Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse by Patrick Hamilton (Gorse #2)

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Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse (1953) continues the career of Patrick Hamilton’s anti-hero, the coldly malevolent fraudster, Ralph Gorse.

It is 1928 now and Gorse is twenty five. He finds himself house-sitting for a friend in Reading and bumps into fortyish widow, Mrs Joan Plumleigh-Bruce, in the local pub. Having spotted that she is quite well off, Gorse decides to make her his next victim. There is first the small problem of detaching her from her suitor and would-be husband, fifty-something estate agent and widower Donald Stimpson.

Readers of The West Pier will see that Gorse is up to something similar here; the destruction of an existing relationship in order to insinuate himself into his victim’s affections so that he can steal from her. The youthfulness and innocence of the characters in that first book gave the story a sort of poignancy. Here, the people in the circle into which Gorse inserts himself are old enough to know better. They are led astray by Gorse’s air of being a worldly sophisticate from London.

Gorse plays on the vanity, snobbery, and greed of Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce. He uses to the full “his gift of causing and using the emotion of relief in women”.

The tone is darker, more satirical and humorous, than the first novel. In places it is laugh-out-loud funny, particularly the scene where Gorse manipulates Stimpson into getting drunk and visiting a prostitute. Gorse plays on Stimpson’s unease at finding himself in a grander sort of hotel bar than he is used to. Stimpson passes out and the next morning has a horrendous hangover and no memory of what happened. Gorse then plays on Stimpson’s fear of having caught a nasty disease. He has also acquired a nice story to tell Joan to lower her opinion of Donald and drive a wedge between them.

Hamilton goes into great detail about how Gorse carries out his fraud, as well as the snobberies and attitudes of his characters. Much of the novel is told in dialogue. Some of the satire is excruciating, for example the “mock historical” jargon that the men slip into.

A section near the end is presented as Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce’s diary. Hamilton is merciless about her banal thoughts expressed in pretentious language. It’s almost as if he wants to torment his characters in the sadistic manner of Gorse.

All this leads the reader to think that Hamilton’s intention was something more than the story of a crime. The novel is as much about the class structure and attitudes of the 1920s as Gorse’s fraud. Biographies of Hamilton say that he held Marxist views. He certainly had a startingly clear-eyed appreciation of the role of money in people’s lives.

That is a very useful quality for a novelist trying to create a realistic picture of the 1920s. For example, we are told that the collapse of the General Strike and increasing working-class unemployment has led to more women turning to prostitution on the streets of the West End of London.

We never really know why Gorse acts as he does. What we do know is that he is the biggest snob of all, enraged when he reads Joan’s diary and finds that she thinks his accent sometimes slips into the “common”.

Hamilton tells us that “social snobbery  indeed, may conceivably have been his one true passion in life. Probably it far exceeded his love of money, which, perhaps, derived only from his ambition to appease his social aspirations”.

Malice Aforethought by Francis Iles

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“It was not until several weeks after he had decided to murder his wife that Dr Bickleigh took any positive steps in the matter” is the striking opening sentence of  Malice Aforethought by Francis Iles, published in 1931. It is one of the most memorable novels of the golden age of crime fiction.

It is an early example of a new kind of crime novel, where the identity of the criminal is known right from the beginning. It predates Nicholas Blake’s The Beast Must Die by some years.

The suspense of the story is therefore not “whodunnit?” but more “how exactly will he go about it and will he get away with it?”. There is a darkly comic tone, and a realistic presentation of a believable world. This is definitely not a puzzle-plot detective story. Detectives do appear, but the would-be perpetrator is the central figure.

The 1920s social world of rigid class divisions is carefully evoked and slyly satirised. At the opening tennis party the real game being played is not the one on the court. “One does not have to listen to gossip in a place like Wyvern’s Cross. It inserts itself into the consciousness somehow, quite irrespective of the ears.”

In this small north Devonshire village, Dr Edmund Bickleigh is trapped in a loveless and sexless marriage to Julia. She comes from a decaying aristocratic family and only married him to escape the family home. He married her to improve his social status. She looks down on him and he has become the archetypal henpecked husband. Helped by his father, Bickleigh has risen from humble origins to qualify as a doctor. But the social conventions of this era judge a person not by what they have done, but by who they are.

