Death in Devon (The County Guides)

by Ian Sansom

  I sidled into the back of the hall, which had undergone another transformation: now, instead of being set with tables and chairs for breakfast, or for a grand meal at high table, it was arranged as for a concert: row upon row of seats, occupied by expectant parents and fidgeting sons. The fires had been lit against the early autumn afternoon chill, and waves of perfume and brilliantine were beginning to swirl and coil in the heat. Floral displays flanked the dais. There was an air of expectation. Up at the front the teachers were gathered like a jury, or like the Greek gods deciding on the fate of Odysseus and his men, and seated at the very back, like a sentinel, was Alex. So he had got back safely. I looked around for Miriam – no sign. I was keen to talk to her. Leaving me inside the caves may perhaps have been an accident. Leaving me outside the caves was clearly intended to provoke.

  Proceedings opened with a poorly prepared but thankfully extremely short excerpt from the school’s recent production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Theseus was played by an effeminate boy who looked as if he might struggle to tie his own shoelaces, never mind to found Athens, and his bride Hippolyta was a gibbon-featured young chap with ginger hair, glasses and freckles. Theseus gabbled – ‘NowfairHippolytaournuptialhourdrawsonapacefourhappydaysbringinanothermoonbutOmethinkshowslowthisoldmoonwanesshelingersmydesiresliketoastepdameoradowagerlongwitheringoutayoungmansrevenue’ – while Hippolyta drew out every single syllable, pomping hard on each fourth or fifth word, presumably in the hope that such words, simply by virtue of the rules of English grammar, might be significant nouns or verbs and so might magically convey the sense and meaning: ‘FOUR days will quickly STEEP themselves in night; / FOUR nights will quickly DREAM away the time; / And then the MOON, like to a silver BOW / New-bent in HEAVEN, shall behold the NIGHT / Of our solemnities.’ In Shakespeare for Schoolboys (1935) Morley expresses the opinion that gobbets of Shakespeare should be learned by heart by schoolchildren entirely without the aim of understanding – in the same manner as Bible passages and the long poems of Tennyson – ‘in the hope and expectation one day of understanding’. The boy players of All Souls certainly seemed to have taken this principle to heart.

  After this theatrical opening number there was a brief fanfare of ill-tuned trumpets, a mumbled prayer by the school chaplain, and then the headmaster got up, thanked various parents and donors who had assisted with the move to the new school, and proceeded to introduce Morley.

  ‘Here at All Souls,’ he intoned, rather dustily, in that dusty age-old manner of all intoning headmasters, ‘we believe that whether a man starts his life in a grand castle or in some modest cottage he should have an equal opportunity to rise to the top.’ I looked around the room at all the fur coats and the diamonds, and the pinstripes and the vicuna overcoats and it seemed to me unlikely that many of the boys here had started life in some modest cottage, or indeed in a great castle. Nonetheless. ‘Here at All Souls we like to think of ourselves as intellectual aristocrats.’ Again, I had distinguished no such signs of intellectual distinction during my time at the school. Anyway. ‘Our motto, as you know, is Scientia Potentia Est – Knowledge is Power, the words of course of the great Francis Bacon, and no one of my acquaintance is more powerful in this sense, no one perhaps exemplifies the aristocracy of the intellect more than my dear friend, our Founder’s Day speaker this year, Mr Swanton Morley.’

  There was some shuffling at this point, as the audience expected the headmaster to conclude. But he went on, and on, providing a more than generous summary of Morley’s various achievements.

  ‘Mr Morley and I could not have come from more different backgrounds. While I was lucky enough, like you boys, to enjoy the benefits of an English public school education, and a number of years of higher learning at Cambridge, Mr Morley had to make his way in the world entirely by dint of his own efforts. Leaving school at fourteen, he began working as a copy holder for his local newspaper in Norfolk. At twenty-five he was the toast of London, and the editor of the Westminster Gazette. He is a member of the Royal Society, the Linnean Society, and is the founder of the Society for the Prevention of Litter. He is also the author of more than one hundred books, and he is currently embarked on a project to write a guidebook about each of the English counties. He is, in short, and without doubt, one of the most brilliant men I have ever met. We will doubtless all have much to learn from our speaker today. So, ladies and gentlemen, boys, please welcome our Founder’s Day speaker, Mr Swanton Morley, the People’s Professor.’

