by Ian Sansom
‘No, sir.’
‘Aversions or allergies to any kind of animals?’
‘Not that I know of, sir.’
‘And you are not in current employ?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Good. So you’d be able to start immediately?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Very well.’
My curiosity had certainly been piqued by my interviewer’s description of his enterprise, but after several rounds of questioning I was still keen to know more about the details. I made one more bid for clarity. ‘Can I ask, sir, exactly what the project is to be?’
‘The project?’ He sounded surprised, as though the nature of his work was widely known. ‘A series of books, Sefton, called The County Guides. A complete series of guides to the counties of England.’
‘All of them, sir?’
‘Indeed.’
‘How many counties are there?’
‘Schoolmaster, aren’t we, Sefton?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Well, then? Let me ask you the question: how many counties are there?’
‘Forty? thirty-nine?’
‘Thirty-nine. Exactly.’
‘So, thirty-nine books?’
‘We may also include the bailiwicks of Guernsey and Jersey, Sefton. In which case there shall be forty-one.’
‘An … ambitious project then, sir.’ It struck me, in fact, not so much as ambitious as the very definition of folly.
‘In a life, Mr Sefton, of finite duration I can’t imagine why anyone would wish to embark on any other kind of project. Can you?’
‘No, sir.’
‘I intend the County Guides as nothing less than the new Domesday Book. I shall be going out into England with my assistant to find all the good things and to put them down.’
‘Only the good, sir?’
‘The books are intended as a celebration, yes, Sefton.’
‘Works of … selective amnesia, then, sir?’
My interviewer frowned deeply at this untoward remark. ‘Among those I would call the “not-so-intelligentsia”, Sefton, I know there to be an inclination to talk down our great nation. Are you one such down-talker?’
‘I like to think I’m a realist, sir.’
‘As am I, Sefton, as am I. Which is why I am undertaking this project. You may wish to reflect, sir, that you are of a generation that may live to see the year 2000, from which distant perspective you will be viewing a nation doubtless very different from that which you see around you now. It is my desire merely to set down a record of this place before its roots are cut and its sap drained, and the ancient oaks are felled once and for all. I do not wish England – our England – to be unknown by future generations. Do you understand, Sefton?’
‘I think so, sir.’
‘Good.’ He shifted in his seat and he glanced around the room, as though someone were among us. ‘Because I believe I can feel the chilly hand of fate coming upon us, Sefton. The County Guides I hope shall be clarion calls: they may be memorials.’ He paused momentarily for reflection upon this profundity.
‘And how long do you imagine this great enterprise will take, sir?’
‘I intend to have completed the series by the end of the decade, Sefton.’
‘By 1940?’
‘1939 I think you’ll find marks the end of the decade, Sefton. 1940 forms a part of the next, surely?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘So, 1939’s our deadline.’
‘A book on every county? By 1939?’
‘On every county, yes, Sefton. And by 1939. A celebration of England and the Englishman. From the wheelwrights of Devon to the potters of the north, from the shoe-makers of Northampton to the chair-makers of High Wycombe, the books will be—’
‘The chair-makers of High Wycombe?’
‘Renowned for its chair-making, Sefton. Do you know nothing of the English counties? Anyway, as I was explaining. I envisage this not merely as my magnum opus, but as a magnum bonum. De omnibus rebus, et quibusdam aliis—’
‘But that’s … dozens of books a year, sir.’
‘Precisely. Which is why I need an assistant, Sefton.’
‘I see, sir.’ The sheer scale of the task seemed ludicrous, lunatic. Which is, I think, what appealed: my own life had already reached the brink.
‘I was ably assisted for a number of years, Sefton, by my daughter and by my late wife. But my daughter is … maturing. And so I find myself … seeking to employ another. Anyway,’ he announced, as the final grains of sand gathered to announce the passing of fifteen minutes, ‘tempus fugit.’
‘Irreparable tempus,’ I said.
He glanced at me approvingly. ‘The hour is coming, Sefton, when no man may work.’
‘Indeed, sir.’
And at this he rose from his seat and walked towards the door. I followed. ‘I do hope that you don’t imagine that because of our surroundings today’ – he gestured into the gloom around him – ‘that we shall be going in for ritzy social gatherings, Sefton.’
‘No, sir. Not at all.’
‘Or chatterbangs. No swirl of the cocktail eddies here.’
