by Peter Corris
Andy McKinnon had the development money in a 'Craft Project' operating account in record time.
3
Extracts from Walking Across the World, by Basil Craft
I was born in Wimbledon on 1 May 1911, precisely at midnight. A storm was raging outside and windows in the house were blown in. My father delivered me, not because the birth was unexpected, but because my father was a doctor. I come, in fact, from a line of doctors. When I graduated in Medicine I became the fourth eldest son carrying the Craft name to do so. I was, however, only the third gentleman doctor. My great-grandfather, Bernard Kraft, was a German surgeon, according to family tradition. It is my belief that he was a barber by profession and a surgeon only in the sense that barbers were surgeons in those days—men able to lance boils, pull teeth and hack off arms and legs.
Another family tradition is that my grandfather, James Kraft, served in the Crimean War. My own researches have confirmed this. In a letter to one of her legion of admirers, Florence Nightingale refers to the German Kraft 'up to his elbows in blood, daubed with it like a savage, bellowing for bandages'.
On my mother's side, my forebears were great travellers. Men by the name of Sheriff were to be found aboard ships bound for the New World in the seventeenth century, in caravans crossing the vast plains of Asia in the next century and ever afterward among the ranks of Europeans who have found the continent of Europe, let alone the island of England, too small for them . . .
As a child I was physically strong and enjoyed exceptionally good health. I was also mentally alert and temperamentally aggressive. My father was a busy Harley Street man and my mother was much occupied with social and political causes. She was a passionate suffragette, an associate of the Pankhursts, and she was taken into custody on a number of occasions. Accordingly, I was the de facto master of the house from an early age. Nannies and other servants quickly learned not to attempt to bring me under their authority . . .
Although my father had attended Winchester he and my mother, a woman of comprehensively progressive views, turned their backs on the public school system of England and had me educated in a variety of schools in Germany and France as well as at an 'experimental' institution in Scotland. It is my belief that this education, unorthodox although it undoubtedly was, ideally fitted me for the life that was to unfold for me. I should add that it was a principle ardently pressed by my mother that I should receive an extensive theoretical and practical education in sex.
I lost my virginity at the age of fifteen in a Paris brothel frequented by sophisticated men and women to whom sex was one of the life-enhancing arts like conversation, music and the pleasures of the table. Similar establishments existed in Berlin, Prague, Vienna and London and I visited them all and learned much. As a consequence, I was greatly in advance of my contemporaries in sexual knowledge and experience when I went up to Oxford in 1929 . . .
'The man's an insufferable prick,' Bright said. 'But maybe you have to be a prick to do the things he did. Anyway, I'm off.' He leaned across the table to kiss Marsha, who was spreading marmalade on toast. She was wearing a length of batik cloth wrapped around her slim body under her armpits. The shape and feel of her never failed to please Bright. He came around the table and pulled her to her feet, hugged her tightly and kissed her jam-smeared mouth. 'Delicious,' he said.
Marsha smiled and sat down. 'You, too. What's on today?'
Bright patted the pockets of his denim jacket, feeling for the keys to his old but well-maintained Mini Cooper. 'The money's in the bank so it's time to start work. Thought I'd nip out to Wimbledon and take a look at the family house. Then shoot up to Oxford and poke around the old college a bit. Being a university man myself, I'm quite at home with the ivy-covered walls and all that.'
'You told me your university was an old Tech school—not even redbrick. Cream.'
'Quite,' Vic said. 'But I played football against Sydney. It's got the colleges, cloisters, bell towers, the whole bit. Oxford doesn't scare me. Couple of days should do it.'
Marsha licked jam from her fingers. 'I'll finish with the Channel 4 thing today. Then I can start work on Craft.'
'Great. We'll begin with dinner Thursday night, you know when and where.'
Marsha nodded. 'Drive carefully.'
