Jem (and Sam)

by Ferdinand Mount

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Ferdinand Mount

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  I: The Marsh

  II: The Shop

  III: The Palace

  IV: The Barge

  V: The Tower

  VI: The Laboratory

  VII: The Hospital

  VIII: The Island

  IX: The Coffee-House

  X: The Shore

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Copyright

  About the Book

  How does Jeremiah Mount, the dealer in pornography, come to be the lover of the Duchess of Albermarle and the colleague of the great Samuel Pepys? In Pepys’ Diary, Jem Mount plays a shadowy role, but in Jem’s own memoirs Sam Pepys looms large. Friends and drinking partners at first, they become vicious rivals for fame and women. This ‘newly discovered autobiography’ – with its disconcerting echoes of our own time – brings a splendidly dubious hero to life.

  About the Author

  This is the second of Ferdinand Mount’s Tales of History and Imagination. The first, Umbrella, was described by the historian Niall Ferguson as ‘quite simply the best British historical novel in years’. Of Love and Asthma, which forms part of his other series, A Chronicle of Modern Twilight, was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for 1992. Ferdinand Mount is a Sunday Times columnist and has been Editor of the Times Literary Supplement since 1991.

  ALSO BY FERDINAND MOUNT

  Tales of History and Imagination

  Umbrella

  A Chronicle of Modern Twilight

  The Man Who Rode Ampersand

  The Selkirk Strip

  Of Love and Asthma

  The Liquidator

  Very Like a Whale

  The Clique

  Non-Fiction

  The Theatre of Politics

  The Subversive Family

  The British Constitution Now

  Communism (ed.)

  Jem (and Sam)

  A Revenger’s Tale

  Ferdinand Mount

  Everyone born in Kent is born free.

  Statutes of the Realm of Edward I

  God taketh no notice of our prayers.

  The Acts of the Witness of the Spirit of Lodowick Muggleton

  Copperas or Green Vitriol is a mineral substance, formed by the decomposition of pyrites. Its colour is bright green, and its taste very astringent.

  The British Cyclopedia

  Introduction

  When a Clerk working for the Great Western Railway dropped a half-finished cigarette in the waste-paper basket in my uncle’s study (his house being requisitioned ‘for the duration’ as the railway’s regional office), among the things that were badly scorched in the consequent inferno were all the records of the family, the various houses they had occupied, built or knocked down, and the business which they had sustained with ever slackening attention for more than two centuries: Mount & Page of Tower Hill, stationers, marine map-makers, booksellers and, with whatever cash they had managed to squeeze out of these lines, investors in anything going from soap to – well, in this age of openness let us have it out – slaves. Even before they were so singed, these plump bundles of paper had long since ceased to tickle our failing curiosity (I speak collectively, I was five and a half at the time) and they were shipped off to the County Record Office, where they lay undisturbed giving off that dismal odour of half-burnt things for fifty years or so.

  It was not until a cold spring day in 1994 – I was watching one of the Cup semi-finals – that the telephone rang and an eager voice announced himself as the Assistant Archivist at the Kent Record Office and he had some exciting information for me if he was speaking to the right person. I didn’t catch his name because of the football commentary. When I switched it off, the commentary went on at the other end, and I could not help remarking that the information couldn’t be that exciting if he was watching the match at the same time.

  He laughed and said that he always had to do two things at the same time, it was the only way he could keep out of mischief. This was the beginning of my friendship with Derek Olaf Dupree (‘Doddy’), my fellow editor and archivist extraordinaire, to whom this present volume is dedicated.

  Somehow he persuaded me over the phone that it would be worth making the pilgrimage to Canterbury to view his discovery. When I came into his frowsty cubby-hole somewhere below the main reading-room, he had it there waiting for me: a dumpy box, of oak he said, about twenty inches in each of its dimensions.

  ‘Key?’

  ‘No need, the fire burnt the wood off the hinges. I’ve left it all just as I found it, in the reserve store where I do a bit of fossicking about at weekends. It was too big to fit in the ordinary files so they just shoved it down there. There was a lot of chaos after the war and the bombing.’

