Jamaica Inn

[Spoiler alert – don’t read on if you do not wish to have the major plot-twist of Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier revealed to you.]

“Bodmin is the greatest and wildest stretch of moorland in Cornwall … I came unprepared for its dark, diabolic beauty. People say that my fictional characters seem to emerge from the places where my stories are set, and certainly when I first set eyes on the old, granite-faced inn itself it made me think there was a story there, peopled with moorland folk in strange harmony with their background.”

So wrote Daphne du Maurier (in Daphne du Maurier’s Cornwall) about the Jamaica Inn, a moorland pub/hotel located in a hamlet called Bolventor which is just off the A30 in the middle of Bodmin Moor, about mid-way between Launceston and Bodmin (both of which have at some point served as Cornwall’s county town). It’s about a mile away from Dozmary Pool, a small lake which some say was the lake where King Arthur received his sword Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake. But I digress; back to the Jamaica Inn. Although much altered over the years (it’s been renovated considerably since du Maurier’s time), the current building dates back to around 1750 although there’s been an inn on the site since at least the 1540s, serving as a staging-post for the changing of horses on stagecoaches travelling on the London-to-Penzance road which, as the A30, went straight through Bolventor until a by-pass was built in the 1970s. I cannot say what it is like as a pub, for I, like many a traveller in the West Country, have only ever used it as a brief stopping-point on the way home, as a last place to get a coffee and a few Cornish souvenirs before heading back across the Tamar.

It is, of course, famous today for being the main venue for Daphne du Maurier’s famous novel Jamaica Inn. Daphne du Maurier first visited the Jamaica Inn in the early 1930s at the suggestion of a friend of hers, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch – a prolific writer, known as ‘Q’, best remembered today for being the editor of The Oxford Book of English Verse. She ended up going there with Q’s daughter, and while staying there they decided to ride a few miles across the moor to visit someone. Unfortunately the weather turned, and in rain and fog they got lost – in the end, they resorted to leaving the reins loose and hoping that the horses would lead them back to the inn, which they eventually did.

It was her stay at the Jamaica Inn that inspired her to write the novel of the same name, her second, which was published in 1936. In early nineteenth-century Cornwall, Mary Yellan, a farm girl from Helford in the south-west of the county, goes to live with her aunt and uncle after the death of her mother. Her uncle, Joss Merlyn (who she has never met before) is the landlord of the Jamaica Inn, and even before Mary gets there on “a cold grey day in late November” we readers get the impression that all is not well at the isolated roadside inn. The coachman initially refuses to go beyond Bodmin, and it’s only after Mary tells him that she’s the landlord’s niece that he is reluctantly persuaded to take her there, and he’s very cagey as to why (“Jamaica’s got a bad name … Respectable folk don’t go to Jamaica any more”).

Strange things are indeed happening at Jamaica which, despite being on the main road, has no passing trade. Joss Merlyn is a violent drunkard (although, as he points out during one of his drinking-sessions, “I’m not drunk enough to tell you why I live in this God-forgotten spot”; that comes later), while his wife – the sister of Mary’s late mother – is a timid, almost ghost-like figure. The only activity is at night, when horse-drawn waggons occasionally arrive to unload vast amounts of goods at the inn (the passage in which Mary witnesses this from her bedroom window is particularly good). Then there’s the late-night drinking-session that occurs when strange men come from all over Cornwall, and which ends with Joss Merlyn ordering the murder of one of the men. Mary assumes that her uncle is heavily involved in smuggling – with the inn being used to store contraband that’s been landed all over the county – but it is actually worse than that. For Uncle Joss is not involved in smuggling but wrecking – the act of deliberately luring ships onto the rocks of the northern Cornish coast, and then murdering survivors and stealing whatever the ships are carrying.

Meanwhile, there’s Bodmin Moor itself, for this is a tale as much of a place as it is of people. All around Jamaica Inn and its nefarious goings-on is the brooding presence of the moor – “a silent, desolate country … vast and untouched by human hand; on the high tors the slabs of stone leant against one another in strange shapes and forms, massive sentinals who had stood there since God first fashioned them”. Like her creator, Mary Yellan goes for a walk out on the moor – she gets lost, and is saved (more or less) by the local vicar.

