Author: The Good Reader

Ha’nacker Mill by Hilaire Belloc

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I knew who Belloc was, but I did not know much about him. One of the giants of Edwardian writing and friend of G K Chesterton. I was familiar with Cautionary Tales for Children, of course, perhaps his most famous work today. And then there is that poem The South Country, with its repeated references to “the men who were boys when I was a boy”.

But it wasn’t until I saw a television programme about writers in Sussex that I began to realise the depth of Belloc’s attachment to the Sussex countryside over many years.

That led me to the poem below, from 1923. The ruined windmill and the desolate field suggest the end of a rural way of life that was coming to a close at that time. It’s a lament, really, and a poem that needs to be heard to get the full effect.

 

Ha’nacker Mill by Hilaire Belloc 

Sally is gone that was so kindly,
Sally is gone from Ha’nacker Hill.
And the Briar grows ever since then so blindly
And ever since then the clapper is still. . .
And the sweeps have fallen from Ha’nacker Mill.

Ha’nacker Hill is in Desolation:
Ruin a-top and a field unploughed.
And Spirits that call on a fallen nation,
Spirits that loved her calling aloud,
Spirits abroad in a windy cloud.

Spirits that call and no one answers;
Ha’nacker’s down and England’s done.
Wind and Thistle for pipe and dancers,
And never a ploughman under the Sun.
Never a ploughman. Never a one.

 

 

 

The Secret Trilogy by John Gardner

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John Gardner is mainly remembered today for his series of James Bond continuation novels, published between 1981 and 1996, but he wrote many other espionage stories. The Railton family saga is a trilogy of long novels. They are The Secret Generations (1985), The Secret Houses (1988) and The Secret Families (1989). The family trade of the British Railtons and the American Farthings, to whom they are linked by marriage, is intelligence work.

On the back of the first volume there is a quote from Len Deighton, who says that this is the first book to combine a family saga with the history of British intelligence. This is interesting, because Deighton’s Berlin Game had been published in 1983, and was the first volume in his long sequence of novels involving Bernard Samson, which covers fairly similar territory. Who had the idea first? It may well be that Gardner was influenced not so much by Deighton as by Douglas Reeman. Badge of Glory by Reeman was published in 1982 and was the first in his sequence of Blackwood family novels, a family who all served in the Royal Marines. Gardner himself was an ex-marine.

The first volume makes more of the historical angle than the later ones do. Starting before the first world war, we see the origins of what became MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. The complex plot involves German spies in England and Ireland, as well as British spies in Germany, during the naval arms race of this time. In his London house, Giles Railton, the patriarch, has a den, from which he oversees the operations of his espionage network. There is a cabinet containing his huge collection of model soldiers from all eras, with which he replays the great battles of history. His son Caspar is badly wounded in the war. By the end we have learnt that not all the Railtons are loyal to Britain. Giles is revealed to have become a convert to communism, out of guilt at the advantages of the class he was born into. A postscript set in 1935 reveals that his son Ramillies, who went missing in Germany in the war, has become a Russian KGB officer.

The second volume moves forward in time and is set in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It is largely concerned with a retrospective investigation into the betrayal and rounding-up of a French resistance group during the second world war. This has some resemblance to the Klaus Barbie affair, although he is not mentioned by name. Caspar’s role in all this now comes into question. His nephew Donald Railton, known as Naldo, becomes a leading character. There is a lot of action on the streets of  early cold war Berlin, convincingly rendered.

We get the “origin story” of Herbie Kruger, who had already featured in another series of books by Gardner. Here, he is a streetwise young Berliner and keen student of English who is recruited by British intelligence. He is devoted to the works of Gustav Mahler. He is a significant character in the third book, too, by which time he has risen through the ranks and is based in London. We suspect that his colourful, not quite correct use of English might be a deliberate ruse to wind up his superiors.

The third volume, which starts in 1964, is perhaps the best. Caspar is now dead, but his connection to the Russian double agent known as “Alex” is under investigation, so once more Naldo must find out if his uncle was a traitor. Anthony Blunt features here, and “Alex” is the code name of the real-life Russian double agent Oleg Penkovsky.