  So, ladies and gentlemen, boys, finally to Morley.

  He was seated not with the teachers up on the dais but with the local dignitaries down at the front of the hall, and as the headmaster beckoned him forward he at first rose slowly and stepped haltingly towards the stage, but then, with a discernible twinkle, he suddenly sprang up the few steps in a manner that could only be described as theatrical. This tendency to the theatrical was perhaps a weakness of Morley’s and has been remarked upon by a number of his critics, though one might also claim in his defence – and in the case of Morley one might surely be permitted to make the claim and the comparison – that it was simply his way of honouring one of his great heroes, Charles Dickens. In his popular book on Dickens – Dickens At Work (1930), part of his multi-volume ‘Writers At Work’ series, in which he details the working lives of writers, from Shakespeare to Milton to Trollope, noting their working routines and habits, their earnings from both book- and non-book-related activities – he devotes several chapters to the subject of Dickens’s reading tours. These chapters reveal much, I think, about Morley’s own habits and interests as a writer and I can perhaps do no better – rather than attempting to analyse and describe the complex motives for his own incessant public speeches, and readings and tours and promotional activities – than to quote what he writes about Dickens in the famous chapter, ‘Dickens on Stage’:

  Charles John Huffam Dickens was, therefore, as we know, and as we have seen, and as I hope amply to have demonstrated, a great writer. Indeed, one of this nation’s very greatest, the inheritor of Chaucer, and of Johnson and of Shakespeare himself. An immortal, one might say, even among the immortals. Yet Dickens was also, more than any of them, a performer. Indeed, I believe, and I hope to convince you, dear reader, that Dickens was a great writer because he was a performer. A great performer. Charles John Huffam Dickens is the great example in English literary history of the writer as performer, or the performer as writer. His page is a stage, and his stage a page. As a young man it is said that Dickens took lessons with one of the great comedians of his time, and it is perhaps possible to imagine him, our greatest prose stylist, as a music-hall act: Charles Dickens, Miles of Smiles! A keen amateur theatricalist, shall we say – Dickens himself surely drives us towards such terms of invention – in 1858 he became a true professional. In 1858, aged forty-six years old, a man in the very midst of life, a man who has published no fewer than eleven novels, works of extraordinary range and vitality, The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) and Oliver Twist (1837–39) and Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41) and Barnaby Rudge (1841) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44) and Dombey and Son (1846–48) and David Copperfield (1849–50) and Bleak House (1852–53) and Hard Times (1854) and Little Dorrit (1855–57), a man who is also editing a weekly magazine, and who has helped to establish a home for fallen women, and who has a wife and children, a man who by any standards, even by his own extraordinary standards, is a busy man, embarks upon an extraordinary new project, a project for which he will be remembered almost as fondly as for all his other works and endeavours!

  In 1858 Charles John Huffam Dickens takes to the stage. In 1858 he embarks upon his first great reading tour of the cities of Great Britain and Ireland. It was of course a risk, as all great enterprises are a risk, but everywhere throughout the land Dickens found himself greeted by rapturous houses. The question for us perhaps is why? Not why was he adored: the evidence is there for all to read in the books. The question is rather, why take the
risk? Why, if your home is on the page, why attempt to make another home on the stage? I think perhaps the answer lies here: for Dickens, it was simply not enough that he was writing his novels, and his articles, and editing his magazines, and agitating on questions of political reform. For Dickens, above all the great English writers, needed to be with his readers. To be actually with them and among them. For Dickens, there was a need, a hunger, a desire to be loved, a simple human need for human company and the thrill of other people.

  For Dickens, read Swanton Morley.

  He stood at the lectern in silence for what seemed like a long time, long enough for everyone in the audience to examine him closely: the thick tweed suit, the bow tie, the moustache, the brogues, the costume: his writer’s habit. ‘My harlequinade,’ he once described it to me. ‘My costume and disguise.’ And then, and only then, when the teachers’ eyes were upon him, and the boys’ eyes were upon him, and the parents’ eyes were upon him, then and only then, when he had everyone’s full and undivided attention, did he begin to speak.

