After a bit, of course, we got round to the problems facing writers today.
‘You can’t get over it,’ sighed Haddock, Pinn, Pownall, Sprout and Trouncer, ‘the days of
the old one-man-band type of writer are pretty well over.’
Barnold, Brevis, Frowder, Straithwaite and I agreed.
‘We mean,’ said Haddock, Pinn, Pownall, Sprout, and Trouncer, ‘we’d never have been
able to make up our minds about decimal coinage in the way we did if there hadn’t been
five of us.’
‘What we personally feel,’ said Barnold, Brevis, Frowder, Straithwaite and I, ‘is that if
there were ten or eleven of us, as in the Amis outfit, or the Brophy concern, we might be
able to stand back far enough from the details to come down clearly and unambiguously
on one side or the other in Vietnam.’
Because the truth is, of course, that today writers have got to merge and amalgamate
to survive, just like everybody else. Big issues demand big thoughts; and big thoughts
require big teams of thinkers.
Anyway, we’re all going to write to The Times about it.

(1967)

Cottage industry
The wonderful thing about having a country cottage, say our good friends Christopher and
Lavinia Crumble, is that they can have their good friends (such as us) down for the
weekend.
‘And the wonderful thing about having our friends down for the weekend,’ explains
Lavinia, as they take our bags and show us our room, ‘is that we really have the chance to
talk to them down here, away from all the mad rush of town life. Don’t we darling?’
 ‘We like to feel we’ve created a setting for the sort of relaxed house-party thing that
used to be such an important part of the civilised way of life in the past,’ says Christopher.
‘Plain living and high thinking – that kind of thing. We find ourselves talking like mad down
here. Don’t we, darling?’
Apparently the place was absolutely derelict when they found it. All their friends
thought they were crazy. But of course they got it for a song, and they did it all up
themselves.
‘We really have put a tremendous amount of work into it. Haven’t we, darling?’
‘People think we’ve been spending our weekends idling about in the countryside. But
we’ve scarcely had time to sit down! You really can’t imagine how much we’ve had to do.
Can they, darling?’
Apparently all the beams we can now see were covered with plaster and wallpaper
when they moved in! The doorway we’ve just come through didn’t exist! The floor we’re
now standing on was completely rotten! The whole house reeked of mildew! We can’t
really appreciate its present condition, of course, not having seen it in its original state.
‘I mean, Christopher did have a tiny worry when we bought it that we might be doing
local people out of a house. You know what Christopher’s like! But it was absolutely
derelict …’
‘And of course what these people want is really some neat little two-up-and-two-down
semi. Isn’t it, darling?’
‘And if we hadn’t done it up somebody else would have. Wouldn’t they, darling?’
‘They’re not all as tender-hearted as we are. And we have put the most tremendous
amount of work into the place.’
Have we admired their view, they ask? Oh, God, the view – no, we haven’t. Admire,
admire. Only six miles or so beyond that electricity sub-station, apparendy, is the Vale of
Relpham, which Walter Bridmore mentions in one of his novels! The window-frame itself, it
appears, is treated with Osterman’s ‘Windowjoy’ polyester window-frame sealer.
They expect we’d like a wash etcetera after our journey. It seems terrible to interrupt
our discussion of architecture and literature for anything so mundane as a wash etcetera.
But there’s plenty for us to admire and meditate upon in the bathroom. Apparently
Christopher did most of the plumbing himself, and is rather proud of his handiwork. And
we’re to help ourselves to hot water as lavishly as we like, because they’ve installed a
Supa-Heata, the literature about which we must remind them to give us before we go.
Over lunch the conversation turns to the world of art.
‘Did you admire that old Agricultural Show poster in the loo?’ inquires Christopher.
‘We’re frightfully proud of it. Lavinia got it from a little man over in Market Strayborough.
Didn’t you, darling?’
‘Of course, the loo’s our great triumph altogether. I found a little man in Morton
Winchevers who built us the septic tank for about half what we’d have had to pay a big
firm.’
‘And she found another little man practically next door to the little man in Market
Strayborough who got hold of that Victorian pedestal and cistern for us. Lavinia’s got an
absolute genius for getting hold of little men. Haven’t you, darling?’
In the afternoon we go for a stroll, so that our hosts can point out various features of
the locality of which they’re particularly proud, and introduce us to one or two marvellous
locals we absolutely must meet, now that the Crumbles have succeeded by dint of hard
work and perseverance in penetrating their natural rural reserve. The long grass in the
meadows and the summery smell of the cow-parsley along the lanes put everyone in a
gently reflective mood.
‘You can get down here in 4½ hours, you know,’ says Christopher, ‘if you avoid Snaith,
and take that little road through Chocking which comes out just this side of Griever …’
‘Or 4¼, if you don’t get held up by all that terrible weekend traffic to the coast where
you cross the main road at Westchamps Peverel …’
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
When they got to Easterfield, Maurice and his father, the sun was
shining on a street of melting snow, following a quick and rainy
thaw, on well-groomed men and horses, on hounds eager to be off
on the day’s business. And, as luck had it, they found a game fox
that took them at a tearing gallop, five miles across the wet and
heavy pastures, before they met a check.
The check lasted beyond the patience of the hunters, and Sir Jasper
chose his moment well.
“Gentlemen,” he said, rising in his stirrups—“gentlemen, the meet is
at my house of Windyhough to-morrow. Who rides with me?”
The field gathered round him. He was a man commanding men, and
he compelled attention.
“What meet?” asked Squire Demaine, his ruddy face brick-red with
sudden hope.
“The Loyal Meet. Who’s with me, gentlemen?”
Sir Jasper was strung to that pitch of high endeavour which sees
each face in a crowd and knows what impulse sways it. They
gathered round him to a man; but as he glanced from one to the
other he knew that there were many waverers. For loyalty, free and
unswerving, sets a light about a man’s face that admits no
counterfeit.
Yet the din was loud enough to promise that all were of one mind
here. Hounds and fox and huntsmen were forgotten. Men waved
their hats and shouted frantically. Nance Demaine and the half-
dozen ladies who were in the field to-day found little kerchiefs and
waved them, too, and were shrill and sanguine in their cries of “The
Prince, God bless him!—the Prince!—the Stuart home again!”
It was all like Bedlam, while the austere hills, lined here and there
with snow that would not melt, looked down on this warmth of
human enterprise. The horses reared and fidgeted, dismayed by the
uproar. Hounds got out of hand and ran in and out between the
plunging hoofs, while the huntsman, a better fox-hunter than King’s
man, swore roundly and at large as he tried to bring them out of this
outrageous riot.
“Where’s Will Underwood?” asked a youngster suddenly. It was
young Hunter of Hunterscliff, whose lukewarmness had angered
Nance not long ago. “It’s the first meet he’s missed this winter.”
A horseman at his elbow laughed, the laugh that men understood.
“He had business in the south, so he told me when I met him taking
the coach. Wild Will, from the look of his face, seemed tired of
hunting.”
“No!” said Sir Jasper sharply. “I’ll have no man condemned without a
hearing. He lives wide of here—perhaps this last news of the Rising
has not reached him. Any man may be called away on sudden
business.”
