Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London, SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2015

1

Copyright © Ian Sansom 2015

Cover image © Science & Society Picture Library / Getty Images

Ian Sansom asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

Source ISBN: 9780007533169

Ebook Edition © January 2015 ISBN: 9780007533152

Version: 2016-12-08

Dedication

For Will

Epigraph

And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees’ excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation: neither shall the Arabian pitch tent there; neither shall the shepherds make their fold there. But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there. And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces: and her time is near to come, and her days shall not be prolonged.

Isaiah 13:19–22

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1: Good to be Back

Chapter 2: Pranic Breathing

Chapter 3: Gateway to the Riviera

Chapter 4: The Very Boundaries of England

Chapter 5: A Sodality of Pedagogues

Chapter 6: Recommendations of Where to Visit

Chapter 7: To Record Every Detail

Chapter 8: The Science Mistress

Chapter 9: Everything in Hand and Under Control

Chapter 10: The Caves at Beer

Chapter 11: Scientia Potentia Est

Chapter 12: Out on the Lawn

Chapter 13: Basic Psychology

Chapter 14: Ruritania

Chapter 15: Lex Talionis

Chapter 16: The Ciderist

Chapter 17: Aloha!

Chapter 18: An Adept

Chapter 19: Sator Arepo

Chapter 20: An Artificial Paradise

Chapter 21: The Full Moon

Chapter 22: Back to the Light

Acknowledgements

Picture Credits

Keep Reading …

Also by Ian Sansom

About the Author

About the Publisher

CHAPTER 1
GOOD TO BE BACK

‘AH, SEFTON, MY FECKLESS FRIEND,’ said Morley. ‘Just the man. Now. Rousseau? What do you think?’

He was, inevitably, writing one of his – inevitable – articles. The interminable articles. The inevitable and interminable articles that made up effectively his one, vast inevitable and interminable article. The über-article. The article to end all articles. The grand accomplishment. The statement. What he would have called the magnum bonum. The Gesamtkuntswerk. ‘An essay a day keeps the bailiffs at bay,’ he would sometimes say, when I suggested he might want to reduce his output, and ‘The night cometh when no man can work, Sefton. Gospel of John, chapter nine, do you know it?’ I knew it, of course. But only because he spoke of it incessantly. Interminably. Inevitably. It was a kind of mantra. One of many. Swanton Morley was a man of many mantras – of catchphrases, proverbs, aphorisms, slang, street talk and endless Latin tags. He was a collector, to borrow the title of one of his most popular books, of Unconsidered Trifles (1934). ‘It takes as little to console us as it does to afflict us.’ ‘Respice finem.’ And ‘May you never meet a mouse in your pantry with tears in his eyes.’ Morley’s endless work, his inexhaustible sayings, were, it seemed to me, a kind of amulet, a form of linguistic self-protection. Language was his great superstition – and his saviour.

To stave off the universal twilight that evening Morley had rigged up the usual lamps and candles, and had his reams of paper piled up around him, like the snow-capped peaks of the Karakoram, or faggots on a pyre, like white marble stepping stones leading up to the big kitchen table plateau, where reference books lay open to the left and to the right of him, pads and pens and pencils at his elbow, his piercing eyes a-twinkling, his Empire moustache a-twitching, his brogue-booted feet a-tapping and his head a-nodding ever so slightly to the rhythms of his keystrokes as he worked at his typewriter, for all the world as if he were an explorer of some far distant realm of ideas, or some mad scientist out of a fantasy by H.G. Wells, strapped to an infernal computational machine. A glass and a jug of barley water were placed beside him, in their customary position – his only indulgence.

It was already well after midnight. I had returned to Norfolk and St George’s after two days in London, attempting to put my affairs in order and succeeding only in disordering them further.

‘Rousseau?’ I said. It was my job in these exchanges, I had soon realised, to bat the ball gently back to him, the warmup to his Fred Perry, as it were, throwing him balls or titbits, that he might leap up and devour them. ‘My interlocutor’, he would sometimes introduce me to new acquaintances, or, alas, worse, ‘My bo’, one of those terribly unfortunate phrases he’d picked up from his beloved hard-boiled detective stories, and which got us into a number of scrapes over the years. Damon Runyon, Ellery Queen: I could never quite understand his enthusiasm for purveyors of what he might, in the argot, have called shtick.

‘Rousseau. Yes.’ I was finding it hard to think. I had, admittedly, in London, been drinking and indulging, even though I had promised myself not to return to my former habits and haunts, but had found it impossible to resist. Just forty-eight hours away from Morley and his high thinking and I had descended back down to the depths of my depravities.

‘Come, come, Sefton. Rousseau?’ He clapped his hands.

‘Well …’ I’d managed to catch the last train out of Liverpool Street for Norfolk, in the full knowledge that if I stayed a day longer the die would be cast for ever, and I would be adrift and out of employment again, at the mercy of Messrs Gabbitas and Thring, and worse …

‘Hello? Dial 0 for operator?’ He rapped his knuckles against the table. ‘Hello? Operator? It’s ringing for you, caller! Remind me why I employed you again, Sefton?’

I had at that stage been Swanton Morley’s amanuensis, his assistant, and his ‘bo’ for approximately two weeks. And I had to admit that – apart from my time in Spain – it had been the strangest, most utterly disorientating and exhilarating two weeks of my life. It had also – not insignificantly – helped to solve certain personal and practical problems I had been facing in London. Which is why, after a hectic few days, I had returned again to the wilds of Norfolk ready to clock in promptly for work on Monday morning.

‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau,’ I offered, fossicking around in my rather disordered mental store cupboard. ‘Philosopher. Educationalist—’

‘No! No! No! Come on, man. Wrong Rousseau!’ said Morley. ‘Henri. Or Henri, pronounced in the continental fashion.’

‘Ah.’ As if I should have known which continental Rousseau he had in mind.

‘Here, here. Come, come, come.’

Morley beckoned me towards him. I edged carefully around the books and papers and looked over his shoulder at one of the large volumes spread out on the desk.

‘Well. What do you think of that?’

The moon shone down brightly from the high window above the table, illuminating the book, which showed an illustration of an extraordinarily vivid, disturbed sort of painting, like the work of a brilliantly gifted child, depicting what was presumably supposed to be a lion sinking its teeth into what was presumably an …

‘Anteater?’ I said.

‘Antelope,’ said Morley. ‘Though granted it’s not entirely clear. The gaucheries of the self-taught, eh, Sefton?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not that you’d know anything about that, eh?’

‘Well, no’ – my privileged upbringing and education were a constant source of amusement to Morley, who had raised himself by his proverbial bootstraps, and who found it hard to take anyone seriously who did not possess bootstraps that needed raising – ‘although—’

‘Quite extraordinary,’ he said.

‘Quite extraordinary,’ I agreed. ‘Remarkable.’ I was rather groggy from the after-effects of my journey, and all the tobacco, and drink and too little sleep – and even under the best of circumstances it was simply easier to agree with Morley.

He turned the page to another illustration. A lion eating a leopard. And another page: a tiger attacking a water buffalo. And another: a jaguar bringing down a white horse.

‘Wonderful stuff, isn’t it, Sefton?’

‘It’s certainly … interesting, Mr Morley,’ I agreed.

‘Interesting?’ he said. ‘Interesting?’ ‘Interesting’, I learned over time, was a trigger word. There were others. ‘Literally’, for example, used incorrectly, would send him – literally – mad. ‘Effect’, as a cause, infuriated him. His ‘instant’ was never quick. And he could never see the irony in ‘irony’. His moustache bristled. ‘Is that really an aesthetic category, Sefton, do you think? Interesting? Hmm? Acceptable to the philosophers and critics of taste in your alma mater, in the old wisteria-swagged ivory towers of Cambridge, do you think? Mr Wittgenstein? Mr Leavis? “Interesting”? A common term of approbation among your peers, is it?’

‘Well …’

‘God save us from “interesting”, Sefton. God Himself save us. Jesus Christ? Hmm? What do you think?’

‘What do I think about Jesus Christ, Mr Morley?’

‘“Interesting” sort of fellow, would you say? And what about – I don’t know, take your pick – Tutankhamun? Captain Scott? Napoleon? Christopher Columbus? Any of them “interesting” in your books? J.M.W. Turner perhaps? J.S. Bach? “Interesting” at all, at all, at all?’

‘Erm …’

‘Never left France, Rousseau.’ Morley suddenly switched tack, as he was wont to do. ‘All this exotica derived entirely from images in books and magazines. And up here, of course.’ He tapped his head with his fingers, one of his favourite gestures in his wide repertoire of gestures: he would have made a fine actor in rather broad Shakespearean roles, I always thought, or perhaps an understudy to Charles Laughton, though in looks of course, as has often been remarked, he resembled rather more a mustachioed Fritz Leiber, in his heyday in The Queen of Sheba. ‘And the Jardin des Plantes,’ he continued. ‘Dioramas in museums and what have you – look at the lion there, looks like a stuffed toy, doesn’t it? Product entirely of the imagination, Sefton. An orchestration of images, ideas and desires. And yet an instinctive understanding of the mysteries of the tropical, wouldn’t you say? Look at that undergrowth.’

‘Yes.’

‘I think our friend Herr Freud would have something to say about Rousseau, wouldn’t he, eh? Monsieur Henri, eh? Eh?’

‘I’m sure he would, Mr Morley.’ Though I wasn’t sure entirely what it was Freud would have to say. Nor did I entirely care.

‘Hmm.’ He stroked his moustache. ‘The tangles, you see, Sefton. Tangles. Tangles. You see the tangles?’ I saw the tangles. ‘And the deep lush vegetation. Vines. Lianas. Terrible confrontations in deep dusky dells with mysterious hairy beasts. Look at these gashes and wounds here.’

‘Yes.’

‘One doesn’t have to be Viennese, I think, to have a guess, does one?’