He has many dalliances with local girls, to which Julia turns a blind eye. He is something of a fantasist, and when the wealthy Madeleine Cranmere comes to live in the village, believes he has met “the one”. Unfortunately, Madeleine is a self-dramatising fantasist herself. It is when Julia tells Edmund that Madeleine is merely playing with him and refuses him an amicable divorce that his thoughts turn to murder.

He ponders long and hard before he comes up with what seems like the perfect plan, that can never be detected as murder. We are shown how he puts this into operation in great detail. However, at the very moment when it seems he has succeeded, he makes a crucial mistake, seemingly unnoticed. This adds another layer of suspense to the rest of the novel. There are many surprises ahead before the end, both for the Doctor and the reader. The biggest twist of all is reserved for the very last page.

Bickleigh acts with chilling detachment towards his wife as his carries out his plan to make her a morphine addict. It is as if he is not responsible for her plight at all. For most of the time, he is able to hide the murderous rage inside himself, but it spills over when he hits Ivy, his trusting and innocent former girlfriend. As he drives away, he realises that he enjoyed doing it.

Dr Bickleigh is the main character and we see him from the inside, but the novel is written in the third person, so Francis Iles is also able to keep a critical distance from him. We watch both horrified and amused as Bickleigh retreats further into his fantasy vision of himself. He thinks he has been transformed from a downtrodden nonentity into a Nietzschean superman. He relishes the feeling that he holds the power of life and death over anyone who crosses him. It turns out that he is sadly mistaken. After all, this is subtitled “The story of a commonplace crime”.

There is hardly a sympathetic character in this novel. Even the solicitor who is the only one to suspect what Bickleigh has been getting up to is not really a very pleasant person. But the twists and turns and the horrible fascination we feel for the doctor himself, make it a really compelling read.

It was adapted for television by the BBC in 1979 with a career-best performance by the late Hywel Bennett as Bickleigh. This is much better in every way than the later ITV version.

 

The Good Shepherd by C S Forester

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The Good Shepherd by C S Forester is a novel of the second world war at sea, published in 1955. It’s the story of a convoy making its way across the Atlantic from America to Britain in 1942. It is concentrated into a short period of time, about forty eight hours. There is really only one fully developed character, Commander Krause of the US navy, and we see everything through his eyes. He commands the escort force, but four ships are not really enough to protect a convoy of thirty seven merchantmen as they sail towards the u-boat wolf pack that Krause knows lies ahead to meet them.

His job has a diplomatic element to it, because the four ships are from four different allied nations, America, Canada, Great Britain and Poland. This is his first command, as he was passed over for promotion before the war. Now by a quirk of seniority, he finds himself in charge of men who have been at war for several years.

The novel brilliantly captures the physically draining effect of constant vigilance. Fate has put Krause in this position. He must rise to the occasion and bring all his ability and experience to bear. As we read on we come to realise the loneliness and responsibility of command.

Krause’s mind is constantly occupied with calculations: navigation, time, distance,  fuel consumption. If a ship detaches itself from the convoy to hunt a submarine how long will it take to get back into position? When the sonar indicates a submarine ahead, which course should the escorts steer to try and intercept it? How can they know what course the sub will steer to try and evade them? We find out that Krause was a fencing champion before the war. Now his opponents are the German submarines.

Krause must constantly think of the effect of his actions, on the men of his ship as well as those on the other escorts. He must analyse whether men under his command will do the right thing under fire; it is the first time in action for all of them. He is under relentless pressure.

What makes this book a little different to other stories on a similar theme is that Krause is a devout Christian, the son of a Lutheran minister. His thoughts are full of biblical quotations. What God is to Krause, he must be to the ships of the convoy, as he attempts to get them across the Atlantic to safety.

There is an intriguing feeling at the end that even things in Kraus’s life that seemed negative were somehow part of a higher plan that put the right man in the right place at the right time.