Ah, the vicar. The Reverend Francis Davey, who happens to be an albino, is the vicar of the nearby village of Altarnun (like the Jamaica Inn, a real place, located in the north-eastern edge of Bodmin Moor). He comes across as being a kindly man, but all is not what it seems. For it is the vicar who is the real villain of Jamaica Inn, the unlikely brains behind Joss Merlyn’s brawn. He’s only revealed as the leader of the wreckers towards the end, of course, after Mary finds a picture of his in which he depicts himself as a wolf preaching to his congregation who are shown as sheep.

I really enjoyed Jamaica Inn, even though reading it ‘blind’ – not knowing who the real villain of the piece is – is difficult, as the story is so well-known. Would I have seen that twist towards the end coming had I not already known that the vicar was the bad guy? It’s impossible to say. I’d’ve liked to have seen more characterisation of said villain, though, but that’s not really possible when his true identity is revealed so late in the novel (and, as we shall see, revealing him as the baddie-in-chief earlier would’ve ruined the whole thing). Part of me wonders if it might have worked better had du Maurier made Mary Yellan the narrator rather than telling the story in the third person. From my own perspective, though, the main thing I was wondering about was how the evil vicar compares to another fictional man of the cloth who turns out to be heavily involved in activities of a nocturnal and highly illegal nature.

I refer, of course, to Doctor Syn. How does the Vicar of Altarnun measure up against the Vicar of Dymchurch? It’s rather hard to say, for Doctor Syn (similarly not revealed as the smuggler leader until close to the end of the original novel in which he appeared) got to return in six adventures that fill out his considerable back-story – for which we readers must be thankful that Russell Thorndike’s acting career did not pan out as he’d hoped, forcing him back to writing novels. Daphne du Maurier, of course, was (unlike Thorndike) a novelist first and foremost, and she never saw any reason to return to the characters of Jamaica Inn (although it would be great to have had a sequel about how Mary’s relationship with Jem Merlyn pans out after they leave Cornwall at the end). Plus, of course, it is easier to make a smuggler leader into a sort-of hero (in a Robin Hood way) than it is a wrecker leader, given how the latter activity involves a lot of cold-blooded murder (or did it? This, I feel, is something that should be explored in greater depth in another ‘Historic English crime’ piece!). So, as far as the Reverend Davey is concerned, he’s a more out-and-out villain than the Reverend Doctor Syn for that reason, but we have just a few hints at how a man of God came to be the leader of a gang of wreckers: “I am a freak in nature and a freak in time. I do not belong here, and I was born with a grudge against this age, and a grudge against mankind. Peace is very hard to find … I thought to find it in the Christian Church, but the dogma sickened me”. There are also hints at an obsession with paganism which might, if dealt with in any more depth, tie in with the elemental nature of the moor (“I have stood in the church at midnight, Mary, and listened to the silence; there is a murmur in the air and a whisper of unrest that is bred deep in the soil and has no knowledge of the church and Altarnun”), but no more. At the end, the Reverend Davey remains a bit of an enigma, just like Rachel in My Cousin Rachel. And it’s the enigmatic bit that makes Daphne du Maurier’s characters linger in the memory long after you’ve finished reading her books.

Even the ones you already know about, for Jamaica Inn has been adapted several times. Unfortunately, a couple of the more high-profile adaptations haven’t been particularly good, with the film and TV people failing to do the novel justice. There was that BBC adaptation back in 2014, which didn’t go down too well thanks to the almost-inaudible dialogue; the 1983 ITV version, with Jane Seymour as Mary Yellan and Patrick McGoohan as Joss Merlyn, is much better. And then, back in 1939, there was the Alfred Hitchcock version.

Jamaica Inn was to be the last British film to be directed by Alfred Hitchcock before he moved to Hollywood (decades later, he would return to his native London to make Frenzy). It wasn’t one of his better efforts. Problems began when he had to comply with Hollywood’s Production Code, which frowned upon negative depictions of the clergy – meaning that the Reverend Davey was replaced as the villain of the piece by a local squire called Sir Humphrey Pengallan (the English gentry, of course, was fair game). Hitchcock then managed to do away with much of the novel’s tension and suspense. This, one suspects, was mainly because Charles Laughton, the actor who played Sir Humphrey, was also one of the film’s producers and demanded that his character have more lines (Laughton had a lot of pull in the British film industry back then, having won the Oscar for Best Actor a few years previously for playing the title role in The Private Life of Henry VIII). This forced Hitchcock to have him revealed as the baddie sooner than planned. Daphne du Maurier didn’t like it, to the point that she apparently considered withholding the film rights to Rebecca, which had been published a year earlier. Thankfully, she relented, and Rebecca was made into a film by Hitchcock in America a year later.