‘No, Mr Morley.’ Or rather, What, Mr Morley? (Which is of course the title of his famous series of books of notes and queries, published annually, containing answers to questions posed in the form of the book’s title, thus, ‘What, Mr Morley, is the meaning of the term mah nishtana, which I have heard some of my Jewish neighbours exclaim, and which I believe may be either Hebrew or the Jewish language of Yiddish?’, or ‘What, Mr Morley, is the best way to remove coal dust from my antimacassar?’)

‘Not quite top rank though, is it?’ continued Morley. ‘In all honesty? I think we’ll grant him an accessit, shall we?’

‘A—’

‘Second prize medal. Forgotten all your Latin?’

‘Ahem. Well. That sounds about …’

‘The great untaught, you see, Sefton. All that power and originality combined with sometimes shocking naivety. The child’s perspective, one might say. The sublime cheek by jowl with the ridiculous. One of life’s great mysteries, wouldn’t you say?’

I couldn’t have agreed more.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Good.’

‘And who’s the article for, Mr Morley?’

‘Sunday Graphic. Just a little jeu d’esprit, as Mr Rousseau himself might say.’

He poured himself a fresh glass of barley water, and stared at me inquisitively.

‘So, my young fellow, how was London?’

‘It was fine, thank you, sir.’ I never spoke to Morley about my other life. It did not seem appropriate.

‘Good. Good. You’ll be delighted to know that in your absence I’ve finished Norfolk.’

‘Finished it?’

‘That’s correct. Aquila non capit muscas and what have you.’

We had only returned from our first adventure around the English counties on Sunday. This was a week later. Which meant that he had written a book … in a week?

It took me a moment to gather my powers of speech.

‘But I thought we were going to …’

‘We have a strict schedule to stick to, Sefton, remember. If we’re going to cover everything by 1940. Uphill all the way, I’m afraid. No time for slacking.’

‘No, of course.’

‘Or shilly-shallying.’

‘No.’

‘Or funking.’

‘No, absolutely. No slacking. No shilly-shallying. No funking.’

‘Precisely! So I took the liberty of writing up most of my notes myself – to save you time. You’ll be copy-editing and proofing this week. We want to have it more or less ready for the presses within two weeks. Photographs and what have you. Excellent photographs, by the way, Sefton – though a little bit more artistic, next time, eh?’

‘More artistic, Mr Morley?’

‘Well, you know. Something a bit more … Man Ray perhaps?’

‘Really? Man Ray?’

‘Yes, you’ve come across him?’

‘I think so, yes.’

‘Or … I don’t know, maybe not Man Ray, Sefton. But something. We need to capture the public’s imagination, man. Give them something new. Something fresh. Something … unexpected.’

‘I’ll do my best, Mr Morley.’

‘Good! Bit of experimentation, man. But not too much.’

‘Very good, Mr Morley.’

‘And then as I say, we should have everything ready for publication by the end of October. The County Guides – book number one.’

‘That’s … good.’

‘And in the meantime we shall move on swiftly to book number two.’

‘Right. I’ll be staying here then, to do the copy-editing and proofing on book one?’

‘Here?’

‘St George’s? Norfolk?’ I could imagine myself curled up by the fire in the library, leisurely correcting Morley’s proofs, cigarettes and coffee to hand.

‘Not at all, not at all, not at all, Sefton. Not. At. All. No, no, no. We’re all packed and ready to go again, my friend, first thing in the morning. You’re going to have to get accustomed to the pace of life here, old chap. You’ll be editing en route to our next county.’

‘I see.’ I was tired already. ‘Will Miriam be joining us?’

‘She will, indeed. For better and for worse. Until you’ve got the hang of things.’

‘I think I’ve probably—’

‘Also, she needs to … get away for a while. I have spoken to you about Miriam before, Sefton, you will recall.’ He narrowed his eyes rather as he spoke.

‘Yes.’

‘And you have clearly understood my concerns?’

A bit of experimentation

‘Yes, yes, of course, Mr Morley.’

‘Wild.’ He shook his head. ‘Untameable.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t say—’

‘And it’ll take a better man than you to tame her, Sefton. With all due respect. There’s talk of another engagement …’

‘I see.’

He gazed up at the window above the desk. It was a clear night sky.

‘There’s a storm coming.’

It wasn’t immediately clear to me whether he was speaking literally or metaphorically; he spoke often of gathering storms. It wasn’t always clear whether he meant rain, or Miriam’s doomed engagements, or the imminent collapse of human civilisation. Or all three.

‘Do you ever think about the future, Sefton?’

‘Occasionally, Mr Morley. Yes, I do.’

‘And when you think about the future, what do you think?’

‘Erm …’ An answer, obviously, was not required.

‘When I think about the future, Sefton, I think that what we are doing now will be seen largely as an irrelevance, alas. The book will become a decorative art object, and as for newspapers …’ He shook his head. ‘There will be endless wars. Famines. And the England that we know and love will have entirely disappeared. We will achieve a classless society, not because we have all been raised to new heights, but rather because we have all been dragged down to the same depths.’ When speaking of heights and depths, Morley illustrated the point with his usual gestures.

‘I see.’ This was a version of a speech I had already heard him utter on numerous occasions.

‘People’s bodies will seize up, Sefton, due to their unthinking reliance on machines. Men and women will balloon in size, like vast blimps, and go bouncing around our towns and cities, crushing one another in their hurry to acquire more and more of less and less that is truly good. Don’t you think it’s possible, Sefton?’

‘It’s certainly not im—’

‘But one day, I believe, man will overcome himself. He will rise from his slumber. He will slip the bounds and trammels of this earth. He will transcend his small concerns and reach for the stars! He will travel … to the moon! Do you think it’s possible, Sefton?’

‘Again, it’s entirely—’

‘Not in my lifetime, perhaps. But in yours. It will be wonderful: an opportunity to start all over again, eh? Not granted to every man, Sefton, is it?’

‘No, Mr Morley.’

‘But in this brave new world I believe there will be so much going on that no one will care to remember what we have lost.’

‘Indeed.’

‘Which is our task, of course, Sefton! To act as recording angels, if you like. No more. No less. Quite a calling though, eh?’ His rambling speech seemed to have cheered him – as his rambling speeches so often did. I wondered sometimes if he spoke merely for the sole purpose of his own encouragement.

‘Yes. Indeed.’

He stared at me again. ‘You seem rather liverish this evening, Sefton, if you don’t mind my saying.’

‘Yes, well, I …’

‘Time for your beauty sleep, perhaps.’

‘Well, I am rather tired, Mr Morley.’

‘Raram facit misturam cum sapientia forum, Sefton.’

‘Quite. So … unless there’s anything I can do for you here …’

‘No, no, no. The cottage won’t be ready for a while, I’m afraid. I’ve spoken to Wilson about it. It’s going to need quite some fixing up. In the meantime we’ll put you upstairs in one of the attic rooms, if that’s still OK? Same room as before. All set up for you.’

‘That’s wonderful, thank you.’

‘Eaten?’

‘I had a sandwich at Liverpool Street.’

‘Cheruntis pabulum! You can find yourself something in the kitchen if you’d like. Cook made a wonderful mutton and parsnip soup a few days ago. It’s maturing rather nicely.’

‘No, thank you.’

‘What’s the Korean dish?’

‘I’m not sure, Mr Morley.’

‘Kimchi! That’s it. Rather reminiscent. I was there just after the Japanese occupation. Pretty grisly. Merciless … Anyway. Probably best to avoid the soup in your condition. I’ll bid you goodnight. Must just finish this.’ And with that he turned back to his books and his typewriter, and the endless words began to flow again.

Upstairs, as I walked down the long corridor towards my room up in the attic, the echo of Morley’s typewriter in the distance, a door happened to open and Miriam walked out. She was smiling inwardly, it seemed to me: there was a look of satisfaction on her face, of satiation, one might almost say, as if she had … Well … I had enjoyed a rather long weekend in London and was tired; my imagination was doubtless running away with me. Her hair, I noted, was a blonder shade of blonde than I remembered, her cheeks were flushed, and she was wearing a nightgown made of a silvery silk, creating an effect that in the half-lit corridor might be described as simultaneously ethereal and electrifying, shuddering almost, as if one had bumped into Carole Lombard herself, made-up, half dressed, lit, on set, and ready to take her call …

‘Oh, Sefton. You’re here!’ she gasped, clutching her nightgown more closely to her. ‘Sorry, I was just …’

‘Yes. Good evening, Miss Morley.’

‘Back for more then? We haven’t put you off?’

‘No. No. Not at all.’

‘You were in London?’

‘Yes, I was.’

‘I hope you had fun?’

‘I … did. Yes. Certainly.’

‘Good. I think we’re going to have fun, aren’t we, Sefton?’ She was standing alarmingly close to me at this point, so close that I began to feel rather vulnerable, like the poor antelope in Rousseau’s painting.

‘I’m sure we will, Miss Morley.’

‘You … and me,’ she said.

‘And your father, of course.’

‘Hmm.’

She walked off then, turning only to wave goodnight and to cast the mystery of her smile before me, like a cryptic invitation, or a code I was supposed to crack.

I entered my room and lay down on my bed, exhausted.

God, it was good to be back.

CHAPTER 2
PRANIC BREATHING

AS MORLEY HAD PREDICTED, there was a storm. I stood watching it from the window of my room as the lightning at first flickered feebly in the distance and then, as it came closer, began flashing through the darkness, illuminating both sky and earth, thunder reverberating everywhere, the whole building humming in response, it seemed to me, window frames squealing, until finally, after all the tumult, the soft rain came splashing down, dripping from the eaves above my little dormer window as though the house itself were weeping.

Eventually I fell asleep, with the assistance of only a couple of pills, and topped up with no more than half the bottle of brandy I’d brought with me in case of emergency, and which I’d intended to last me for some time. And then, as usual, I woke early, tense from another terrible dream – Spain, gunfire – in Laocoon-like distress, twisted, hot and uncomfortable, the sheets tangled tight around my body. Freeing myself from the bed, I rose, splashed myself with cooling water from the washstand, threw open the heavy damask curtains and stood by the open window, allowing the morning air to calm my racing thoughts. As I gazed out across the vast north Norfolk landscape, my previous life – all my indulgences and regrets, my lies and my mistakes – suddenly seemed far away. Everything seemed invigoratingly fresh and new. All that mattered now, I tried to convince myself, were the County Guides.