  He stood back to allow me to open the box, his bustling figure stilled into a kind of reverence which he could not resist breaking into with:

  ‘There now – the memoirs of your forebear Jeremiah Mount. Or memorials, they would have said then.’

  I took out one of the large brown leather ledgers which were piled in pairs and almost square. It was burnt at the edges, but the writing on the pages was mostly undamaged: a neat hand but so small as to be nearly illegible, the ‘a’s looking just like the ‘o’s, the ‘i’s like the ‘l’s.

  ‘I asked around,’ I said, ‘and none of us has ever heard of Jeremiah Mount. How exactly is he, was he, related?’

  ‘You’ll be amazed you ever asked that,’ he said.

  ‘And you think all this is worth deciphering?’

  ‘You’ll be amazed you ever asked that, too.’

  ‘Will you help me?’

  ‘I’m halfway through the first ledger already.’

  Even after we had got the hang of Jeremiah’s handwriting, we were frequently puzzled not merely by the language of the late seventeenth century but also by the gaps and non-sequiturs in the text (we were to discover that much of it had been written late at night and after a couple of drinks). We have filled in the gaps where we could make a reasonable guess at the meaning. We have also modernised the spelling, and the punctuation, and replaced the occasional archaism and obscure word or phrase with their modern equivalents. For the reader’s further convenience, we have also included the relevant page from the Diary of Samuel Pepys wherever that immortal work covers the same day or incident as Jem’s memoirs.

  But that is just the trouble. For to begin with, I found there was something distasteful about the task Doddy had pressed me into. Perhaps disappointing would be a better word. The ‘Mr Mount’ who pops up now and then in Pepys’s pages may not be a very alluring character. But he is sweetness and dignity compared to the character who emerges from Jem’s own account. Time and again I have muttered under my breath, Come on, endear yourself, but he wouldn’t. I began to wish for a kinsman of some moral substance, a personality whose life and opinions would bring alive the challenges and disappointments of his age, and so speak across the centuries, whispering a sort of solace to us in our own perplexities. But there it is, the past is a cussed place.

  Yet as I ploughed on through the minuscule acres of Jem’s script, I found to my surprise, even to my shame, that I was starting to feel differently about my subject. His later years were certainly peculiar enough (though they did him little more credit than his youth), but I had fallen into the habit of making allowances for him. Why? Hard to say. I was somehow more passionately concerned for him, or on his side anyway, which is not quite the same thing.

  And even when he was young, there was something about him, something kindred, I suppose.

  Here they are the
n, the Memorials of Jeremiah Mount. My fellow editor wanted a fine title-page with an engraving, but I thought better not.

  I

  The Marsh

  I REMEMBER FIRST the blossom.

  It was apple blossom for the most part, but on the slope down towards the marshes there was a pear orchard as well. At first it appeared all white but then pink when I came close and ducked down under the boughs to escape from my schoolfellows, Tommy Court, Lob Loader and Bare-arse Jack Scott. I was always the one they chased, not because I was the runt of the litter but because I could show them the best sport. Jem for our hare, they would cluck, and off I went, running bent like an old man for miles under the apple boughs, until my hair was full of the blossom and my head was as hoary as my grandfather Ralph’s. But by then I would have lost the hounds and I could amble along the bank of the Drain – it has a learned name too, the River Reculver, but we all called it the Drain, for that was its usage – and I would draw aside the rushes and look down into the foul water in the hope of seeing a drowned maid or at least a water-rat. My mother was always telling stories about girls who had thrown themselves into the Drain because they’d been got with child. But I never saw anything there but a few sticklebacks. Then I would lie down in the grass to recover my breath and look back at the white blossom covering the hill. The day was so bright that I could not see where the hill ended and the sky began.

  They were but low hills in our country, for the land was all marsh down to the sea five miles away. On a clear day, if there was no sun, you could descry (but barely) the ships roving out at anchor in Herne Bay and count their masts, the country was that flat. Our own church at Churn was itself as a ship with a queer spire like a mast and a hipped roof which had the aspect of sails. You could climb into the little gallery below the spire and fancy you were a cabin boy in the crow’s-nest, giving warning of land on the Spanish Main.