There is a short introduction and a short coda, but the main body of the novel is not divided into chapters; the only breaks are the changes of each watch. The book brings the reality of a trans-Atlantic convoy starkly to life. The reader is there on the bridge of the USS Keeling living every minute of danger and drama along with Krause, the good shepherd.

The Fighting Téméraire by Henry Newbolt

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To mark the appearance of Turner’s The Fighting Téméraire on the reverse of the £20 note, here is Henry Newbolt’s poem of the same title. The last verse captures in words the scene that Turner recorded in oils. (A linstock, by the way, is a staff that holds the match used to fire a cannon; it allowed the gunner to do so from a safe distance.)

 

It was eight bells ringing,
For the morning watch was done,
And the gunner’s lads were singing
As they polished every gun.
It was eight bells ringing,
And the gunner’s lads were singing,
For the ship she rode a-swinging,
As they polished every gun.

Oh! to see the linstock lighting,
Téméraire! Téméraire!
Oh! to hear the round shot biting,
Téméraire! Téméraire!
Oh! to see the linstock lighting,
And to hear the round shot biting,
For we’re all in love with fighting
On the fighting Téméraire.

It was noontide ringing,
And the battle just begun,
When the ship her way was winging,
As they loaded every gun.
It was noontide ringing,
When the ship her way was winging,
And the gunner’s lads were singing
As they loaded every gun.

There’ll be many grim and gory,
Téméraire! Téméraire!
There’ll be few to tell the story,
Téméraire! Téméraire!
There’ll be many grim and gory,
There’ll be few to tell the story,
But we’ll all be one in glory
With the Fighting Téméraire.

There’s a far bell ringing
At the setting of the sun,
And a phantom voice is singing
Of the great days done.
There’s a far bell ringing,
And a phantom voice is singing
Of renown for ever clinging
To the great days done.

Now the sunset breezes shiver,
Téméraire! Téméraire!
And she’s fading down the river,
Téméraire! Téméraire!
Now the sunset’s breezes shiver,
And she’s fading down the river,
But in England’s song for ever
She’s the Fighting Téméraire.

James Bond returns: Win, Lose or Die by John Gardner

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James Bond goes back into the Royal Navy in Win, Lose or Die, the eighth in the series of  Bond continuation novels by John Gardner, published in 1989. Near the end of the cold war, a secret superpower summit is to take place aboard a navy ship in the Mediterranean. Bond must foil the terrorist group who plan to attack and disrupt it.

There’s plenty of action along the way. Bond engages in air-to-air combat, flying a sea harrier, and dodging a missile. There’s an assassination attempt at a villa near Naples, and a final confrontation with the head villain in the tunnels beneath the rock of Gibraltar. This is a fast-paced thriller written in Gardner’s fluent and elegant style,  and as usual with his take on Bond there is much to enjoy.

There are two women, one in the navy and one in the secret service, but which of them is not quite what she seems? Bond doesn’t find out until near the end. M’s elegant country house, Quarterdeck, makes a re-appearance and there’s a neat reference to Bond having been secretly involved in the Falklands war. The villain is motivated by greed, rather than the cause that his agents think they are fighting for.

I have a couple of minor quibbles, that I wish I could edit out. Bond is promoted to captain. Yes, I know captain is a higher rank, but commander just sounds so much better, doesn’t it. There is also another woman who is introduced merely to sleep with Bond before getting herself killed.

The Fleming estate chose well when they approached Gardner to revive Bond in 1981. He was already an established spy thriller writer. Before that he had served in the Royal Marines and the Fleet Air Arm. His brief was to bring Bond into the 1980s, so M and Bond remain about the age they were in Fleming’s books, but must deal with the geopolitical realities of the new era.

Perhaps the best of them, certainly of the ones I have read, is The Man From Barbarossa, published in 1991. In this book, Bond works with a Mossad officer to collaborate with the KGB, and the assignment takes him to Russia. A terrorist group is threatening the Russian government in an attempt to bring soviet war criminals of the second world war era to justice. But what is behind it? This is set at a very specific historic moment, just before the Gulf war, when the hardliners were trying to regain control of the soon to be extinct Soviet Union. All of this comes to an action climax when Bond goes up against the Spetznatz, or Russian Special forces.