Bright wrestled with the traffic. The slowness of London driving, its innumerable stops and starts, exasperated him and occasionally led to thoughts of living outside the city. The thoughts invariably evaporated as soon as he stepped from the car. He was a city man, Sydney born and bred, but like many Australian urbanites, he fancied he could cope pretty well in the bush. The prospect of expeditions to the wildernesses was one of the attractions of the Craft project. He drove well and exploited the manoeuvrability and zip of the Mini to the full. He drove past the tennis stadium where the crowds had gathered a few months before to witness another European triumph, reflecting that the great days of Australian tennis—the days of Sedgman and Hoad, Laver and Newcombe—were probably gone forever.
Walking Across the World contained a photograph captioned, 'Birthplace and home, Soames Crescent, Wimbledon'. The house, behind a severe iron fence and fronted by a deep garden, rose high and arrogantly above its neighbours. Bright knew nothing of architecture. Marsha had told him that the house was 'late Victorian bourgeois'. The A to Z told him that Soames Crescent was a short street, not far from the common. The Craft house would certainly command a view of its greenery.
He turned into Soames Crescent and began a slow progress down the street. Bourgeois, all right, he thought, and bloody nice too. The street was narrow and curving; several of the big houses had trees he took to be oaks growing stoutly in the middle of carefully tended front lawns. Plenty of trees, big and small; garden beds; bricked and paved driveways, double garages; very few cars parked on the street. The blocks were very large and he saw at least one high mesh fence that suggested a tennis court. He remembered reading that Ivan Lendl had rented a house in Wimbledon when he'd made his last, failed, attempt at the championship. Could've been right here. He scrutinised the houses carefully; they were all old and solid, no parvenu extravaganzas among them. Tiled roofs, red and grey; gables stained dark or painted in shades to harmonise with the garden setting; bow windows at ground level; attics and casements. He drove the length of the street twice, stopping to peer past hedges and luxuriant trees. There was no house that remotely resembled the austere residence in the photograph. No pot-topped chimneys or narrow leadlight windows.
He consulted the A to Z again: no Soames Street, Road, Lane or Square in the suburb. At this time of the mid-morning, Bright reflected, there was no activity in the street. The stockbrokers and architects and doctors were no doubt away making the money. The wives who weren't running their own fashion houses were playing golf and tennis. The kids were at Eton and St Cath's. He sat in the car and looked at the photocopy of the photograph, squinting at the number mounted on the sandstone gatepost. It looked like 26 or possibly 28. He got out of the car and walked along the even concrete pavement to the front of number 26. Nothing like it. Same next door. As he stood looking through an elaborate wrought-iron gate, a man dressed in overalls and carrying a pair of garden shears appeared from behind the high hedge.
'Help you, sir?' The voice was old and cracked with the timbre lent by Woodbines and pints of bitter. The man was tall but rather bent, although he tried to hold his spare frame straight. His face was wrinkled and brown like tree bark.
'You work here?' Bright said.
The man waved the shears. 'Yup. Gardener. Not just here. Do a lot of houses in this street. If you're selling something you can save your breath. Half the places you won't get through the gate.'
'I'm not selling anything. I was looking for this house.' He passed the illustration through the gate.
The gardener studied it with pale, dry eyes. 'Right street, wrong house. Nothing like that here. I know this area pretty well. Can't place it at all.'
'How long have you worked around he
re, if you don't mind me asking? Mr . . . ?'
A thin brown hand was thrust through the gate. 'Tom Casey. Where're you from, young feller?'
Bright shook the hand. 'Australia. I'm Vic Bright.'
'Australia, eh? Well you come a long way not to find a house. I've worked around here nearly all me life apart from a stint in the army. Sorry I can't help you.'
'Does the name Craft mean anything to you, Mr Casey? Craft, with a C.' Bright spelled the word.
The gardener scratched at the thin white hair on his leathery head. 'Craft, Craft with a C. There's Bridges here and Wallace-Crabbes next door; Simondson over the road and, let's see . . . Manning . . . Thompson. I wouldn't swear to it, mind, but I'd say there hasn't been a Craft with a C in Soames Crescent in my time. I yarn to the other poor slaves, gardeners and swimming pool cleaners and such, the postman. I never heard the name.'
