by Peter Rimmer
They heard the motorboat return and watched the fish being handed up to Captain Cookson while the river flowed on, pocked by flotsam, on its tragic rush to the sea. Will had no immediate answer but instead of feeling sorry for Hilary in his solitary isolation, he felt the beginning of envy, a yearning for the way out into a world untroubled by anything other than one’s own stupidity. It made his own life seem worthless and his present more uncomfortable. Priests were meant to make you feel better in yourself, not worse! He began to think back on his life, like a gravedigger digging up bones. There had to have been something in his life that had made it worthwhile and slowly, carefully, he began to sift back, searching for the reason for one William Langton, his family, his friends, and the disillusioned priest dangling his feet in the water next to him. It did not take him too long to feel better and some of the answers to Hilary’s despair formed in his mind. He turned to his friend.
“I still say you must leave this miniature paradise and return with me to Langton Manor, and not only for you but for me. We are two old men without wives and neither of us would wish to go out and search for a wife at this stage in our lives despite what you suggested. There is a library at home every bit as magnificent as the one you have here and when you have read your fill during the day, the two old boys can sit down round the fire and have a drink, talk about the things you have been reading and the comings and goings of the farm. Randolph may even be dead by now and Byron cannot live in England as the tax would kill him and he means kill him, the old miser, and the estate has to go to the eldest son of the eldest son by the law of entailment. So Gregory will inherit but he hates sheep. I have nothing much to do now and the idea of caretaking the family home appeals to me… The younger son who went off to the colonies, which promptly disappeared, now has something constructive to do. I probably need you a lot more than you need me but having seen all this I would find it difficult to stop the picture of you being helpless on the floor with the old dog whimpering. You said yourself we should leave Africa to the Africans. As a colonial power we tried our best and was told it was not good enough, we were exploiting and not fairly administering the territories. The new order have done a lot worse for the people but that is for the people to find out and do something about. You may be right about politicians but I think it was Winston Churchill who said democracy was a bad form of government but he couldn’t think of a better one. And if the London Missionary Society are paying you a pension on which you are unable to live, we will go and see them and sort out the mistake.
“One of my more cynical friends in London says the Gay Movement is a wonderful thing, it keeps them together, stops them breeding and thereby keeps down the population. One fallacy I have found in life is judging other people by myself. I have no tendency to be a queer and I have liked women far too much in my life, but if a man loves a man or a woman loves a woman and physical contact gives them comfort, so let it be. They are doing no one any harm and if they find some happiness, good luck to them. Your God, I can’t help you with. I have been agnostic for all my adult life and nothing has happened to change my mind. I simply don’t know if there is a God. I personally think that when we die, we are as dead as mutton and the thing that lives on is the species with its ever-changing evolution and through that evolution and its by-product science, we will generate more wealth in the world to repay our grandchildren. Sometime in the deep future of our evolution we may even understand the reason for our existence. England is a far fairer society than it was when we were born. We may not have an empire but the man in the street has no fear of want. We may all look and think a bit like each other but that can make us homogeneous and stop us fighting with each other. And quite frankly, Hilary, I never fancied living under Adolf and his Gestapo and I think the vast majority of Germans would go along with me. Evolution and man have always taken ten paces forward and nine paces back. Africa has been doing a lot of going back in the last thirty years, and when they work out what they really want – a rural subsistence living or a modern economy, warts and all, one or the other – they will go forward again and find some national happiness.
“The older I grow the more difficult I find it to define your right and wrong. As a kid it was easy, whatever Mother said was wrong, was wrong and no argument; and mostly, looking back, I find her definitions correct. But then I surmise it was a simpler world, a lot less people for one and words like pollution, which they called smog, ecology, which was the countryside, had not been used along with a thousand other disturbing words we use in our daily life. Politically you were Conservative or Labour and the two were on opposite ends of the same, long pole. Now they each change their philosophies in mid-sentence if they find themselves disagreeing with a crowd or the popular opinion on a chat show. The simple clarity of our youthful right and wrong has gone forever. The world is a far too dangerous place to be naïve.”
“Then you also don’t know the difference between right and wrong,” said Hilary, sullenly.