It’s slightly untypical of the series as it’s more like a serious spy novel with a character called James Bond in it. It was reportedly Gardner’s favourite among his Bond novels. I read it in  a state of trepidation, because I was enjoying it so much I was worried that something would go wrong before the end, but I am pleased to say it did not. Certainly, it’s the only Bond continuation by any author that I did not find fault with and that I would put on the shelf next to Ian Fleming.

Other Bond authors have stuck to the original timeline, and this can create problems.

Colonel Sun by Kingsley Amis starts brilliantly, with the kidnapping of M, then continues well with a night time fight on the slopes of the acropolis in Athens. But as it goes on, the pace slackens; it’s like a balloon deflating.

Something similar happens with Solo, by William Boyd. It starts strongly, with Bond’s awaking from a dream of being back in the commandos. It was also a good idea to send Bond to Africa, something I believe Fleming was contemplating. Here, he is caught up in something like the Biafran war. But again, the novel slows down alarmingly in the second half, to the point of actually becoming quite boring when the scene shifts to America. There is also too much explaining of the villain.

Anthony Horovitz fell into a couple of traps with Trigger Mortis. He states very specifically that this story takes place just after Goldfinger, yet it is riddled with anachronisms. Again, there is far too much of an attempt to justify the villain psychologically. The modern political sensibility that, for me, mars Horovitz’s TV dramas, is also present. His second attempt, Forever and a Day is much better, but something of a missed opportunity, I feel. This is the Bond “origin story” and takes place before Casino Royale. But surely the Bond origin story that remains to be written is his time in the commandos in the second world war and his transition from that into the secret service? That is the story Boyd hinted at.

The spy novelist Anthony Price did something along those lines when he showed the main character of his espionage series, David Audley, as a young tank officer in Normandy who becomes involved in behind the lines operations in The ’44 Vintage.

Sebastian Faulks had a go with Devil May Care. A title worthy of Fleming, and there’s a neat joke at the beginning when Bond drives up the King’s Road and smells marijuana smoke. It’s a good read, but a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster, in that it seems to be assembled from left over parts of Fleming novels. For example, Goldfinger’s cheating at golf becomes cheating at tennis here, with a remote control adjustable net. One can’t quite escape the feeling that Faulks thought the task was beneath him. On the cover it said “Sebastian Faulks, writing as Ian Fleming”, in case anyone should mistake this for one of Faulks’ more serious productions.

It was Gardner, with his thriller writer’s imagination, who came closest to carrying on what Fleming had started. It was the more literary novelists who came a cropper. There’s a lively debate about his Bond novels on the internet, which suggests that they are still being read and enjoyed today.

 

 

The Small Back Room by Nigel Balchin

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The Small Back Room by Nigel Balchin was published in 1943, while the second world war was still going on. I am quite surprised that publication of this short, vivid and grim novel was allowed under wartime censorship rules, given the rather jaundiced picture it paints of the scientific establishment of that time. The wartime civil service atmosphere is very well caught; they work long hours and weekends with little time off. It is written in a terse, stripped-down, dialogue-heavy style, so that when there is a figure of speech it comes as a surprise.

Complex bureaucracy and office politics figure strongly in this story of a small technical research unit. The Reeves gun is an anti-tank weapon at the experimental stage; the army doesn’t like it, and the narrator, scientist Sammy Rice, has written a report saying it isn’t ready. However, his boss, Waring, and Professor Mair, head of the unit, have already persuaded their minister that the gun is a good idea.

Any consideration as to whether this will eventually be a useful weapon takes second place to a plot to oust Mair. The effectiveness of the gun becomes merely a pretext in the power struggle. The senior scientists and civil servants seem less interested in winning the war than scoring points off each other. Mair tells Sammy that scientists over fifty are not capable of original thinking anymore; it’s all about competing for knighthoods and so on. When Holland, the old soldier, intervenes in a meeting to make a point about the soldiers who will eventually have to use the gun on the battlefield, Sammy thinks he is the first person who has spoken as if they meant what they said.