‘I understand, sir.’
‘Good. Well. That’ll be all, I think, Sefton. I’ll send a telegram.’ He went to shake my hand.
‘Actually, sir. I have one more question, if I may.’
‘Yes?’
There was one question that remained unanswered, and which I was keen to have resolved before leaving the room.
‘Might I ask your name, sir?’
‘My name? My apologies. I thought you knew, Sefton. My name is Morley. Swanton Morley.’
CHAPTER THREE
SWANTON MORLEY.
Anyone who grew up in England after the Great War will naturally be familiar with the name, a name synonymous with popular learning – the learning, that is, of the kind scorned by my bloodless professors at Cambridge, and adored by the throbbing masses. Swanton Morley was, depending on which newspaper you read, a poor man’s Huxley, a poor man’s Bertrand Russell, or a poor man’s Trevelyan. According to the title of his popular column in the Daily Herald he was, simply, ‘The People’s Professor’.
Morley’s story is, of course, well known: a shilling life will give you all the facts. (I rely here, for my own background information, on Burchfield’s popular The People’s Professor, and R.F. Bolton’s Mind’s Work: The Life of Swanton Morley.) Born in poverty in rural Norfolk, and having left school at fourteen, Morley began his career in local newspapers as a copy-holder. Coming of age at the turn of the century, he had ‘stepped boldly forward’, according to Bolton, ‘to become one of the heroes of England’s emancipated classes’. By the time he was twenty-five years old he was the editor of the Westminster Gazette. ‘Unyielding in his mental habits’, in Burchfield’s phrase, Morley had grown up the only child of elderly, Methodist parents. He was a man of strict principles, known for his temperance campaigns, his fulminations against free trade, and his passionate denunciations of the evils of tobacco. He was also an amateur entomologist, a beekeeper, a keen cyclist, a gentleman farmer, a member of the Linnean Society and the Royal Society, the founder of the Society for the Prevention of Litter – and the chairman of so many committees and charitable organisations that Bolton provides an appendix in order to list them and all his other extraordinarily various and energetic outpourings of the self.
On the day of my interview, however, I knew absolutely none of this.
Like most of the British public, I knew not of Morley the man, but of Morley’s books. Everyone knew the books. Morley produced books like most men produce their pocket handkerchiefs, his rate of production being such that one might almost have suspected him of being under the influence of some drug or narcotic, if it weren’t for his reputation as a man of exemplary habits and discipline. Morley had published, on average, since the early 1900s, half a dozen books a year. And I had read not one of them.
I had heard of his books: everyo
ne had heard of his books, just as everyone has heard of Oxo cubes, or Bird’s Custard Powder. I had certainly seen his books for sale at railway stations, and at W.H. Smith’s. I can even vividly recall a bookcase on the top landing of my parents’ home – beneath the sloping roof and the stained-glass window – containing a set of Morley’s leather-bound Children’s Cyclopaedia, which I may perhaps, as a young child, have thumbed through. But they left no lasting impression. Swanton Morley was not an author who produced what I, as a young child, would have regarded as ‘literature’ – he was no Edgar Rice Burroughs, no Jack London, no Guy Boothby or Talbot Baines Reed, no Conan Doyle – and by the time I had reached my adolescence I had already begun to fancy myself a highbrow, and so Morley’s sticky-sweet concoctions of facts and tales of moral uplift would have been terribly infra dig. Finally, Dr Leavis at Cambridge had effectively purged any lingering taste I may have had for the middle- and the lowbrow. Morley and I, one might say, were characters out of sympathy, of different kinds, and destined never to meet.
But I was also, at that moment in time, out of work, out of luck and out of options.
On leaving the Reform Club after my interview, I therefore found myself walking up Haymarket, and then along Shaftesbury Avenue and onto the Charing Cross Road. I thought I might visit Foyle’s Bookshop, in order to catch up with a lifetime’s reading on Mr Swanton Morley.
Crowds thronged outside Foyle’s, the usual overcoated men rifling through the sale books, the publishers’ announcements filling the vast windows, one of which was given over to the current ‘Book of the Week’, a volume optimistically titled Future Possibilities. Two dismal young boys in blue berets prodded a shuffling monkey in a red cap to keep moving in circles on the pavement to the sick-making tune of their hurdy-gurdies. The customary beggar stood outside the main door, scraping on a violin, a piece of card hung around his neck. ‘Four Years’ Active Service, No Pension, Unable to Work’. Pity and loathing made me give him a penny.