“You’re generous, sir. I’m hot for the King, and no other business in
the world would tempt me out of Lancashire just now. Besides, he
must have known.”
Nance had lost her high spirits; but she was glad that some one had
spoken on Will Underwood’s behalf, for otherwise she must have
yielded to the impulse to defend him.
“That does not follow, sir,” said Sir Jasper, punctilious in defence of a
man he neither liked nor trusted. “At any rate, it is no time for
accusation. Mr. Underwood, if I know him, will join us farther south.”
Young Hunter, a wayward, unlicked cub, would not keep silence.
“Yes,” he said, in his thin, high-pitched voice, “he’ll join us as far
south as London—after he’s sure that a Stuart’s on the throne
again.”
An uneasy silence followed. Older men looked at older men, knowing
that they shared this boy’s easy summing-up of Underwood’s
motives. And Nance wondered that this man, whom she was near to
loving, had no friends here—no friends of the loyal sort who came
out into the open and pledged their faith in him.
There was a game hound of the pack—a grey old hound that, like
the huntsman, was a keener fox-hunter than loyalist; and, through
all this uproar and confusion, through the dismayed silence that
followed, he had been nosing up and down the pastures, finding a
weak scent here, a false trail there. And now, on the sudden, he
lifted his grey head, and his note was like a bugle-call. The younger
hounds scampered out from among the hoofs that had been playing
dangerously near them and gave full tongue as they swung down
the pastures.
Sir Jasper spurred forward. “Here’s an omen, friends,” he cried. “The
hunt is up in earnest. We shall kill, I tell you! we shall kill!”
It was a run that afterwards, when the fires of war died down and
all Lancashire was hunting once again in peace, was talked of beside
cottage hearths, on market-days when squires and yeomen met for
barter—was talked of wherever keen, lusty men foregathered for the
day’s business and for gossip of the gallant yesterdays.
Sir Jasper led, with Squire Demaine close at his heels. It seemed,
indeed, the day of older folk; for away in front of them, where the
sterns of eager hounds waved like a frantic sea, it was Pincher—
grey, hefty, wise in long experience—that kept the running.
Prince Charles Edward was forgotten, though he had need of these
gentlemen on the morrow. After all, with slighter excuse, they might
any one of them break their necks to-day in pursuit of the lithe red
fox that showed like a running splash of colour far ahead. The day
was enough for them, with its rollicking hazards, its sense of sheer
pace and well-being.
Down Littlemead Ings the fox led them, and up the hill that
bordered Strongstones Coppice. He sought cover in the wood, but
Pincher, with a buoyant, eager yell, dislodged him; and for seven
miles, fair or foul going, they followed that racing blotch of red.
There were fewer horsemen now, but most of them kept pace,
galloping hard behind Sir Jasper and the Squire, who were riding
neck for neck. The fox, as it happened, was in his own country
again, after a sojourn he regretted in alien pastures; and he headed
straight for the barren lands of rock and scanty herbage that lay up
the slopes of Rother Hill. The going was steep and slippery, the
scent cold, because snow was lying on these upper lands; and the
fox, who knew all this a little better than Pincher, plunged through a
snowdrift that hid the opening of his favourite cave and knew
himself secure. They could dig him out from a burrow, but this cave
was long and winding, and all its quiet retreats were known to him.
Pincher, the grey, hefty hound, plunged his nose into the snow, then
withdrew it and began to whimper. He was unused to this departure
from the usual rules of fox-hunting; the snow was wet and chilly,
and touched, maybe, some note of superstition common to hounds
and hill-bred men. Superstition, at any rate, or some grave feeling,
was patent in the faces of the riders. The huntsman, knowing the
windings of the cave as well as Reynard, gathered his pack.
“They’d be lost for ever and a day, Sir Jasper,” he growled, “if once
they got into that cave. I followed it once for a mile and a half
myself, and then didn’t reach the end of it.”
Sir Jasper glanced at Squire Demaine, and found the same doubt in
his face. They had chosen this gallop as an augury, and they had not
killed. It is slight matters of this sort that are apt constantly to turn
the balance of big adventures, and the two older men knew well
enough how the waverers were feeling.
“Gentlemen,” said Sir Jasper sharply, “we’re not like children. There’s
no omen in all this. I jested when I talked of omens.”
“By gad, yes!” sputtered the Squire, backing his friend with a bluster
that scarcely hid his own disquiet. “There’s only one good omen for
to-morrow, friends—a strong body, a sound sword arm, and a leal
heart for the King. We’ll not go back to the nursery, by your leave,
because a fox skulks into hiding.”
There was a waving of three-cornered hats again, a murmur of
applause; but the note did not ring true and merry, as it had done at
the start of this wild gallop. The horses were shivering in a bitter
wind that had got up from behind the hollows of the uplands. Grey-
blue clouds crept round about the sun and stifled him, and sleet
began to fall. They were children of the weather to a man, and to-
morrow’s ride for London and the Stuart took on the semblance of a
Lenten fast.
 CHAPTER V
THE HORSE THIEF

At Windyhough, Rupert had watched Sir Jasper and his brother ride
out to the hunt, had felt the old pang of jealousy and helplessness.
They were so hale and keen on the day’s business; and he was not
one of them.
He turned impatiently from the upper window, not guessing that his
father had carried the picture of his tired face with him to the meet.
With some thought of getting up into the moor, to still his
restlessness, he went down the stair and out into the courtyard.
Lady Royd, who had not lain easy in her bed this morning, was
standing there. Some stronger call than luxury and well-being had
bidden her get up and steal into the windy, nipping air, to watch her
men ride out. She was late, as she was for all appointments, and
some bitter loneliness had taken hold of her when she found them
gone. She had never been one of these gusty, unswerving people
here in Lancashire, and their strength was as foreign to her as their
weaknesses. Until her marriage with the impulsive northern lover
who had come south to the wooing and had captured her girl’s
fancy, she had lived in the lowlands, where breezes played for frolic
only; and the bleakness of these hills had never oppressed her as it
did this morning. She forgot the swift and magic beauty that came
with the late-won spring, forgot how every slope and dingle of this
northern country wakened under the sun’s touch, how the stark and
empty moor grew rich with colour, how blackbird and lavrock, plover
and rook and full-throated thrush made music wild and exquisite
under the blue, happy sky. For the present, the wind was nipping;
on the higher hill-crests snow lay like a burial-shroud; her husband
and the younger son she idolised were riding out to-morrow on a
perilous road because they had listened to that haunting, unhappy
melody which all the Stuarts had the gift of sounding.
Lady Royd could not see beyond. Her faith was colder than the hills
which frightened her, emptier than this winter-time she hated. She
had not once captured the quiet, resolute note that sounded through
her husband’s conduct of affairs. Let the wind whistle its keenest
under a black and sullen sky, Sir Jasper knew that he was chilled, as
she did; but he knew, too, that summer would follow, blithe and full
of hay-scents, fuller, riper in warmth and well-being, because the
months of cold had fed its strength.
