Author: The Good Reader

H V Morton: poetic snapshots of a lost London

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The short pieces that make up H V Morton’s The Nights of London were originally published as newspaper columns in the 1920s, but had a long afterlife in book form. My small blue hardback is dated 1948 and it had been reprinted fourteen times by then.

Morton was a star journalist, making his name by being present at the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun. He went on to become a successful travel writer, the Paul Theroux of the inter-war years.

Here, Morton is our guide on a series of lone, nocturnal tours of London. He was aware that the idea of London by night had already become something of a cliché and he strove to avoid that.

He starts out at two in the morning in front of the Bank, cold, dead and deserted. It’s immediately clear that we are in the company of a sort of poet of London, as he walks on to London Bridge: “No sound, but that of a stray, petulant siren downstream. . . the rush of lit water and a sudden puff of steam from the Cannon Street railway bridge.”

Part of the fascination of this book is reflecting on what has changed and what has not. Morton’s attitude to the Chinese in Limehouse is not that of today; on the other hand he is broadly sympathetic to those struggling to make ends meet.

He visits the Suicide Station under Waterloo Bridge, where the police wait with a small dinghy to fish would-be suicides out of the dark water.

He accompanies the maintenance men on the tube and hopes that the current in the live rail really has been turned off, as they so confidently assure him.

He passes the time in a warm and cosy cabman’s shelter.

When he visits Fleet Street, we feel the journalist’s love for “the astonishing thunder of the press”. There is something of Rudyard Kipling here, as he describes the huge printing machines, “ready to tell today about yesterday”. There is also a reminder in his language that this is London just after the first world war: “In Fleet Street it is zero hour. The first edition is just going over the top into a new day.”

Similarly, the firemen in the station he visits remember dealing with the recent Zeppelin raids.

The pieces on evening classes and hospitals, remind us that we are in a harder world than today, before the expansion of public education and public access to health care.

He spends an evening in the East End, watching boxing bouts in a smoky hall.

The steam engine Sir Percivale pulls the night Continental boat train into Victoria Station, bringing the romance of the Mediterranean into London along with his train of Pullman cars. A touch of Kipling again, as Morton imagines the engines talking to each other in the engine shed.

He reflects on the sad atmosphere in an afterhours club, where people dance on into the small hours, people “who dare not be alone with themselves”.

A long bus ride north takes him to the very edge of London, where a development of new houses is reaching out into the countryside. His young companion proudly shows him the unfinished house, waiting for him and his young bride. On the other hand, a Bloomsbury boarding house straight out of E F Benson or Patrick Hamiliton is inhabited by retired Indian army colonels and shabby-genteel widows.

On a trip down the river on a police launch, time slips away in the dark and Morton sees London looking much as it always has done. This is an experience certainly not available to us today. What would Morton make of the view now?

The penultimate piece is slightly longer and was not previously published. Morton goes to stay in a candle-lit room at The George in Southwark, the coaching inn even then regarded as a miraculous survival from Victorian London. Even more miraculous is that it is still there today, now looked after by the National Trust.

His nocturnal wanderings end with a beautiful evocation of early morning over London: “The feeling of other worldliness has vanished with the dawn light”.

“London in the dawn is a clean, unwritten page”, Morton tells us. What will the new day bring for the millions of Londoners?

Goodbye Bernie Gunther, farewell Philip Kerr

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For many years now the publication of a new Bernie Gunther novel by Philip Kerr has been something to look forward to, but this time it’s a sad occasion as well, because Philip Kerr died in 2018, before this book was published. It is therefore our goodbye to Bernie Gunther and our farewell to his creator.

It was a brilliant idea to take a Raymond Chandler-style, wise-cracking narrator and make him an ex-policeman, now a private detective, trying to make a living in Nazi-era Germany.

For this last appearance, Kerr takes us back to where the whole story began, Berlin in 1928, with a youngish Bernie still haunted by his experiences in the trenches and newly appointed to the murder squad. Despite the first three novels being re-issued as an omnibus volume under the title Berlin Noir, not all of the saga takes place there. Over the course of 14 novels and approximately 30 years, Bernie finds himself in many of the conquered territories of the Third Reich and, after the war, in Vienna, the South of France, Greece, and South America, re-visiting Berlin in flashback.

