All That is Wales
Page 13
They died for England
(Say no more)
died with ‘God save the King’ on their lips and a smile on their faces …
As you’ll find out if you dive to the bottom of that crater …
and they died as well, for Scotland and Wales, and the subject races.25
The implication is that Scotland and Wales are also viewed by the English as subject races – the races to the service and welfare of which Nigel Heseltine was, in a sense, to dedicate his later life. His later work in Africa, Madagascar and a myriad other places could be seen as the continuation, in mature and frequently sceptical form, of his early sympathies with his fellow-Welsh. He turned to other culturally oppressed or colonially subjugated peoples worldwide, and showed a practical, unillusioned interest in their transition to self-rule, while deploring the ruinous waste of resources by self-serving native power élites in establishing the ostentatious trappings of statehood.
It is therefore not inappropriate that Tales of the Squirearchy should begin with a story about a shoot that unexpectedly ends in a bloody massacre. Among those assembled at the country house of Cam-Vaughan, distantly descended from Welsh princes, is an embittered overbearing General from darkest America who exclaims at the ‘ugly face’ of Owen the head keeper, grinning obliquely at him ‘like a dark and evil man (he’s Welsh)’ (7). The gentlemen in the shooting party ‘lower their moustaches’ on their guns, and start downing the pheasants. But suddenly balloons, not birds, begin to rise out of the woods where the beaters are at work, and then the loaders run to join the beaters as the latter reach for guns stuffed down their trousers. It is no contest. The Quality are quickly out-gunned, and Thwaite, who has escaped the carnage by shinning up a tree, sees Owen below him slitting Cam-Vaughan’s throat. As Owen and his cohorts sweep up the drive to the great house, whose door is obligingly opened for them by the butler, Thwaite nonchalantly comes down from the tree, picks up his gun and starts shooting rabbits. As a Welshman, he remains unperturbed by the massacre of these foreigners.
Heseltine’s own socially and culturally ambivalent position seems to be expressed through Thwaite. Heseltine was a rogue product, so to speak, of the border squirearchy, a part of him rebelling socially, politically and culturally against the background from which he came and keen to release himself from it by exposing its grotesqueries. So when Thwaite attends an Upper Crust party in the company of a Miss Menzies, he views her as if anatomising a peculiar exotic specimen:
Thwaite slipped the skin from her and looked at her organs while they swelled and groaned with the burden of living; and he looked from her heart to her lungs to her viscera, and her pear-shaped womb. And he thought, shall I plant there a seed and run off with this bone-faced woman, and away from her when she holds me? (13)
In another story, Thwaite is excoriated because
he has not behaved according to the traditions of his class, he has not acted with esprit de corps; he has behaved contrary to other people, he has behaved contrary to the principles on which good breeding, on which kindness or the dealing in a magnanimous way with inferiors is based. Thwaite does not acknowledge his inferiors, and he has no reverence! He has none of the milk of human kindness possessed by the inhabitants of the county of Cariad, who conform. (28)
In the same story, Reverend Codger, a Calvinistic Methodist minister, is caught shooting pheasants in a squire’s wood and hauled before Sir Gam Vychan: ‘“In India!”, he cried, “You would be shot. In the Malay you would be flogged! In Africa you would be chained up!”’ (31). Here again the Welsh are seen as a subject race, a colonised people. But the Revd Codger’s friend, Mr Cambyses, objects to such treatment of the Welsh and in revenge refuses to send his ram, Owen’s pride, to service Sir Gam’s flock. And the local people are stirred to protest, the town band leading them through the town with banners that read: ‘Defend our Antient Rights, Down with Feudal Tyranny’. When the band plays ‘Land of my Fathers’ there’s not a dry eye in the crowd, but their conception of mass popular uprising is just a little skewed, since they proudly march in the name of Arglwydd Jones, another local grandee.