She chose to believe that he was playing with a fine, romantic sense
of drama, in following the Prince, that he was sacrificing Maurice to
the same misplaced zeal. Yet hour by hour and day by day of their
long companionship, he had made it plain, to a comrade less
unwilling, that he had followed a road marked white at every
milestone by a faith that would not budge, an obedience to the call
of honour that was instinctive, instant, as the answer of a soldier to
his commanding officer. If all went amiss with this Rising, if he gave
his life for a lost cause, it did not matter greatly to Sir Jasper; for he
was sure that in one world or another, a little sooner or a little later,
he would see that Restoration whose promise shone like the
morning star above the staunch, unbending hills of Lancashire.
“Who is to gain by it all?” murmured Lady Royd, shivering as she
drew her wrap about her. “When I’m widowed, and Maurice has
gone, too, to Tower Hill—shall I hate these Stuart fools the less? It
matters little who is king—so little——”
She heard Rupert’s step behind her, turned and regarded him with
that half-tolerant disdain which had stood to her for motherhood.
Not long ago she had felt a touch of some divine compassion for
him, had been astonished by the pain and happiness that pity
teaches; but the mood had passed, and he stood to her now as a
simpleton so exquisite that he had not strength even to follow the
stupid creeds he cherished. She was in no temper to spare him; he
was a welcome butt on which to vent her weariness of all things
under the sun.
They looked at each other, silent, questioning. Big happenings were
in the making. The very air of Lancashire these days was instinct
with the coming troubles, and folk were restless, ill-at-ease as moor-
birds are when thunder comes beating up against the wind.
“It is not my fault, mother,” said Rupert brusquely, as if answering
some plainly-spoken challenge. “If I had my way, I’d be taking
fences, too—but, then, I never had my way.”
Lady Royd laughed gently—the frigid, easy laugh that Rupert knew
by heart. “A man,” she said, halting on the word—“a man makes his
way, if he’s to have it. The babies stay at home, and blame the dear
God because He will not let them hunt like other men.”
Rupert took fire on the sudden, as he had done not long since when
he had fought with his brother on the moor. Old indignities were
brought to a head. He did not know what he said; but Lady Royd
bent her head, as if a moorland tempest beat about her. It seemed
as if the whole unrest, the whole passion and heedlessness, of the
Stuart battle against circumstance had gathered to a head in this
wind-swept courtyard of the old fighting house of Windyhough.
And the combatants were a spoilt wife on one hand, on the other a
scholar who had not yet found his road in life. The battle should
have given food for laughter; yet the scholar wore something of his
father’s dignity and spirit, and the woman was slow to admit a
mastery that pleased and troubled her.
Again there was a silence. The east wind was piping through and
through the courtyard, and rain was falling; but on the high moors
there were drifts of snow that would not yield to the gusty warmth.
All was upset, disordered—rain, and snow, and wind, were all at
variance, as if they shared the unrest and the tumult of the times.
“You—you hurt me, Rupert,” she said weakly.
“I had no right, mother,” he broke in, contrite. “Of course I am the
heir—and I was never strong, as you had wished—and—and I spoke
in heat.”
“I like your heat, boy,” she said unexpectedly. “Oh, you were right,
were right! You never had a chance.”
He put his hand on her arm—gently, as a lover or a courtier might.
“Maurice should have been the heir. It cannot be helped, mother—
but you’ve been kind to me through it all.”
Lady Royd was dismayed. Her husband had yielded to her whims;
the folk about her had liked her beauty, her easy, friendly insolence,
the smile which comes easily to women who are spoilt and have
luxury at command. She had been sure of herself till now—till now,
when the son she had made light of was at pains to salve her
conscience. He was a stay-at-home, a weakling. There was no
glamour attaching to him, no riding-out to high endeavour among
the men who were making or were marring history. Yet now, to the
mother’s fancy, he was big of stature.
She yielded to a sharp, dismaying pity. “My dear,” she said, with a
broken laugh, “you talk like your father—like your father when I like
him most and disagree with his mad view of life.”
Rupert went to bed that night—after his father and Maurice had
returned muddied from a hunt he had not shared, after the supper
that had found him silent and without appetite—with a sense of
keen and personal disaster that would not let him sleep. Through all
his dreams—the brave, unspoiled dreams of boyhood—he had seen
this Rising take its present shape. His father’s teaching, his stealthy
reading in the library of books that could only better a sound Stuart
faith, had prepared him for the Loyal Meet that was to gather at
Windyhough with to-morrow’s dawn. But in his dreams he had been
a rider among loyal riders, had struck a blow here and there for the
Cause he had at heart. In plain reality, with the wind sobbing round
the gables overhead, he was not disciplined enough to join the hunt.
He was untrained.
Maurice shared his elder brother’s bedroom; and somewhere in the
dark hours before the dawn he heard Rupert start from a broken
sleep, crying that the Prince was in some danger and needed him.
Maurice was tired after the day’s hunting, and knew that he must be
up betimes; and a man’s temper at such times is brittle.
“Get to sleep, Rupert!” he growled. “The Prince will be none the
better for your nightmares.”
Rupert was silent. He knew it was true. No man would ever be the
better, he told himself, for the help of a dreamer and a weakling. He
heard his brother turn over, heard the heavy, measured breathing.
He had no wish for sleep, but lay listening to the sleet that was
driving at the window-panes. It was bitter cold, and dark beyond
belief. Whatever chanced with the Prince’s march to London, there
was something to chill the stoutest faith in this night-hour before the
dawn. Yet the scholar chose this moment for a sudden hope, a
warmth of impulse and of courage. Down the sleety wind, from the
moors he loved, a trumpet-call seemed to ring sharp and clear. And
the call sounded boot-and-saddle.
He sprang from bed and dressed himself, halted to be sure that
Maurice was still sound asleep, felt his way through the pitch-dark of
the room until he reached the door. Then he went down, unbarred
the main door with gentle haste, and stood in the windy courtyard.
It was a wet night and a stormy one on Windyhough Heights. Now
and then the moon ran out between the grey-black, scudding clouds
and lit a world made up of rain and emptiness.
And Rupert again heard the clear, urgent call. Slight of body, a thing
of small account set in the middle of this majestic uproar of the
heath, he squared his shoulders, looked at the house-front, the
fields, the naked, wind-swept coppices, to which he was the heir.
Old tradition, some instinct fathered by many generations, rendered
him greater than himself. “Get to saddle,” said the voice at his ear;
and he forgot that the ways of a horse were foreign to him. He
glanced once again at the heath, as if asking borrowed strength,
then crept like a thief toward the stables.
It was near dawn now. The wind, tired out, had sunk to a low,
piping breeze. The moon shone high and white from a sky cleared of
all but the filmiest clouds; and over the eastern hummocks of the
moor lithe, palpitating streaks of rose, and grey, and amber were
ushering up the sun.
All was uproar in the stable-yard, and the future master of these
grooms and farm-lads waited in the shadows—a looker-on, as
always. He saw a lanthorn swinging up and down the yard,
confusing still more the muddled light of moon and dawn; and then
he heard Giles, his father’s bailiff, laugh as he led out Sir Jasper’s
horse, and listened while the man swore, with many a rich
Lancashire oath, that Rising work was better than keeping books
and harrying farmers when they would not pay their rents. And still
Rupert waited, watching sturdy yeomen ride in from Pendle Forest,
on nags as well built as themselves, to answer Sir Jasper’s rally-call.