  That gallery served also as a refuge from my mother. She was the one I took after, being tall and black. Even then I was nearly two yards tall like the late King and as dark as he, or black-avized, as our ponderous rector Mr Hignell would have said. My mother was not much shorter, but my father was a little fluffy man with red cheeks, and my sisters took after him, so that when my mother and I quarrelled we were as two ravens croaking at one another while a flock of fieldmice fled and hid themselves.

  My father was seldom indoors and scarcely sat down to eat as he came in muttering some foolishness about the cows must be moved from one field to the other when he had only put them there the day before, and he would be out the back door again with his bread and cheese still in his hand. He was a futile restless man who always sold his calves too early or cut his hay too late. We did not bandy words for he could not abide prolonged discourse, except to his cows whom he would coax and reproach with all the speech he dared not use to us.

  But my mother – ah my mother. Her voice was as resonant as a bell, but one that is cracked. I have heard Welshwomen with such voices, so that when they are talking to their husbands in bed, it is as though they were whispering fond nothings in your own ear. Not that my mother’s nothings were fond. Her perceptual powers belonged to the supernatural order. She could tell when I had failed to construe my Latin even before Mr Hignell our rector and schoolmaster had remarked on my errors, she knew when my underlinen was dirty though she had not seen it, when I had teased the neighbour’s cat before it mewed. Then would come that harsh low call – Jeremiah, Jeremiah – and the indictment exact to the last particular. When I complained that I was the universal scapegoat, my sisters would say that I was unkind and that she persecuted me because she loved me the best and expected the most of me. Did I not remember how she would tickle me and call me Jemmy Junket? But I could not explain how even these sunny interludes alarmed me for they were so precarious, the sun so easily turning to storms, the tickling to pinches and slaps. When I was almost grown, I must yet stand like St Sebastian while she supplemented her verbal injuries with her fists which struck as sharp as flints. So when I saw the storm brewing, I would slip out of the back door past my father singing lullabys to his flyblown herd and pelt up the spiral steps to the gallery.

  It was an ancient church, and the parish was yet more ancient, founded by St Augustine himself, and second only to St Martin’s in Canterbury. Mr Hignell was much possessed with such matters and spent his hours of leisure (which were numerous, for he was an idle greasy man who never visited the sick and who paid a clerk to conduct his services) in useless study of the old charters and registers that were kept in the vestry.

  The church possessed a mill upon the Drain and Mr Hignell had title to the revenues of it. But the water was so low and the current was so sluggish that except in times of flood it would not turn the mill wheel. In a dry summer the farmers took off their corn to the great mill at Stourmarsh and so Mrs Scott, a widow woman who kept the mill, had scarce a penny to feed her son and none to pay Mr Hignell.

  One day we were lying on the bank by the race (though to call it a race is a melancholy irony, for it had barely strength enough to shift the water-daisies) and I saw Mr Hignell go into the mill with his broad black hat on, and the door shut behind him. The sun beat hot on our backs. We tickled Mary Court (Tommy’s sister) with straws and her face grew red and Tommy told us to stop and Bare-arse Jack (his mother was so poor he had once come to school with breeches that were torn at the back) said he would push Tommy into the stream but in pushing Tommy he pushed me too and I was the one who fell in, but even in the race the water came up no higher than my knees and I stood there wreathed in daisies like Ophelia swearing mock vengeance on Jack Scott. He towered there above me on the coping stone, tall and black as I was, his ragged breeches falling off him, shouting insults at me. Then behind him I saw the door of the mill opening and Mr Hignell clapping on his hat and Mrs Scott coming out and she was weeping.