All I had with me were the clothes that Morley had kindly provided me with, a wash kit, some shaving gear and a few books. My humble tout ensemble. Having given up my digs in London I no longer had a permanent home: it seemed now as if every room I stayed in was almost immediately cleansed of my presence. Before leaving London I had purchased a few books to accompany me: George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English and a second-hand edition of Pound’s A Draft of XXX Cantos, published by the Hours Press in Paris, the hessian cover already worn thin. I was on another self-improvement jag. Not in the mood for either Orwell or etymology, I began flicking through the Pound, trying to find something at least half-readable, until I came to Canto XXX, and the poem beginning ‘Compleynt, compleynt I hearde upon a day’:

All things are made foul in this season, This is the reason, none may seek purity Having for foulnesse pity And things growne awry; No more do my shaftes fly To slay. Nothing is now clean slayne But rotteth away.

Both inexplicably cheered and thoroughly depressed, I shaved and dressed and went downstairs. I thought I would go outside to smoke. It was, by this time, about 5.30 a.m.

To my great surprise, as I walked quietly outside and around St George’s, along the path fringed with flowers and grasses that leads eventually under the narrow archway tangled with roses, and past the yew hedges down towards the model farm and the orchards, I came across Morley standing on the lawn outside his study. He was dressed only in a pair of pure white underpants and a white vest, without shoes or socks. His eyes were closed and his arms outstretched, as if in an enormous embrace, and the grass was thick with rain, and his breath rose from him like … I can only properly describe it as like steam rising from a dish of potatoes, though Pound would perhaps have described it as like steam from a bowl of rice, or Yeats perhaps as a grey mist, Auden as like a cigarette smouldering in a border, and Eliot – I don’t know – as a kind of god river sweat? I wonder sometimes if I’ll ever write a poem again, and indeed if I ever truly wrote one. If nothing else, my time with Morley convinced me of my own limited capacities as a writer.

The gardens and grounds of St George’s stretched out far behind Morley, in bright greens and in grey-green hollows of mist. He appeared in that moment, I thought, almost a kind of Christ figure, hanging suspended over the early morning English landscape. It was a strange and particular scene, and yet also somehow entirely everyday – and of course rather comic and banal. As Morley himself often liked to remark, the juxtapositions and non sequiturs of everyday life are often more astonishing than even the most extraordinary work of art. ‘There is no such thing as the avant-garde’ – this was one of his favourite sayings, repeated in a number of his books, including Morley’s Style Manual for Writers and Editors (1936) and Art for Art’s Sake (1939) – ‘there is only the garde-en-retarde. All artists are catch-up artists and merchants in nostalgia.’

In his semi-clad reverie he didn’t seem to notice me, so I stood behind a large shrub, finishing my cigarette, watching him silently from a distance. A big grey-backed fox – that old type of fox that one rarely sees any more – came prancing across the lawn, came towards him, glanced up, flirtatiously almost, and then trotted on, doubtless towards its breakfast in the hen-house and the orchards. Birds called – let’s say, for the sake of argument, that they were blue tits, willow warblers and chiff-chaffs, though at the time, in all honesty, I could not have recognised any of their calls, having only in recent years taken up Morley’s frequent admonition to make myself familiar with birdsong and the sounds of nature – and a couple came and settled so close almost as to rest upon him.

And then the sun suddenly cast a blaze of light across the scene, further illuminating the brilliant damp green, and Morley’s dazzling white underclothes, and his glaring white moustache, and his pale white skin, and this was one of those moments, I think, when I began to understand the true paradoxes of Morley, and of my strange relationship with him. During our time together I think I tended to think of him as a kind of mechanism, rather like an electric appliance – an animation of a man, unnatural, Karloffian almost, like Dr Frankenstein’s monster, twitching with life, a creature of unnatural habits and abnormal brain. And yet there was simultaneously this other very marked aspect of his personality, which one might describe as botanical and germinal, organic perhaps, his thoughts and ideas growing slowly and gently within him and from him as a tree might throw forth branches, or a flower blossom. This combination of the natural and the mechanical, the extraordinary and the everyday, the practical and the poetic, the physical and the metaphysical, always made him seem larger than life, macrocosmic almost – and, it has to be said, utterly bizarre.

After some moments of inactivity, he started rocking his head backward and forward, breathing in on the upswing, and out on the downswing. He did this for about a minute, and then began to prepare for a series of exercises that seemed to require the removal of his underwear. I coughed, involuntarily, and he opened his eyes and spied me on the path.

‘Ah, Sefton. Don’t be shy. Come on over.’ He glanced down. ‘Almost an inch, I’d say. What do you think?’

I walked rather shyly across the damp lawn towards him.

‘Right,’ I said. I didn’t know what to reply.

‘Of rain, man. Last night.’

‘Ah.’

‘Refreshing, isn’t it? A good old autumn storm. We had hailstones last year in September that shattered the glasshouses. Tore the plants from their pots. Beware nature, eh, Sefton? Just communing myself, here. Connecting to the old vital forces. Care to join me?’

‘No, I’m fine, thank you.’ I took out another cigarette and lit it.

‘Still smoking?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Won’t do you any good, you know. Chains of bondage. Nil tam difficile est quod non solertia vincat.’ He began swinging his arms in contrary motion. ‘We need you in peak condition, man, if you’re going to stay the course with the County Guides. It’s no holiday.’

‘No,’ I agreed.

‘An endurance test really. Test of strength. Of mettle. Of one’s inner resources, eh?’

‘Indeed.’

His arm-swinging had by now become alarmingly vigorous.

‘You want to try this, Sefton. You’re familiar with pranic breathing, I take it?’

‘Pranic breathing?’

‘Taught to me by a man in Paris, many years ago – respiration pranique. Haddo. Funny sort of fellow. Your sort.’

‘My sort?’

‘You know, bohemian. Bit of a fraud, actually. Claimed he could live without food or water and that he existed merely on the energy of the sun.’

‘Is that possible?’

‘Obviously not. Met him in a restaurant one night, tucking into a fricandeau à l’oseille and a bottle of German hock. Anyway. Most people don’t breathe at all properly, Sefton, as you know. Essential, breathing.’

‘Yes. I suppose it is.’

‘I found the technique very useful, after my wife …’ Morley rarely spoke of his wife, and when he did he was often overcome with such emotion, such an intense turmoil, such a storm, that he was simply unable to speak, as if he were momentarily gripped by a pain beyond words. He would literally stall and stop, like one of his cars, and then he would blink, and clear his throat, and continue on again, as now. ‘The breath, you see, gets interrupted all the time.’ I thought I saw a tear in his eye. ‘Shallow breathing – curse of our age. I might write a little pamphlet, actually. In fact, make a note could you, Sefton? I don’t seem to have my notebook or cards with me.’ He patted at his underpants, as if fully expecting to find a notebook tucked away there.

I felt in my own pockets for a notebook, but found none. Not that it mattered. The storm had passed. Morley moved on.

‘Girdling,’ he said. ‘Medieval monastic practice. Prevents a man being caught short. I’ve spoken to you about it before?’

‘You have, Mr Morley, yes.’

‘Good. Anyway. Fear, anxiety, anger – all stored in the breath, you know. If people were given basic lessons in good consistent, circular breathing I think everyone would be much happier. Don’t you think so? Moves energy from the body, proper breathing. Energy in motion. Here.’ He reached out towards me and placed his hands on my belly. ‘Breathe in.’ I breathed in. ‘And breathe out.’ I breathed out. ‘Yes, as I thought. You should be breathing from the diaphragm, Sefton. When you take a breath, you’re inhaling from the chest. You need to take a proper breath.’ He kept his hands on my belly. ‘Go on. Try again. From the diaphragm. Here. Not here.’ He tapped my chest.

The more I thought about diaphragm breathing, the less I seemed able to do it.

‘You’re constricting on your exhale, man. You’re not letting go. How did you sleep?’

‘Not well, I’m afraid.’

‘Hardly surprising. Poor breathing robs us of energy and doesn’t allow us to rest properly.’

‘I think it was more because of the thunder,’ I was about to say, and also perhaps because of the half-bottle of brandy, and the pills and the dreams, but he had taken his thumb and index finger and pressed my left nostril with his thumb, making speech difficult.

‘There we are. Breathe in. Hold for three.’

And then he pinched the bridge of my nose, before pressing my right nostril with his index finger.

‘And now exhale through the left for a count of six. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Good. And again.’ More nostril-pinching.

I had only recently been in a Soho club where—

‘Hold for three. Good. And exhale for six. Etcetera. Don’t worry. We’ll get there, Sefton. We’ll get there.’

He began walking back towards the house. I followed: what else could I do?

‘I am not – as you know – entirely ecumenical in my outlook, Sefton, but I do think there are some things we could profitably learn from our Hindu brothers and sisters. And Confucians. Buddhists. Taoists. Do you know the Waley book on the Tao Te Ching?’

‘Erm …’

‘Worth looking up. Jainism also. Ever come across any Jains?’

‘I think I may have come across one or two Janes in my time, yes, Mr Morley.’ I grinned.

‘Are you being facetious, Sefton?’

‘No.’

‘Good, too early in the morning to be facetious, Sefton. And too late in the day, I fear. The Jains, man. Jains. There’s a beautiful white granite statue of Bahubali, on a hill near Sravanabelagola I think it is – visited it once. Long time ago. Astonishing piece of work. Sixty foot tall, and they have this quite extraordinary ceremony where they anoint it with milk and saffron and what have you. Marvellous. Quite extraordinary. Anyway, as I was saying, prana, Sefton – the life force. Powerful thing. Very popular notion in all Asiatic religions: qi among the Chinese, of course. Odic forces I think are probably the closest we come in the West. Personally, I am trying to develop my apana, the long down breath, which reaches down all the way to the root chakra.’