When gulls attack

They warn you about the seagulls in Falmouth.

If you’ve got food and are eating it at an exposed place like the quayside, there is every likelihood that the gulls will attack you and steal your food. I’ve heard talk of it in the pubs and the B&Bs, and I have seen it for myself – a young chap who’d got his dinner from the chippy (Harbour Lights, the best one in town) and was heading for a bench with a view out across the harbour when a gull swooped (swept?) down and hit him on the back of the head. He dropped his food, turned round to see who’d hit him, and when he turned back the main part of his dinner – a battered sausage so hot you could still see the steam coming off it – had gone, along with quite a few of the accompanying chips.

The good people of Falmouth – Britain’s most south-westerly port and a great place to visit – do not like the seagulls. They’d rather like there to be a cull, or some sort of means of keeping gull numbers under control, and earlier this year a West Country MP even managed to ask a question in the House of Commons about whether gulls could be culled. The answer was no, because internationally most species of gull are declining in numbers as there is less and less food for them at sea; perhaps that is why so many of them have started to look inland for something to eat. One species, the Herring Gull, has even made it onto the RSPB’s ‘Red List’ of threatened bird species, while the rest are on the ‘Amber List’ as their numbers have moderately declined over the last few years. Not that that’s any consolation to the lad who had his battered sausage nicked … by a Herring Gull.

There are four species of gulls that you will most likely encounter in this country. There’s the Herring Gull, which is easily recognisable with its light grey back and wings and the distinctive yellow beak with a red spot. It will go just about anywhere for food; my copy of the RSPB Handbook of British Birds (third edition, 2010) describes it as having a “wide range of food, from offal and carrion to seeds and fruits … eats the young and eggs of other birds, catches small mammals, scavenges on shorelines and rubbish tips”. Smaller is the Black-headed Gull, so-called for the chocolate-brown hood that it has during the summer (don’t ask). Although they’re gulls, they’ve been fairly common inland for as long as I’ve been birding. And then there are the two black-backed ones, the Lesser Black-backed Gull (which has a dark grey back and wings) and the Greater Black-backed Gull (this one, our biggest gull, does indeed have a black back and wings). The Greater Black-backed Gull can be really vicious – it “hunts in a variety of ways and takes a wide range of food. Kills and eats young seabirds … robs others of their food, will catch fish or feed on carrion, either in the water or washed up on the shore … has been observed scavenging road kills. It will kill and eat mammals, such as rabbits.”

Although I’ve been told that gull attacks have been on the rise, they’re not a new thing by any means. At least, not in Cornwall. Back in the early Fifties, Daphne du Maurier wrote a short story, ‘The Birds’, about what happens when the birds – not just the gulls, but the crows and all manner of little garden birds – somehow co-ordinate attacks on people; “birds that by nature’s law kept to their own flock and their own territory, and now, joining with one another in their urge for battle”. Seen from the point of view of a Cornish farm labourer who tries to defend his family against the attacks, it’s a tale of suspense in which no-one seems to realise that, somehow, evolution is turning against mankind: “As he jumped the stile he heard the whirr of wings. A black-backed gull dived down at him from the sky, missed, swerved in flight, and rose to dive again. In a moment it was joined by others, six, seven, a dozen, black-backed and herring mixed … Covering his head with his arms he ran towards the cottage. They kept coming at him from the air…”

Some say that Daphne du Maurier got the idea for this story after seeing someone attacked by a gull in St Ives, but the lady herself told the following story (in Daphne du Maurier’s Cornwall) of how ‘The Birds’ came to be: “Walking down from Menabilly to the farm one day, I caught sight of the farmer on his tractor ploughing the fields, a cloud of screaming gulls circling above his head, and thought, ‘Supposing the gulls attacked!’ That picture started the brewing process...”

Alfred Hitchcock later made it into a famous film, and although he set that film in California (he being based in Hollywood) the fact remains that the original story is set, and was inspired by something that Daphne du Maurier saw and subsequently thought, in Cornwall.