“’Tis only decent-like, Giles,” he heard one ruddy yeoman say, “to
ride in a little before our betters need us. I was never one to be late
at a hunt, for my part.”
“It all gangs gradely,” Giles answered cheerily. “By dangment,
though, the dawn’s nearer than I thought; and I’ve my own horse to
saddle yet.”
Rupert waited with great patience for his chance—waited until Giles
came out again, leading a thick-set chestnut that had carried him on
many a bailiff’s errand. And in the waiting his glow of courage and
high purpose grew chilled. He watched the lanthorns bobbing up and
down the yard, watched the dawn sweep bold and crimson over this
crowd of busy folk. He was useless, impotent; he had no part in
action, no place among these men, strong of their hands, who were
getting ready for the battle. Yet, under all the cold and shame, he
knew that, if he were asked to die for the Cause—asked simply, and
without need to show himself a fool at horsemanship—it would be
an easy matter.
He looked on, and he was lonelier than in the years behind. Until a
day or two ago he had been sure of one thing at least—of his
father’s trust in him; and Sir Jasper had killed that illusion when he
taught his heir how Windyhough was to be defended against attack
and afterwards confessed that it was a trick to soothe the lad’s
vanity.
Yet still he waited, some stubborness of purpose behind him. And by
and by he saw his chance. The stable-yard was empty for the
moment. Sir Jasper’s men had mustered under the house-front,
waiting for their leader to come out. Giles had left his own horse
tethered to a ring outside the stable door, while he led the master’s
grey and Maurice’s slim, raking chestnut into the courtyard. From the
bridle-track below came the clatter of hoofs, as Sir Jasper’s hunting
intimates brought in their followers to the Loyal Meet. On that side
of the house all was noise, confusion; on this side, the stable-yard
lay quiet under the paling moonlight and the ruddy, nipping dawn.
Sir Jasper’s heir crossed the yard, as if he planned a theft and feared
surprisal. There had been horse-thieves among his kin, doubtless,
long ago when the Royds were founding a family in this turbulent
and lawless county; and Rupert was but harking back to the times
when necessity was the day’s gospel.
He unslipped the bridle of Giles’s horse, and let him through the gate
that opened on the pastures at the rear of Windyhough. Then he
went in a wide circle round the house, until he reached a wood of
birch and rowan that stood just above the Langton road. The wind
was up again, and rain with it; and in the downpour Rupert, holding
the bridle of a restive horse, waited for the active men to pass him
by along the road that led to Prince Charles Edward. He could not
join them at the meet in the courtyard, but he would wait here till
they passed, he told himself, would get to saddle afterwards and
ride down and follow them. And in the coming battle, may be, he
would prove to his father that courage was not lacking, after all, in
the last heir of the Royd men.
The front of Windyhough, meanwhile, was busy with men and
horses, with sheep-dogs that had followed their masters, unnoticed
and unbidden, from the high farms that bordered Windyhough. It
might have been Langton market-day, so closely and with such
laughing comradeship yeomen, squires, and hinds rubbed shoulders,
while dogs ran in and out between their legs and horses whinnied to
each other. The feudal note was paramount. There was no distrust
here, no jealousy of class against class; the squires were pledged to
defend those who followed them with healthy and implicit
confidence, their men were loyal in obedience that was neither blind
nor stupid, but trained by knowledge and the sense of discipline, as
a soldier’s is. Each squire was a kingly father to the men he had
gathered from his own acres. In all things, indeed, this gathering at
Windyhough was moved by the clan spirit that had made possible
the Prince’s gathering of an army in Scotland—that small, ill-
equipped army which had already routed General Cope at
Prestonpans, had compelled Edinburgh to applaud its pluck and
gallantry, had taken Carlisle Castle, and now was marching through
a country, disaffected for the most part, on the forlornest hope that
ever bade men leave warm hearths.
Sir Jasper, standing near the main door of Windyhough, watched the
little companies ride in. He was keen and buoyant, and would not
admit that he was troubled because his own judgment and that of
his friends was justified. He had guessed that one in five of those
who had passed their claret over the water would prove their faith;
and he had calculated to a nicety. One whom he had counted a
certain absentee was here, to be sure—young Hunter of Hunterscliff,
whose tongue was more harum-scarum than his heart. But, against
this gain of a sword-arm and a dozen men, he had to set Will
Underwood’s absence. Some easy liking for Will’s horsemanship,
some instinct to defend him against the common distrust, had
prompted him to an obstinate, half-hearted faith in the man. Yet he
was not here, and Sir Jasper guessed unerringly what the business
was that had taken him wide of Lancashire.
Squire Demaine was the last to ride in with his men. He could afford
to be late; for Pendle Hill, round and stalwart up against the
crimson, rainy sky, would as soon break away from its moorings as
Roger Demaine proved truant to his faith.
It was wet and cold, and the errand of these men was not one to
promise warmth for many a day to come. Yet they raised a cheer
when old Roger pushed his big, hard-bitten chestnut through the
crowd. And when they saw that his daughter was with him, riding
the grey mare that had known many a hunting morn, their cheers
grew frantic. For at these times men learn the way of their hearts,
and know the folk whose presence brings a sense of well-being.
Sir Jasper had not got to saddle yet. He stood at the door, with his
wife and Maurice, greeting all new-comers, and hoping constantly
that there were laggards to come in. He reached up a hand to grasp
the Squire’s.
“The muster’s small, old friend,” he said.
“Well, what else?” growled Roger. “We know our Lancashire—oh, by
the Heart, we know it through and through.” He glanced round the
courtyard, with the free, wind-trained eye that saw each face, each
detail. “There’s few like to make a hard bed for themselves, Jasper.
Best leave our feather-bed folk at home.”
Sir Jasper, with a twinge of pain to which long use had accustomed
him, thought of Rupert, his heir. He glanced aside from the trouble,
and for the first time saw that Nance was close behind her father.
“Does Nance go with us?” he asked, with a quick smile. “She can
ride as well as the best of us—we know as much, but women are
not soldiers these days, Roger.”
Squire Demaine looked round for a face he did not find. “No, she
stays here at Windyhough. Where’s Rupert? I always trusted that
quiet lad.”
“He’s gone up to the moors, sir, I think,” said Maurice, with some
impulse to defend the absent brother. “He was full of nightmares just
before dawn—talking of the Prince, who needed him—and he was
gone when I got up at daybreak.”
“Well, he’ll return,” snapped the Squire; “and, though I say it, he’ll
find a bonnie nestling here at Windyhough. Nance, tell the lad that I
trust him. And now, Jasper, we’ll be late for the meet on the Langton
Road, unless we bestir ourselves.”
Sir Jasper, under all his unswerving zeal, grew weak with a fine
human tenderness. He turned, caught his wife’s glance, wondered in
some odd, dizzy way why he had chosen to tear his heart out by the
roots. And Rupert was not here; he had longed to say good-bye to
him, and he was hiding somewhere, full of shame that was too
heavy for his years—oh, yes, he knew the lad!
He passed a hand across his eyes, stooped for a moment and
whispered some farewell message to his wife, then set his foot into
the stirrup that Giles was holding for him. His face cleared. He had
chosen the way of action—and the road lay straight ahead.