If the first world war spy games of the first volume inevitably recall John Buchan and Somerset Maugham, the two later volumes read a bit like a slightly less realistic version of John Le Carré. It has to be said that Gardner did not really leave his own distinctive stamp on the genre. He was though a highly professional and competent thriller writer, with a polished prose style, a fertile imagination and a knack of fitting his plots to real world events. This was what made him such an inspired choice to step into Ian Fleming’s footsteps.

He had a knack for coming up with good “alternative history” ideas. Here, the Kennedy assassination is cleverly connected to the American role in the fall of the Vietnamese government, prior to the war there. In the first volume, he offers a quite plausible explanation as to why people with all the advantages, such as the Railtons, might have become traitors.

And the Railtons do have all the advantages. They are a landed family of long standing. Their connection with the world of spying goes way back. “They’re mentioned in the bloody history books. One of them was a go-between for Anthony Standen, Walsingham’s agent. Sixteenth-century stuff.”  They all share a fondness for quoting from Shakespeare.

By this third volume, the Railtons have begun to be disillusioned with the secret world. “Why do we do it, Naldo asked himself now. . .then was shocked to realise he was repeating one of his father’s comments on the trade. ’God knows why we do it. The politicians treat us like dirt; the military have trouble in believing us; the general public think of us as superannuated adventurers, while the novelists make a killing from presenting us as candyfloss killers’.”

His colleague Gus Keane is much clearer about his motives. “Ok, why do we do it? Because we believe in freedom of thought, of speech and of movement. Here we can criticise the government in public; here we can read what we like and more or less print and say what we like. Try doing that in a totalitarian state – Communist or Fascist.”

But for Naldo: “Everything my family has ever done has been devious. . . This whole bloody country makes you like that, and when we all become a sort of United States of Europe, we’ll be more devious than ever.”

The book ends in 1989 with the revelation that an IRA plot to attack the handover of Hong Kong to the Chinese has been foiled, bringing the whole story full circle.

The Belfry by Laurence Binyon

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Like most people, I suppose, I knew Laurence Binyon for the famous lines from his 1914 poem For the Fallen: “They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old/Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn/At the going down of the sun and in the morning/We will remember them.”

The poem below is in a rather different vein and is completely new to me. I found it in Walter de la Mare’s wonderful anthology Come Hither, which has been a source of inspiration to me for some time now, as it’s full of exactly the sort of poetry I like. The Belfry is rather reminiscent of the style of de la Mare’s own poetry, I feel. It really comes to life if you read it aloud. I don’t know exactly when it was written.

I think it also appeals to me, partly because I too had the childhood experience of climbing up inside an ancient church tower.

 

The Belfry

Dark is the stair, and humid the old walls
Wherein it winds, on worn stones, up the tower.
Only by loophole chinks at intervals
Pierces the late glow of this August hour.

Two truant children climb the stairway dark,
With joined hands, half in glee and half in fear,
The boy mounts brisk, the girl hangs back to hark
If the gruff sexton their light footstep hear.

Dazzled at last they gain the belfry-room.
Barred rays through shutters hover across the floor
Dancing in dust; so fresh they come from gloom
That breathless they pause wondering at the door.

How hushed it is! What smell of timbers old
From cobwebbed beams! The warm light here and there
Edging a darkness, sleeps in pools of gold,
Or weaves fantastic shadows through the air.

How motionless the huge bell! Straight and stiff,
Ropes through the floor rise to the rafters dim.
The shadowy round of metal hangs, as if
No force could ever lift its gleamy rim.

A child’s awe, a child’s wonder, who shall trace
What dumb thoughts on its waxen softness write
In such a spell-brimmed, time-forgotten place,
Bright in that strangeness of approaching night?