Wildly anarchic in spirit, the stories revel in the crazy energies at work in this world. Naturally, therefore, sex is treated as the most potent spirit of black mischief that sets people running amok. Pamela Blinding, in the ironically entitled ‘Boring Story’, is twenty-four and a proud virgin:
Ignorance and up-bringing in ignorance managed in a mysterious way to keep down her natural passions amongst the savage surging reproductions of the herbs and the beasts of the land. She never wondered what her father did so late in London, nor what he did with the large body of Mrs Blinding in their brass marriage bed. (61–2)
Needless to say, Pam’s virginity is not long for this world: she succumbs to a local pub landlord. But more surprising is the way her mother, who has been ‘running the house until the floors and the walls vibrated with her energy’, is seized with an importunate lust for Albert the footman. Left to his own devices and to the nagging of his tyrannically interfering crone of a mother, Colonel Blinding strikes her on the head with a hatchet. ‘And with many expressions of horror on both sides, Colonel Blinding was tried for the murder of his poor old mother and sent to a Criminal Lunatic Asylum where he founded Colonel Blinding’s Band of Hope’ (68).
Such an episode exposes the impacted anger and violence that lie at the root of the anarchic black comedy of Tales of the Squirearchy. A similar anger explodes bitterly in Heseltine’s wartime collection of poetry, The Four-Walled Dream, which for all its Modernist affectations is at bottom a young man’s rant against the profiteering and the ruthlessly self-serving power-politics of the English Establishment: the unholy alliance between the upper, ruling and military classes. There is, for instance, his acid sketch of a ‘Recruiting Office’:
bodies in queue for heroes
…
From the sharks of the works, and the bumping land
shooting its sons in a gun. (32)
Even love is seen not so much as a refuge as infected and inflected by the surrounding violence. So in a kind of allusive rewriting of Yeats’s famous ‘Leda and the Swan’, he dramatises Leda’s experience of the ‘rasp of live feathers, beak dug in my neck/ tearing my breasts with his own, jabbing with bird member’ (12). Alternatively, he resorts to Audenesque parody of ballad style to prophesy social revolution:
hang up your boater till that summer comes
when people run and rulers suck their thumbs:
when arms are melted down for coin,
and clubs are there for all who care to join. (47)
As for Tales of the Squirearchy, itself after all essentially a wartime production, a like bitterness stands revealed in the final story when the grinning, grimacing mask of comedy is allowed to slip. As already suggested, however, the tensions that find expression through this work are much older than wartime. And if they have their roots in the peculiar sociocultural study of the Welsh borders, they are also partly psychological in origin. Included in the collection is a story about a spinster who, while carrying on a lustful affair with her somewhat reluctant footman, writes steamy, bodice-ripping fiction. One day, one of her characters comes to life off the page and threatens to ravish her. The story seems to be a coded expression of Heseltine’s own fears – that through the would-be exorcism of his writings he might raise up ghosts that would refuse to be laid to rest. In writing his fictions, he was risking what Freud would have termed the return of the repressed. In this connection, it is worth noting the brief portrait of his young self Heseltine included in Scarred Background:
The subject of this notice, myself, represents an obscure connection between a suppressed desire for violence and travel, and the instinct that makes us kick the table when we are angry and stamp around the room. I wander because I cannot usefully canalize my animal lust for disturbance. I am not aware of it, but it gives me itchy feet.26
And, one might add, an itchy pen. And
when he goes on to admit that he ‘has also felt an admiration for primitive lives and cultures, and the desire to seek them out and live with them’ (15), it is now surely possible for us to see that he was, unaware, already intuiting at this early stage his long later career of service in Madagascar and several other countries of Africa.27
As already noted, the psycho-social origins of this violent restlessness, this pent-up anger, this appetite for risky adventure may well be found in his own childhood. The family circumstances were in some ways lurid. In his memoir, Capriol for Mother, he recalls an extraordinary turning point in his life. On a hot Italian day in the early 1950s, he visits a fortune-telling old lady who lives, almost crowded out by her extensive family, in a dilapidated concrete block, a relic of Mussolini’s Rome. She leads him into a dining-room, with its damp concrete walls and cheerless centre light and cuts the cards. There stand revealed ‘pictures I had never seen, and now she showed me two with faces contorted in agony. “They are in Hell,” she said, “They are in agony in Hell. It is they who watch and call to you”’ (23). The faces are those of Heseltine’s parents and it is they, she adds, ‘“who are blocking you when you want to accomplish what you are capable of doing”’. This brings back to Heseltine the memory of the many pitiful dreams he had had of reconciliation with his dead father; and of the way that unease about his mother and father would rise ‘like bile’ any time he had a drink. He was already older than his father had been when he died. And he realised that ever since he had heard of the circumstances of that death in his adolescence, he had ‘changed my pattern of life, [thrown] away many advantages, and followed a pattern that seemed to be imposed from without, rather than arising from my own character and upbringing’ (24). Moreover, ‘my work in distant places was banishing the dream-world of Philip’ (24). But when young,