“I know it is better to be right than wrong. I don’t say the right is wrong if you can get away with it. What I find difficult is applying the old principles to determine whether something is right or wrong. Yes, buggery is against the laws of nature but creating happiness is not. Science has developed more in the last ten years, man’s knowledge has increased more than in the whole previous history of the human race. We just can’t keep up emotionally or politically and the mental trauma is tantamount to the industrial and post-industrial revolution all in one and overnight. Our thinking is way behind our scientific achievement. We grew too big too quickly and the body politic is skinny and gets tired easily; growing pains of a global village where once four generations back we didn’t travel further than twenty miles. We have experienced, you and I in our lifetime, the great leap forward in history and the compounding energy that it has generated will be even more staggering in the future. I personally don’t believe we will blow ourselves up or ecologically destroy the world as the first and strongest instinct of man is self-preservation. The ‘wrong being right if you can get away with it’ syndrome doesn’t apply if you destroy your enemy in the full knowledge that you will destroy yourself. The political Tower of Babel may find some sense and eliminate poverty from the face of the earth rather than mankind. For every megalomaniac shouting his mouth off there are millions of quiet people getting on with their lives who are not activists, gay, lesbian, anarchist or drug peddlers. They are the majority and, though I agree at present that social democracy is controlled by the activist fringe, the swing vote that every politician panders to, there will come a time when more rational thought will prevail. We all discuss the wrongs of the world and never the rights because we are presently confused as to which is wrong and how wrong; the grey shades of understanding. Soon we will go into space, very soon in terms of man’s span of evolution, and we will find there are other people in the universe and then the argument between black and white culture will look very mundane. We evolve, Hilary, because we keep thinking as you are doing. Maybe you should publish your thoughts of a one-time missionary in Africa. But do it in England. All you will do here, alone, is go round and round in the same circle, even with all the wisdom in your books. Maybe you have thought long enough in isolation and your untainted thoughts will be of value in the ongoing process. Look, you were always the brains in the family and I tagged along. I probably don’t know what I am talking about but I can say your company at the manor would be a lot more beneficial to me than chewing over childhood memories. We can visit the pubs in Corfe Castle, swim in the sea and talk. Just because we are past the age when men procreate children, it doesn’t mean our brains are dead… Now, I’ve said more than I’ve probably ever said and it’s getting damned hot. Come on board and you and I will drink a glass of cold beer with the good captain, eat a fillet of fresh Zambezi bream and try and work out how we can make the last third of our lives as pleasant as possible as you and I, Hilary Bains, are going to live to ninety and by then they w
ill have found a cure for old age and we will live forever just to find out what happens. Give this dog here some food and we will adjourn to the top deck to discuss the more frivolous things of life, and I am not talking about my ex-girlfriend.”
“When a society reaches the point where everyone is permitted to do exactly what they want no matter how it affects their neighbour, when moral decay has reached the stage of purification, all your new wealth will be unable to save the goal of that civilisation and it will destroy itself. When righteousness and honour, duty, just reward for hard work, sensitivity to the feelings of others and so many other attributes that were once good in man, once they toss these on the rubbish heap of their rights, most of which are not right at all because they don’t know the difference, you have a classic civilisation in its death throes. Churchill also said that if you wish to find out what will happen in the future, look into the past. All the great civilisations fell when they indulged themselves, when discipline collapsed and the free for all of good living took its place. When they morally collapsed, they collapsed entirely. When the comforts of the body were more important than the soul. When a man is surrounded by a problem, he finds it more difficult to see the wood for the trees. Creeping disaster is much more difficult to comprehend… First, I am falling into this water and then I will join you for a cold beer, something that has not passed my lips for a very long time… Poor Randolph. It comes to all of us. One day you think you are going to live forever and the next you have cancer. When one’s own generation begins to die, death is indeed close. Good old stick-in-the-mud Randolph. I often envy people with small emotions. England from this standpoint is a long way away… Last in is a fool.” Ripping off his few clothes, Hilary Bains, ex-missionary, beat William Langton, ex-rover around the world, into the water by a fraction of a second, both laughing hysterically at the old game they had played so often as children.
“Will you think about it?” said Will, back on the side of the pool.
“It’s good to talk to someone, that it is… Skinny-dipping at our age! We should be ashamed.”
“Why?” And again they both laughed.
Part 1
1937 to 1950
1
William Langton was born in an exclusive nursing home twelve hundred yards from Buckingham Palace. Ethelred Langton, his father, was not taking any chances with his family. For years afterwards, William thought he had been brought into the world by the same man who delivered the future Queen of England but like so many other things in his life, he would discover from Jo it was the assistant; the twins and Randolph had been delivered by the gynaecologist to the then Duchess of York who became Queen of England the year William was born. His three elder siblings considered him inferior, the youngest child and delivered by the assistant. He was an afterthought, six years younger than the twins and eight years younger than Randolph. Byron, shown the baby in his perambulator when he was first returned from the London nursing home to Langton Manor, asked if he could flick him. Byron was at the flicking stage and when Adelaide Langton, mother of them all, was out of the way, Byron gave the baby his first flick right on the baby’s left ear and ran into the bushes when the two-week-old William howled his discontent. Byron, William was to discover, started most of the mischief in his life but was only around to receive the rewards, never the penalties. The pram had been put on the well-cut, sweeping lawns next to the rose garden, and the nurse, seeing the baby asleep in the spring sun, had gone off to visit the chauffeur and nobody heard the child screaming. It may have been the cause of William distrusting his brother, a subconscious knowledge of what Byron was all about.