As these two gaze, their fingers tighter press;
For suddenly the slow bell upward heaves
Its vast mouth, the cords quiver at the stress,
And ere the heart prepare, the ear receives

Full on its delicate sense the plangent stroke
Of violent, iron, reverberating sound.
As if the tower in all its stones awoke,
Deep echoes tremble, again in clangour drowned,

That starts without a whir of frighted wings
And holds these young hearts shaken, hushed, and thrilled,
Like frail reeds in a rushing stream, like strings
Of music, or like trees with tempest filled,

And rolls in wide waves out o’er the lone land,
Tone following tone toward the far-setting sun,
Till where in fields long-shadowed reapers stand
Bowed heads look up, and lo, the day is done. . . .

 

 

 

Fragile reputations

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Some years ago, I bought a book by Eric Ambler in a secondhand bookshop in the Charing Cross Road. It was an American paperback and at the counter, the proprietor smiled approvingly and said “hard to get hold of these days, Ambler”.  He seemed to be a forgotten figure then, out of print and out of favour.

How times change. In 2009, Penguin started to re-issue his novels, the 1930s ones on which his reputation rests. Ambler went on writing into the 1970s, but none of his later books really made the same impact as the earlier ones. The covers featured black and white photos at first, but these were soon replaced with images that resembled the colourful travel posters of the inter-war years.

Ambler’s stories of a troubled Europe on the brink of war seemed to resonate again in the world of mass migration, Putin and Trump. They felt strangely contemporary as the world started to look less secure and settled than it had done. The passage of time brought them back into circulation and today you can read many favourable comments online. If anything, he has gone from being underrated to slightly overrated.

Compare this with the case of Angus Wilson. Angus who, you may ask. He wrote basically realistic novels of English social life with a touch of mordant humour. In the 1950s and 1960s, he was a big figure in the world of serious fiction, up there with Kingsley Amis and William Golding. He taught at the then new University of East Anglia, setting up the creative writing course there. By the 1970s though, his reputation was in decline.

A TV adaption of Anglo Saxon Attitudes, perhaps his best book, got his novels back into print, but they soon disappeared again. If he was remembered at all, it was as an awful warning of the fragility of a seemingly secure literary reputation. There was an idea that his name had been erased in some way by the rising popularity of the younger novelist, A N Wilson.

Can this be true? J G Farrell had the same initials as J G Ballard, yet no-one ever seemed to confuse them. Farrell died in 1979, and his three major novels of the decline of the British Empire have never been out of print. His reputation has grown steadily and The Singapore Grip is due on TV soon.

Perhaps it’s to do with a kind of clarity about what sort of books a writer’s works are, what we might call marketability, I suppose, that feeling that we know what we are in for. For example, if you were recommending Ambler to a friend, you could say something along the lines of “Graham Greeneish, film noirish, early spy fiction, the English Dashiell Hammett” and your friend might have an idea what to expect.

It’s rather more difficult to sum up the fiction of Angus Wilson in this way. and also difficult to imagine what changes in the world could create new interest in his writing.

It’s a tricky business, trying to second guess the ruthless test of time. When the biography of William Golding came out in 2009, the publishers felt the need to subtitle it “the man who wrote Lord of the Flies”. I would have thought that was a fact known to anyone who went to school in the UK after the year 1960, but perhaps not.

The Coombe by Edward Thomas

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I don’t know what brought this one to mind again; perhaps walking in the woods, as I have done so often recently, listening to the birds singing. It’s one of Edward Thomas’ earliest poems, from 1914, I believe.

 

The Coombe

The Combe was ever dark, ancient and dark.
Its mouth is stopped with bramble, thorn, and briar;
And no one scrambles over the sliding chalk
By beech and yew and perishing juniper
Down the half precipices of its sides, with roots
And rabbit holes for steps. The sun of Winter,
The moon of Summer, and all the singing birds
Except the missel-thrush that loves juniper,
Are quite shut out. But far more ancient and dark
The Combe looks since they killed the badger there,
Dug him out and gave him to the hounds,
That most ancient Briton of English beasts.

 

The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff

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The Eagle of the Ninth was a favourite book of mine when I was younger. It was fascinating to re-visit it. Published in 1956, it was aimed at young people, but the only way in which it is a children’s book is that the violence and sex are toned down. The style of writing is enjoyably straightforward, for adults or children, and there is a strong sense of the British landscape. There is no feeling that the author is condescending to a youthful readership.