the repetition-compulsion of Freud fought inside me against the desire to escape. To escape, however, not from reality, but into the reality of my own life … While the dream world had control, I lived according to [my father’s] pattern, but when its control faltered and I saw reality for a while with my own eyes, I escaped. (35)
What can be sensed in Tales of the Landless Gentry and Tales of the Squirearchy is precisely the conflict between repetition compulsion and escape – a conflict felt as one between indulgent affection and bitter condemnation for this border place and its people. This is the complex psycho-social conflict that is mediated in and through comedy. And folded into that comedy is a sense of pain and of aching loneliness. It comes out briefly and shyly in his portrait of Thwaite when a boy. He is happiest when able to slink out and cuddle up to the dogs in their kennels; or when he sneaks away to a secret corner of the river.28 The deep pathos of this desperately needful attachment to place is indirectly echoed in Capriol for Mother. There he recounts how he heard of his father’s death. He was a public schoolboy at Shrewsbury, and was coldly informed by his unsympathetic housemaster. Heseltine duly squeezed out the dutiful tear that was expected of him, but in reality his feelings were not of loss but rather of relief and even of exultation. After all, his father had many times threatened that when he inherited Cefn-Bryntalch he would immediately sell the estate – would sell the beloved woodlands, streams and fields that in many respects had provided the boy Heseltine, as the mountains and lakes of the Lake District had the boy Wordsworth, with a kind of deep emotional consolation, a parent substitute. But mingled with this exultation at his father’s death was no doubt guilt at such feelings, to be compounded by jealousy as he realised that the dead Peter Warlock had now effectively usurped his own place in his grandmother’s affections. Not long afterwards, when the now-adolescent Heseltine was on leave from preliminary officer training at Sandhurst, he was initiated into sex by a slightly older woman, Katherine, who was rumoured to have been his father’s mistress. The psychological charge of such a relationship is surely unmistakeable – it provided Heseltine symbolically with a form of intimacy with both his father and (given Katherine’s age) his anonymous mother; it also allowed him symbolically to usurp his father’s place at a time when, to his grandmother, he seemed to be hell-bent on repeating Peter Warlock’s disastrous life by determining to become a writer, rather than the military man or senior civil servant she thought appropriate. This, then, is the nexus of intensely conflicted feelings that find indirect expression in his Tales.
It seems a wonder that, given his early background, his baleful relationship with his father and the terrible blankness where his mother’s nurturing, directing and sustaining love should have been, that Heseltine ever succeeded in living a fulfilling life. That he did was, as he candidly and clearly admits in his Memoir, thanks to Cefn-Bryntalch, to his formidable grandmother, and above all, perhaps, to his step-grandfather, Walter Buckley Jones, to whom in Capriol Heseltine pays the warmest and most moving of tributes: ‘I tell of the family of Walter, Philip’s stepfather, who was like a father to me … thanks to Walter and Covie [Nigel Heseltine’s grandmother Edith Covernton] I survived and prospered’ (5–6). However, the greatest compliment of all that he paid to this stabilising background was the two collection of Tales he completed. Walter was himself a spellbinding teller of tales, and therefore in reproducing these, as Heseltine did in his own fashion, he was acknowledging the ‘parenthood’, so to speak, of Walter, and the centrality of Cefn-Bryntalch. As noted earlier in this essay, Tales of the Squirearchy was published in the very year (1946) in which Heseltine sold off the family estate and departed for foreign parts. And in the very last story in Tales of the Landless Gentry, the now-ageing Heseltine returns in imagination to Cefn-Bryntalch, and produces a powerful, haunting elegy for everything that was lost with its passing out of the family:
There are two ways of visiting my old home, Rhys pondered. One is to push my way through the rain-forest that grows where my mother’s garden was, see what the concrete-mixer was doing, greet whoever is sitting in our drawing-room, watching TV where the Reynolds prints of laughing girls used to hang.
