by Frank Baker
As we walked back to Dungannon in the rain, the darkness of evening falling over us, the chill of winter in our bones, I said to Henry after a long silence:
‘Why did you stay behind in the churchyard, Henry?’
I had gone on quickly ahead the moment we had left the church. But Henry had stayed for some minutes.
‘I looked–at all the graves,’ he said.
‘Surely that wasn’t necessary?’
‘No. It wasn’t necessary. Her name was nowhere to be found.’
Neither was her place, I told myself. And suddenly I remembered that to-day was All Souls’ Day.
I could not return to Cornford as I had intended. Three days later a letter and a Cornford Mercury arrived from my father. This is what the letter said:
‘I shouldn’t come back yet awhile, boy. Read the paper and you’ll see why. People are suspicious of you. Mother keeps fussing, but I can keep her down. Stay where you are for a few weeks. Money enclosed. Told you not to do it, boy; here to-morrow, gone to-day, that’s what I say. Wouldn’t surprise me if I disappeared at this very moment. What comes first? Figure one, or figure nought? Told you not to do it. By the way, wasn’t Tennyson. Poet called Walke wrote those words. People like you and me have got to be careful.
‘Ever your loving FATHER.
‘PS.–Lessways is gloomy. Miss the harp.’
I searched for the money father had mentioned, but I couldn’t find any. Then I fingered the paper nervously. Finally I braced myself to read it.
‘Scotland Yard is investigating the extraordinary mystery which surrounds the disappearance of Lady Hargreaves, etc. etc. On Wednesday afternoon, November the 2nd, she left her house and was driven by her chauffeur to the Cathedral. As she entered, Mr Josiah Meakins, the Dean’s verger, was showing round a party, then about to proceed up to the nave roof, traverse the whole length of the building and descend by means of the stairway to the Lady Chapel.
‘Lady Hargreaves expressed her desire to join them. The party went slowly along the narrow little plankway between the inner and the outer nave roofs, walking in single file, and it was not until they came down to the Lady Chapel that her absence was remarked upon. Mr Meakins went back immediately, but finding no trace of her, he came down, summoned the other vergers and organized a thorough search of the nave roof, bell chambers, triforiums, galleries, tower and–indeed–the entire Cathedral. Meanwhile, the chauffeur drove back to Lessways to see if she might have returned on foot. She had not done so. The search in the Cathedral yielded no sort of evidence and we understand that subsequent searches have proved equally fruitless.
‘The police take a somewhat serious view of the matter, but were bound to admit that they have no evidence whatsoever that could point to the possibility of foul play . . .’
In the nave roof–alone–crying ‘Norman–Norman–Norman!’ And I in Lusk church with all my power denying–– her existence. Even the realization that destructive thought had at last destroyed could not lighten my wretchedness.
For many weeks I could not bring myself to go back. Staying alone at Dungannon (I did not revisit Lusk), I wrote most of what you have now read. One day, near Christmas, a letter came from Marjorie which made me realize that somehow life had to be resumed.
‘Norman dear [she said], please do come back. Terrible things are being said about you. I can’t bear it because I know they can’t be true. If you stay away everybody will say you have killed her, even when they can’t find the body. I’m sure you wouldn’t do that, whatever you would do. Henry has told me everything and I’m simply forcing myself to believe it. Darling, you must come back and face it. I’ll help you. I’m sorry we quarrelled. I think you’re wonderful, really.’
It touched me. I knew I should have to go. With an aching heart, dreading to face all the talk, I took the boat for Heysham.
I remember moodily gazing at a lot of cows being lowered into the hold and marvelling at their patience. I walked along the deck, attracted by the figure of a nun leaning over the rail and looking at the lights of Belfast. There was something soothing about her quiet, pensive figure, so detached from all the bustle of the ship getting under way.
‘Belfast looks lovely at night, doesn’t it?’ I said to her.
‘Ah, it is always lovely to me,’ she murmured. ‘It was my home. It is twenty years since last I was there.’
‘Twenty years! Well!’ I did not know what to say. ‘But time is nothing,’ I added. ‘Twenty years might be twenty minutes, really.’ And, I was thinking, twelve weeks might be twelve years.
From below, down in one of the saloons, a drunken sailor with a voice that made me grate my teeth started to sing ‘Over the sea to Skye’. I sighed heavily, leaning over the rail, far up in the stern of the boat, and looking at the black sea. The engines started; Ireland was sliding away from us; something, for ever, sliding away from me.
For ever?
I murmured her name into the dark sea.
‘Miss Hargreaves–Miss Hargreaves–’ Could I hear my own name, or was it only the sighing of the wind?
Again I called.
‘Miss Hargreaves–Miss Hargreaves ’–
Mevagissey 1939
La Chaise 1940
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
FRANK BAKER was born in Hornsey, London in 1908 and was educated at Winchester Cathedral School. A keen musician, Baker enjoyed singing in choir and playing the piano. After moving to Cornwall he made a living as an organist, earning £1 per week. There he wrote his first novel, The Twisted Tree (1935).