Set in Roman Britain, or at least the Britain that Rome is trying to subdue, “a place where two worlds met without mingling”, the story concerns the search for the missing standard of the ninth legion, the eagle of the title. The legion marched north of Hadrian’s wall and was never heard of again. Were they defeated in battle by the British and all killed, or did they revolt against their officers?

The young hero, Marcus, invalided out of the Roman army, volunteers to go north with his British companion, Esca, to find out what happened to the legion, and its commander, his father. It is both a personal quest and an official mission.

This book is a very good example of the way in which imaginative writing can bring the past to life in a way that factual history books cannot. There is a powerful sense of what a less-populated Britain was like: “On they went, following the road that now ran out on a causeway between sodden marsh and empty sky, now plunged into deep boar-hunted forest, or lifted over bleak uplands where nothing grew save furze and thorn-scrub.”

When Marcus and his uncle Aquila play a game of draughts by the light of an oil lamp, in what is modern-day Silchester, the reader has a clear impression of the room in the villa as an island of warmth and peace in the darkness of this wild country where “the wind moaned through the desolate woods, the skies wept. . .”

There is a touch of something supernatural about the fate of the legion. Esca saw them marching, and recalls: “But the mist was creeping down from the high moors, and the legion marched into it , straight into it, and it licked them up and flowed together behind them, and they were gone as though they had marched from one world into another.” There is also what we might now call folk horror, with the missing Roman eagle finally being discovered as an object in a pagan ritual.

Marcus has a dream, in which he sees the Roman column marching northwards. In a chilling moment, he realises there are no faces under the metal helmets. Reading now, this sent a tingle up my spine, and at the same time I remembered how exactly the same thing had happened the first time I read it long ago.

Books stay the same but we change and that is part of the fascination of re-reading. Marcus’ shattered leg destroys his hopes of a military career. In the end he is partially cured. He can get around, but with a limp, and is not fit enough to go back to the army. He has to settle for what he has got. As a teenager bursting with health, I did not notice the disability theme here, but I do now.

I am not usually keen on biographical interpretations of fiction, but in this case, it is fascinating to know that Rosemary Sutcliff suffered grave ill-health, spending much of her life in a wheelchair. The vivid action scenes were created purely from her imagination. I don’t think she had ever actually been able to ride a horse, for example.

I have seen it suggested that she is one of the only authors to have been directly influenced by Rudyard Kipling. I think that’s unfair on Kipling, because his influence was so all-pervasive that it can hardly be seen now. For example, where would the modern spy story be without Kim?

Nevertheless, The Eagle of the Ninth does partly derive from three particular stories of his. These are “On the Great Wall” and “A Centurion of the Thirtieth” from Puck of Pook’s Hill and the Indian army story “The Lost Legion”.

There are also several “lost legion” stories from the first world war, about units that seemingly disappeared on the battlefield, that may be an influence. The anecdote about the ghostly legion seen in York to this day is in there somewhere, too.

Perhaps we should see The Eagle of the Ninth as belonging to the post-war period when it was first published, with its disabled young officer hero, missing father, and missing soldiers.

In the end, despite the weather, Marcus decides to stay on and make his life in Britain. It’s clear that we are meant to see him as our common ancestor. This glimpse into the past sees us as the modern descendants of the Romans, but also as the inheritors of something older and stranger.

 

The Shadow Line by Joseph Conrad

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Conrad outlined his artistic intention in an early essay. “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see.” He certainly succeeds in that aim in his short 1916 novel The Shadow Line.

I wrote in an earlier post how I had been re-visiting Conrad’s works, and that he seemed to be the perfect writer for current circumstances and my present mood. Strangely enough, I had forgotten the illness theme in The Shadow Line.

The unnamed narrator leaves a secure berth, almost on a whim. He is then approached to take command of a ship whose captain has died suddenly. The prize of command has fallen to him as if by accident. It appears, though, that there was something strange about the late captain.

The crew start to fall ill, and our narrator assumes that the sickness will stop once the ship puts out to sea, yet more and more of the crew succumb to the fever. Different crew members are affected in different ways.

