The coronavirus diary, or continuing to read...

What with being on furlough, I have been continuing to get through the unread novels on my bookshelf…

I was rather looking forward to The Shadow of Doctor Syn. This was the last of Russell Thorndike’s  adventures about the Reverend Doctor Christopher Syn, that fascinating fictional character who is a vicar by day, a smuggler leader by night and a former pirate captain; sadly they have long been out of print (my version is a paperback from the Sixties that originally sold for two-and-six). Although it’s the last published Doctor Syn novel, the action takes place shortly before the events of the original novel, Doctor Syn: A Tale of the Romney Marsh (all of the follow-up ones were prequels). It’s the time of the French Revolution, and the talk in fashionable London is of two things – the Terror in France and the continuing exploits of the Scarecrow, that smuggler extraordinary who is still able to bring bootleg brandy over the Channel and whose reward has gone up to £1,000 (the reader is, of course, aware from the start that this the Scarecrow is Doctor Syn’s alter ego). Captain Foulkes, a bully of a man who cheats at cards but gets away with it because his opponents are afraid to challenge him to a duel, makes a bet that he can bring the Scarecrow to justice; when he makes his way down to Romney Marsh, he’s in the same horse-drawn coach as a certain vicar…

What follows is all rather fun, up to a point. There’s the usual hapless troop of dragoons down on the marsh trying and failing to beat the smugglers. Jimmy Bone, the highwayman who’s in league with the smugglers, is at one point obliged to don the Scarecrow costume so that smuggler leader and vicar can be seen together. Doctor Syn goes across to France and, as L’Épouvantail – the Scarecrow’s French alias – he gets the better of Robespierre himself (as The Scarlet Pimpernel was an inspiration for Doctor Syn, I presume Thorndike had been toying with this one for a while). Lord Cullingford, a young nobleman impoverished by Captain Foulkes to the point where he goes to Romney Marsh to try and capture the Scarecrow himself (and thus claim the reward money), is talked out of this course of action by Doctor Syn and ends up joining the dragoons before they get posted abroad.

And yet. This is one of the later books and it shows, for Thorndike is not just going through the motions but actually repeating himself. The officer in charge of the dragoons is Major Faunce, a name that has been encountered before although this one is actually the brother of the original. Captain Foulkes’s nickname, ‘Bully’, has been used before (it was applied to a character in an earlier novel whose fate was, as it happens, the same as this one’s). Finally, a major plotline of The Shadow of Doctor Syn is the story of the squire’s youngest daughter Cicely, who falls in love with the vicar while becoming fascinated with the Scarecrow, a repeat of what happened to another daughter of the same squire in an earlier adventure, Doctor Syn Returns. Much though I like the Doctor Syn books, the fact that Thorndike ended up re-hashing old plots means that this was ultimately not as enjoyable as I’d hoped.

Following that, I tackled an archaeological thriller from the Seventies which has (also) long been out of print but which I was able to find going cheap (on the £1 stand outside my local second-hand bookshop; back in 1976, it went for £3.75 brand new). The Pontius Pilate Papers is a novel by Warren Kiefer, an American film director who also wrote a few novels but who is rather obscure given that he often used an alias. The main character (and narrator) is Jay Marcus, a somewhat unlikable millionaire playboy who trained as a doctor but is content to spend his time (and money) indulging in his passion for archaeology. He’s endowed a museum in Jerusalem and the adventure starts when an archaeologist who works for that museum gets murdered; the dead man had previously discovered some Roman papyrus scrolls while excavating a site at Caesarea and had been rather secretive about the content of these, which shed new light on the actions of a Roman official stationed in Jerusalem during the first century AD. There are no prizes for guessing who – the clue’s in the title – but this new evidence will inevitably call in to question the Biblical account of the events leading up to the Crucifixion. The scrolls have of course been stolen, and by the end of the third chapter our hero has managed to get lucky with Nicoletta, the dead archaeologist’s beautiful Italian assistant. Everyone else – the museum director, another benefactor who appears to be just as rich as Jay and a seemingly shifty museum employee – is a suspect.