  ‘Boys,’ he began. ‘Boys, boys, boys. I am shocked.’ He paused. For a long time. This was certainly an arresting opening. I saw that several of the young fellows, whose hunched shoulders already indicated the beginnings of boredom, straightened appreciably. The headmaster also adjusted himself slightly in his seat – perhaps concerned that Morley might mention the morning’s tragic accident. He had nothing to fear. ‘I am shocked,’ continued Morley, ‘to have had this honour bestowed upon me.’ There was a slight huff of amusement and relief among the parents. ‘But I am also disappointed.’ Again, a pause for dramatic tension. ‘I am disappointed in myself.’ It was clear that this Founder’s Day speech was going to be interesting.

  ‘Traditionally, you will know, the Founder’s Day speech begins in Latin. And so I intended to begin my speech today here at All Souls, in this magnificent new school, perched as it is on the very edge of England, a fronte praecipitium a tergo lupi, as it were. But anyone who is a scholar would say of my Latin and my Greek what Johnson famously said of Milton’s two Tetrachordon sonnets: that the first is contemptible and the second not excellent. I have decided therefore to address you, if I may, this afternoon, on this special occasion, boldly and directly, in our own dear mother tongue.’

  Disparaging looks were exchanged among some of the teachers up on the dais, but one could feel a palpable sense of relief among the boys and their parents, who could at least look forward to understanding something of what was said. Morley was of course being falsely modest: his Latin and Greek were neither contemptible nor perhaps excellent, though they were certainly eccentric, as far as I could tell, as were his Afrikaans, his Armenian, his Yiddish, his Vietnamese, his Czech, his Esperanto, his Pitman’s shorthand, his Braille and, very often, his English.

  ‘Life, boys, as many of you will doubtless already be aware, can be difficult. In fact, not only can life be difficult – it is difficult. It will be difficult – and it will sometimes be difficult for you, as it has doubtless been difficult for your parents.’ Appreciative nodding among the parents here. ‘At times, boys, you will find your loyalties divided. Or perhaps you will find yourselves cast down, or cast among those who do not have your best interests at heart. You will at times have to face the dark and stifling interiors of the human mind: your own and that of others. Perhaps you will find yourselves placed under what might seem to be intolerable pressures and strains, and it will seem to you, to quote the unforgettable Noddy Boffin in Our Mutual Friend, as though society were merely a matter of “scrunch or be scrunched”.’ Morley here theatrically relished the scrunching sound of ‘scrunch’ and ‘scrunched’. The speech seemed to be drifting rather towards a challenge.

  ‘It is my belief, boys, however, that life’s difficulties can often be overcome – both the little difficulties, and the larger difficulties. It is my belief that one can, as it were, “unscrunch” the tangled mess of our lives, that one can face up to one’s responsibilities and overcome those forces and individuals, however powerful and forbidding they might seem, who seek to cast us down into darkness. All of us, boys, have a choice. And you have a choice in particular, in these magnificent new school premises, to make it a place of safety, a place of calm, as well as a place of learning.’

  Up on the dais, Alexander remained impassive. The headmaster seemed to give a little sigh, whether of deep appreciation or of despair I could not tell.

  ‘I would like this afternoon, if I may, ladies and gentlemen, to take as my text Captain Scott’s famous last letter. This letter, you will recall, was composed by a man who was facing a situation in real life as strange and as terrible as any fiction that ever occurred, a situation as extraordinary as any sprung from the imaginations of Aeschylus or from Sophocles or from Shakespeare. A truly desperate situation. This was a man upon whom the Fates had truly been let loose.’ He stared hard out at the audience – as though summoning the Fates himself. ‘“Things,” writes Scott, “have come out against us.” The art of English understatement, ladies and gentlemen! Scott and his men are stranded and alone, their deaths imminent. “Surely misfortune could scarcely have exceeded this last blow. We arrived within eleven miles of our old One Ton Camp with fuel for one last meal and food for two days. For four days we have been unable to leave the tent – the gale howling about us.”’ I felt a sudden chill in the hall, as though a ghost had walked past. ‘“I do not think human beings ever came through such a month as we have come through, and we should have got through in spite of the weather but for the sickening of a second companion, Captain Oates, and a shortage of fuel in our depots for which I cannot account, and finally, but for the storm, which has fallen on us within eleven miles of the depot at which we hoped to secure our final supplies.”