In 1939 his most successful novel, Miss Hargreaves, was published. It was consequently reprinted several times and was adapted for the stage in 1952 at the Royal Court Theatre Club in London, with Dame Margaret Rutherford in the leading role. The novel has also been adapted for the radio.
Baker then became a professional actor and toured during the Second World War. He later worked at the Old Vic and was an accompanist at the Players Theatre in London. After moving to Cardiff, Baker worked as a script editor and playwright for the BBC and continued to write more novels and several short stories. Over the course of his lifetime he published fifteen novels, including The Birds (1936), and three works of non-fiction, of which his final book was The Call of Cornwall (1976). He was also a contributor to the Guardian and the Radio Times.
Frank Baker died in 1983 at the family home in Cornwall.
POSTSCRIPT
MUCH water has passed under the bridge, or down the weirs, or wherever it is water flows in the proverb, since, nearly thirty years ago, I closed my account of the most extraordinary thing that ever happened to me, or (perhaps it could be put this way) the most extraordinary thing I ever happened to. For all I know, Constance might have gone with it, though water, they say, finds its own level, and that is one of the few things Constance never tried to find. However that may be, from the moment when my father, Henry and I said good-bye to her after her party at Lessways we have never seen her again. ‘I have enjoyed it all so much.’ Those were her last words to us.
Yet there have been more than hints in the passing years that she has never travelled far away from us. For example: when I was married in Cornford Cathedral Dr Carless, who was to have played the Wedding March for us (Mendelssohn, not Wagner), said that he was driven out of the loft by a kind of a warm blast, and that he saw the keys depressed, and saw the stops shoot out, as the Wedding March sounded. (And who will forget with what brilliant timing the tubas were coupled on that occasion!) Then there is my father, Cornelius (who still runs his bookshop in Cornford); many times, he says, he has been aware of a disturbance of the dust on the books in his ‘specials’ case, where he keeps his Tennyson ‘firsts’, and other treasures. And then there was the mystery of the ‘Bundle’: although we had some run off by a local printer and gave most of them away, the original copy was shot ‘like an arrow into the air’ falling to earth ‘I know not where’. In short, it was pinched; and who is to say the Author didn’t pinch it
? Fortunately, I still had the typed copy which I made from the original; and I cannot end a latter-day edition of a book which has wandered around the globe a good bit since its first publication, without giving some of the verses in full. Lines from some are quoted in the preceding pages (and some misquoted, due to my carelessness); but there are some which are only hinted at, and not included in the text.
And as to these hints of Constance’s continued existence there is also my wife, Marjorie, who swears to this day that our oldest son, Peregrine, has often been heard talking to Constance over the telephone at the Ministry of Dis-establishment, where he has an office. In Cornford Cathedral the shadow of a tall hat has from time to time been seen in the bishop’s throne, falling across the pages of the great Prayer Book on its dark blue velvet cushion. Much of the City itself–which I seldom visit nowadays–would be unfamiliar and perhaps not pleasing to Constance: a supermarket where once the old Butter Cross stood (with the Butter Cross itself enshrined in a hideous courtyard within the place); an abominable hotel eavesdropping right by the north-east corner of the Cathedral; Canticle Alley all offices; ‘Lessways’ part of the new Town Hall–one would hardly know the place if it weren’t for the Cathedral which, fortunately, ‘they’ dare not touch. What would Constance make of the place now? Even though she might dislike much of it, I have the feeling that she would still be at home there, because although she always celebrated the past she was also essentially a part of the present. I would give very much to see her in command of play in the new skittle-alley, which is built on the site of the old flea-pit cinema. Or bidding her chauffeur drive contrariwise in the oneway traffic of the High Street.
This is not the place for me to say anything about myself–where I live and work–nor what I work at. Suffice it, that it took me a long time to ‘settle down’ (to use a phrase my dear Mother used); and that now, sometimes, of an evening, when it is quiet about the house, I hear a harp playing ‘Over the sea to Skye’, and I know there are certain harmonies which can never be lost.
So I leave Constance Hargreaves, not behind, but beside me.
And on those words, I will close, once and for all (knowing that if I go on it will continue, as they say in my village in the West); I will close, leaving the Reader with some of Constance’s own thoughts about life, as expressed in ‘Wayside Bundle’.
Norman Huntley
July, 1965.
THE LAY OF THE LAST CRICKET
Cleft in the narrow gulf of gusty grief
My soul is like a cricket on a leaf,
Who peering down amongst the autumn grasses
Peevishly wonders where he left his glasses.
Old is the cricket; lame; he cannot hop
As once he did in Old King Willow’s shop.
There, often, on the Hearth the Cloister sat,
Young crickets gathered round him on the mat.
Happy the Hearth–the Hearth of his beginnings,
Where first he played his modest maiden innings!
Old is the cricket; blind; he cannot see
That X Y Z must follow A B C.
Old, with a slow, rheumatic, autumn clicking–
Voice harsh, green armour tarnished, knee-joints sticking.
Old, too, the crinkled leaf of sycamore
Where mourns his wife, knowing he’ll never kick her more.
He sighs, he sobs, his tear-drops fall to grass,
And over them the mists of autumn pass.