The action of The Pontius Pilate Papers flits from Israel to Paris, Vienna, London and Oxford, during which Jay and Nicoletta have to contend with an array of (mostly) two-dimensional characters. There are cops from several countries who aren’t sure what’s going on (not helped by Jay and his uncle Aaron choosing not to keep them fully in the picture), bitchy academics, bitchy academics’ wives who like to start drinking early, a somewhat ridiculous antiquarian book-dealer and private detectives who are either reckless, incompetent or who moonlight as international film stuntmen and provide Jay with an extra woman when he has to spend the night away from Nicoletta. One of the British cops was called Sergeant Battle, which I presume to be a nod to Agatha Christie who had a recurring police character in some of her books called Superintendent Battle.

I had originally bought the book because I like thrillers which revolve around a potentially very dangerous secret – and, given when this one was published, it would be not so much sub-Da Vinci Code as pre-Da Vinci Code. But it never quite takes off. Jay, the protagonist, is both unsympathetic and unconvincing. There are a few sequences that rather jar, being either implausible or long-winded. There are also parts – descriptive sequences as well as character descriptions – that have not aged well at all. By the time the villain of the piece was revealed I no longer cared (although the fact that I had guessed, and guessed correctly, at said villain’s identity before I was half-way through may have had something to do with this). Finally, the wrapping-up of the plot was spoilt a bit by a final twist on the last page. Here, I think, is one to forget.

There followed much better fare courtesy of Agatha Christie. Sparkling Cyanide is an enjoyable murder mystery which centred around the murder of an upper-class heiress by way of cyanide administered in a glass of champagne at a dinner party (hence the title). This method of murdering someone, by the way, is identical to the murder in the Nero Wolfe mystery Champagne for One, although a quick bit of research told me that Sparkling Cyanide was first published in 1945 and Champagne for One in 1958. Thus, Rex Stout was copying Agatha Christie, not the other way round. 

Everyone initially assumes it was suicide, the victim having been depressed for some time prior to her death. However, a few months later her husband starts to receive anonymous letters hinting that it was murder. He therefore decides to repeat the dinner party with the same guests at the same place on the anniversary of his wife’s death, only to meet the same end as his wife. It falls to Colonel Race (a military intelligence officer who’d previously assisted Hercule Poirot in Death on the Nile) and the original victim’s sister’s boyfriend to work out what’s been going on and try to prevent a third murder. A good read, in which all of the supporting characters are well fleshed out, each of them with a convincing reason for wanting the original victim dead. Recommended.

The coronavirus diary, or things to do at home: re-arranging books and reading them

Looking for something to do, and feeling that it was about time I off-loaded some surplus books (never a shortage of those in our house!), I went through my bookshelves last week and came up with a dozen or so that I read ages ago and have no plans to re-read again, especially given that I still have plenty of unread ones. So, such classics as The Day of the Jackal, Royal Flash and The Wench is Dead went to the communal bookshelf at East Finchley Tube station, for the delight of those essential workers who are still relying on public transport and those who pop into the station during their out-of-the-house daily exercise breaks to pick up a copy of Metro.

I then sorted out my remaining books, looking for the ones that I have acquired over the years but not got around to actually reading (everyone has this problem, right?). Now I have all of my unread books ready to go – this picture merely shows the fictional ones! 

Depending on how long this lockdown business lasts, I might finally get around to reading Lorna Doone and Bleak House – although I’ll probably go for The Shadow of Doctor Syn and at least one of the Agatha Christies before either of those...

I started on my unread books with a point of order – regarding the John Buchan book, The Strange Adventures of Mr Andrew Hawthorn & Other Stories (which I had myself picked up from the communal bookshelf at the Tube station). This recent Penguin Classics Buchan anthology contains 18 of JB’s short stories, eight of which I already have thanks to my owning both volumes of The Best Short Stories of John Buchan so I felt that this one was a bit of a cheat. None of these volumes, by the way, contains the Buchan short story that made it into The Penguin Book of the British Short Story from Daniel Defoe to John Buchan; all I can deduce from that is the obvious observation that JB wrote a lot of well-regarded short stories! My plan here, I decided, was to read through the JB short stories that weren’t in the books that I already own (if that makes sense). I particularly enjoyed the titular one, a very Buchan-esque piece about a man who steps out of his house one morning ... and is neither seen nor heard of for the next five years.