“We’re ready, gentlemen, I take it?” he said. “Good! The Prince
might chance to be a little earlier at the meet. We’d best be
starting.”
Nance had slipped from the saddle, and stood, with the bridle in her
hand, watching the riders get into some semblance of a well-drilled
company of horse. At another time her quick eye would have seen
the humour of it. Small farmers—and their hinds, on plough-horses
—were jostling thoroughbreds. Rough faces that she knew were self-
conscious of a new dignity; rough lips were muttering broad, lively
oaths as if still they were engaged in persuading their mounts to
drive a straight furrow.
Yet to Nance the dignity, the courage, the overwhelming pity of it all
were paramount. The rain and the ceaseless wind in the courtyard
here—the wintry moors above, with sleet half covering their black
austerity—the uneasy whinnying of horses that did not like this cold
snap of wind, telling of snow to come—all made up the burden of a
song that was old as Stuart haplessness and chivalry.
The muttered oaths, the restlessness, died down. The drill of months
had found its answer now. Rough farmers, keen-faced yeomen,
squires gently-bred, were an ordered company. They were equals
here, met on a grave business that touched their hearts. And Nance
gained courage, while she watched the men look quietly about
them, as if they might not see the Lancashire moors again, and were
anxious to carry a clear picture of the homeland into the unknown.
It seemed that loyalty so grim, and so unquestioning, was bound to
have its way.
She saw, too, that Sir Jasper was resolute, with a cheeriness that
admitted no denial, saw that her father carried the same easy air.
Then, with a brisk air of command, Sir Jasper gathered up his reins
and lifted his hat.
“For the King, gentlemen!” he said. “It is time we sought the
Langton Road.”
It was so they rode out, through a soaking rain and a wind that
nipped to the bone; and Nance, because she was young and untried
as yet, felt again the chill of bitter disappointment. Like Rupert, her
childish dreams had been made up of this Loyal Meet that was to
happen one day. Year by year it had been postponed. Year by year
she had heard her elders talk of it, when listeners were not about,
until it had grown to the likeness of a fairy-tale, in which all the
knights were brave and blameless, all the dragons evil and beyond
reach of pity for the certain end awaiting them.
And now the tale was coming true, so far as the riding out went.
The hunt was up; but there was no flashing of swords against the
clear sunlight she had pictured, no ringing cheers, no sudden music
of the pipes. These knights of the fairy-tale had proved usual men—
men with their sins and doubts and personal infirmities, who went
on the Prince’s business as if they rode to kirk in time of Lent. She
was too young to understand that the faith behind this rainy
enterprise sang swifter and more clear than any music of the pipes.
She heard them clatter down the road. She was soaked to the skin,
and her mare was fidgeting on the bridle which she still held over-
tight, forgetting that she grasped it.
“You will come indoors, Nance?” said Lady Royd, shivering at the
door. “They’ve gone, and we are left—and that’s the woman’s story
always. Men do not care for us, except as playthings when they see
no chance of shedding blood.”
Nance came out from her dreams. Not the quiet riding-out, not the
rain and the bitter wind, had chilled her as did the knowledge that
Will Underwood was absent from the meet. She had hoped, without
confessing it, that young Hunter’s gibe of yesterday would be
disproved, that Will would be there, whatever business had taken
him abroad, in time to join his fellows. He was not there; and, in the
hand that was free of her mare’s bridle, she crushed the kerchief she
had had in readiness. He had asked for it, to wear when he rode out
—and he had not claimed it—and her pride grew resolute and hot,
as if one of her father’s hinds had laughed at her.
“You’re wet and shivering, child,” said Lady Royd, her temper frayed,
as always, when men were stupid in their need to get away from
feather-beds. “I tell you, men are all alike—they follow any will-o’-
the-wisp, and name him Faith. Faith? What has it done for you or
me?”
Nance quivered, as her mare did, here in the soaking rain and the
wind that would not be quiet. Yet she was resolute, obedient to her
training. “Faith?” she said, with an odd directness and simplicity. “It
will have to help us through the waiting-time. What else? We are
only women here, and men too old for battle——”
“You forget Rupert,” broke in the other, with the tired disdain that
Nance hated. The girl did not know how Lady Royd was suffering,
how heart and strength and sense of well-being had gone out with
the husband who was all in all to her. “Rupert—the heir—is here to
guard us, Nance. The wind will rave about the house—dear heart!
how it will rave, and cry, and whistle—but Rupert will be here! He’ll
quiet our fears for us. He is—so resolute, shall we say?—so stay-at-
home. Cannot you see the days to come?” she went on, seeking a
weak relief from pain in wounding others. “Rupert will come down to
us o’ nights, when the corridors are draughty with their ghosts, and
will tell us he’s been reading books—that we need fear no assault,
surprisal, because good King Charles died for the true faith.” She
drew her wrap about her and shivered.
She was so dainty, so young of face, that her spite against the first-
born gathered strength by contrast. And, somehow, warmth
returned to Nance, though she was forlorn enough, and wet to the
skin. “So he did,” she answered quickly. “No light talk can alter that.
The King died—when he might have bought his life. He disdained to
save himself.”
Lady Royd laughed gently. “Oh, come indoors, my girl. You’ll find
Rupert there—and you can put your heads together, studying old
books.”
“Old books? Surely we’ve seen a new page turned to-day? These
men who gathered to the Loyal Meet—were they fools, or bookish?
Did they show like men who were riding out for pastime?”
“My dear,” said Lady Royd, with a tired laugh, “the Stuart faith
becomes you. I see what Sir Jasper meant, when he said one day
that you were beautiful, and I would have it that you had only the
prettiness of youth. Rupert——”
Nance stood at bay, her head up. She did not know her heart, or the
reason of this quiet, courageous fury that had settled on her. “Rupert
fought on the moor—for my sake; you saw the plight Maurice came
home in. I tell you, Rupert can fight like other men.”
“Oh, yes—for books, and causes dead before our time.”
“The Cause lives, Lady Royd—to Rupert and myself,” broke in Nance
impulsively.
So then the elder woman glanced at her with a new, mocking
interest. “So the wind sits there, child, does it? It is ‘Rupert and I’ to-
day—and to-morrow it will be ‘we’—and what will Mr. Underwood
think of the pretty foolery, I wonder?”
The girl flushed. This tongue of Lady Royd’s—it was so silken, and
yet it bit like an unfriendly wind. “Mr. Underwood’s opinion carries
little weight these days,” she said, gathering her pride together. “He
is known already as the man who shirked his first big fence and ran
away.”
“Oh, then, you’re like the rest of them! All’s hunting here, it seems—
you cannot speak without some stupid talk of fox, or hounds, or
fences. For my part, I like Will Underwood. He’s smooth and easy,
and a respite from the weather.”
“Yes. He is that,” assented Nance, with something of the other’s
irony.
“He’s a rest, somehow, from all the wind and rain and downrightness
of Lancashire. But, there! We shall not agree, Nance. You’re too like
your father and Sir Jasper. Come indoors, and get those wet clothes
off. We shall take a chill, the two of us, if we stand here.”