Now, through the falling apple-rusty sun
He sees dead years, and knows that laurels won
On Willow’s Hearth can nevermore be flaunted.
What use the chaplet on a brow so haunted?
My soul is like a cricket on a leaf,
Cleft in the narrow gulf of gusty grief.
A SMALL THING
(Written on some tower, I cannot remember where)
I came, I go, I breathe, I move, I sleep,
I talk, I eat, I drink, I laugh, I weep,
I sing, I dance, I think, I dream, I see,
I fear, I love, I hate, I plot, I be.
And yet–
And yet–
I sometimes feel that I am but a thought,
A piece of thistledown, a thing of naught;
Rocked in the cradle of a craftsman’s story
And destined not for high Angelic glory.
And yet–
And yet–
I came, I go, I breathe, I move, I sleep,
I talk, I eat, I drink, I laugh, I weep . . .
THE FERRY
What various hindrances we meet
Before we cross the Bar!
The path is choked with weeds, the weeds
Most fascinating are.
We linger in the undergrowth,
We loiter ’midst the sedges;
Full many a country lane conceals
Poison in its hedges.
We pick up this, we pick up that,
When given tit, we offer tat,
Till suddenly we find we’re at
The dark and dismal Ferry.
Though to step forward we are loth
The past we have to bury.
Reluctant as we are
We have to cross the Bar.
EVENSONG IN ADVENT
Lo, He comes with clouds descending . . .
Helmsley rings its clarion call!
In the Close the elms are bending
’Neath the wild December squall.
Candles in the Choir-stalls flicker,
Aisles are dark and nave is dim,
Where some lonely country Vicar
Listens to his favourite hymn.
Hark, a thrilling voice is sounding . . .
(Zion waits to greet the Star).
Mr Dean in tone astounding
Wrecks the anthem bar by bar.
Next to him a mild Archdeacon
(Eighty-three, completely deaf),
Wishes he were not so weak on
Reading in the alto clef.
These are days to be remembered,
(Purcell, in the Lord rejoice!)
When the year is being Decembered,
(Wisdom, answer Doctor Boyce!)
When the wind in transept cries,
And Thomas bears the shortest day,
Warm the heart who knows that sighs
And sorrowings shall flee away.
A FRIEND FOR TEA
‘Muffins for tea!’ he used to cry,
And fall into my chair.
Above the soda-cake, tobacco
Smoke lay on the air.
Exhausted after Evening Prayer
He’d play himself at Solitaire,
Toy vaguely with his third éclair–
Happy young hostess I!
Now when I light my lamp and drain
My cup beside the fire,
I see the ghost of him I lack. Oh
Memory retire!
Muffins for tea . . . My thoughts conspire
To conjure up King’s College Choir
And happy days in Cambridgeshire
That will not come again.
SONNET TO MY BATH
Belovéd Bath, wherein my tiréd feet
Have oft-time plunged before the peaceful hour
When sleep descends, within you blooms the flower
Of rosy youth. Across the years I greet
Him who to me bequeath’d thee. Ever plastic,
His figure to thy cracked enamel clings.
I see him now, a bariton at King’s,
A little sharp, but so enthusiastic!
Belovéd Bath, when my last sleep shall claim me,
You will remain, a silent witness to
The foolish things that Undergradu’tes do.
And though the word might judge, you will not blame me.
You will remember and you will not speak
The lines he wrote in you to me in Greek.
DOCTOR PEPUSCH
Doctor P, my cockato
o
Despises birds who bill and coo.
Long he’s set his heart upon a
Duet with a prima-donna.
Some composers he dislikes,
Such as Grieg and Doctor Dykes.
Very fond is he of Handel.
Sometimes from the Bechstein grand’ll
Float a hollow laugh from Carmen.
(Once he tried the Dresden Amen . . . )
What a bird! O what a bird!
Once in May I swear I heard
Fragments from die Fledermaus
Ringing wildly through the house.
‘Over the hills and far away’
Is, of course, his favourite lay;
This he sings with perfect ease,
Con brio, and in many keys.
‘Rallentando! Rallentando!’
Once I cried, when Elgar’s ‘Land o’
Hope and Glory’ he was singing,
Quavers into crotchets flinging.
I taught him all the simpler airs —
‘It is enough . . . ’A chant by Nares;
‘Comfort ye . . .’ and ‘Daisy, Daisy . . .’
A Gloria by Pergolesi.
Doctor Pepusch most detests
The ignorant, facetious pests
Who call him ‘Pretty Polly’. Once
He nipped a Rural Dean from Hunts
Who thus addressed him. (Cockatoos’
Contempt for parrots never lose).
Green he is; and underneath
Shades of pumice, puce and heath.
Black his bill and blue his crest,
Splendid creature, grandly dressed!
Doctor P! Doctor P!
How you worked for your degree!
Sleep now, birdie; done the day . . .
‘Over the hills and far away . . .’
There beyond the last horizon
One day you shall feast your eyes on
Groves of orange, where the beams
Of sun exotic flush the streams.
Only you could ever cope
With Yellowshank and Phalarope,