  Mr Hignell had them out of the mill before the week was done and we heard they left the country before the year was out. We knew no more of them which I was sorry at, for Bare-arse Jack made me laugh. It was not the last I knew of Mr Hignell, or of his lessons that were both tedious and painful. As is common in that profession, at least among schoolmasters who are bachelors, beating boys was his great diversion. If you misbehaved in church or were idle in lessons, he would have you held down by his poor creature, Voules the beadle, and waddle half a dozen yards back and then come at you with his birch, grunting like a pig as he came. I perceived that he took an unwholesome pleasure in this chastisement and after he had beaten me once for whistling in the graveyard and then for forgetting the theorem of Pythagoras (which has been of no value to me in my life) I resolved to take revenge upon him and to do it by striking at that which was dearest to him of all things in life, viz. his old charts.

  He kept the key to the muniment chest behind the door to his scullery and I could have taken it without being seen, but I thought it more cunning to break open the chest with the old ploughshare which had been left in the farmyard, such as a robber might light upon and take to his use. One night towards the end of Lent when there was no moon, I stole down to the church, knowing that the lock on the vestry door had rusted, slipped in and smashed the lock on the chest, gathered up the oldest scrolls and books that I could see and ran with them down to the Drain, but I stumbled as I ran and dropped the scrolls into the ditch. The next morning I heard Mr Hignell crying from the lychgate of the church: Robbers, robbers, we are undone. I have never heard sweeter music. We ran in all directions to apprehend the monster who had done this deed. I ran towards the Drain. There they were, the silly scrolls, perched on the tops of the rushes, dripping with dew and mud and blossom. Oh Mr Hignell, look here, look here, I cried. I do believe these be, etc., etc. And the greasy fellow galloped panting down the path. Oh Jem, you’re an excellent fellow, yes here’s the so-and-so charter, and this is the register. And he picked up these old papers, with the blossom and the mud on them, and clasped them to his bosom as though they were his c
hildren, which they were, since no woman had been lunatic enough to permit Mr Hignell up her petticoats, and he had breath like a badger.

  But then as he was chattering there with these stinking old rolls in his arms, all of a sudden he stops and looks at me. Jeremiah, he says, you were quick on the scent, very quick. Sir, I am a quick lad, anyone will tell you that. Yes, he says, so you are indeed. But he goes on looking at me, and although he said nothing more – for what more could he say? – I perceived at that moment the awful power of reputation and determined to acquire a reputation which should help rather than hinder my progress on this earth.

  The rest of my family resembled my father and my sisters. They had curly hair and faces as red as the apples they grew for a living. There were plenty of us Mounts. The family had so many branches and they all grew apples (as they do to this day) except my father and thus prospered as he did not. All but me were named Ralph or Richard. The only way to tell one Mount from another was by the names of our villages. My father was Ralph Churn, his younger brother Richard Elmstead, his son my cousin Ralph was Ralph Elmstead, etc., etc. My cousin did not much care for his nickname which was Fluffy Ralph or Fluff. His curly hair was so thick and unruly that birds could have nested on it. That was the only unruly thing about Ralph. He was a neat boy. His breeches were always clean and his face shining. He was an excellent penman. The rector of Elmstead had declared his Latin verses to be the finest in Kent for his age. Sometimes Ralph would walk over from Elmstead which lay up in the Downs beyond Canterbury, ten miles off, for the pleasure of showing off his verses to Mr Hignell. In return, Mr Hignell would show him the old charters. I would skulk behind them squashing flies against the window pane. I stayed only because Mr Hignell would then invite us to dinner and he kept a magnifico’s table. He would give us a fine piece of roast beef or a rich mutton pie or a barrel of oysters or a jowl of salmon. He would drink a deal of sack and would put on a good humour, but I never saw my cousin Ralph merry. Fluff would drink but little, pleading that his head ached or that he had a pain in his cods (he was hypochondriac even as a youth). And when Mr Hignell cracked a feeble jest, he would smile as much as to say: ‘Ah, that’s a jest, I salute it, now may we pass on to more serious matters’, and he would begin to talk of the old charters and the other ancient rubbish that Mr Hignell kept in the vestry. In truth, it was as much to pique my cousin Ralph as to vex Mr Hignell that I stole the scrolls. And the day after they were found, I hit upon a droll device.