Nance shivered, more from heart-chill than from cold of body.
“Yes,” she said—“if only some one will take this mare of mine to
stable. She’s wet and lonely. All her friends have left her—to seek
the Langton Road.”
Again the older woman was aware of a breadth of sympathy, an
instinctive care for their dumb fellows, that marked so many of these
hill-folk. It seemed barbarous to her that at a time like this, when
women’s hearts were breaking for their men, Nance should be
thinking of her mare’s comfort and peace of mind.
A step sounded across the courtyard. Both women glanced up
sharply, and saw Giles, the bailiff, a ludicrous anger and worry in his
face.
“Well, Giles?” asked his mistress, with soft impatience. “Are you a
shirker, too?”
“No, my lady. I was not reared that way. Some cursed fool—asking
pardon for my plain speech—has stolen my horse. I’ll just have to
o’ertake them on foot, I reckon—unless——”
His glance rested on Nance’s mare, big and strong enough to carry
him.
“But, Giles, we keep no horse-thieves at Windyhough,” said Lady
Royd, in her gentle, purring voice. “Where did you leave him?”
“Tethered to the stable-door, my lady. He couldn’t have unslipped
the bridle without human hands to help him. It was this way. I had
to see Sir Jasper mounted, and Maister Maurice. They’re raither
feckless-like, unless they’ve got Giles nigh handy to see that all goes
well. Well, after they were up i’ saddle, I tried to get through the
swarm o’ folk i’ the courtyard, and a man on foot has little chance.
So I bided till they gat away, thinking I’d catch them up; and when
they’d ridden a lile way down the road, I ran to th’ stable. Th’ stable-
door was there all right, and th’ ring for tething, but blamed if my
fiddle-headed horse warn’t missing. It was that way, my lady, take it
or leave it—and maister will be sadly needing me.”
He was business-like in all emergencies, and his glance wandered
again, as if by chance, from Nance’s face to the mare’s bridle that
she held.
“There’s not a horse in Lancashire just the equal of my chestnut,” he
said dispassionately; “but I’d put up with another, if ’twere offered
me.”
Nance, bred on the soil, knew what this sturdy, six-foot fellow asked
of her. It was hard to give up the one solace she had brought to
Windyhough—her mare, who would take her long scampers up the
pastures and the moor when she needed room about her.
“She could not carry you, Giles,” said the girl, answering the plain
meaning behind his words.
“Ay, blithely, miss. But, then, you wouldn’t spare her, like.”
There was a moment’s silence. Nance was asked to give up
something for the Cause—something as dear to her as hedgerows,
and waving sterns of hounds, and a game fox ahead. Then she put
the bridle into Giles’s hand.
“On second thoughts”—she halted to stroke the mare’s neck—“I
think, Giles, she’ll carry you. Tell Sir Jasper that the women, too, are
leal, though they’re compelled to stay at home.”
Giles wasted little time in thanks. Business-like, even in this matter
of running his neck into a halter, he sprang to the mare’s back. He
would be sore before the day was out, because the saddle was
wringing wet by this time; but he was used to casual hardships.
Lady Royd watched the bailiff ride quickly down the road, heard the
last hoof-beats die away. “You are odd, you folk up here,” she said,
with a warmer note in her tired voice. “You did not give up your
mare lightly, Nance—and to Giles, of all men. Who stole his horse,
think you?”
Nance answered without knowing she had framed the thought.
“Rupert is missing, too,” she said, with an odd, wayward smile. “I
told you he had pluck.”
Yet, after they had gone indoors, after she had changed her riding-
gear, Nance sat in the guest-chamber upstairs, and could think only
of Will Underwood. Her dreams of him had been so pleasant, so
loyal; she was not prepared to trample on them. She saw him giving
her a lead on many a bygone hunting-day—saw the eager face, and
heard his low, persuasive voice.
Nance was steadfast, even to disproven trust. She caught hold of Sir
Jasper’s challenge yesterday, when men had doubted Will. He would
join them on the southward march. Surely he would, knowing how
well she liked him. And the kerchief he had asked for—it must wait,
until he came in his own time to claim it.
 CHAPTER VI
THE PRINCE COMES SOUTH

Rupert stood in the little wood that bordered the Langton road,
waiting for Sir Jasper’s company of horse to pass. It would have
been chilling work for hardier folk. The rain soaked him to the skin;
the wind stabbed from behind, as the sly northeaster does. He had
no prospect of joining his friends as yet; his one hope was to follow
them, like a culprit fearing detection, until they and he had ridden so
far from Windyhough that they could not turn him back to eat his
heart out among the women.
Yet he was aglow with a sense of adventure. He was looking ahead,
for the first time in his life, to the open road that he could share at
last with braver men. The horse he had borrowed from Giles was
tugging at the bridle. He checked it sharply, with a firmness that
surprised the pair of them. He was conscious of a curious gaiety and
strength.
Far down the road at last he heard the clink of hoofs, then a sharp
word of command, and afterwards the gaining tumult of horsemen
trotting over sloppy ground. His horse began to whinny, to strain at
the bridle, wondering what the lad was at. He quieted him as best
he could, and the Loyal Meet that swept past below him had neither
thought nor hearing for the uproar in the wood above.
Rupert saw his father and Squire Demaine riding with set faces at
the head of their motley gathering. Then, after all had passed and
the road seemed clear, there came again the beat of hoofs from the
far distance—the hoofs of one horse only, drumming feverishly along
the road. And soon Giles, the bailiff, passed him at a sweltering
gallop; and Rupert saw that he was riding Nance’s mare.
The scholar laughed suddenly. Intent on his own business, he had
not guessed until now that Giles would be troubled when he found
his fiddle-headed horse stolen. He could picture the bailiff’s face,
could hear his broad and Doric speech, when he found himself
without a mount. It was astonishing to Rupert that he could laugh at
such a time, for he was young to the open road, and had yet to
learn what a solace laughter is to hard-bitten men who fear to take
big happenings over-seriously.
He heard Giles gallop out of earshot. Then he led his horse through
the wood and down into the high-road. There was no onlooker to
smile at his clumsy horsemanship, and for that reason he mounted
lightly and handled the reins with easy firmness; and his horse,
doubtful until now, found confidence in this new rider.
The sun was well up, but it had no warmth. Its watery light served
only to make plainer the cold, sleety hills, the drab-coloured slush of
the trampled highway. Only a fool, surely—a fool with some instinct
for the forlorn hope—could have woven romance about this scene of
desolation. Yet Rupert’s courage was high, his horse was going
blithely under him. He was picturing the crowd of wiser men whom
he had watched ride by—the gentry, the thick-thewed yeomen
whose faces were known to him from childhood, the jolly farmers
who had taken their fences on more cheery hunting days than this.
Something stirred at the lad’s heart as he galloped in pursuit—some
reaching back to the olden days, some sense of forward, eager
hope. So had the men of Craven, just over the Yorkshire border,
ridden up to Flodden generations since—ridden from the plough and
hunting-field to a battle that gave them once for all their place in
song and story.