I am not quite sure where the story about Daphne du Maurier witnessing someone being attacked by a gull in St Ives comes from, but to many it does ring true, for the gulls who frequent St Ives are to this day regarded as the worst offenders in terms of attacking people for food. Woe betide anyone who tries to eat their pastie while walking alongside the harbour there! It has to be said, though, that their Falmouth equivalents are catching them up.

They warn you about the seagulls in Falmouth.

There's something about Rachel

Last year, work took me first to Rotherhithe and then to a farm outside Rickmansworth. By ‘work’, I am in this context referring to being a film extra; Rotherhithe was where I went for the fitting and Rickmansworth for the filming. The fitting was done in under an hour, as is usually the case, and the filming – rather unusually – was over before lunchtime. Such was my very modest contribution to the movie My Cousin Rachel, and for what it’s worth a mere couple of seconds of the scene I was in made the final cut.

[Spoiler alert: if you have neither seen the film My Cousin Rachel nor read the novel of the same name, be prepared to have key plot details (including the ending) revealed to you if you continue reading this blog-post. You have been warned.]

Naturally one feels obliged to go to the cinema to see the films one is in (or in this case the films one might have been in, had the director decided that the flashback scenes required a couple more minutes than they ended up getting), and as My Cousin Rachel is based on a novel I also felt obliged to read said novel. So, for the first time in my life, I sat down and read a Daphne du Maurier novel. I’ve seen and enjoyed film versions of her work before – Rebecca, The Birds, Don’t Look Now – but I’d never read one of her books. Until last month. For the record, My Cousin Rachel was first published in 1951 and this is not the first time it was made into a film (that was in 1952, and I have not seen that version).

“They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the old days. Not any more, though.” 

The opening lines both grab the reader and give the first hint of murder, and hints of murder are what this story is all about. The opener is followed by a description of a decaying body (that of a convicted murderer) encased in a gibbet, and after the first few-dozen pages one of the main characters is dead in what are presented as suspicious circumstances. Ambrose Ashley is central to the plot despite being dead, for it is the manner in which he died that is at the heart of My Cousin Rachel. He is the one who raised Philip – his orphaned cousin, the novel’s narrator – on the family’s Cornish estate in a curiously female-free environment; a man content with avoiding the company of women and yet one who suddenly decided to marry his other cousin, the titular Rachel, when he met her when he went to Italy for his health. His death not long after marrying Rachel is the event that drives the rest of the novel.

It is young Philip who, via a rather alarming letter and an all-too-late trip to Florence, has to come to terms with Ambrose’s death at the same time as coming to terms with the existence of this mysterious female cousin on whom he has never laid eyes. Rachel, of course, comes to Cornwall and Philip’s feelings towards her are confused enough before he receives further communication from the late Ambrose in the form of letters or fragments of letters that surface throughout the novel. Philip’s only friend, Louise (the rather sensible daughter of his rather sensible godfather and the girl who everyone appears to have assumed he would one day marry), can only stand by and occasionally provide the voice of reason as he veers between feelings of hatred and infatuation towards his beguiling, enigmatic cousin Rachel.

It’s one of those books that has stayed with me since, mainly due to the ambiguity over the central question: Did Rachel kill Ambrose? Well, did she? Du Maurier does well to keep the reader guessing even after the end by providing no definitive answer. Even at the end, we do not know for sure. At first I was convinced that she had killed him, then I wasn’t so sure, then I was absolutely certain and then at the end doubts resurfaced once again.

Rachel, of course, is not the type to do something as rash as incriminate herself – assuming, of course, that she has anything to incriminate herself about, she being to all intents and purposes the grieving widow who has come to see her late husband’s estate that he was always talking about. Therefore, all Philip has to go on are the afore-mentioned letters which occasionally appear and his own gut instinct, and neither of these can be considered to be entirely reliable. The reliability of what cousin Ambrose says in his letters about Rachel trying to kill him is brought into question by Rachel herself, who tells Philip about his deteriorating mental state prior to his death; but then, if she did indeed kill Ambrose she would of course have a vested interest in making sure that the content of his letters is discredited as the ravings of a diseased mind. As for Philip’s gut instinct – well, he’s a bit of a fool is Philip, first building Rachel up to be an evil murderer before he meets her, and then making an idiot of himself as he falls for her despite what he thinks about her supposed role in his beloved cousin’s death.