Sammy is not very good at all this game-playing and career making. He has an artificial foot, a drink problem and a tendency to feel sorry for himself. He rails against “the bloody silly way things were arranged”. He doesn’t realise he is being sounded out as deputy director of the unit and is amazed when the job goes to Waring, the ex-advertising man who knows next to nothing about science, but is good at selling ideas to people.

Sammy is kept more or less on an even keel by his relationship with Susan, Professor Mair’s secretary. They have a ritual to keep Sammy’s drinking under control. She asks him if he would like a whisky and he replies that, no, he wouldn’t.

The real war in which people get killed keeps intruding into this world of farcical meetings and inconclusive conversations. Sammy’s younger brother Dick, is a twice-decorated fighter pilot who volunteers for secret and highly dangerous duty. Sammy has been asked by the engineer officer Captain Stuart to help with the investigation into a booby trap bomb the Germans are dropping, that is responsible for the deaths of several children.

Eventually, two of the bombs are found intact on a west country beach. Sammy tells Stuart to wait until he gets there before starting work. But by the time Sammy’s train gets in, Stuart has gone ahead and been blown up while attempting to defuse the first one. Sammy is a civilian; it was Stuart’s responsibility to do the dangerous part, but for various reasons, Sammy volunteers to defuse the second bomb.

We have now arrived at the novel’s tense, dramatic and unforgettable climax, with Sammy alone on the beach, working painstakingly on the second unexploded bomb, using the notes left by Stuart, giving a running commentary on every move he makes to the control point by telephone, in case he too should be killed. It tends to be this part of the novel that readers remember, despite the fact that it is only one chapter or so. It leaves a very strong impression.

I’m not sure if this novel actually introduced the phrase “back room boys”, to mean wartime scientists. The phrase is usually attributed to Beaverbrook, but I think the novel may have popularised it. The dialogue is full of 1940s expressions, such as “the balloon going up” and “I’ll put you in the picture”.

It was filmed in 1949 by Powell and Pressburger in a black and white expressionist style, I think they altered it a little too much. It’s time for a remake, in colour and widescreen, more faithful to the realism of the book.

Weathers by Thomas Hardy

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I had been planning to post a favourite poem of mine, “Snow in the Suburbs” by Thomas Hardy, with a photo to match. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look as if there is going to be any snow in my neighbourhood this winter. Despite the wind and rain, we are heading towards spring. So, instead of a winter poem, here is another one by Hardy that contrasts spring and autumn.

 

Weathers

This is the weather the cuckoo likes,
And so do I;
When showers betumble the chestnut spikes,
And nestlings fly;
And the little brown nightingale bills his best,
And they sit outside at ‘The Traveller’s Rest,’
And maids come forth sprig-muslin drest,
And citizens dream of the south and west,
And so do I.

This is the weather the shepherd shuns,
And so do I;
When beeches drip in browns and duns,
And thresh and ply;
And hill-hid tides throb, throe on throe,
And meadow rivulets overflow,
And drops on gate bars hang in a row,
And rooks in families homeward go,
And so do I.

White Eagles Over Serbia by Lawrence Durrell

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White Eagles Over Serbia is an unusual book among Lawrence Durrell’s many works. It is a cold war spy story that was published in 1957. Intriguingly, that was also the year that he published Justine, the first volume of his most celebrated work, The Alexandria Quartet.

The opening in London’s clubland recalls Ian Fleming and this intelligence unit is called Special Operations, Q Branch. The shabby office where the lifts don’t work, known as “The Awkward Shop”, and Boris, the specialist in disguise, anticipate John Le Carré or Len Deighton.

I don’t know if this was intended as the first of a series, because the hero, Methuen, is on the point of retirement from the service and is tempted back for one last mission. Realism is given by the mention of a recent mission in Malaya. There are no first names here; his boss is known simply as Dombey.

Methuen is despatched to Yugoslavia to investigate the death of a British agent and to try to find out about mysterious goings-on in the mountains of Serbia. A royalist, anti-communist organisation known as the White Eagles is up to something. They distrust the British because of British wartime support for the Partisans, the group led by Tito who now rules communist Yugoslavia.