And he, the Scholar, was part, it seemed, of this later riding out that
promised to bring new fame to Lancashire. All was confused to him
as he urged Giles’s fiddle-headed nag to fresh endeavour. Old tales
of warfare, passed on from mouth to mouth along the generations,
were mingled with this modern battle that was in the making London
way; voices from the elder days stole down and whispered to him
from the windy, driven moors that had been his playmates. As if
some miracle had waited for him at the cross-ways of the Rising,
where many had chosen the road of doubt and some few the track
of faith, Rupert knew himself the heir at last—the heir his father had
needed all these years.
His seat in the saddle was one that any knowledgable horseman
might praise. The bailiff’s chestnut was galloping with a speed that
had taken fire from the rider’s need to catch up the Loyal Meet.
Rupert was so sure of himself, so sanguine. He had let his friends
ride forward without him because he had not known how to tell
them that at heart he was no fool; and now, when he overtook
them, they would understand at last.
They pounded over a straight, level stretch of road just between
Conie Cliff Wood and the little farm at the top of Water Ghyll, and
Rupert saw Bailiff Giles half a mile in front of him. Giles was doing
his best to ruin Nance’s mare for life in his effort to catch up the
hunt; and so Rupert, in the man’s way, must needs ask more of his
own horse, too, than need demanded. He would catch up with the
bailiff, he told himself, would race past him, would turn in saddle
with a careless shout that Giles would be late for the Meet unless he
stirred himself. His mood was the more boyish because until he
fought with his brother on the moors a while since he had not tasted
real freedom.
It was not his fault, nor his horse’s, that they came heedlessly to a
corner of the road where it dipped down a greasy, curving slope. In
the minds of both there was the need for haste, and they were
riding straight, the two of them. His fiddle-headed beast slipped at
the turning of the corner, reeled half across the road in his effort to
recover, and threw his rider. When Rupert next awoke to knowledge
of what was going forward he found himself alone. Far down the
road he could hear the rattle of his horse as it galloped madly after
its brethren that carried Sir Jasper’s company.
Sir Jasper, meanwhile, had got to Langton High Street, had drawn
his men up on either side of the road. Their horses were muddied to
the girths. The riders were wet to the skin, splashed and unheroic.
Yet from the crowd that had gathered from the rookeries and the by-
streets of the town—a crowd not any way disposed to reverence the
call of a Stuart to his loyal friends—a murmur of applause went up.
They had looked for dainty gentlemen, playing at heroics while the
poor ground at the mill named “daily bread.” They saw instead a
company of horse whose members were not insolent, or gay, or free
from weariness. They saw working farmers, known to them by sight,
who were not accounted fools on market-days. Some glimmering of
intelligence came to these townsfolk who led bitter lives among the
by-streets. There must be “some queer mak’ o’ sense about it,” they
grumbled one to another, as they saw that the Loyal Meet was wet
to the skin, and grave and resolute. It was the like resolution—
dumb, and without help from loyalty to a high Cause—that had kept
many of them faithful to their wives, their children, their houses in
the back alleys of Langton Town.
The rain ceased for a while, and the sun came struggling through a
press of clouds. And up through the middle of the street, between
the two lines of horsemen and the chattering crowd behind, a single
figure walked. He was big in length and beam, and he moved as if
he owned the lives of men; and the shrill wind blew his cassock
round him.
Sir Jasper moved his horse into the middle of the street, stooped,
and grasped the vicar’s hand.
“We’re well met, I think,” he said. “What’s your errand, Vicar?”
“Oh, just to ring the church bells. My ringer is a George’s man—so’s
my sexton; and I said to both of them, in a plain parson’s way, that
I’d need shriving if Langton, one way or t’other, didn’t ring a Stuart
through the town. I can handle one bell, if not the whole team of
six.”
Sir Jasper laughed. So did his friends. So did the rabble looking on.
“It’s well we’re here to guard you,” said Sir Jasper, glancing at the
crowd, whose aspect did not promise well for church bells and such
temperate plain-song.
“By your leave, no,” the Vicar answered with a jolly laugh. “I know
these folk o’ Langton. They should know me, too, by now, seeing
how often I’ve whipped ’em from the pulpit—and at other times—
yes, at other times, maybe.”
The Vicar, grey with endeavour and constancy to his trust, was
vastly like Rupert, riding hard in quest of a boy’s first adventure. He
stood to his full height, and nodded right and left to the townsmen
who were pressing already between the flanks of Stuart horses.
“Men o’ Langton,” he said, his voice deep, cheery, resonant, “Sir
Jasper says I need horsemen to guard me in my own town. Give him
your answer.”
The loyal horse, indeed, were anxious for the Vicar’s safety, seeing
this rabble swarm into the middle of the High Street, through the
double line of riders that had kept them back till now. They were
riding forward already, but the parson waved them back.
The Vicar stood now in the thick of a roaring crowd that had him at
its mercy. Sir Jasper, who loved a leal man, tried to get his horse a
little nearer, but could not without riding down defenceless folk; and,
while he and his friends were in grave anxiety and doubt, a sudden
hum of laughter came from the jostling crowd.
“Shoulder him, lads!” cried one burly fellow.
Five other stalwarts took up the cry, and the Vicar, protesting with
great cheeriness, was lifted shoulder high. And gradually it grew
clear to the Loyal Meet that the parson, as he had boasted, was safe
—nay, was beloved—among these working-folk of Langton.
They moved up the street, followed by the rabble, and the two lines
of the Loyal Meet were facing each other once more across the
emptying roadway. And by and by, from the old church on the hill, a
furious peal rang out. The Vicar, who was a keen horseman himself,
had named his bells “a team of six”; and never in its history,
perhaps, had the team been driven with such recklessness. The
parson held one rope—one rein, as he preferred to call it—and knew
how to handle it. But his five allies had only goodwill to prompt them
in their attempt to ring a peal.
There was noise enough, to be sure; and across the uproar another
music sounded—music less full-bodied, but piercing, urgent, not to
be denied.
Sir Jasper lifted his head, as a good hound does when he hears the
horn. “Gentlemen,” he said, “the pipes, the blessed pipes! D’ye hear
them? The Prince is near.”
They scarcely heard the jangling bells. Keen, swift, triumphant, the
sweetest music in the world came louder and louder round the bend
of Langton Street. The riders could not sit still in saddle, but were
drumming lightly with their feet, as if their stirrups were a dancing-
floor. Their horses fidgeted and neighed.
And then Prince Charles Edward came into Langton, and these
gentry of the Loyal Meet forgot how desolate and cold the dawn had
been. Some of them had waited thirty years for this one moment;
others, the youngsters and the middle-aged, had been reared on
legends of that unhappy ’15 Rising which had not chilled the faith of
Lancashire. And all seemed worth while now, here in the sunlit
street, that was wet and glistening with the late persistent rain.
The Prince rode alone, his officers a few yards in the rear, and
behind them the strange army, made up of Scottish gentry, of
Highlanders in kilts, of plain Lowland farmers armed with rusty
swords, with scythe-blades fixed on six-foot poles, with any weapon
that good luck had given to their hands.
It was not this motley crew that Sir Jasper saw, nor any of his
company. It was not Lord Murray, a commanding figure at another
time; not Lochiel, lean and debonair and princely, though both rode
close behind the Prince.