For me, though, the scenes set in Berlin have a special quality, so this last novel is a real treat, as Bernie delves into the neon-lit night of the metropolis in search of a serial killer. Or is it two killers? Bernie has to offer himself as a potential victim to find out. Detection isn’t really the point here, though, it’s merely the pretext for a portrait of Berlin in all its 1920s wildness.

Kerr has always mingled real-life characters with his fictional ones, but as this is the only one of the books set before the Nazis came to power, several of the real-life characters here, rather than the familiar villains such as Goebbels and Reinhardt Heydrich, are the artists of the Weimar era.

Thus, Bernie becomes a somewhat unwilling sitter for both George Gross and Otto Dix. Thea von Harbou, Fritz Lang’s wife and screenwriter, asks for Bernie’s inside help with a crime story she is planning. Bernie’s impersonation of a disabled war veteran brings him into contact with the theatre world as well. At the theatre where his make-up is being applied, the music that Bernie doesn’t care for is The Threepenny Opera. The singer he thinks can’t carry a tune turns out to be Lotte Lenya. There’s a sly vein of humour in that Bernie’s taste in art and music is conventional. He’s quite disdainful of the works that we readers of 2019 regard as modern classics.

There is a another film reference too, when Bernie “accidently on purpose” mistakes the actor Gustaf Grundgens for Emil Jannings. Grundgens was the basis for the character in the film Mephisto, the actor who stayed in Germany and worked under the Nazis.

Kerr has planted film references in his Bernie novels before. In A German Requiem, set in Vienna in 1948, there’s a British film crew shooting in the streets at night, a nod to The Third Man. Dalia Dresner in The Woman from Zagreb, was a (fictional) UFA star.

And so to the neatest film reference of all. The novel takes its title from Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s futuristic fantasy film. The black joke about the killer having the word “murderer” chalked on his back, and the witnesses’ accounts of the suspect whistling a classical tune, point us in the direction of another Lang film, however. The attentive reader who has seen the film in question, will spot what is going on here by the appearance and behaviour of one character in particular.

Bernie has already suggested to Thea von Harbou that, in a film about serial murder, the audience might inclined to think that if the victims were prostitutes, they deserved their fate. It would work better with children as victims. He has also told her that detectives need contacts in the criminal underworld. And so, after the way events play out towards the end of the story, Bernie says he has another film idea for her. It’s left for the reader to realise that this is Lang’s classic M, and it’s a clever conceit that the idea for it came from Bernie Gunther, based on his own experience.

I saw M for the first time on TV, on the BBC many years ago. Now, the world in which one could stumble by accident on a classic film such as this in the middle of the evening, seems as remote as the Weimar republic itself.

However, Kerr also suggests that a certain public cruelty is not unique to the Berlin of that era. The Cabaret of the Nameless, where talentless individuals are tricked on to the stage to be mocked by the audience, is alive and well on British television today.

Of course, no novel in English as steeped in Weimar culture as this one is, would be complete without a reference to Christopher Isherwood and there it is, at the visit to the grisly Berlin mortuary. Philip Kerr takes his place alongside Isherwood, Len Deighton and John le Carre as a British author who has found literary inspiration in Berlin.

We will never know where Kerr might have taken the series had he lived to write more. There’s an intriguing loose end in the penultimate novel, Greeks Bearing Gifts. There is a suggestion that the 60-year-old Bernie is going to work for the Israelis hunting down Nazi war criminals on his return to Germany. This would have fitted in nicely with Bernie’s dealings with Eichmann in earlier books. Bernie could have played a role in the capture of Eichmann, which would have been atonement for the things he was forced to do on the Eastern front.

I must say I enjoyed this book hugely and it might even rival The Lady From Zagreb as my favourite of the whole series. I particularly like that one for its delving into a murky area of history, and the nice black joke when the clean-cut young SS officer who is chauffeuring Bernie reveals that his name is Kurt Waldheim. And the lady herself, Dalia Dresner, has to be the ultimate femme fatale.

The Good Soldier: a good film

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I finally watched the DVD of The Good Soldier the other week. This is an adaptation of the 1915 novel by Ford Madox Ford, much admired for the unreliability of its narrator. My partner is not altogether a fan of the book, but she enjoyed this as much as I did. We both thought it was really excellent. Everything just seemed to come together to produce an adaptation that was faithful to the feel of the book.