To enter into a bookseller’s is of course to feel an instant elevation in one’s mental station – or it should be. My father had once held an account with Ellis of 29 Bond Street, a bookseller that raised the tone not merely of those entering the shop, but even of those merely passing it by, and I had visited small bookshops in Barcelona, and others in the Palais Royale in Paris, whose elegance seemed to rub off on the browser, like fine print from the daily papers. But Foyle’s is not, and never has been, a place of elegance and enlightenment: it is a shop, merely, a very large shop, but most definitely a shop, a place of sales, a department store for books, with its vast stock and signs jumbled everywhere, shelf rising inexplicably above shelf, book upon book, complex corridor upon complex corridor. I squeezed into the main lobby past a young lady in an apron dusting the top row of a long shelf displaying Sir Isaac Pitman’s apparently endless Industrial Administration Series, and asked the first shopwalker I could find, a young man, where I might discover the works of Swanton Morley. He turned from casually rearranging an inevitable shelf of those dreadful, faddish books – including How Not to be Fat, Why Not Grow Young? and Eating Without Fear – and escorted me daintily to a long wooden counter, bearing vivid colour posters advertising a new edition of Kettner’s Book of the Table, where a young lady – who might easily have been a barmaid were it not for the fact of her wearing spectacles – seemed more than prepared to assist.
‘Swanton Morley? One moment, please,’ she said efficiently, turning to reach behind her for a large red volume whose embossed spine announced it as The Reference Catalogue for Current Literature 1936. ‘I’ll just check in Whitaker’s.’ She opened up the book, began rifling through the pages. ‘Would you like me to note down the titles for you, sir?’
‘No thank you.’ I thought I should be able to remember a few titles.
‘Very well,’ she said, her finger sliding slowly down the page and finally coming to rest. ‘Here we are now. Morley’s Animal Husbandry. That would be in Animal Lore, sir, second floor.’
‘Good.’ I made a mental note of Animal Lore, second floor.
‘Morley’s Art for All. Aesthetics, sir, second floor.’
I nodded. She continued.
‘Morley’s Astronomy for Amateurs. Astronomy, third floor … Morley’s Carpentering. Carpentering, second floor. Morley’s Children’s Songs and Games, ground floor … Cookery, first floor … Education, fourth floor …’
‘Wait, wait, wait,’ I said. ‘Third floor, second floor, first floor, ground floor.’
‘Fourth floor,’ she added.
‘And how many floors have you?’
‘Four. Unless you have a specific book in mind, sir, you might be better simply browsing among our stock. Mr Morley seems to have published many …’ She slid the big red book around so I could see the entries. ‘Gosh. Possibly hundreds of books, sir.’
‘I see.’ The list of Morley’s books ran to two pages of two-columned tiny type: my eyes glazed over at the mere thought of them.
Nonetheless, I wandered contentedly alone for the rest of the afternoon through Foyle’s great avenues of books. As readers will doubtless be aware, books in Foyle’s are not much arranged; within their categories books seem to be classified variously, and possibly randomly, by name, or by title, or by publisher. Some books seemed to have been undisturbed for many years, and many of the rooms were entirely deserted. But Swanton Morley was everywhere: he seemed successfully to have colonised the entire shop. During the course of a long afternoon I discovered not only books about poetry, and philosophy, and economics, which I had expected, but also campaigning works – The Cigarette Peril, Testaments Against the Bottle, War: The Living Reality – and volumes on gardening, marriage, medicine and mineralogy. In Religion I found Morley’s Children’s Bible. In Music, Learn to Listen with Morley. Elsewhere, in and out of their appropriate places I came across Morley’s Happy Traveller, Morley’s Nature Story Book, Morley’s Animal Adventures, Morley’s Adventure Story Book, Morley’s Book for Girls, Morley’s Book for Boys, Morley’s Everyday Science, Morley’s Book of the Sea, Morley’s Tales of the Travellers, Morley’s Lives of the Famous, Morley’s British Mammals, Morley’s Old Wild West … The sheer plenitude was astonishing, dumbing. It was as if the man were writing in constant fear of running out of ink. Morley’s Want to Know About …? series were everywhere. Want to Know About Iceland? Want to Know About Shakespeare? Want to Know About Trees? Just the thought of them made me want to give up knowing about anything. Morley’s Book of the World, a four-volume set I came across misplaced among books on Veterinary Science, made the boast on its dust jacket that a book by Swanton Morley could be found in every household in Britain. They were certainly to be found on almost every shelf in Foyle’s.