The weather does not follow any previously known pattern and the wind refuses to blow. The only sailor apart from the captain not to fall ill has a heart problem, restricting his capacity for physical exertion. These two must save the situation.

They are becalmed; time seems to slow down and then stop altogether: “. . .my command seemed to stand as motionless as a model ship set on the gleams and shadows of polished marble.” Has the previous captain exerted some kind of supernatural influence, so that they will all die, leaving a ghost ship? There are echoes of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner here. This first voyage as captain has turned into a nightmare.

There are descriptive passages of such vividness that I had to read them again: “Here and there in the distance, above the crowded mob of low, brown roof ridges, towered great piles of masonry, king’s palace, temples, gorgeous and dilapidated, crumbling under the vertical sunlight, tremendous, overpowering, almost palpable…”

There is an astonishing scene when the night turns to an inky blackness just before the rain comes, and the sailors have to feel their way around the ship: “The impenetrable blackness beset the ship so close that it seemed that by thrusting one’s hand over the side one could touch some unearthly substance.”

There is also a good deal here about the hidden motives of human behaviour. The odd reasons that some of the characters have for behaving as they do are gradually revealed. The shadow line itself is the line between youth and experience, we are told, but is it something more as well?

I feel that I cannot do justice to the depth and complexity of Conrad’s writing in a short piece like this. That’s not to say it’s a difficult read, though. I found it unputdownable and read it in a single sitting, despite having read it at least once before.

I think it’s a pity that so many people encounter Conrad’s writing first through Heart of Darkness, perhaps on an academic course. It’s not his easiest or most accessible work.

Knowing something of Conrad’s biography and the fact that English was actually his third language, you might think that the plainer style of the later works was a consequence of his becoming more familiar with the language.

Yet the short story An Outpost of Progress, the other fiction that came out of Conrad’s time in the Belgian Congo, was published in 1898, before Heart of Darkness and is written in a much more direct style. It’s certainly a good place to start with this extraordinary writer.

The Way Through the Woods by Rudyard Kipling

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I’m lucky enough to live within ten minutes’ walk of some woods that I’ve known since I was a boy. It’s been a life saver to be able to go there during the lockdown. The place has been transformed, with no planes overhead and much less traffic noise.

Everything smells fresh and the birds all sing at the same time so it’s hard to tell the calls apart. Today we went a little further off the beaten track and surprised a bird in a hole in a tree trunk.

So many trees have grown up since I first knew the place. It’s a nature reserve now and allowed to run wild. It’s hard to pick out the features I knew so long ago and the paths seem to lead in different directions from how I remember them. I found the sunken field with a concrete retaining wall, where they used to race bicycles. It’s completely overgrown now.

As I wander the paths, trying to orientate myself, the opening words of Kipling’s poem come into my mind.

 

The Way Through the Woods

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods.
But there is no road through the woods.

 

 

 

Unknown Assailant by Patrick Hamilton (#Gorse 3)

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Unknown Assailant (1955) is much shorter than Patrick Hamilton’s other two Gorse books, only some hundred pages in all. It is now 1930 and Gorse is masquerading as “The Honourable Gerald Claridge”. His plan this time is to defraud barmaid Ivy Barton of her savings, as well as relieving her father of a considerable sum of money by persuading him to invest in a musical play. No one is more aware than Gorse of how posing as a theatrical “insider” can awe and dazzle the gullible.

It is a bit like the outline of a story that was not quite finished. It lacks detail. For example we are never told quite how Gorse met Ivy or why he considered her a suitable victim. There are few of the long dialogue scenes that we find in the previous novel and not as much humour (although the scene where Gorse, as Claridge, and Mr Barton call each other “sir” is amusing). We are told about the hostile letters Mr Barton writes but they are not reproduced.

Despite these flaws it is an essential read for admirers of the first two books and contains much of interest. It is the simple-minded Ivy who comes closest to seeing what Gorse is up to and thwarting his plans.