It is quite rare that you have an ensemble piece like this where the actors playing the main characters are all perfect for their roles, but in this the four principals were all dead right. Jeremy Brett, Susan Fleetwood, Robin Ellis and Vickery Turner all seemed to be the characters from the book as I remember them.

The locations were dead right, too. I think they may have used the actual German spa town, Bad Nauheim, in which the early part of the book takes place. These parts of the film had the same sense of leisured ease, with nobody in too much of a hurry, that comes across in the film of Death in Venice.

The screenplay adaptation was a masterclass, really, in how to take quite a complex, literary novel and make it work on screen. It’s a long time since I read the book, but I think the major change was the flashback structure. We knew from the beginning that Ashburnham was going to be dead at the end, and this worked really well.

Scenes were repeated, as the both the audience and the character Dowell gained more knowledge about what had really been going on. The look on Dowell’s (Robin Ellis’) face when Leonora told him that Flora and Edward had been having an affair was quite something. These repetitions gave the film something of a Nicolas Roeg feel.

Jeremy Brett was magnificent as Ashburnham, perhaps the best thing he ever did on screen, even better than his Max de Winter. I always thought he was a bit wasted as Sherlock Holmes. I have the feeling that Susan Fleetwood was sometimes a bit hard to cast, because she seemed to radiate strength of personality all the time and that wasn’t always what was called for, but here it was exactly right.

Going back to the screenplay, it was of course by Julian Mitchell and quite the equal of Pinter’s scripts for the Losey films, I thought. The only thing I can say against this film is that it is in need of a good restoration and clean up; the print on the Network DVD is a bit faded. I suppose it is not well-known enough to get the full digital upgrade treatment, which is a great pity.

I was unaware that this film had been made until I found it on DVD. I had seen the text of a stage adaptation, so I assume that is derived from his screenplay. I can’t think how I managed to miss this. It was first broadcast in 1981, at around the time Granada were making some really good TV drama. It may be that I had not actually read the book at that point and therefore did not notice it in the schedule.

It is a great pity that it was not released in the cinema first, like the films that Channel 4 made later in the 1980s. I think that, if it had been, it would quite rightly be regarded as a classic today. It is not for nothing that Robin Ellis has devoted a whole section on his website to this film. And of course, the highest compliment I can pay is that it has made me want to read the book again. I read a fascinating piece online that suggested that John Dowell is not quite the innocent he portrays himself as. I shall have to read it once more to find out.

Guy Burgess: An Englishman Abroad

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The other day I listened to Alan Bennett’s An Englishman Abroad, as I like to do from time to time. This is the BBC radio recording with Simon Callow as Burgess and Brigit Forsyth as Coral Browne.

I suppose it is something of a favourite of mine. I have seen the original 1983 TV film with Alan Bates more than once, I have a copy of the text on my bookshelf, and I saw the theatrical version with Robert Powell and Liza Goddard.

Out of a real-life anecdote, the actress Coral Browne’s chance meeting in Moscow with the exiled Cambridge Spy, Guy Burgess, Alan Bennett fashioned a witty and amusing piece that invites us to reflect on those perennial English pre-occupations of class, charm and the establishment. In the original film, Coral Browne played herself.

This version of Burgess is not so much a villain as a scapegoat, condemned to “sit on the naughty step” forever, not allowed back to the UK because there “is too much egg on people’s faces”, despite the fact that the threat of prosecution that hung over him could never be carried out.

I love the quote from Browning’s The Lost Leader that comes near the end: “Life’s night begins, let him never come back to us/There would be doubt, hesitation and pain/False praise on our part, the glimmer of evening/Never glad confident morning again.”

The music is beautifully chosen, too. Burgess has only one gramophone record, Who Stole My Heart Away by Jack Buchanan, which he plays repeatedly. It seems like a neat allusion to Stalin until Burgess asks Coral Browne if she knows Buchanan. I nearly married him, she explains; he jilted me.

And what could be more appropriate to close with than the Gilbert and Sullivan song? “For in spite of all temptations, to belong to other nations, he remains an Englishman”. Impossible to hear now without seeing in one’s mind’s eye Alan Bates strolling insouciantly along, resplendent in his new outfit, made up from the measurements that he persuaded Coral Browne to take back to his tailor in London.