The other way is not visit it …
His eyes travelled over the little rounded hills of Montgomery, and the small sunny valley where the river Severn flashed sudden silver patches.
But his thoughts were on the evenings of childhood, leaning out of a friendly window of the Plas where the sky was an aquarium green, the rooks flew home against the green sky, and the blackbirds chaffered in the laurels. Then the sky mellowed into the hills, and into the night …
I left, and what little I left behind vanished like grass. You carry rich memories with you, and the smiling faces of people. With my eyes shut, I see it all. When I open them, there is only the beautiful empty valley …
The engine purred. ‘What is my future?’ he asked himself, thinking how the future rushes on you like a river, leaves you suddenly old and lonely, like an old stone standing unwanted in the land of your fathers.29
Notes
This is a revised and extended version of a lecture delivered in Montgomery at the Peter Warlock Festival, 17 December 2005. Published in Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays 11 (2006–7). I am very grateful to Dr Rhian Davies for the kind loan of several texts of critical importance to this discussion and for providing a wealth of biographical information about Nigel Heseltine.
1‘The Life and the Burial’, in Nigel Heseltine, Tales of the Squirearchy (Carmarthen: Druid Press, 1946), p. 19.
2Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).
3Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze (Routledge Critical Thinkers, London: Routledge, 2002), p. 5.
4Wales, 6/7 (March 1939), 208.
5See, for instance, Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Perfomative (New York/ London: Routledge, 1997).
6Wales, 4 (March 1938), 157. At this point in the text, the editor, Keidrych Rhys, inserts the tart exclamation ‘Oh dear me!’ in parenthesis.
7Ian Parrott, The Crying Curlew: Peter Warlock, Family and Influences: Cen
tenary 1994 (Llandysul: Gomer Press, 1994), p. 18.
8Wales, 8/9 (August 1939), 246.
9Tony Conran, Frontiers in Anglo-Welsh Poetry (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997). See also ‘Writing Glamorgan’, in M. Wynn Thomas, Internal Difference: Twentieth-Century Writing in Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992), pp. 25–48.
10‘The Lay Reader’, in Wales, 8/9 (August 1939), 227. Later included (Story X) in Tales of the Landless Gentry, an unpublished collection of short stories (see below).
11I am very grateful to Dr Rhian Davies for so kindly loaning me a typescript copy of this collection. The pages are not consecutively numbered, instead each story is paginated separately. Consequently reference to the text in this essay will take the form of story title and number followed (where relevant) by page reference within that particular story.
12Kenneth O. Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation: Wales, 1880–1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 9.
13According to Ian Parrott, it was Nigel Heseltine’s formidable grandmother, Edith (née Covernton), who, upon marrying his step-grandmother Walter, converted the plain surname ‘Jones’ into ‘Buckley Jones’ (Parrott, Crying Curlew, p. 20).
14Nigel Heseltine, Capriol for Mother: A Memoir of Peter Warlock and his Family by his Son Nigel Heseltine (London: Thames Publishing, 1992). In his Introduction Heseltine states ‘I began this book in Rome around 1958; I have finished it in Ziguincho, Sénégal, in 1991’ (p. 5).
15‘Break away if you can’, Story IX.
16‘Generous Patrons’, Story V, p. 1.
17‘A Young Night of Love’, Story III, p. 1.
18‘Generous Patrons’, Story V, Part II, p. 3.
19‘Flaming Tortoises’, Story VII, p. 4.
20‘Generous Patrons’, Story V, Part IV, p. 1.