There are patriotic poems broadcast on the radio that may be coded messages of some sort. Methuen is of course expert in the language, an old hand in the area.

Durrell makes his political opinions quite clear with the descriptions of the degraded state of ordinary people under the communist regime. Methuen is struck by the change in the people since he was last in the country, before the communist takeover. “These ragged creatures seemed to have lost all self-respect in the struggle to make ends meet.” The officials on the other hand look secure and well-fed. The secret police or “leather men” as they are known, are everywhere.

Methuen is based at the Belgrade embassy under a false identity. His cover for his journey to the mountains is that he is on a fishing trip, and he gains the support of the ambassador through their shared love of fly fishing. Once his real mission begins, he lives rough in a cave in the mountains.

Here, the book takes on the flavour of John Buchan or Geoffrey Household as an outdoor adventure, allowing Durrell free reign with his landscape descriptions. The bulk of the story concerns Methuen’s solitary investigations among the forests and rivers. He realises the danger he is in when he sees a fisherman sitting still on the riverbank for some time. When he goes to check, he finds that the man is dead and a placard with the word “traitor” is round his neck.

The code by which Methuen keeps in touch with Dombey in London is based on Thoreau’s Walden. He selected this book simply as a code book long ago, but has come to love it after “many re-readings in solitary places”.

The story bursts into action when Methuen infiltrates the White Eagles and discovers just what they have been involved with.

I don’t know the extent of Durrell’s involvement, if any, with the espionage world. Certainly, he worked on and off for the Foreign Office, his duties described as press officer. This novel draws on his time in the Belgrade embassy, as do his comic stories of diplomatic life.

I’m also not sure if this was intended as a children’s book. The paperback I had in the 1980s was published by Peacock, a “young adult” offshoot of Puffin books. The novel was re-issued by Faber in 1993, perhaps because of the war in the Balkans. It is packaged as an adult book and described as “an early novel that continues to appeal to readers of all ages”.

If this is not quite up to the level of Ian Fleming or Eric Ambler, this realistic and enjoyable spy thriller is not far off it. It shows just how talented and versatile a writer Lawrence Durrell was.

The House by Walter de la Mare

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At the beginning of Walter de la Mare’s story The House, a tired and elderly man arrives back at his house in the country, late at night. We learn that he is to leave the house for the last time in the morning. Two female servants, the only other occupants, have already left. During the night, the man, who we know only as Mr Asprey, goes on a final tour of the house, where he has lived all his life, it seems. Rooms contain memories, regrets…or are they ghosts of some sort?

He sees himself as an unhappy small boy. The room that used to be his parents’ summons up a vision of his father’s grave. A portrait of a woman reminds him that he never declared his love to her.

As he goes round he makes careful notes of things to do. But these are major things, such as leaving an heir to inherit the house. It is as if he is making an inventory of his regrets, the things left undone in life.

There is an odd atmosphere, and the reader begins to wonder. Is the man actually alive? Is all this taking place in some mysterious zone between life and death? Is it a real house or a symbolic one, representing the man’s life or personality?

He ponders a manuscript, given to him by a friend for a critical appraisal; he had not read it when his friend died suddenly and he never returned it to the friend’s wife.

In the kitchen, he finds a wallet hidden in a drawer. It was presumed stolen by one of his servants many years before and led to her dismissal. When he turns round, the wronged servant is sitting at the table. He hands the wallet to the woman. Then she disappears, taking the wallet, which he had assumed to be real, with her. We are on the borderline between the physical and the insubstantial here.

He accidentally spills a pot of coffee over the list he has so carefully compiled, making it illegible, with no time left to write another one.

He is expecting some kind of “conveyance” to come for him in the morning. But finally, he steps through the front door into an “infinite waste of wasteless light”, and the door closes by itself behind him. He seems to be in another world, but one that is familiar to him. If this is death it feels like an awakening. “It looked as if he must be intended to walk. And so he set out.” So ends a story that will linger long in the reader’s mind.

