Category: Fiction

The Beast Must Die by Nicholas Blake

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Surbiton Festival (4) XA

The Beast Must Die by Nicholas Blake was published in 1938. It is an example of the type of detective story where the identity of the criminal is known, or appears to be, right from the start. It has some of the expected features of novels of the “golden age”, but is also strikingly different. It feels like an attempt to do something more realistic with the genre conventions, closer to Graham Greene than Agatha Christie.

This is hardly surprising, given that Nicholas Blake was the pen name of Cecil Day Lewis, poet and critic, who was poet laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972. The Beast Must Die was the fourth book to feature his series detective, Nigel Strangeways.

Depending on your view of these things, you might see him as a serious poet writing commercial fiction on the side, or as an innovative and brilliant crime writer who also wrote a great deal of poetry. What is undeniable is his talent for language.

Day Lewis wrote sixteen Strangeways novels, and four “stand alone” mysteries, from the early 1930s to the late 1960s. All of them anticipate the more psychological approach adopted by later writers in this genre.

The plot of The Beast Must Die concerns the attempts of Felix Lane to take revenge on the man who killed his young son in a hit-and-run accident. The opening section of the novel is presented as Felix Lane’s diary, describing in great detail how he goes about identifying and tracking down the driver.

Like his creator, Lane is a man with an alter ego. He is in fact, Frank Cairns and Felix Lane is the pen name under which he writes detective stories. It is his knowledge of detection that enables him to find the speeding driver, garage owner George Ratteray, and the use of his pen name that enables him to cover his tracks.

Lane/Cairns has told us right from the start that once he has found the driver he intends to kill him, yet when Ratteray is found dead, Lane insists he has been framed and calls in Nigel Strangeways to clear his name.

The latter part of the novel is on the face of it, more conventional, as all the occupants of Ratteray’s household come under suspicion, and Strangeways works in conjunction with the police inspector to crack the case.

Strangeways begins to suspect that all may not be as it seems when the evidence he gathers conflicts with what Lane wrote in his diary. Has Lane deliberately falsified his account, or has he accurately recorded that Ratteray lied to him?

Strangeways gets to the truth in the end, and the solution is highly ingenious, involving the interpretation of a literary reference in Lane’s diary. It’s an early example of textual analysis as detection, the sort of thing done later on by Colin Dexter in The Wench is Dead.

The greater depth than usual comes from the characterisation and the moral questions that the reader is asked to ponder. Ratteray is a domestic monster who beats his wife and tyrannizes his sensitive son. He has callously covered up his responsibility for the death of a young boy. He would be no great loss to the world.

But the central question of the book, on which the mystery depends, is just what sort of man is Felix Lane.

The criticism that is often made of “golden age” stories is that tragic events seem to make no real impact on anyone. That is not the case here; Lane has been devastated by his boy’s death and there is a suggestion that his nurturing relationship with Ratteray’s son Phil is a substitute for that with his own lost son.

Like all the Blake novels, it is fluently written and highly readable. The peaceful English rural locations, seen at their best in the summertime, are an effective counterpoint to the sad events of the story.

The 1969 Claude Chabrol film adaptation of this book is very good, but omits Strangeways altogether and alters the ending somewhat. The use of the diary in the book would be difficult to reproduce on screen in any case, as it depends for its impact on the sense that Lane/Cairns is confessing directly to the reader.

I am pleased but also somewhat wary to find that the BBC are going to do another adaptation. Pleased because I am a huge admirer of the Blake novels and I think they deserve to be better known today. Wary, though, because I wonder how the finished version will actually turn out. This story is quite dark enough as it is, and does not need any alterations. In the end, there is more than one victim.

(An interesting footnote is that the story was said to have been inspired by a similar incident in Day Lewis’ own life, when his young son had a “near miss”. Perhaps Blake/Day Lewis and Lane/Cairns had more in common than we might think.)

 

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.

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.

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.