It could easily be argued that Bennett was too soft on Burgess here, although I think his concern was more with the condition of exile than with spying. Burgess certainly did supply huge bundles of documents to his Soviet masters. However, the very ease with which he obtained them meant that the Soviets could never quite rid themselves of the suspicion that he was a plant, still working for the British. Much of the material he supplied was never translated into Russian and it’s been suggested that it was the revelation of traitors in high places that did the real damage to British interests, rather than any information leaked.

Alan Bennett himself was one of the bright young men who were seconded from the army during their national service in the 1950s and given intensive training in the Russian language. It was thought that in the event of a war with Russia, interpreters would be needed for the interrogation of prisoners. It’s been rumoured that Burgess liked to cast an eye over the young men, possibly fishing for potential recruits to the Russian cause. I wonder if he and Bennett ever met?

I’ve been out of a job for some while, so these days I feel a bit like Guy Burgess myself, as he sits marooned in his Moscow apartment, doing the crossword, waiting for the afternoon phone call from his minders giving him permission to go out.

 

Of Love and Hunger by Julian Maclaren-Ross

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At first glance, Of Love and Hunger, the 1947 novel by Julian Maclaren-Ross, has some resemblance to the work of Patrick Hamilton. There is the South Coast setting, the world of seedy boarding houses, pubs and insecure employment. Against this background there is the doomed love affair, the Mosley supporters, the very specific time of spring and summer 1939, as Britain slides slowly towards the second world war. One can’t help but think of The Slaves of Solitude and Hangover Square.

There are crucial differences, though. The language here is terse and straightforward, a long way from Hamilton’s more ornate style. For example, the verbs are all shortened, “he’d”, “I’d”, and so on, there is a lot of dialogue and a lot of slang; the word “gertcher” appears on the first page. The novel is told in the first person, by the main character, Fanshawe, vacuum-cleaner salesman and aspiring writer, whereas Hamilton always favoured omniscient narration.

Along with the main narrative concerning Fanshawe’s problems with work, money and sex, there is a fascinating second one, a sort of ongoing speculation about what is suitable material for fiction, what can and cannot be put into a novel. Sukie Roper, Fanshawe’s married lover, lends him a copy of The Postman Always Rings Twice, by the American “hard-boiled” writer, James M Cain, and he takes this as his model.

Fanshawe reads a novel set in India and wonders how it would read if it had been written by the author of The Postman. He thinks of his own experiences in India, and this is printed in italics. He reflects: “There was so much now that I could write. Course a lot of it I couldn’t put in.” There are several other passages where thoughts printed in italics represent buried memories, the unpleasant truths that Fanshawe thinks must be held back, both from himself and the page.

While his character wrestles with this problem, Maclaren-Ross himself quietly pushes the boundary of what was acceptable to publishers in 1947. We are in no doubt that Fanshawe masturbates when he thinks about his former lover, or that he thinks the friend of his colleague’s wife is a lesbian, but the language used is so subtle that no censor could have objected.

Sukie reads another book, Auden and Isherwood’s Letters from Iceland, and it is from a poem in that book that the title is taken.

The coda, set in 1943 makes clear that the low-rent pre-war world will have to be replaced by something better after the war. This is another difference to Hangover Square; Maclaren-Ross was looking back at 1939 from a slightly greater distance. This raises the interesting question of just how many Mosley supporters were there in the 1930s, if one uses fiction as the measure. By 1947 it was clear that they had backed the wrong side, so it might have been tempting to make them slightly more prominent than they had been in reality.

I first became aware of Maclaren-Ross in the 1980s when I was reading Anthony Powell, and discovered that he had been the model for Trapnel in the later volumes of Dance. Powell was quite open about this in his memoirs. The only work of Maclaren-Ross’s that I could  find at that time was the Penguin edition of Memoirs of the Forties. There was something of a Maclaren-Ross revival in the early years of this century. Paul Willetts’ biography came out in 2003. Of Love and Hunger was reissued by Penguin in 2002 and that is when I first read it. Given the things that have been happening in my own life, it seemed appropriate to re-read it now.