Frankly, I found it a little early to be discussing Jainism, qi and chakras, but fortunately, in characteristic style, Morley soon switched subject matter again as we entered his study through the French windows, and several of his many dogs came bounding towards us. One of his particular favourites – an Irish terrier named Fionn mac Cumhaill (‘pronounced MacCool, Sefton, please, in the Celtic fashion’) – never seemed to warm to me and stood protectively now at Morley’s side, with the clear intention first of growling at me, and then very possibly barking, chasing, biting and savaging.

‘Irish dogs,’ said Morley. ‘Like Irish men. Or women, for that matter. Not to be trifled with. Cave canem, Sefton – as they said in old Pompeii.’ He stroked the dog absentmindedly. ‘You really do need to learn how to handle animals, Sefton. They can sense fear, you see. Like children. One should simply fondle them – thus – when they’re near.’ He fondled the dog, thus. ‘But without appearing to pay them much attention.’ He then duly paid the dog no attention. ‘Very much like the Irish … So. Anyway,’ he said, striding around in his underwear, as if it were the most natural way to conduct a meeting. ‘There’s Norfolk.’ He pointed to a pile of typed papers, stacked on the floor next to boxes of index cards: the work of the past week. What was impressive was not only his uncanny ability to produce copy but also his capacity for processing information of all kinds; he had a method of both overseeing and arranging material that was entirely his own, or certainly that I had never encountered before and that required the constant categorising, filing and sub-categorising and refiling of his papers and notecards. He often worked through the night, shuffling papers.

Fionn mac Cumhaill (pronounced in the Celtic fashion)

He pointed to another teetering pile of papers on a desk.

‘And there’s some correspondence we should probably sort before setting off, Sefton. There’s been quite a lot of talk about what happened in Norfolk, as you know. I’d like to avoid any such troubles on our next trip.’

‘Of course.’

‘Anyway, I cleared a couple of dozen letters before going to bed last night, but I’d like to get them all done before we leave.’

‘I see. It seems like rather a lot,’ I ventured. I imagined that such a pile of correspondence might take several days to work through.

‘And what is our motto here, Sefton?’

‘No slacking.’

‘Correct.’

‘No shilly-shallying.’

‘Precisely.’

‘And no funking.’

At that moment Miriam appeared at the study door. She was dressed and made up, as usual, in a fashion that suggested that she was about to arrive fashionably late at a cocktail party, probably somewhere in Kensington, thronged with wealthy and elegant suitors.

The County Guides: Norfolk, in preparation

‘Hard at it already then, boys?’

‘Ah, Miriam,’ said Morley. ‘You’re uncharacteristically bright and early.’

‘Good morning, Father. Yes. The storm kept me awake in the night. I was terribly disturbed. And what about you, Sefton? Another long and lonely night?’

‘I slept as well as could be expected, Miss Morley.’

‘Glad to hear it.’

‘We’ll be leaving at seven, children,’ said Morley. ‘Quick breakfast, and on the road. I want to be in Devon by nightfall.’

‘Devon?’ I said.

‘And when is your speech, Father?’

‘Tomorrow. Founder’s Day.’

‘You’re giving a speech?’ I said. ‘In Devon.’

‘Yes, I thought we’d kill two birds with one stone. I’ve been asked to give the Founder’s Day address down at All Souls, Sefton. They’ve just moved into new school buildings down there somewhere. Where is it, Miriam?’

‘Rousdon, Father.’

‘Rousdon, yes, that’s it, and—’

‘Or Rouse them, Sefton,’ said Miriam coquettishly.

‘So the plan is to base ourselves there and tackle Devon. Book number two. How does that sound, Sefton?’

‘Mad,’ said Miriam. ‘Utterly, utterly mad. As usual.’

‘Super,’ I said.

‘Oh, please,’ said Miriam. ‘Soo-per. If you’d wanted someone to soft-soap you, Father, you could have employed a masseur.’ She raised a quizzical eyebrow towards me.

‘Thank you, Miriam,’ said Morley. ‘Let’s fight nicely, shall we?’

‘Sorry, gents. Must pack,’ said Miriam, leaving as abruptly as she’d arrived, glimmering as she went.

‘Untameable,’ said Morley, shaking his head. ‘Wild, Sefton. Utterly wild. Like Devon.’

The Lagonda

CHAPTER 3
GATEWAY TO THE RIVIERA

AFTER A BRIEF but exhausting breakfast – Morley expatiating on the history of sausages, the music of Wagner, the music of birdsong, the symbolic meaning of the human hand, and the decline of smithying (‘It’s the bicycles I blame, Sefton, not the cars, and of course people getting rid of the pony and trap’) – Miriam and I loaded the Lagonda and prepared to set off. The weather was sullen, and so was Miriam. After everything had been loaded – massive stationery supplies, mostly – I assisted her in lashing a couple of long planks to the side of the car.

‘Careful with the paintwork, Sefton, or you’ll have to touch it up. We wouldn’t want that, would we?’

‘No, Miss Morley,’ I agreed.

‘Ah,’ said Morley, appearing fortuitously with his trusty Irish terrier. He tapped the long wooden boards with a great deal of proprietorial pleasure. ‘They arrived then?’

‘Apparently,’ said Miriam.

‘Beautiful, aren’t they, Sefton?’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. My attention was elsewhere: I was attempting to fondle the dog, and simultaneously to ignore it, as Morley had advised. But the dog was not impressed – the damned thing was tugging determinedly at the turn-ups on my trousers.

‘Finn!’ said Miriam sternly, and the dog immediately stopped and trotted off. Miriam gave me a pitying smile.

‘Absolutely beautiful,’ Morley was saying to himself, about the boards, which were indeed beautiful – sleek, rounded, polished – though I had absolutely no idea what on earth they were.

‘Solid ash,’ said Morley. ‘Had them made by Grays of Cambridge – the cricket chaps. Not cheap. But worth every penny. They finish them with the shinbone of a reindeer. Did you know?’

‘No.’

‘Gives a lovely finish.’

‘And they are …?’

‘Surfboards, of course,’ said Morley.

I must have looked, I suppose, rather nonplussed. It was still early in the morning.

‘Really, Sefton, have you never seen a surfboard?’ said Miriam, delighted.

‘No. Of course I’ve seen … surfboards and … surfboarding, but—’

‘Well, you’re in for a treat,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ agreed Morley. ‘It’s very—’

‘Liberating,’ said Miriam.

‘Yes,’ agreed Morley. ‘Liberating is exactly the word. Like flying. Being free.’

‘It’ll be a new experience for you, Sefton,’ said Miriam.

‘Hawaiian in origin, obviously,’ said Morley, as he climbed into the back of the car, and Miriam fitted his portable desk with his typewriter stays. ‘I’ve done a little research, I think our best bets are north Devon. Saunton. Croyde. Round about there.’

‘We could camp on the beach!’ said Miriam, clapping her hands, and then carefully slotting Morley’s favourite travelling Hermes typewriter into place.

‘It sounds like it’s going to be quite an adventure,’ I said, climbing into the back next to Morley, who unceremoniously dumped the manuscript of the Norfolk book and a pile of index cards into my lap.

‘Let’s hope so!’ said Miriam, climbing into the front, and starting up the engine, which gave its customary pleasing growl. ‘Better than bloody Norfolk anyway.’

‘Language, Miriam,’ said Morley.

‘I need adventure, Father.’

‘I know, my dear – don’t we all. And Devon is of course the great county of adventurers and explorers. Scott of the Antarctic – from?’

‘Plymouth?’ said Miriam.

‘Correct. And Sir Francis Drake, the old sea dog, born near? Sefton?’

‘Erm. Plymouth?’ I said.

‘Tavistock. So we’ll have to pay respects. And we’ll also have to visit Sir Walter Raleigh’s bench ends in All Saints, East Budleigh.’

‘Great,’ I said, as Miriam raced the car down St George’s long drive.

‘And a trip to Axminster, home of the eponymous carpet. Exeter, obviously. And Ottery St Mary.’

‘Utterly St Mary!’ said Miriam.

‘Ever heard of it, Sefton?’

‘No, I—’

‘Shame on you. Church modelled on Exeter Cathedral, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born there. Ring any bells?’

‘Erm.’

‘Yawn,’ said Miriam.

‘And speaking of bells, it has a clock, I think, that’s said to date from the fourteenth century, and which is one of the only pre-Copernican clocks in the country—’

‘And there’s surfing,’ said Miriam. ‘Which way, Father?’

‘Left.’

And so the conversation and the journey continued across country and down to Devon, hour after hour after endless hour, Morley, like Pliny the Elder, continually making notes along the way – ‘Lavender! Roses! Gypsophila! Dry-stone wall!’ – while I corrected his work on the manuscript of the Norfolk book, and Miriam smoked innumerable cigarettes and offered the occasional taunt and barbed aside: she was, as usual, determined to provoke. Somewhere in Essex, for example, I think it was, we passed a woman riding a horse and this excited a typical little Miriam provocation. She often spoke like someone trying to get around the Hays Code.

‘Medicine may well have something to say on the subject of whether women should ride astride once they have reached maturity,’ Morley had remarked. ‘Side saddle is surely the appropriate method, wouldn’t you agree, Sefton?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I said.

‘Oh, come, come,’ said Miriam, cocking her head rather. ‘Surely you must have an opinion on the question of women’s riding styles?’

‘It is a matter about which I have no opinion whatsoever,’ I said.

‘Such a shame,’ she said, revving the engine unnecessarily.

‘Thank you,’ said Morley. ‘No need.’

For navigational purposes Morley had cut up and mounted onto thin oak boards a large Philip’s Road Atlas of Britain, dividing England county by county into squares of approximately nine by six inches. It was my job to arrange these giant county playing cards, as it were, into some kind of meaningful hand, and then to deal out the route, card by card, to Miriam, with Morley adding his own inevitable comments and elaborate instructions: ‘Avoid Cambridge at all costs, Miriam – whole place stagnant with marshes and dons!’; ‘Ah, yes! Beautiful lute-like Berkshire! Belly to the west, neck to the east!’ Etcetera, etcetera. Morley would also make requests for ludicrous detours and stopping points – ‘Do we have time for a dawdle through Hampshire?’ ‘Up to Bristol? Cardiff?’ – which Miriam, thankfully, resisted.