Towards the end of Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse, Hamilton had compared Gorse to an artist. He suggested that the ease of his success with Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce led Gorse to make the mistake of thinking that there were many other and richer women waiting to be defrauded in the same way. “. . Gorse was one who had to pay for the precocity of his youth in the most distasteful coin of premature middle age”.

Do I detect a sense of Gorse as a self-portrait of Hamilton on some level here? After all, Hamilton hit the jackpot early on in his writing career, with the success of his stage plays Rope and Gaslight, but never quite reached those heights of public acclaim again. Gorse is, after all, the same age that Hamilton would have been at the time the novel is set.

There are references throughout that novel to Gorse’s future. Near the beginning, Hamilton compares Gorse to several notorious English murderers. Although it is not stated directly, the implication is to become a nationally famous killer, ending up being executed. The name “Gorse” suggests that Hamilton may have modelled him on Neville Heath. Gorse’s later military impersonation may also refer to Heath, who did something similar.

Here, that idea is taken further by introducing quotations from two future biographers of Gorse. One of them refers to “his life-long habit of writing filthy anonymous letters and abandoning women with entirely gratuitous cruelty”. The other cites the Gorse cases from the earlier novels, as well as “The Haywards Heath dentist” and “The Rugby watchmaker”, for which Hamilton did not provide any further details.

By the time Hamilton wrote Unknown Assailant, his powers as a writer were on the wane, as a lifetime of excessive drinking caught up with him. It was to be his last published novel and there’s a sense that Gorse’s decline mirrors his own.

It’s as if Hamilton had realised that writing about a serial criminal would involve telling the same story over again. Gorse uses his car in the fraud against Ivy, simply because that is what he always had done, and it goes badly wrong for him.

There was obviously at least one more book about Gorse to be written but sadly Hamilton did not live to take Gorse into this imagined future. He died in 1962.

If you like the Gorse novels you might be interested in Patrick Hamilton’s radio play, Money with Menaces.

 

 

On A Return From Egypt by Keith Douglas

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For obvious reasons, the celebrations for the 75th anniversary of VE day were a rather muted affair. It was a bit sad that the Red Arrows flypast became an event for television, rather than for real-life spectators.

One small gem did go ahead, though, the broadcast last night on Radio 3 of the play Unicorns, Almost by the poet Owen Sheers. It is a one-man piece about the second world war poet, Keith Douglas, played by Dan Krikler.

All the major poems, such as “How to Kill” and “Vergissmeinnicht” were included. If my memory is correct, the main biographical source was Douglas’s wartime memoir Alamein to Zem-Zem, with the words transposed to the present tense.

This had the effect of bringing Keith Douglas vividly to life, on the battlefield and in Alexandria, rather than leaving him as a figure dead on the pages of a history book.

The device of having Douglas speak after his death was very effective. It enabled Sheers to include the anecdote about Douglas’ mother finding all six copies of his Collected Poems unsold and unopened in her local bookshop, ten years after it had been published.

His reputation has risen slowly and steadily since then. References to his work crop up now and again. Alan Judd used a quote from Keith Douglas as the title for his novel A Breed of Heroes, and he appears as a character in Iain Gale’s novel Alamein.

Keith Douglas survived the battle of Alamein but was killed in action three days after D-Day. He was twenty-four years old.

The following poem was written in England before D-Day and published after his death.

 

On A Return From Egypt

To stand here in the wings of Europe
disheartened, I have come away
from the sick land where in the sun lay
the gentle sloe-eyed murderers
of themselves, exquisites under a curse;
here to exercise my depleted fury.

For the heart is a coal, growing colder
when jewelled cerulean seas change
into grey rocks, grey water-fringe,
sea and sky altering like a cloth
till colour and sheen are gone both:
cold is an opiate of the soldier.

And all my endeavours are unlucky explorers
come back, abandoning the expedition;
the specimens, the lilies of ambition
still spring in their climate, still unpicked:
but time, time is all I lacked
to find them, as the great collectors before me.

The next month, then, there is a window
and with a crash I’ll split the glass.
Behind it stands one I must kiss,
person of love or death
a person or a wraith,
I fear what I shall find.