In his memoir, Maclaren-Ross recalled a visit to Graham Greene, at that time living near Clapham Common. Greene was fascinated by the details of the vacuum cleaner trade and amazed to find out that Maclaren-Ross had actually done the job in reality. Was this the inspiration for Wormold’s job in Our Man in Havana?

Powell himself acknowledged that he had used Maclaren-Ross, slightly exaggerated, as the basis for Trapnel. He may also have borrowed an event from this novel. When Fanshawe loses his job, he has to move in a hurry. He is in such a state over the breakdown of his relationship with Sukie, that he forgets all about the manuscript of the novel he has been writing with her encouragement, and leaves it behind in a drawer. Rather more dramatically, in Dance, Pamela Widmerpool hurls Trapnel’s manuscript into the Regent’s Canal.

Finally, where is Of Love and Hunger set? Brighton, Worthing and Littlehampton are mentioned by name, but Bognor isn’t. If my memory is correct, the real life events on which the novel is based took place in Bognor. So, bugger Bognor, indeed.

Betjeman’s Banana Blush

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John Betjeman was a National Treasure before that term was in common use. His avuncular, teddy-bear-like presence in his many TV appearances saw to that. His poetry was hugely popular. Lightish, rhyming stuff that scanned, that you could understand, I remember older people saying. The poet of suburbia, of the everyday. In his campaigning for the preservation of Victorian architecture, he seemed to represent an older way of life that was being swept away.

But the themes of his poetry are the classic ones of all serious poetry – love and its absence, death, the existence or not of God. He can be very dark at times. Just think of Croydon, a poem that for me, speaks of the first world war without ever actually mentioning it directly. And there is a sexuality in some of his poems that is quite modern and that the Victorian poets he appeared to resemble would never have dared to publish.

In 1973, the year after he became Poet Laureate, he recorded the LP, Betjeman’s Banana Blush. This was not simply a record of him reading his verse, but placed his voice against music that had been specially composed for the occasion. There had been plenty of recordings of poets reading their work before. T S Eliot and Ezra Pound had done it. There was also the tradition of setting poetry to music, in which the poem became the lyrics of a song, such as John Ireland’s setting of John Masefield’s Sea Fever, or Charles Stanford’s setting of Henry Newbolt’s Drake’s Drum, familiar from the last night of the proms.

The Betjeman record was something a bit different, I think. The music, composed and conducted by Jim Parker, enhances the mood and tone of the poems. Thus, Indoor Games near Newbury, the story of a rather grand and chaperoned inter-war teenage party, alternates between a sort of fanfare-like tune and pastiche 1920s dance music. The melancholy piano, strings and French horn of Business Girls make the single women even lonelier. The slow melody of Youth and Age on Beaulieu River seems to glide like the sailing boat on the water. The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel is given a fast-paced treatment, creating a comic Victorian stage melodrama effect.

In The Cockney Amorist, the jazzy banjo and clarinet contrast with the tale of lost love. Perhaps most effective of all are the descending strings that open On the Portrait of a Deaf Man, where contemplation of the physical decay of his late father’s body leads the poet to question the existence of God.

It’s not really surprising that Jim Parker has gone on to have a very successful career as a film and television composer, including the theme for Midsomer Murders. The blend of words and music on the Betjeman record creates a sort of film in one’s mind.

Betjeman was sixty eight when he recorded this, but the overall effect makes him a strangely modern figure, having more in common with Ray Davies or Scott Walker, than John Masefield. After all, it’s not a million miles away from the sort of thing that John Cooper Clarke did only a few years later.

It appeared on Charisma Records, an independent company, whose label was a painting of the mad hatter. It was home to a roster of other English eccentrics such as Genesis. Betjeman was rather dismissive of his efforts here but this is a recording that has definitely passed the test of time.

I only discovered this marvellous recording a few years ago, but it certainly gave me a new understanding and appreciation of Betjeman’s poetry. If I not heard this, I might have been tempted to dismiss his writing as a bit “old hat”, as so many people did in the 1970s.

A Banana Blush is a cocktail, I believe, but I am not sure exactly what its ingredients are.