‘This is the route, Father, that we are sticking to, if we wish to arrive any time today. Repeat after me: Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire and Dorset.’

‘And Devon!’ cried Morley.

A giant county playing card

‘Obviously,’ said Miriam. ‘No slacking. No shilly-shallying. No funking.’

‘No Bristol?’ said Morley.

‘Correct,’ said Miriam. ‘And no Bath, no Basingstoke, no Bournemouth. So please don’t ask. I have the wheel, Father. Mine is the power.’

‘Onwards, Boudicca!’ cried Morley. ‘To defend the nation!’

We stopped for a filthy tea somewhere near Salisbury, at the inexplicably named Nell Gwynn Tea-Rooms, a place decorated both inside and out with an unfortunate combination of fake wooden beams and very shiny yellow bricks.

‘A Tudorbethan lavatory,’ said Miriam, as we pulled up. ‘How quaint.’

‘Worse than Mugby Junction,’ said Morley, which seemed to be an allusion to something or other: it certainly made Miriam laugh. They often enjoyed little jokes like these, based on a lifetime’s shared experience and reading: I imagine Milton and his daughter might have enjoyed similar happy reminiscences. Our Nell Gwynn tea consisted of cold potato soup and rather hard and arid little rolls which produced in us all such indigestion that we had to consume several packs of Morley’s favourite mints in order to overcome the aftertaste. (These mints – Bassett’s People’s Mints – are not to be confused with actual Morley Mints, which were at one time produced by the manufacturers of Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls, and which Morley consumed in incredible quantities. ‘Insufficient weaning,’ Miriam would traditionally reply, when Morley asked for another of his mint balls, and ‘Oh, do spare us your Freud,’ he would traditionally respond, popping another into his mouth.)

And then finally, towards evening, after much indigestion and some confusion in my dealing of the county cards – I had accidentally confused Somerset with Dorset, sending us on a rather round-about route – we made it to Honiton. The weather had remained calm all day, but now the sky closed in again, menacing, threatening more rain. This did not, however, dampen Morley’s mood.

‘At last!’ he cried. ‘Honiton! Gateway to the Riviera!’

I looked around as we sped through the streets – street, really – of Honiton.

‘Really?’

‘Indeed, Sefton. Welcome to Devon! So, what are we looking forward to most in Devon, Sefton?’

‘Erm …’

‘Yes, Sefton,’ called Miriam. ‘What are we looking forward to most in Devon?’

‘In Devon?’

‘Yes,’ said Morley. ‘Or Dumnonia, as I believe the ancient kingdom was once called.’

‘And don’t say the cream teas!’ called Miriam from the front seat.

‘The …’

‘Moors, of course,’ said Morley. ‘Yes. Correct. Dartmoor. Exmoor.’

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘And it is renowned for what else, Devon? Topographically, geographically, I mean?’

‘Well, there are the moors, obviously, and …’ I was struggling rather.

‘The fact that it is the only one of our counties to be in proud possession of not one but two coastlines!’

‘Ah.’

‘Correct! And any other particular places and sights of interest? I am myself particularly looking forward to visiting Torquay United, Exeter City and the mighty Argyle. But you’re not a fan of association football, are you, Sefton?’

‘Well, no, I’m more of a—’

‘Lah-di-dah?’ said Morley. ‘But we’ll say no more about it. What about you, Miriam?’

‘I can’t wait to just strip off and get into the water,’ she called. ‘I’ve brought my costume. Have you brought yours, Sefton?’

I forbore to answer.

‘It’s emerald green,’ she said.

‘And some rockpooling perhaps,’ said Morley. ‘Crabbing. I do love a spot of crabbing.’

‘And surfing,’ said Miriam.

‘Indeed,’ said Morley. ‘Now, Devon: patron saint? Sefton?’

‘St Petroc?’ said Miriam.

‘Good guess. But wrong. Cornwall, Petroc. Though I believe he did pass through on his way down. St Winfrid I think is Devon’s, isn’t that right?’

‘Possibly, Father.’

‘Also the patron saint of?’

‘Germany?’ said Miriam.

‘Correct.’

‘And?’

‘Don’t know, don’t care.’

‘Brewers,’ said Morley.

‘Sefton will feel right at home then.’

I blushed rather.

‘And we must make a visit to the Dartmouth pixies, Miriam, while we’re here. Or piskies, as I believe the locals call them. Pharisees, as they are known in Sussex. The little people. They like to ride ponies and lead unwary travellers to their doom in the bogs on the moors, isn’t that right, Miriam?’

‘Yes, Father.’

‘Pixies?’ I said.

‘Indeed.’

‘You’re not serious?’

‘Deadly,’ said Miriam. ‘Deadly serious.’

‘Pixies?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Absolutely. Father is as serious about his pixies as Conan Doyle was about his fairies. Didn’t you know? Deadly, deadly serious.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘Well, I suppose we must allow for the possibility of—’

‘Of course he doesn’t believe in pixies, Sefton!’ cried Miriam.

‘Joke!’ cried Morley. ‘Jolly good, Miriam.’

They roared with laughter: they had a curious sense of humour, the pair of them.

‘Pixies!’ cried Morley, tears coursing down his face. ‘Pixies!’

‘Pixies!’ cried Miriam, sobbing with laughter also.

‘Do you think I have entirely taken leave of my senses?’ This was not a question that required an answer. He wiped the tears from his eyes.

‘People will believe anything, won’t they?’ said Miriam.

‘Indeed they will, my dear,’ said Morley. ‘Indeed they will.’

‘Ghoulies and ghosties!’

‘Gremlins and goodness knows what,’ said Morley. ‘Do you know Yeats’s poem “The Land of Heart’s Desire”, Sefton?’

‘I’m—’

He began to intone, in Yeatsian fashion:

The Land of Faery Where nobody gets old and godly and grave, Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.

‘Pure fantasy,’ said Morley. ‘Absolute nonsense.’

‘Pixies!’ cried Miriam.

‘Pixies!’ echoed Morley. ‘Marvellous! Marvellous!’

And so, in characteristic fashion, we arrived at our destination.

CHAPTER 4
THE VERY BOUNDARIES OF ENGLAND

ROUSDON, according to White’s History, Gazetteer and Directory of Devonshire (1850) – a copy of which Morley had usefully brought with us, along with several other dusty old directories, including Pigot’s, Kelly’s and Slater’s, and a small suitcase-worth of up-to-date guidebooks to the geography, topography, history, culture, coastal scenery and cider-making heritage of a county that most of them insisted on referring to, inevitably, at some point in their Exmoor sheep-herd-like ramblings as ‘Glorious’ – ‘is an extra parochial estate belonging to R.C. Bartlett Esq., and lying within the bounds of Axminster parish, adjoining the great landslip of Dowlands and Bindon’.

This hardly does the place justice. Rousdon is not merely extra parochial. It is ultra-extra parochial. It is far, far, far beyond the parochial. It might best be described as a place at the edge of the world.

The land, with its few original buildings, according to all accounts, was purchased some time around 1870 by a Sir Henry Peek, who undertook various schemes of improvement, including rebuilding the existing church, providing a small school, the vast mansion, a coach house, a bake house, farm buildings, cottages, a walled garden, tennis courts, and every other possible kind of dwelling, convenience and requisite for what became effectively a small private village. The Peek family – latterly Peek Brothers and Winch – had made their fortune as importers of tea, coffee and spices, and Rousdon does indeed have rather the feeling of a plantation complex, ‘with all the appearance of having been planned by the Tudors, built by the Jacobeans, and completed by the Victorians’, according to Morley in The County Guides, ‘and with perhaps just a touch of the Lombardic, in what one might generously describe as an act of freestyle Anglo-Euro-Renaissance sprezzatura’. For all its undoubted pizzazz and sprezzatura, the estate’s development was in fact overseen and undertaken by a redoubtable Englishman, Ernest George, who was one of Morley’s great heroes, and responsible also for Cawston Manor in Norfolk, one of Morley’s favourite English houses, and Golders Green crematorium – undoubtedly his favourite crematorium.

The estate is approached by a long driveway, though since it was dark by the time we arrived, having stopped off at Lyme Regis in order for Morley, in his words, to ‘acquaint myself with some ammonites’, I wasn’t aware initially of the extraordinary dimensions of the place and it wasn’t until we – just – managed to stop the car at the bottom of a steep, deep dark lane, our having taken another wrong turning in a maze of roads, that I realised that the entire estate seemed to have been built along a clifftop that dropped precipitously down to the sea.

Rousdon isn’t just isolated: it is simply on its own. It is one of the very boundaries of England. And we were about to go sailing headlong over the edge of it …

Morley, as usual, was expounding on some subject or another, Miriam was energetically riposting, and I was doing my best to keep the peace. None of us was paying much attention to what was ahead. Fortunately we were travelling slowly, and it seems we all at once caught a glimpse of the cliff’s edge and the moon on the sea beyond it. Miriam gave a yelp, Morley uttered, accurately, if not entirely helpfully, ‘Thalatta! Thalatta!’ and I realised that if nothing was done then the fate of the overloaded Lagonda, stationery, surfboards, passengers and all, was going to be not dissimilar to that of the steam train in Buster Keaton’s The General (a film that Morley writes about at great length in his book Morley Goes to the Cinema, published in America as Morley’s Movies, a misleading title which rather implies that Morley himself were a film star, which he most certainly was not; his personality, if anything, was too big, too boisterous and too boundless for the silver screen; he was, I often thought, a strictly novelistic character, a panoramic soul from a panoramic story, of the kind found in the pages of Balzac, or Victor Hugo).

I yelled ‘Stop!’, leapt up out of my seat, leaned across and yanked on the handbrake. Miriam stamped on the footbrake, and Morley …

Morley had leapt out of the car – I thought initially to save himself from what might have been certain death. As it turned out, to my astonishment, he’d leapt out only to get closer to the cliff edge, where he immediately launched into another recitation. This time it was Kipling, ‘Mandalay’:

Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,

Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst;

For the temple-bells are callin’, an’ it’s there that I would be –

By the old Moulemein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea.