Bright took back the photograph. 'Thanks anyway. Nice garden Mr Bridges' got.'
Casey nodded. 'Dr Bridges. Good soil and he doesn't mind spending a quid. Look, Vic, when're they goin' to clean up that Bondi?'
'I don't know', Bright said.
4
Extracts from Walking Across the World, by Basil Craft:
The Oxford University I went up to was not quite the Oxford of the twenties. The gaiety, which had set in after the end of the Great War, was still present but wearing thin. The rowing hearties sweated and caroused and got fourth-class degrees as they had always done. The ex-servicemen, who had lent a serious note to proceedings in the previous decade, were gone and seriousness was represented by those with political ambitions.
The dilettantes, aesthetes and brilliant scholars were present in their usual proportions. Certain stairways in certain colleges were foetid with the secret passions of homosexuals. Having seen these relationships conducted under relaxed and elegant circumstances in Europe, I was distressed to see how the brotherhood conducted itself in damp, foggy England. Such deceptions, such guilts, such betrayal and despair. I turned aside clumsy seduction attempts and refused to play the pander. Homosexuals are a tribe apart, well worthy of study.
Clubs and societies abounded; these catered for all tastes and interests. It should be said that most of them were excuses for dining and drinking, although there were clubs specifically designed to facilitate those activities.
I was invited by many but joined only the Geographical Society, of which I became President in my second year. The deliberations of the society were not very interesting and I can recall nothing worth recording here. Of more importance were the field trips organised, I must confess, by myself and in line with my own interests. I led expeditions to the outer Hebrides, to the fens and to County Mayo in Ireland, to, in short, the more rugged and testing parts of our mild little island group.
My medical studies absorbed me. I found the human mechanism in all its working the most wonderful thing on this wonderful planet and I resolved to understand as much of it as I could. Anatomy and physiology were old subjects carrying much obfuscating baggage; psychology, genetics and biochemistry were new and full of exciting possibilities. I worked long and hard at all branches, discarding the useless and, I flatter myself, refining and honing the newer tools.
The medical faculty was well represented at Walsingham and Doctors Matthews, Clarkson and Rigby, among others, earned my deepest respect. Professor Sharpe agreed with me on the matters of sex and religion. 'Crucial and critical, my boy,' he once said to me in private. 'And sex is the foundation of much, perhaps most, human behaviour. But no subject is more dangerous to discuss and experimentation, of course, is out of the question. As to religion, 80 per cent of the population does not know what the word theology means, 10 per cent knows the word's meaning but not a syllable of the subject matter and the remainder are in dispute about points of doctrine. But hypocrites abound. Carry on your investigations, but take care.'
My reasons for choosing medicine and Walsingham interlocked. At a very early age I had conceived my life's work—to travel and study mankind. To put Pope's words into simple, literal action. But not as a parasite. Nothing disgusted me more in my early reading than stories of aimless wanderers and, still worse, missionaries, visiting themselves upon primitive people. They consumed scarce resources and contributed nothing. I would be a useful traveller and observer—a doctor.
Partly as a result of the Rhodes Scholarship, partly by tradition, there were more colonials and other foreigners at Walsingham than at other colleges. Most were mediocre, a couple were wise, some were fools, but I made it my business to cultivate as many of them as I could. Thus I learned things of the manners and mores, particularly of Arabia and America, not found in books.
From a young Egyptian I learned Arabic; from a Hong Kong student, Chinese. I had learned Spanish on my travels but of course there was no-one at Oxford to instruct me in any of the languages of the native Americans of the south-west. I did, however, acquire a smattering of the Australian Aboriginal language, Arunta, from a student whose father owned a vast cattle station in the Northern Territory.
Thus I plundered the intellectual riches of Oxford. I did not, however, graduate from the university, preferring to complete my studies abroad . . .
As he drove into Oxford, a city he had visited several times and liked, Bright tried to recall the names of Australians who had attended Oxford. No-one of his acquaintance. But Malcolm Fraser he thought, and Hawke, surely? As a Rhodes Scholar. And John Stone the same. Hardly names to conjure with. And his only connection with them was to vote for or against them, mostly against.