No one was sure whether Langton Manor took its name from the nearby village of Langton Matravers or the Langton family, or even if the family name had given birth to the village; most people thought they had probably evolved together with the arrival of Angles, Jutes and Saxons in the fifth century and afterwards. The family were definitely Anglo-Saxons, not original islanders, and had probably conquered the land they farmed with the sword, killing or chasing off the original owners. The Germanic tribes landed along the coast of England, beaching longboats dozens at a time before pillaging and raping their way inland where they settled down comfortably, the Anglo giving England its very name. The Langtons, along with so many Anglo-Saxons, were proud of their history and gave their children the names of kings and poets, the great men of English history. William’s father had to shoulder the unfortunate name of Ethelred throughout his life, called after Ethelred the Unready, Saxon King of the English. William was never sure whether he came from William the Conqueror, William of Orange or William Shakespeare, but he hoped it was the poet.
1937 was the last summer in British history when the flag of the empire flew without threat or hindrance. The King was King of England, Scotland and Ireland and all the dominions, Emperor of India, Defender of the Faith. Germany, defeated years earlier, would not dare to challenge the empire again, or so they thought.
After a few minutes of howling William gave up and went back to sleep. Being the fourth child, his purpose was to inherit or marry money and as an Englishman it created most of the advantages when looked at in perspective. The snag of inheriting was handing over the inheritance to the following generation. Even William was to find there was no such thing as a free lunch.
Ethelred Langton, Red as he was known to friends and enemies, was one of the many in the island who were not secure in mind when they contemplated Hitler’s Third Reich eating up large parts of Europe with no one telling them to stop; but then he had more information than the man in the street, having taken up with aeroplanes in 1924 at the age of seventeen. Red would have preferred a life with aeroplanes but being the eldest Langton son it was his responsibility to run the family estate. Like his middle son Byron, he considered sheep to be the most stupid animals on God’s earth. Duty was duty and once he had finished his extended tour of Europe, university and its academic pleasures giving Red as much of a thrill as the sheep, he came home and buckled down to learn the estate business. Appreciating the importance twin lambs were to the estate accounts, and that sheep were as good as the grass they ate and that Harold Langton, Granda to the kids, was primarily a grower of grass, good grass with all the legumes a sheep needed for strength, growth and good wool, Red soon found the secret to every success was knowledge and not the luck of being born into wealth. His father, like his father before him, drummed in the old adage that a fool and his wealth were easily parted. In 1936, Red had joined the RAF reserve squadron based at Boscombe Down in Wiltshire and once a month he was away for four days where he flew to his heart’s content and learnt that Hitler was a menace that one day would have to be reckoned with, which was why he was not ecstatic about another child that Adelaide had set her mind to and which arrived in the person of William in May 1937. They had an argument, he and Adelaide, one of their few. Given the memory of the last war and the toll it took on their class of Englishmen, Red was not sure of the future, potentially a war more bloody than the last; he was a bomber pilot and he knew it would be. Her argument, one with painful logic, was that if a war was imminent, they needed more sons not fewer to protect the entailment of Langton Manor and the way of life of all those who lived and worked on the estate. Adelaide won her argument, and William was conceived with all the problems a life on earth was to entail which started with Byron giving him a flick on the ear.
All the same, that first summer suggested his life would pass in sunshine and happiness, as cross words were something rarely heard at Langton Manor. Will sat up in the pram in the same spot next to the roses, vaguely aware of the herbaceous border further down the lawn and the trees, and then the Downs and beyond, the booming sea when the English Channel was angry, a sound young William accepted along with the chirp of the blackbirds and thrushes and the smell of sweet blossom on the evening air, before they put him away in the nursery and his parents came to look at the last of their sons for ten minutes. There were a lot of things happ
ening at the manor and William was only one of them, a fairly insignificant bystander to the greater event of so many lives welded together to go forward through life with a common bond. A sick, expensive sow that earned income, received considerably more attention from Red Langton than his youngest son. Everything had its place and a baby or a small boy was expected to be seen and not heard. Will found early on in his life that he was on his own, that real survival depended on Will Langton and not the patronage of a family responsible for umpteen other individuals who relied on the manor and the good management of the Langton family for a living.