‘Well,’ said Miriam, rather breathless, ‘we certainly seem to have found the limits of the estate, Sefton.’

‘Quite,’ I agreed.

‘I could have sworn the sign for the school pointed down this way.’

‘Apparently not,’ I said.

‘Did you see the sign, Father?’

‘Sign?’

‘For the school?’

‘No idea,’ said Morley. ‘But I think we might be able to climb down here, actually. Onto a little beach.’ He was standing perilously close to some loose scree.

‘Father!’ called Miriam. ‘For goodness sake, not tonight!’

‘A night-time descent might be rather fun,’ said Morley, staring down, illuminated by the headlamps of the car and framed by the bright-lit moon, making him appear rather like his own ghost, or a velvety shadow puppet.

‘We’re going back to find the school, Father.’

‘But—’

He had edged close enough now for us both to be concerned about his safety.

‘Should I?’ I asked Miriam.

‘Would you mind awfully?’ she replied.

And so I jumped out of the car and edged close enough to Morley to make a grab at his clothes if he were to lose his footing.

‘What do you think, Sefton?’

‘It is certainly a steep cliff-face, Mr Morley. And we’re all rather lucky not to be heading over the edge.’

‘Five-hundred-foot drop, would you say?’

‘Something like it,’ I said.

‘V. diff., do you think?’

‘V. diff.?’

‘Climbing-wise.’

‘Yes,’ I said, not entirely sure what he meant.

‘Straight down to a nice little hidden beach.’

‘Indeed. Quite a drop.’

‘Into the ocean.’

‘Indeed.’

‘The abyss – tehom, in the Hebrew, isn’t it? “Draw me out of the mire, that I may not stick fast: deliver me from them that hate me, and out of the deep waters. Let not the tempest of water drown me, nor the deep swallow me up: and let not the pit shut her mouth upon me.” What is that? Psalms … 68? 69?’

‘I don’t remember exactly.’

‘Ever done any mountaineering of any kind, Sefton?’

‘I can’t say I have, Mr Morley, no.’

‘Well, we’ll have to put that right. I was lucky enough to have climbed with Mallory and Sandy Irvine. Long time ago. Do you know Lisle Strutt?’

‘No, I’m afraid not.’

‘Glad to hear it. President of the Alpine Club. I resigned in protest. Not a fan.’

‘Father, come on!’ said Miriam. ‘Enough shilly-shallying. It’s late.’

‘Next trip, we’ll bring along some rock boots and rope and see where it takes us, shall we?’

‘That sounds like an excellent idea,’ I said. ‘I look forward to it.’

‘Not tonight though, chaps, eh?’ cried Miriam, who had lit a cigarette and who seemed to have instantly recovered from our near-death experience and was enjoying the cool breeze from the sea. She, like her father, rather enjoyed risk-taking, near-misses and every other kind of calamity. Neither of them, of course, had ever been to war.

‘Thing to remember, Sefton,’ said Morley, as we made our way back to the car, ‘is that the top of the ascent is the most dangerous part of any climb. The summit, you see. Gets the old heart racing.’

‘Is your heart racing, Sefton?’ said Miriam, as we clambered back into the car.

I was in fact feeling my stomach grumbling – we hadn’t had anything to eat since our filthy Nell Gwynn buns.

‘You know, we could camp out here for the night,’ said Morley. ‘Do you remember we used to do that when you were young, Miriam? In the old Standard? It had the detachable front seats, and your mother would—’

‘Not tonight, Father,’ cried Miriam.

‘“Only the road and the dawn,”’ said Morley, ‘“the sun, the wind and the rain, / And the watch fire under stars, and sleep and the road again.”’

‘Not tonight, thank you, Father!’

‘Very well,’ said Morley.

‘Onwards!’ said Miriam.

‘Or backwards,’ said Morley, ‘to be accurate.’

‘Thank you, Father.’

Eventually managing to reverse back up the lane in the Lagonda – after much pushing and the grinding of gears – we picked up another route and soon found ourselves stopping in a courtyard outside an enormous building that by all appearances – mullioned windows, finialled gables, coats of arms and what-not – had to be the main Rousdon manor house. We had arrived at All Souls.

CHAPTER 5
A SODALITY OF PEDAGOGUES

AT THE SOUND OF OUR APPROACH the vast door of the manor house was swung open by a worried-looking young woman, apparently a nurse, who was done out in a most striking outfit, consisting of a blood-red dress with a white apron over it, and a little Sister Dora cap perched jauntily on her head, which gave her the appearance of someone having just rushed panicking from performing some particularly grisly surgery. From behind this rather ghoulish creature first came there a voice, and then a man, shuffling into view.

‘Do I hear John Bull’s roar?’ cried the voice. ‘The People’s Professor?’

‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,’ Morley said to the figure who now stood in the doorway. Their exchange of words caused much mutual amusement – it was some kind of private greeting, I understood. There was then a prolonged and vigorous shaking of hands – the two men seemed to operate on the same frequency and gave off exactly the same vibration of relentlessly hearty vigour – and Morley then introduced us.

‘This is Dr Standish,’ he said. ‘Headmaster of All Souls.’

‘Well, well, well,’ said Dr Standish. ‘What do we have here?’

What we had here was a man who might almost have been Morley’s double, though perhaps a little more careworn, his face perhaps rather coarser-featured, his cheeks perhaps a little redder and rounder, his moustache rather more drooping, and his eyes small and hard and bitter, like a blackbird’s.

‘This is my assistant,’ said Morley, ‘Mr Stephen Sefton.’

‘Your Boswell, eh, Swanton?’ said Dr Standish, in a rather sniggering fashion, I thought.

‘I don’t know about that,’ I said. We shook hands: he gave off a slight whiff of lavender, as though having only recently bathed.

‘I have always been of the opinion,’ said Morley, ‘that the Great Cham was in fact a fictional character invented by the scheming Scotsman as a way of making a reputation for himself.’

‘Ha ha! Very good!’ said Dr Standish, smiling and showing a set of gleaming teeth. ‘Though I’m sure such treasonous thoughts are far from the mind of your young assistant.’

‘Indeed,’ I agreed. Nothing could have been further from my mind.

‘And this is my daughter,’ said Morley.

‘Charmed,’ said Miriam, offering her hand, and simpering rather.

‘Well, well,’ said Dr Standish. ‘You have grown up since last we met.’

‘Indeed, we are now full-grown,’ said Miriam, hoisting herself up to her not inconsiderable height, and gazing at him, mesmerisingly, in her fashion, over her cheekbones.

Puer Aeternus, The Eternal Boy

‘You haven’t aged, though, Headmaster,’ said Morley.

‘Well, teaching keeps one young, I suppose.’

‘Puer Aeternus,’ said Morley. ‘The Eternal Boy.’

‘Indeed,’ said Dr Standish. ‘No need to stand on ceremony though, old friend. Come in, come in, come in!’

Given Morley’s well-known quirks and attributes – his extraordinary working habits, his odd detachment from others, his fixation on objects, his obsession with classification, and his complete and utter inability to understand or to be able to empathise with others – one might have suspected that he would have found close relationships almost impossible to maintain. In fact, as I was to discover during the course of our time together, he was a man who attracted and enjoyed the company of all sorts of individuals, of both sexes, of all ages, all classes and all kinds. Of course above all he attracted fans, with whom and about whom he was always polite and courteous. Much of my time was spent protecting him from these fans, and from all sorts of other less well-meaning hangers-on and acolytes. (He was most often beset and troubled by those whom one might call Morley-mimickers: one thinks most readily perhaps of Frederick Bryson and John Fry, Morley-mimickers of brief renown. Such individuals often started out as fans, became acolytes, and then attempted to actually become Morley – ‘stealing our bread from the table’, as Morley often complained – trying to forge careers as hacks and popular writers, though none of them could match Morley’s own ferocious output. About such types Morley could be surprisingly and shockingly discourteous. Bryson, for example, I recall him once describing as a ‘sunburned nut’: he famously kept a house on the French Riviera. And Fry he often referred to simply as ‘the Pygmy’: he was a man famously short in stature.) But Morley also had real actual friends, and Dr Standish was one of them: he had contributed to a number of volumes edited by Morley for the edification of the young, including Manners Maketh the Man: A Guide for Parents and Teachers (1932), and A Boy’s First Fingering: Easy Piano Pieces for Small Hands (1934).

While the two men caught up with all their news and gossip, Miriam and I were shown through by the nurse to what seemed to be the old drawing room of the manor house, which had been converted into the school’s staff common room. The transformation had been entirely successful – and was, of course, quite appalling. Noticeboards had been erected on the oak-panelled walls, a long coat-rack was hung with gowns and mortarboards, and where there once might have been pleasing arrangements of bibelots, vases and ornaments there was now a mess of packets of chalk, cigarettes, brass ashtrays and bottles of ink. An elephant’s foot umbrella-stand in one corner held a quiver of canes, ranging from a thin-strip willow to a heavy hardwood beater. Windows high up allowed for no views, and little natural light. I knew exactly what the place had become, having wasted so much of my time over the course of the past five years in similar rooms throughout the country. It was a place for the gathering of the unredeemed before their trials: we had come upon a sodality of pedagogues.

We entered into a thick fug and hubbub of tobacco being smoked, of jokes being cracked, of sherry glasses tinkling, of the crackle of corduroy and tweed, and of the infernal sound of a gramophone playing music of a Palm Court trio kind – ‘the music of the damned’, Morley would have called it – but upon our entrance all noise abruptly ceased. From deep within the fug a dozen or so pairs of eyes fixed upon us. Only the Palm Court trio played on: the dreaded sound of Ketèlbey’s ‘In a Persian Market’, a tune regarded by Morley with particular horror (‘self-aggrandising nonsense’ is his memorable description in Morley’s Lives of the English Composers (1935)). The room also had the most extraordinary smell: rich, thick and rank. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but in this stench, and to the sound of Ketèlbey’s self-aggrandising nonsense, the gathered crowd smoked and stared at us, breathing as one.