The Prince himself drew all men’s eyes. His clothes, his Highland
bonnet, had suffered from the muddy wet; the bright hair, that had
pleased ladies up in Edinburgh not long ago when he danced at
Holyrood, was clotted by the rain. He stood plainly on his record as a
man, without any of the fripperies to which women give importance.
And the record was graven on his tired, eager face. Forced marches
had told on him. His sleepless care for the least among his followers
had told on him. He knew that Marshal Wade was hurrying from
Northumberland to overtake him, that he was riding through a
country worse than hostile—a country indifferent for the most part,
whose men were reckoning up the chances either way, and choosing
as prudence, not the heart, dictated. Yet behind him was some
unswerving purpose; and, because he had no doubt of his own faith,
he seemed to bring a light from the farther hills into this muddy
street of Langton.
He drew rein, and those behind him pulled up sharply. The pipes
ceased playing, and it seemed as if a healthy, nipping wind had
ceased to blow from these sleet-topped hills of Lancashire. The Loyal
Meet rose in their stirrups, and their uproar drowned the Vicar’s
bells. They were men applauding a stronger man, and the pipes
themselves could find no better music.
Sir Jasper rode forward with bared head, and the Prince, doffing his
bonnet in return, reached out a capable, firm hand.
“Leal and punctual, sir. I give you greeting,” he said.
And the tears, do as he would, were in Sir Jasper’s eyes. This man
with the fair, disordered hair and the face that laughed its weariness
away, was kingly, resolute, instinct with the larger air that comes of
long apprenticeship to royalty. He and the Loyal Meet and all the
ragged army might be on their way to execution before the week
was out; but the Prince was following this day’s business without
fear of the morrow, as creed and training taught him.
“All Langton gives your Highness greeting,” answered Sir Jasper,
faltering a little because his feelings were so stirred. “Our bells are
ringing you into your kingdom.”
The Prince glanced keenly at him, at the faces of the Loyal Meet. He
was quick of intuition, and saw, for the first time since crossing the
Border, that light of zeal, of courage to the death, which he had
hoped to find in England.
“We’re something wet and hungry,” he said, with the quiet laugh
that had less mirth than sadness in it. “You hearten us, I think. My
father, as I was setting sail, bade me remember that Lancashire was
always the county of fair women and clean faith.”
Lord Murray was tired and wet, like the rest of the army; and, to add
to his evil plight, he was consumed by the jealousy and self-
importance that were his besetting luxuries. “The church bells, your
Highness,” he said, glancing up the street—“I trust it’s no ill omen
that they ring so desperately out of tune.”
Sir Jasper saw the Prince move impatiently in saddle, saw him
struggle with some irritation that was not of yesterday. And he felt,
rather than framed the clear thought, that there were hot-and-cold
folk among the Scots, as here in Lancashire.
Then the Prince’s face cleared. “My lord Murray,” he said suavely, “all
bells ring in tune when loyal hands are at the ropes. Your ear, I
think, is not trained to harmony. And now, gentlemen, what food is
in your town? Enough to give a mouthful to us all? Good! We can
spare an hour in Langton, and after that we must be jogging
forward.”
The hour was one of surprise to Sir Jasper and his friends. Here was
an army strong enough to raid the town, to break into the taverns,
to commit licence and excess; yet there was no licence, nor thought
of it. A Stuart, his fair hair muddied and unkempt, had charge of this
march south; and his will was paramount, because his army loved
him. No fear, no usual soldier’s obedience to discipline, could have
hindered these Scots from rapine when they found the town’s
resources scanty for their hunger; but the fearlessness, the
comradeship of their leader had put honour, sharp as a sword,
between temptation and themselves.
“We must foot our bill here, Sir Jasper,” said the Prince as they were
preparing to ride out again.
“Oh, that can wait——”
“No, by your leave! Theft is the trade of men who steal thrones. I
will not have it said that any town in England was poorer because a
Stuart came that way. Lochiel, you carry our royal purse,” he broke
off, with a quick, impulsive laugh. “Peep into it and see how much is
left.”
“Enough to pay our score, your Highness.”
“Then we’re rich, Lochiel! We may be poor to-morrow, but to-day
we’re rich enough to pay our debts.”
A half-hour later they rode out into the wintry, ill-found roads, into
the open country, wet and desolate, that was guarded by sleet-
covered uplands. And Sir Jasper, who had the countryman’s
superstitious outlook on the weather, remembered Lord Murray, his
cold, easy smile, as he said that the Langton bells were ringing out
of tune.
A mile south from Langton, as Giles, the bailiff at Windyhough, was
riding not far behind the gentry—having at heart the need to keep
his master well in sight—a fiddle-headed horse came blundering
down the road. The beast was creamed with foam, and he scattered
the footmen right and left as he made forward. Only when he
reached Giles’s side he halted, stood shivering with the recoil from
his own wild gallop, and pushed his nose up against the bailiff’s
bridle-hand. And Giles, with scant respect for the mare that had
carried him so far, slipped from the saddle, and fussed about the
truant as if he were a prodigal returned. Giles did not heed that he
was holding up all the men behind, that the gentlemen in front had
drawn rein, aware of some disturbance in the rear, and that the
Prince himself was asking what the trouble was.
“Where hast thou been, old lad? I thought thee lost,” the bailiff was
muttering, with all a countryman’s disregard of bigger issues when
his heart was touched. And the horse could not tell him that, after
throwing Rupert, he had lost sight of the master he pursued and had
wasted time in seeking him down casual by-roads. “Ye’ve had an ill
rider, by the look o’ thee. Ye threw him, likely? Well, serve him right
—serve him varry right.”
Giles, with a slowness that suggested he had all the time in the
world to spare, got to the back of the fiddle-headed chestnut, and
felt at home again.
“What mun I do wi’ this lile nag?” he asked dispassionately, still
holding the reins of Nance’s borrowed mare.
Sir Jasper, seeing that his bailiff was the cause of this unexpected
check, could not keep back his laughter.
“What is the pleasantry?” asked the Prince. “Tell it to me. I think we
need a jest or two, if we’re to get safely over these evil roads of
yours.”
“Oh, it is naught, your Highness—naught at all, unless you know
Giles as I do. He thinks more of that fiddle-headed horse of his than
of the pick amongst our Lancashire hunters—and he’s holding up our
whole advance.”
“What mun I do wi’ the mare?” repeated Giles, looking round him
with a large impassiveness. “I can’t take a led mare to Lunnon and
do my share o’ fighting by the way. It stands to reason I mun have
one hand free.”
The Prince, whose instinct for the humour of the road had put heart
into his army since the forced march began, looked quietly for a
moment at Giles’s face. Its simplicity, masking a courage hard as
bog-oak, appealed to him. “By your leave, Sir Jasper,” he said, “my
horse will scarcely last the day out—these roads have punished him.
I shall be glad of the mare, if you will lend her to me.”
When the march was moving forward again, the Prince in the grey
mare’s saddle, Lord Murray turned to an intimate who rode beside
him. “His Highness forgets old saws,” he murmured, with the
insolent assurance that attaches to the narrow-minded. “‘Never
change horses when crossing a stream’—surely all prudent Scotsmen
know the superstition.”
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