His press credentials would secure him an interview with the right guy, the bursar or someone such, but probably not today. It was early afternoon on a fine summer day, the kind of day when telephones tend not to be answered and even university administrators find reasons not to be at their desks. Traffic regulations prevented Bright from entering the centre of the city and he didn't know the place well enough to locate Walsingham. He parked as close to the cluster of colleges as he could and found a pub with a telephone. After a longish wait, filled in with a half of mild and a sandwich, he was granted an interview with Millicent Cooper, the college secretary, for 10 a.m.
Bright's next stop was the Bodleian Library, the mysteries of which had been explained to him by Marsha. By dint of charm, some familiarity with the system and use of his British Museum reading room ticket, he wangled his way into the periodical stacks. He staked out a desk with a notepad, pen and his pocket A to Z and searched the shelves for the Proceedings of the Oxford Geographical Society. Playing safe, he lugged the volumes from 1929 through 1935 back to his seat. He opened the first volume and sneezed violently. The books were covered in a thin layer of dust. He thumped the pages shut to shift the dust and another reader glanced at him in annoyance. Bright nodded an apology and blew gently over the stack of green-leather-bound, gilt-lettered books.
Geography hadn't been one of the subjects favoured by the better students at Randwick High School, and most dropped it after a few years. But Bright had stuck with it, enjoying the map work and field trips and trusting to his excellent memory to pull him through the examinations. He could still recall the number of frost-free days required for the growing of maize and the velocity of the Mont Blanc glacier.
He flicked through the first volume containing articles on such subjects as the silversmiths of Peru and the ancient coracles of Wales. Firm binding, good quality photographs on good paper—nothing like the xeroxed, stapled rags he'd known at university. The names of the office-bearers in the society were listed at the back, along with a photograph of the members of an expedition to investigate wave action on the Isle of Wight. Neither Basil Craft's name nor his face appeared.
'Well, he was a fresher,' Bright said aloud, drawing another look of reproof which he ignored. He opened the second volume and turned immediately to the back. B. Craft, Walsingham was listed as vice-president of the society. His craggy face, looking old beyond its years, gazed out from a group
photograph of eight earnest, warmly dressed young men. The background was a rocky windswept beach and the picture was captioned, 'The members of the field excursion to the Outer Hebrides led by G. Snell, King's'.
Bright made a note and turned to the next volume of the Proceedings. Craft's name had gone from the list of office-bearers and he did not appear as a contributor or as a member of any of the several excursions conducted that year. Bright looked through the succeeding volumes. His eyes opened and he drew in a sharp breath when he reached the publication for 1933. The president of the society in that year was Richard Craft, Walsingham. His photograph appeared more than once in the volume—as the leader of an expedition to Normandy, welcoming his opposite number from Cambridge at a lecture given by Arnold Toynbee and as the winner of the society's medal for his essay on 'Geographical Influences on the Crusades'. The essay was published as an appendix: it was long, lavishly illustrated and copiously footnoted. The detailed maps were drawn by R. Craft.
Bright scratched at his stubble with the end of a pencil. He had a heavy beard and had to shave twice a day if he was to be presentable in the evening. No need for that now. What was needed now was an explanation. He checked through the rest of the volumes for the decade and found no further references to either of the Craft brothers. As he put away his notes he realised that that was how he had begun to think of them—as the Craft brothers. And it looked as if some very funny things were going on.
He left the library and resisted the impulse to go to the pub. The puzzle had begun to stimulate him. He had questions, possible answers and still more questions. The pub wouldn't help at this point, maybe later. He never forgot that it would be a film he was making, not a book. Visuals. The geographers had held their meetings in a room above a barber shop in Oriel Street opposite the college of the same name. The building was still there, a narrow red-brick structure, but instead of the red and white striped pole there were blown-up photographs of women's heads displaying elaborately formal and aggressively sporty coiffures. Nice shot, Bright thought.