A good farmer and a competent manager of a country estate he may be, but boy is Philip Ashley useless when it comes to interacting with a woman (the shortcomings of Ambrose’s unconventional way of raising him become clear as events take their course). Philip presents a string of pearls (a valuable family heirloom) to her as a Christmas present, only to be forced to take them back. Although Ambrose left the estate to him and not Rachel, he signs everything over to her despite being advised not to. He then becomes convinced that having sex with her equates to a successful proposal of marriage; this turns out to be particularly humiliating as he doesn’t bother to clarify the situation with Rachel before telling everyone that they’re engaged. The involvement of Rainaldi, the shady Italian lawyer who Philip mistrusted on sight in Italy and who over the course of the plot turns up in Cornwall, adds to Philip’s frustration and confusion; rather like Doctor Watson and Bertie Wooster, he is not so much an unreliable narrator as a narrator who doesn’t have all of the facts to hand (but unlike them, he has no Holmes or Jeeves to explain things and put things right).

It’s only when Philip himself falls ill, with symptoms not unlike those that affected Ambrose, that he (on recovering) veers back to his original hypothesis regarding Rachel’s involvement in Ambrose’s death, and for good measure it looks as though she might have been trying to do away with him too. All that tisana that she insists on making for Philip looks rather suspicious (a special brew just for him?), but he and by extension we cannot be sure even though there is strong circumstantial evidence (those laburnum seeds, “poisonous to cattle, and to men”) to suggest that this may have been the method by which she did for Ambrose.

But enough doubt remains. Rest assured, though, that we readers and viewers are not the only ones in the dark. A revealing line in Daphne du Maurier’s Cornwall shows that the author herself wasn’t entirely sure about Rachel’s guilt: “I have often been asked whether Rachel was really guilty of murdering Ambrose or whether it was in Philip’s mind. I cannot answer the question. One moment I thought, ‘Well, I wonder if she is?’ and the next moment I was not at all sure. What is certain is that our past will not be buried, for it is alive, with us and within us.”

As My Cousin Rachel nears its climax, one of the characters is on the same wave-length as the author, and it’s not the narrator: “‘If there is no proof,’ said Louise, ‘you cannot condemn her. She may be innocent. She may be guilty. You can do nothing. If she be innocent, and you accused her, you could never forgive yourself. You would be guilty then, and she not at all ... I wish now we had not meddled with her things.’”

This makes Philip’s actions at the end all the more questionable. Although he cannot be sure of Rachel’s guilt, he is nevertheless prepared to send her to her death by encouraging her to go for a walk in the terraced garden without warning her that the newly-installed bridge is merely decorative and not in any way load-bearing (in the movie, he encourages her to take the horse for a ride on the top of a cliff that he knows to be dangerous; the effect is the same). With Rachel dead, the question of her guilt must go unanswered; suspicion is and was always tempered by doubt. But it does raise the issue of Philip being responsible for Rachel’s death; does him sending her out into the garden (or onto the cliff) without warning her of the dangers make him guilty of murder? It’s tantamount to manslaughter at least, and Louise clearly suspects worse (“‘What have you done?’ she said; and apprehension came upon her, conviction too.”).

What is not in doubt is the fact that My Cousin Rachel is a thoroughly engrossing read; the question of whether or not Rachel is a murderer is frustratingly left unanswered, but conversely that is in itself what makes the book so fascinating; had du Maurier provided a definite answer one way or the other, I suspect it would not have remained in my mind some two weeks after I had finished it.

And the film? Well, it was well-acted (especially by Rachel Weisz as Rachel) but it had a predictable feel to it that the novel did not. In addition, I wasn’t overly impressed with the way in which the film-makers contrived to provide Philip with a happy-ish ending (marrying Louise, no less) after the death of Rachel, rather than the ambiguity concerning his fate that du Maurier provided by repeating those haunting first lines at the end; as a reader I was left with a very real sense that, for all the question-marks about Rachel murdering Ambrose, there is much in those last few paragraphs to suggest that Philip’s fate is to be thought of as the murderer of Rachel; why on Earth would Louise or anyone else marry such a man?

So there we have it. Much to my surprise, I find myself at the age of 38 teetering on the brink of becoming a fan of Daphne du Maurier. Naturally I will have to read some more of her books before I can be sure of this new departure in my literary tastes, and following a recent trip to Cornwall which involved stopping at a certain old coaching inn on Bodmin Moor I have an idea about what the next one will be…