The West Pier by Patrick Hamilton (Gorse #1)

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West Pier

The West Pier can’t have been the first novel by Patrick Hamilton I read because my Penguin is dated 1986, and my copy of Hangover Square is dated 1985. I know I read a review of The West Pier in Time Out, that finished “further Hamilton re-issues, please”, but was that before or after I saw Gorse glaring up at me from the bookshop table in David Parfitt’s cover illustration? It captures him rather well, that picture, that look of smelling something unpleasant under his nose that he could never quite shake off.

“The best novel written about Brighton” said Graham Greene according to the blurb, but that strikes me as a sort of back-handed compliment, carrying as it does the sly suggestion that everyone really knows that it is Brighton Rock.

I would agree with most Hamilton admirers that this is not his best work, but I think I would have to say that it is my favourite, close to my heart for reasons that will become clear.

Hamilton was writing in the early fifties but The West Pier is set in 1921, with a prologue in 1913. The main characters are seen first as schoolboys, then as young men. What fascinated me was the way so little seemed to have changed. His detailed description of the way teenage boys behave seemed closer to my own experience than anything else I had read. Much as I love The Catcher in the Rye, this is adolescence, English style.

And later, the rituals of “getting off” with the opposite sex rang painfully true, as did the pairing of the tall, willowy beautiful girl with her short, dumpy and less attractive friend. Stocky, determined Gertrude, condemned to be one of the “other ones”, who must always accept being paired off together in the courting rituals that take place on the west pier itself.

The west pier was more or less intact when I first knew it, but already closed to the public. The ancient pre-decimal slot machines had been removed to an arcade on the seafront. You could buy a bag of old pennies to work them with. There was a figure of a sailor in a glass case, who laughed maniacally for about three minutes when a coin was deposited in the slot.

I had a friend, now sadly no longer with us, who lived in Brighton, and was a fellow-admirer of this book. We used to imagine what a good film the story would make, and my friend suggested that the laughing sailor would be an appropriate recurring image for Gorse’s trickery. The film would end, he suggested, on a freeze-frame of the final image in the book, Gorse’s face set grimly as he hunches over the steering wheel, speeding towards London and a dubious future.

I was fascinated that Hamilton described Over Street as a slum. When I first knew it, it was home to students at Sussex University.  In the novel, Esther Downes, daughter of a worker at the nearby railway station lives there. In one of the most striking passages of the book, we are told that despite being a porter and therefore despised, Mr Downes considered that he had risen in life, because his father had tried to make a living by running behind horse carriages and offering to carry the bags when they reached their destination.

It’s quite clear that Gorse is what we would today call a psychopath, but the book is all the stronger for not using any psychological jargon. Hamilton doesn’t need it. The descriptions of Gorse’s behaviour, and the disquiet he arouses in people are quite enough to tell us what is going on. All the tell-tale indicators are there. The general malevolence towards the world, expressed by puncturing strangers’ bicycle tyres, the races in the bath that he subjects his pet mice to and the hints of something strange sexually. Hamilton anticipated Patricia Highsmith and Tom Ripley by several years.

The film we imagined never did get made, but Gorse came to television, in the shape of Nigel Havers, in the series The Charmer. This was an adaptation of the second book of the trilogy, Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse, with an ending invented by the screen writer, Allan Prior. The screenplay was published as a novel and this is a good read for admirers of Hamilton and his compelling creation Ernest Ralph Gorse.

The Image of a Drawn Sword by Jocelyn Brooke

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I discovered this mysterious novel by Jocelyn Brooke via a review in Time Out. My Penguin copy is dated 1983, and was the first re-issue since its publication in 1950.

I had never heard of Brooke, and Penguin must have thought that nobody else had, as the words “with an introduction by Anthony Powell” are quite prominent on the cover.

The narrative in brief, concerns a lonely ex-soldier, now working as a bank clerk and living with his mother in a cottage in a tranquil corner of rural Kent. He is frustrated with life and worried about his health. He meets a young army officer and agrees to start military training with him, in a sort of shadowy territorial unit.

The cover illustration by Tony McSweeney is fascinating in itself. A sad-eyed man in military uniform looks out at us. It is winter and he is wearing greatcoat, scarf, and balaclava under his steel helmet. Behind him is a hedge with a strand of barbed wire above it, and in the distance is a mysterious earthwork and to the left, an oast house. The cloudy sky is a threatening reddish colour, and the dented steel helmet seems to merge into it. Yes, I know, you can’t judge a book by its cover and all that, but I have described this in some detail, because it captures something about the book that Powell’s introduction doesn’t, quite.