‘Oh don’t mind us!’ said Miriam, entirely undaunted, and indeed clearly relishing the attention. ‘At ease, at ease. We’re only the school inspectors.’ And then turning to me, in the sotto voce remarking manner that she had unfortunately inherited from her father, she said, ‘Not sure that we’ll pass them, eh, Sefton? Seem like rather a rum bunch, wouldn’t you say?’ Clearly meant as a joke, the silence that greeted these remarks might best be described as stony, and the atmosphere as icy – until, as the sound of Ketèlbey faded away, a man boldly separated himself from what was indeed a rum bunch and came towards us, like a tribal leader stepping forward to greet the arrival of Christian missionaries.

A sodality of pedagogues

‘I’m Alexander,’ he said, ‘but everyone calls me Alex. Delighted to meet you.’

Alex shook my hand in an appropriately brisk and friendly manner but he took Miriam’s hand with a rather theatrical flourish, I thought, and then he kissed it, lingering rather, bowing slightly – all entirely unnecessary. He then gave a quick glance to his colleagues, which seemed to be the signal for them to resume their conversations. Sherry glasses were once again raised, and someone set the Palm Court trio back upon their damned eternal gramophone scrapings. The natives were calmed and reassured.

Alex was tall, long-legged, dressed in a dark double-breasted suit, and had what one might call confiding eyes. Miriam – who knew the look – offered her confiding eyes back. I feared the worst. There was no doubt that Alex had a commanding presence: he rather resembled Rudolph Valentino, though with something disturbingly super-sepulchral about him that suggested not the Valentino of, say, The Sheikh, but rather a Valentino who had recently died and then been miraculously raised from the dead. He also had the kind of deep, capable voice that suggested to the listener that one had no choice but to trust and obey him, and an accompanying air of bold determination, of knight-errantry, one might say, as if having just returned from the court of King Arthur, in possession not only of the Holy Grail but of the blood of Christ itself. I conceived for him an immediate and most intense distaste. Miriam, on the other hand, was clearly instantly smitten and the two of them fell at once into deep conversation.

Feeling rather surplus to requirements, and dreading an evening of talking about the state of modern education with a group of teachers – having long since forsworn all such utterly pointless conversations – I excused myself to go and arrange for the unloading of the Lagonda.

Out in the school’s forecourt I lit a cigarette and gazed up at the building. The place had a medieval aspect about it, like some kind of monastery, rather ponderous in style, and yet also at the same time strangely promiscuous, self-fertile almost, appearing to consist of numerous buildings growing into and out of one another, clambering over and upon itself with gable upon gable upon turret upon high tiled roof, writhing and reaching up towards the dark heavens above.

As I glanced up and around I fancied that I was being watched – and indeed for a moment I thought I saw the small white faces of young boys pressed up against mullioned window panes in the furthest and highest corners of the buildings. But when I turned again, having stubbed out my cigarette, they had gone.

The sensation of being watched, however, strongly persisted: it was almost as if someone had clapped me on the shoulder, or slapped me on the back; I felt eyes upon me. The air felt cold, as if someone had rushed close by. I turned quickly again, this time looking down around the forecourt and out towards the fields – and there in the moonlight I saw a man. He stood by the hedge beyond the lane, under the shelter of a tree.

‘Hello?’ I said instinctively.

‘Hello,’ he replied softly, his voice carrying clearly across the still night air.

‘Are you watching me?’ I asked. I didn’t know what else to say.

He stepped forward then, out from the shade of the tree, and I saw that he was dressed in old, stained muddy clothes – pig-skin leggings and an old battledress coat – with an unlit lantern in his hand. He was perhaps in his early twenties, with a light beard fringing his cheeks, a grey cap upon his head.

‘You’re out walking?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Well, who are you and what are you doing?’ The man struck me as a reprobate.

‘Who am I? I might be asking you the same, sir. Who are you? And what you be dwain? You a parent?’

‘No.’

‘Teacher?’

‘No.’

‘Who are you then, sir, and what you be dwain? You’re not from round here.’

‘No. That’s correct. My name’s Stephen Sefton and I’m here with Mr Swanton Morley, who is giving the Founder’s Day speech tomorrow.’

‘Is that right?’

‘Yes. And you are?’

‘I,’ he said slowly, ‘am Abednego.’

‘Ha!’ I couldn’t help but laugh. ‘Really? And you don’t happen to have two brothers named Shadrach and Meshach I suppose?’ He did not answer. He now stood no more than a few feet away from me, staring at me hard. I could smell cider on his breath. ‘Well, and what’s your business here this evening, Abednego, if I might ask?’

‘I’m watching the comings and goings,’ he said.

‘I see. You’re the night watchman, then, or a porter?’

‘You might say that.’

‘So Dr Standish would be aware of your activities?’

‘Standish knows all about me. And we know all about him.’

‘Good,’ I said, not entirely reassured, but wishing to be in conversation with this odd young fellow no longer. ‘Well, I’m just unloading the car here …’

He had already turned and walked away.

The contents of the Lagonda eventually unloaded into the school entrance hall, I separated my own travelling items from Miriam’s and Morley’s and picked up the Leica, fancying that I might perhaps take some photographs of the buildings. But as I was about to do so a loud gong sounded, summoning the teachers to dinner. As they flooded through the hall I found myself caught up among them as they trooped towards the dining room. Alex, walking alongside Miriam, spotted me with the camera and paused on his way past.

‘Camera fiend are we, Mr Sefton?’

‘I just take a few photographs,’ I explained. ‘For Mr Morley’s books.’

‘I’m a keen photographer myself. We have a modest little darkroom down in the basement if you’d like to see it some time.’

‘Tomorrow perhaps.’

‘I think you’ll be impressed,’ he said confidingly. ‘I think we may have many interests in common, Mr Sefton.’ And then he swept Miriam before him into dinner.

CHAPTER 6
RECOMMENDATIONS OF WHERE TO VISIT

WE ENTERED A VAST HALL and shuffled up onto a dais, around a long oak refectory table that bore the scars of age and half a dozen wax-encrusted candelabras. The hall was suffering from a split personality: it was a room divided among itself. Below and beneath the grand oak refectory table on its dais, set at right angles, were rows of rough pine trestles and cheap steel chairs, clearly of an inferior kind. The walls sported crude brown-painted wainscoting below, but vast swathes of old William Morris paper above. There were enough fireplaces to be able to warm the place on the coldest of evenings, and a scattering of three-bar electric fires which might do no better than warm the feet. Exquisite crockery and cutlery were laid on our table, along with battered enamelware jugs and chipped, thick glass tumblers. The unmistakable sweet smell of wax and polish: and the underlying stench of sweat and cabbages. All the usual contradictions, in other words, of the English public school.

Mr Woland Bernhard and his excellent and idiomatic English

I found myself next to the maths master, a Mr Woland Bernhard, who was possessed of boyish good looks and tremendous enthusiasm. He was also German: ‘But not of the bad kind!’ he was quick to point out. He spoke, of course, excellent and idiomatic English. ‘Yes, yes,’ he insisted, when I gestured to take the space next to him, ‘take a pew, take a pew.’ Before we had a chance to take our proverbial pews, the headmaster spoke.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, we are privileged to have with us this evening my dear friend Mr Swanton Morley, known to many of you no doubt as the People’s Professor. One might say that Mr Morley is in the same business as us here at All Souls: the education of the ignorant and the—’

‘Ineducable,’ quipped one of the teachers, to the delight of many of the others.

‘Thank you, Mr Jones,’ said the headmaster. ‘As you know, I invited Mr Morley here to give tomorrow’s Founder’s Day address’ – there was some mumbling and grunting around the table at this, I couldn’t tell whether in approval or disgust – ‘our very first Founder’s Day at our magnificent new location here at Rousdon. I wonder if Mr Morley might like to say the grace for us?’

There was no need to ask: never one to miss an occasion for preaching or performance, Morley ceremonially bowed his head, took a deep breath, and delivered a faultless grace. In Latin, naturally:

Exhiliarator omnium Christe

Sine quo nihil suave, nihil jucundum est:

Benedic, quaesumus, cibo et potui servorum tuorum,

Quae jam ad alimoniam corporis apparavisti;

et concede ut istis muneribus tuis ad laudem tuam utamur

gratisque animis fruamur;

utque quemadmodum corpus nostrum cibis corporalibus fovetur,

ita mens nostra spirituali verbi tui nutrimento pascatur

Per te Dominum nostrum.

‘Very good,’ said my mathematician friend, settling into his chair. ‘A classicist, your friend?’

‘Of a kind,’ I agreed. Morley’s stock of Latin tags, sayings and graces was seemingly inexhaustible, though his precise grasp of the grammar of any language other than English was, according to some critics, rather uncertain. He did not believe, for example, in what he called ‘traditional grammar’, propounding instead what he called a ‘theoretical grammar’, which he thought applied to all languages equally. This meant that he spoke Spanish as if it were English, and French as if it were German. He was also extremely disparaging of anything resembling what he called ‘punctuational patriotism’, insisting at all times on using only the very simplest of punctuation marks: he despised my frequent recourse to colons and dashes, which he felt were entirely unnecessary and a barrier to world peace and understanding. His ideas on the subject – which can be found in Morley’s Modern Multilinguist (1928) – had been formed through his correspondence with Mr Ludwik Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, and a man who Morley regarded as a kind of secular saint.

‘Now, do tell me, what do you think of our new school, Mr Sefton?’ asked my new German friend, whose manners and whose grammar were both impeccable.

‘It is quite lovely,’ I said, not untruthfully, ‘what I’ve seen of it.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed, cracking open a starched but rather stained napkin and tucking it into his shirt collar. ‘You are correct. It is lovely. And tomorrow you will enjoy also the farm and the dairy and the pumping house. You may know we also have a bowling alley, for the boys, and a rifle range. Tennis courts. And our own little observatory.’

‘Really?’ I said, not paying much attention to him. I was too busy watching Miriam across the table: she was busy flirting with Alexander.

‘We have everything we need here. It is our own little community.’

‘Very good,’ I said.

‘And Dr Standish is our leader,’ he added.

‘Yes.’