The books, qua books, varied in their quality from edition to edition: some were lavishly illustrated with pictures, plain and coloured, and mezzotint portraits; others were dense with type; some with fine bindings; others in cheap, flexible cardboard covers. And yet for all their apparent variety, the books were all written in the same tone – a kind of joyous, enthusiastic, maddening tone. The pose was of the jaunty professor – or, dare one say, the eccentric sixth-form master – and yet I thought, leafing through various volumes, that I occasionally caught sight of a desperate man fleeing from the abyss. This, for example, from Morley’s History of Civilisation: ‘Some may say that man is but a speck of mud suspended in space. I say to them, some mud, that can know what suffering is, that can love and weep, and know longing!’ Or this, from Morley’s English Usage: ‘The world may be troubled and difficult: our words need not be so.’
But perhaps I was reading my own experiences into the work.
I returned to my room in the early evening, depressed, dizzied and depleted.
As I made my way wearily down the stone steps towards my dank basement, a Chinaman hurried out of the laundry at street level above. He wore his little black skull cap and his long thin black coat turned green with age. We had occasionally e
xchanged greetings, though he could speak no English and I no Chinese – I was anyway far beyond the desire to be neighbourly. He smiled at me toothlessly, thrust a telegram into my hand, and hurried back to his work.
I tore open the telegram, which read simply:
‘CONGRATULATIONS. STOP. HOLT. STOP.
5.30 TOMORROW.’
CHAPTER FOUR
AS IT HAPPENED, I had no other pressing engagements.
And so, the next day, I packed my few belongings – a spare suit, some thin volumes of poetry, my old Aquascutum raincoat, my supply of Seconal and aspirin – into a cardboard suitcase which I had managed to salvage from the wrack and wreckage of my life, and left my lodgings for Liverpool Street Station. There I found the connections for Holt, spent all my remaining money on the ticket and a supply of tobacco, and set off to meet my new employer, Mr Swanton Morley. The People’s Professor.
As the train pulled away I felt a great relief, a burden lifting from my shoulders, and I found myself grinning at myself in the window of the carriage. Little more than eighteen months previously I had left London – Victoria Station, the boat train for France, then Paris – for Spain, a young man full of dreams, about to embark on my great moral crusade, with justice on my side and my fellow man alongside me. Now, gaunt, limping, and my hair streaked with white, I saw myself for what I was: a man entirely alone, scared even of the roar of the steam train and motor traffic, impoverished and rootless. I had of course no idea at that moment, but in giving up on my absurd fantasies of performing on the stage of world history I had in fact unwittingly become a small and insignificant part of the terrible drama of our time. I had imagined that I was to determine the course of history, but history had taken possession of me. And if, as they say, nature is a rough school of men and women, then history is rougher … But already I am beginning to sound like Morley.
I should continue with the tale.
It had always been my ambition to travel. My father’s job as a royal messenger had meant that he had been all over Europe and further afield, scurrying from Balmoral to Windsor and to Whitehall, carrying with him letters of royalty and of state, emblazoned with the proud stamp OHMS. When I was a boy he would recount to me his stirring adventures among the Czechs, and the Serbians, and the Slovaks and Slovenes, dodging spies and brigands who tried to steal his dispatch case – tales in which he would triumph by courteous manners – and although we lived in relatively modest circumstances in a small house in Kensington, I had been introduced at an early age to ambassadors and diplomats from France, and China and Japan, and had imagined for myself a future abroad in khaki, and in starched collars, striped trousers and sun-helmet, upholding the Empire by good manners and breeding alone. In my own country I took little interest: I cared nothing for the Boat Race, or Epsom, or cricket at Lord’s. My dreams were of Balkan beauties, of Paris, Hungary and Berlin, of steamers on the Black Sea, and of adventures in Asia Minor. I imagined camels, and consuls and tussles with petty local officials. I harboured absolutely no desires to travel up and down on the branch lines of England.