Powell is quite keen to compare the novel to Kafka, and this is fair enough, since it undeniably has some Kafkaesque elements, particularly in the later part, where Reynard finds that he has rejoined the army against his will. But the picture on the cover is closer to my feeling that the English landscape, specifically the landscape of Kent, is a major element in this book. Perhaps childhood holidays in the Hythe and Folkestone area had made me aware of the way the countryside here is haunted by a military presence. After all, this is the area of Shorncliffe barracks, the Royal Military Canal, and  Martello towers along the coast, relics of the Napoleonic war and two world wars.

It actually goes back further than that, as Brooke reminds us. The “Roman camp” where Reynard begins his military training regime is thought to actually be an ancient British construction.

The strange shifts of time and place, the mysterious bugle calls in the distance, coming from a location that Reynard can’t quite pin down – it is never clear what is “real” and what is taking place in Reynard’s mind. The landscape itself seems to play a role in all this. For example: “Leaning now, against the gate into the fields, it seemed to him that the very countryside itself was exerting upon him an invisible, indefinable pressure, producing in his fatigued brain an intolerable sense of confinement”. I think the novel is the literary equivalent of the work of some of the painters of the era, such as Paul Nash and Keith Vaughan, where a recognisably English landscape is given a surreal twist.

What is the mysterious “emergency” that is constantly referred to? The Cold War? The Labour Government? A projection of Reynard’s troubled sexuality? Or all of these?

I can imagine a film of this book. It might have something of the atmosphere of David Rudkin’s TV play Penda’s Fen. Indeed, I wonder if Brooke’s novel was an influence on Rudkin’s play, where a young man, troubled by his sexuality, finds a mystery in the landscape. What I can’t imagine is the BBC of today going anywhere near such a project. Perhaps if Mark Gatiss could be persuaded to get involved?

And yet, although it is rooted in the immediate post-second world war period, Brooke’s novel is curiously ahead of its time in some ways. If the term “psychogeography” comes to mind, The Image of a Drawn Sword also has something of the more recent concept “folk horror” about it.

Haunted by the past: E F Benson

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When is a ghost story not a ghost story? We talk about being “haunted” by the past and so on. It would be a shame to give away too much of the plot of this story to those who have not read it. Let’s just say that a man, the last survivor of his siblings, has the idea of buying his childhood home and recreating it as it was during his happiest years.

It seems an impossible project, but then circumstances combine to make it possible. The enigmatic title refers to a game the children used to play in the garden. In the story we are presented with a lush, idyllic dream of Cornwall. The overall effect is rather reminiscent of Rudyard Kipling’s story They.

Benson was well-connected in the world of early 20th century supernatural writing. He was one of the audience when M R James read his first ghost stories to a group of undergraduates at Cambridge, and he maintained a friendship with James. He knew Henry James too, staying with him at Lamb House in Rye. Benson took over the lease and made Lamb House famous as “Mallards” in the Mapp and Lucia novels. He saw a ghost there, an incident fictionalised in Joan Aiken’s 1991 novel The Haunting of Lamb House.

He wrote more than fifty “spook stories” as he called them, among the most famous The Bus Conductor, a story of premonition coming true. His best stories are quite the equal of anything in the genre. His descriptive talents and sense of place mean that you can recognise a real-life location even if he does not name it.

However, it has to be said that the creation of suspense is not his strongest point. What he does have is the ability to be supremely effective in stories that involve predestination, the sense of proceeding to an inevitable conclusion. Pirates has this, and also another element that makes Benson distinctive in the genre; the ghosts, if ghosts they are, are benign rather than malevolent. It stands apart from his other stories, being richly nostalgic and consoling, somehow, rather than frightening.

The story becomes all the more interesting if one is aware that it is fairly autobiographical, and the Cornish setting is indeed where Benson spent his childhood years with his large brood of brothers and sisters when his father was Bishop there. Pirates was published in More Spook Stories in 1934, towards the end of Benson’s life.

By writing the story, Benson was doing what his character did within it, re-visiting the scenes of childhood. He is not the only writer to have done this at the end of a long career. One thinks of Agatha Christie’s Postern of Fate, where the house is again, a re-creation of her childhood home. There is also Graham Greene’s The Human Factor, set around Greene’s childhood landscape of Berkhampstead.