‘An excellent headmaster,’ he said. ‘Despite what some people say.’

‘I see.’ Parts of this conversation I must admit I missed entirely.

‘A headmaster must exert total control over a school. Otherwise …’

His ‘otherwise’ trailed off rather, at the very moment at which plates of soup were set before us, and I looked away from the playful Miriam and Alexander and returned my attention to my mathematical friend.

‘Sorry? You were saying?’

‘Otherwise …’

‘Uh-huh. “Otherwise”?’

‘Otherwise? Well. A good leader must be feared and respected,’ said my friend, factually. Perhaps because of his accent, or perhaps because I hadn’t been listening closely to what he was saying, I wasn’t entirely sure if he was referring to the school or to a nation. ‘But. A glass of our modest vin de table, Mr Sefton?’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

He poured and we shared a toast.

‘To knowledge!’ he said.

‘Indeed.’

‘Now, eat!’ he said.

I had a bellyful of People’s Mints and a day of Morley behind me. I did not argue.

Dishes were served and conversations undertaken. At the head of the table, deep in reminiscence, Morley and the headmaster carried on like long-lost brothers. The meal itself was a curious affair. Dr Standish was apparently a recent convert to the cause of vegetarianism, and was determined that all meals in the new school were to be prepared with ingredients from their own farm. Setting the example, he dined, therefore, on a small dish of carrots and a bowl of new potatoes that looked particularly dull and surly – grey-brown, speckled, about the size of bantam eggs, and rather few in number. For the rest of us, however, there were plates of steak, grilled lamb and whole chickens, fresh bread and pats of butter the size of cricket balls: a veritable feast.

On my right sat the school nurse, the woman who had greeted us on our arrival, a Miss Horniman. She was a young, round neurotic thing who wore Harold Lloyd glasses and picked at her food absent-mindedly like a schoolgirl and who kept telling me how terribly lucky she was to have a job at the school, and how brilliant and creative were all the staff, particularly Alexander, of course, with whom she occasionally exchanged glances across the table – just as I exchanged glances with Miriam – and with whom she was clearly in love. Her paean to All Souls, to its staff and pupils, and to the extraordinary Alexander in particular soon became rather tiring.

‘He takes photographs you know,’ she said. ‘He’s terribly modern and up-to-date. He’s taken photographs of all of us here in the school.’ I momentarily entertained an image of her lounging on a divan, her innocence protected with a carefully draped Chinese shawl, or perhaps a strategically placed puppy, her eyes glowing like ruby sparks behind the Harold Lloyd glasses, and Alex hovering over her greedily with his lens …

‘Really?’ I said. ‘I also take photographs—’

‘And he paints,’ she said. ‘He’s influenced by the surrealists, you know.’

‘Yes. He certainly looks like a man who might be influenced by the surrealists.’

‘And he makes sculptures – clay models. Bronzes.’

‘Is there no end to his talents?’ I asked. This was not, I must confess, intended as an entirely serious question, but Miss Horniman took it entirely as such.

‘Really, I don’t think there is,’ she said, ‘he is so extraordinary.’ She then duly launched into a list of his various other accomplishments, including his athletic prowess, his culinary skills – he was reputed both to be able to boil spaghetti – ‘Italian spaghetti!’ she exclaimed – and to make a fine mayonnaise – and his amazing ability on the recorder. ‘And he plays the organ!’ she concluded. ‘He writes his own tunes!’

‘He is like J.S. Bach himself,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she agreed.

‘Crossed with Pablo Picasso and Auguste Escoffier.’

‘Exactly like J.S. Bach crossed with Picasso,’ she said. ‘And Escoffier! Exactly!’

All the time, opposite us, Alex and Miriam continued deep in conversation, Miriam occasionally looking across the table in my direction, with what could only be described as a mischievous glance.

Tearing through a slice of perfectly pink lamb, I turned back to my German friend, Woland, who proceeded to discourse enthusiastically upon his love of the English countryside, explaining that he had hiked the length and breadth of Devon with nothing but his trusty knapsack on his back and the goodwill of the local people to guide him. Unaware of the torrent of tiresome trouble I was about to unleash, I then foolishly revealed that we were here not just for Founder’s Day but were intending to explore Devon for the second volume of The County Guides series, and I asked, innocently, if perhaps he could recommend anywhere that we should visit? This was a terrible, terrible mistake.

In later years I learned not to mention our purpose to others, in case what happened then happened again – though of course it often happened anyway. Everywhere we visited during our time together working on the books we found people excessively proud of their counties, as though of some prize cow, or a local cheese, and intent upon offering recommendations of where to visit in order best to enjoy the local delights. It was like listening to parents extolling the virtues of their children – which is to say, deeply tiresome.

‘Ah!’ said Woland, flexing his fingers in preparation for what was clearly going to be a serious bout of totting up. ‘Recommendations of where to visit?’

‘Yes, that would be very helpful, if you have any.’

‘Beer,’ he said definitively.

I thought I’d misheard him.

‘Beer?’ I said. ‘No thank you, I’m fine.’ We were by this stage in the meal drinking a red wine so sweet that it might almost have been used for communion.

‘Nein! Nein! Nein! Beer. Beer?’

‘Beer?’

‘A fishing village, not far from here, just a few miles. Surely you know Beer, Mr Sefton? I thought it was famous in England? The stone from Beer, it has been used in the Tower of London?’

‘Of course. The stone from Beer, yes, used in the—’

‘And it has a lovely sheltered bay.’

‘Good.’

‘And white cliffs – and a stream that runs down the main street, leading to the beach.’

‘Sounds absolutely lovely.’

‘And of course the caves.’

‘The caves?’

‘Yes, the quarry caves. Would you prefer for me to write this down?’

‘No, it’s fine. I can remember, thank you.’

‘Good. So. When they have quarried the limestone it has left these … what would you say? Caves?’

‘Caverns?’

‘Yes, caverns. Used for smugglers. Wonderful. The stone of Beer was first quarried for the Romans, I think.’

‘Really?’ I rather wished I was drinking beer, rather than hearing about it.

‘Very big underground rooms, chambers. The rooms are the reverse image, you see, of the great halls and cathedrals quarried from them.’

‘Yes, that does sound very interesting,’ I said, feigning enthusiasm.

‘Where else?’ wondered my friend. ‘Where else would you like to visit?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘I think we probably have an itinerary that will see us through …’

He called across the table to a thin man, Mr Jones, a Welshman, who had earlier made the quip about the ineducable, and who was now engaged in the business of dismembering half a chicken. Woland explained to him the purpose of our visit.

‘Beer, Jon. They are visiting Beer. But where else should they visit?’

‘The Royal Oak at Sidbury?’ said the hilarious Jon Jones, the Welshman, pausing momentarily in his chicken-parting. ‘And the Turks Head at Newton Poppleford?’

‘Not just pubs, Jon!’

‘Only joking,’ said Jon, obviously, his mouth now full. ‘What about the caves? They should probably visit the caves.’

‘Yes, I have already suggested the caves,’ agreed my German friend. Jon Jones the Welshman had by this time nudged the woman on his left, and explained our purpose to her, and she had dutifully nudged the person on her left, who had explained our purpose to them, and etcetera, until soon I had recommendations from almost everyone seated at the table. In south Devon alone we were encouraged to visit Branscombe (‘Thatched forge, terribly pretty, longest village in the country’), Budleigh Salterton (‘You simply must go to Budleigh!’), Colyton and Colyford. Exmouth. Seaton. Shute Barton Manor. Ilfracombe. The moors. Great houses. Battlements. Tudor gatehouses. The usual.

Fortunately, by the time we had reached dessert – of which there was an abundance, including huge fruit flans of cherry, raspberry and apple, with bowls of thick cream – I had managed to move the conversation forward. Unfortunately, the conversation we moved forward towards was education, a topic of course of great importance but frankly of strictly limited conversational interest, but upon which and about which my dear German friend, mid-flan, was very keen to offer his many insights.

‘You see, with teaching it is as it is with cooking, Mr Sefton.’ He clapped his hands together as he spoke, and then paused to ladle more cream into his bowl. ‘First’ – he clapped again – ‘you take your boy, yes?!’ He chuckled. ‘Some young barbarian with all the qualities of the natural savage – raw, if you like, yes? A hard apple, perhaps? Or a nut. A sour cherry. And then you chop him up, and you break him down, and you add your spices and your sugar and cream, and you combine him with all these other ingredients and – voilà!’ He held a spoonful of fruit flan aloft. ‘He becomes this delicious, delightful new thing. A young man!’

‘Quite,’ I said.

‘Good enough to eat!’ pronounced Woland, eating his spoonful of creamy flan.

Miriam called across the table; she had been taking a quiet interest in our conversation.

‘You do know Mr Sefton was a schoolmaster himself for a long time. Isn’t that right, Sefton?’

‘No?’ said the German, his mouth half full. ‘But you should have said! You know exactly what I am talking about.’

‘Well, perhaps not quite—’ I began.

‘And then he went to fight in Spain,’ said Miriam. Unfortunately, this announcement coincided with a sudden lull in the table’s conversation.

‘Spain?’ said Alex.

‘See any action?’ asked Jon Jones the Welshman.

‘A little,’ I said, which was the answer I gave to anyone who asked such a stupid and offensive question.

‘Perhaps you’d be prepared to instruct the boys in a little rifle shooting?’ said Jon Jones. ‘We have an excellent little cadet corps here.’

‘No, thank you,’ I said.

‘Signalling, perhaps?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘Ah, that’s such a shame. We took some of them to a camp at Aldershot last year. Do you remember, Bernhard?’

‘I do, Jon, yes.’

‘Yes, a great success,’ said Alex. ‘Great success.’

Our conversation, unfortunately, was now the conversation of the table.

‘Perhaps we could persuade you to assist the boys with some PT?’ said Dr Standish, from the top of the table. ‘Alex is on a mission to get our boys fit, aren’t you, Alex?’

‘I am indeed, Headmaster.’

‘We were all rather shamed, I think, by our dismal showing at the Olympic Games. Can’t let the Germans take over, can we – with apologies, Mr Bernhard.’

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