I can give only the merest flavour of this extraordinary story. It is difficult to do it justice. It think it is connected in some way to De la Mare’s poem The Railway Junction, which was published around the same time, the mid-1930s, I think, and has similar symbolic undertones.

De la Mare relies on elusiveness and ambiguity. There is often a dreamlike mood in his atmospheric stories, written with the precision of language we would expect from such an accomplished poet. Here, as in so many of his stories, we are not quite sure  exactly what has happened. The effect is a bit like watching a film where something might or might not be glimpsed at the corner of the screen. Each reading of a De la Mare story can reveal a new emphasis or meaning. They almost demand to be read more than once, but the reader will find it hard to settle on one fixed, solid interpretation.

De la Mare’s stories have rather gone out of fashion, but there are signs that interest in his work is reviving. A selection was published by the British Library not long ago. They are often categorised as “ghost stories” and compared to the work of Henry James in this field. Certainly, the subtle, shifting atmosphere so characteristic of De la Mare is closer to Henry James than M R James, but also similar to the later stories of Rudyard Kipling.

Another reason for the comparative neglect of these stories might be that whereas M R James’ ghost stories were collected into one volume which has stayed consistently in print, De la Mare’s were spread over several different collections. There is not even general agreement as to which of his many short stories should be considered as “supernatural” or “ghost” stories.

There is an excellent BBC radio series of readings of five De la Mare tales. It turns up on Radio 4 extra from time to time or can be found on YouTube. The House, alas, is not one of the stories featured.

Roald Dahl goes back to school

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I mentioned Roald Dahl in my recent Patrick Hamilton piece. The Hamilton radio play had reminded me of a particular story. Not long afterwards, by one of those strange coincidences, I saw a TV documentary on Dahl and the story was mentioned by name. It is called Galloping Foxley and is one of Dahl’s adult stories, first published in the early 1950s. I have not read it for many years. It has stayed in the back of my mind, though, ever since.

It is quite a straightforward story. A railway commuter, William Perkins, is a businessman with a very settled routine. He is put out when a stranger appears on the platform one morning and pushes himself into Perkins’ group. The disruptive stranger insists on sitting in the same compartment as Perkins, taking the seat opposite. Perkins fumes about the intrusion of this man into his daily journey, until a few days later, he recognises the newcomer as Bruce Foxley, the boy who bullied him mercilessly at school, many years before.

This brings all his memories of being tormented to the surface. He sits in the train compartment re-living such delightful experiences as cleaning Foxley’s study, being beaten by him, etc. He decides to identify himself and is shaken when the man replies that he is Jocelyn Fortescue, who attended Eton, not Repton, as Perkins and Foxley did.

When I read it, I was convinced that Perkins had simply made a mistake, that the whole thing was in his mind, and that the memory had been brought back by the man he thought he recognised acting as a catalyst. I accepted that it was a mistake, but what seemed so disturbing, was that the memory of his unhappiness was lurking there, just waiting to come to the surface again.

After checking on Wikipedia, I now realise that there are other possibilities that I did not spot when I read the story. Apparently, the story was adapted for the first series of Tales of the Unexpected. In the TV version, the man who denies he is Foxley, is asked by Perkins again and gives a slightly knowing look when he denies it a second time. This implies that he has recognised Perkins but has given a false name.

This dramatises what is only implied in the story; that the stranger might after all actually be Foxley. If he is in fact Foxley, does he deny it because he is ashamed of his conduct at school? Or is his denial a way of tormenting Perkins all over again? Has he only re-appeared in Perkins’ life to carry on the bullying in a more refined, adult way?

There is of course also the possibility that the man is who he says he is, but that he is a perfect example of the same “type” as Foxley, ie public school bully, and it is this that Perkins has responded to, rather than a facial resemblance.

I do not have a copy of the full text to hand, so I cannot check how much importance Dahl gives to the facial resemblance.

Roald Dahl apparently disliked his public school and had similar unhappy experiences there. Perhaps, haunting as it is, this is not so much a short story as a semi-autobiographical meditation on the power of unhappy memories to last a lifetime.