The ending of Pirates leaves scope for a follow-up, but I can’t say too much about that without spoiling this marvellous story for those who have not had the pleasure of reading it yet.

Waterloo to Lynmouth 1914 with Henry Williamson

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Perhaps the most lyrical of all English train journeys in prose fiction is this one, undertaken by Phillip Maddison in the early summer of 1914.

Phillip is the author substitute for Henry Williamson in his huge semi-autobiographical saga, A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. Five volumes of the novel sequence are devoted to the First World War. How Dear is Life, in which this train journey appears, is the fourth volume and covers the transition from peace to war. It was published in 1954.

The novel opens with Phillip starting his working life as a clerk in the same insurance office as his father. He joins the territorials and, when the war begins, volunteers for overseas service on the assumption that the territorials will be used as support behind the lines. However, after heavy casualties, they are needed in the front line and Phillip finds himself thrown into the chaos of combat at the first battle of Ypres.

Phillip’s journey to North Devon for a holiday with his aunt is the first time he has left London, and he is keen to see as much as he can from the train. He stands at an open window all the way “without one moment that was not full of interest”. At Weybridge, he looks out for the Brooklands motor racing circuit. To his disappointment there are no cars actually racing.

This is the stopping train and as it goes on, past Salisbury towards Exeter, Phillip displays his keen interest in the appearance of the people on the station platforms, the way they are dressed, and so on. We realise that for a teenager of 1914, this is the equivalent of going abroad for the first time. Of course, the reader knows what Phillip does not, that he is shortly to go abroad, courtesy of His Majesty the King.

After Exeter, “a city as remote as the sun”, the train goes on towards Barnstaple, and Phillip notices the river, first on one side of the track, then the other. This is the river Taw, a reminder that we are in the countryside with which Williamson will always be associated, thanks to Tarka the Otter.

The weather has been sunny all the way, and “after Exeter the fields of red-gold wheat seemed to have been saturated with the everlasting blaze of the sun”.

After the eight-hour journey from London, Phillip changes trains at Barnstaple. He transfers to the narrow-gauge Lynton and Barnstaple line, which closed in 1935 and is described here in great detail by Williamson, at something like its peak. Phillip notices that the Lynton engine “had a big polished dome like an immense fireman’s helmet rising out of the middle of the tank”.

He is excited to see buzzards, but when he asks a travelling farmer about them, he can’t understand what the farmer says.

A local vicar invites Phillip to sit with him in the observation car at the back of the three-coach train, and we are treated to a description of the country alongside the line.

Particularly striking is the Chelfham viaduct, higher than the arches Phillip has seen on the line into London Bridge station. The vicar explains that it is white because it is built of local materials. Phillip notices that as the train ambles on, the vicar is taking what looks like dust out of his pocket and throwing it on to the embankment. He realises that they are seeds; and explains that he has done the same thing himself at home.

Phillip relishes the journey: “The longer it took the better. To ride in such a train was an adventure which he would like to go on forever.”

At Chelfham station, “no one got out, no-one got in”. This is a deliberate reference to that most loved of rural railway poems, Adlestrop. It is Williamson’s tribute to its author, Edward Thomas, himself killed on the Western Front. Appropriately enough, I wrote this piece on Armistice weekend 2018. I myself marked the centenary by reading Williamson’s novels.

Eventually, Phillip is the last passenger left on the train, alone in his reverie: “It was a dream country, floating on sunshine, the world lying far below. Were some of the shaggy men with dogs, drovers of cattle, descendants of the Doones?”

After nearly two hours Phillip arrives at Lynton to be met by his aunt. Phillip will return to this area later in the sequence, just as Williamson himself did in real life. It stands as a symbol of lost innocence and peace.

The Exeter to Barnstaple route remains open, now known, appropriately enough, as the Tarka Line. The Chelfham viaduct is still there today, although at the moment no trains pass over it. That could change though. About a mile of the Lynton and Barnstaple line is open as a heritage railway, and there are plans to re-open it along its full distance on more or less the original route. For now, if one wants to take the little train from Barnstaple, across beautiful Exmoor, it will have to be in the imagination, with some help from Henry Williamson.