  ‘And this, boys, is what Scott wrote of the valiant Captain Oates, who had fallen sick: “He was a brave soul. He slept through the night before last, hoping not to wake; but he woke in the morning. It was blowing a blizzard. He said: ‘I am just going outside, and may be some time.’ He went out into the blizzard, and we have not seen him since. We knew that poor Oates was walking to his death, but though we tried to dissuade him, we knew it was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman.”

  ‘Be in no doubt, boys – despite all that has been said and written about it – that Captain Scott’s adventure was a failure. It failed to achieve its objective, and it failed for all the reasons that we ourselves fail in life. A lack of planning, a lack of preparation, a lack of foresight. A lack of leadership.’ Was it the case that the headmaster gave another, deeper sigh here? I am perhaps remembering falsely. But Morley went on. (The text of the speech is available in Talking to Boys, 1938.) ‘But did this mean that Captain Scott and his men were themselves failures, boys? Were they fools to embark on this adventure? Was the expedition a mistake? The answer to these grave questions of doubt, I believe, is an emphatic no. Captain Scott and his gallant band were seeking knowledge – not riches, not power, but a deep knowledge of the mysteries of the human world, and such knowledge is always worth the sacrifice. The quest for true understanding is a quest that takes us beyond ourselves into the realms of the dangerous, the unknown and, perhaps, into oblivion.’ Alexander, I noted, was nodding in agreement.

  Morley continued, and as speeches go I thought it was pretty good. I wondered subsequently if he was perhaps subtly indicating that something was rotten in the school – though the deep-rooted nature of the rot I did not then understand and even he, I fancy, was at that time unaware of exactly what was wrong, and how wrong, and besides, we had simply had no time to think about it or to investigate it further. We were caught up and caught out. After the speech Morley was whisked away by the headmaster to be proudly paraded before the boys of All Souls and their parents – all the boys, that is, except Michael Taylor.

  Founder’s Day fun and games

  CHAPTER 12

  OUT ON THE LAWN

  WE WERE IN A MARQUEE out on the lawn at the
back of the school, by the tennis courts. Where this morning the boys had been fed gruel they were now fortified with sticky buns, cucumber sandwiches and lemonade, while their parents were treated to tea, coffee, fino and oloroso. The older boys circulated with the sherry, their circulation becoming steadily more uncertain as the afternoon wore on. I rather suspected that they might be helping themselves when out of sight. Morley found himself, as always, in a throng, with parents and boys asking him to autograph books and pamphlets, and quizzing him about his various writing and campaigning activities, and his opinions on various matters of great public import. What did he think of the National Government? What about the abdication? What about Spain? Mr Hitler? The state of the novel? The state of the nation? And what was his advice on removing stains from rugs and carpets? The usual tiresome sort of questions, which, to his credit, he never tired of answering.

  A father – a big bluff, heavy-handed sort of chap, with the look of a West Country cattle-dealer – shuffled forward with his son, who might as well have been the cattle. Big-boned and slow, with decidedly bovine features, the boy stood sullen by his father’s side, as though awaiting the butcher’s blow.

  ‘Mr Morley,’ said the father, tipping his hat.

  ‘Sir,’ said Morley, respectfully adjusting his bow tie.

  ‘I wonder if you might have some advice for our budding young writer here?’

  ‘Budding young writer, eh?’

  ‘Well,’ said the budding young bovine writer, blushing.

  ‘What is it you would like to write?’

  ‘Erm.’

  ‘Tell him,’ said his father, nudging him sharply.

  ‘I would like to write poetry.’

  ‘Ah, poetry,’ said Morley. ‘The spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, eh?’