As for The Penguin Book of the British Short Story from Daniel Defoe to John Buchan, this is an anthology covering the British short story from the age of Swift and Defoe to the early twentieth century, with works by 36 authors. I’ve been dipping into it at leisure. Some names are familiar to me, others less so. Having enjoyed some of Rudyard Kipling’s short stories in the past, I made a bee-line for his one, ‘The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat’ (a lively read, and a story that I feel has great contemporary relevance in the age of fake news and concerns over the extent of the influence of the media; worth comparing, I feel, with Buchan’s ‘The Last Crusade’). I then chose an unknown (to me) author at random, and thus found myself enjoying ‘Holiday Group’, the tale of a vicar and his wife taking their young family on a holiday to the seaside by E.M. Delafield.

Then it was an immersion into the murky world of Tudor politics courtesy of Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel’s sequel to Wolf Hall. At just under 500 pages it’s a long read even though it covers a short time-frame, from September 1535 (the point at which Wolf Hall left off) to the execution of Anne Boleyn the following year. I do like the revisionist portrayal of Thomas Cromwell, particularly how he deals with the ever-fascinating and ever-dangerous Henry VIII; the part where the King is knocked unconscious during a joust and everyone fears that he has died – this at a time when it was considered treason to speculate on what would happen in the event of the King’s death – is a particular highlight. Then there’s Cromwell’s interaction with the courtiers who think that the low-born Master Secretary (the son, as is often mentioned, of a Putney blacksmith) is beneath them, just like they thought the same of Cromwell’s former mentor Cardinal Wolsey whose ghost haunts the life of his protégé. Oh, how they underestimate him! It’s no coincidence when, as Cromwell moves to bring down Anne Boleyn once it becomes clear to him that the King’s now got eyes for Jane Seymour, he makes sure to take down four noblemen who openly mocked Wolsey after his downfall. Heavy going? Yes, for there is much detail here. That it is very well-researched and very well-written I do not dispute, but although I enjoyed parts of Bring Up the Bodies I do feel that, when it comes to intrigue in the reign of Henry VIII, the Shardlake novels are probably more to my taste.

A lighter read, next. Well, physically lighter at any rate, for Rasselas (full title: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia) by Samuel Johnson comes in at 150 pages and about a fifth of that is the introduction (this being the early Eighties Penguin edition, original retail price £1:60). I am something of an admirer of Samuel Johnson, having volunteered at Dr Johnson’s House in the City (and even visited his birthplace in Lichfield) but I had never previously read this, his only novel which I bought – if memory serves – from the 50p shelf of a second-hand bookshop in Winchester. According to Boswell, Johnson wrote Rasselas in a week in order to pay the costs of his mother’s funeral, although unfortunately some scholars have cast doubt on whether this was actually the case. The story features characters from Ethiopia (formerly known as Abyssinia) which also piqued my interest (since I went there myself on my African odyssey); Johnson himself was not entirely unfamiliar with this country, one of his earlier works being the translation of a book by a Portuguese missionary who’d been there in the seventeenth century. 

The titular Rasselas is a young and idealistic prince, raised in a comfortable-yet-isolated community in the mountains known as the happy valley. He is, for want of a better word, bored with his pampered and carefree existence in the valley and desires to see the wider world and find what it is that makes people happy and contented. So, in the company of his sister Nekayah, her servant Pekuah and a well-travelled poet-philosopher called Imlac who acts as a mentor to the others, Rasselas escapes from the happy valley and travels to Cairo. They meet various people from all levels of society, among them a hermit (who, far from extolling the virtues of a life of solitude as might be expected, decides that he wants to go back to the city), a philosopher who disappoints Rasselas by failing to practice what he preaches (“be not too hasty, said Imlac, to trust, or to admire, the teachers of morality: they discourse like angels, but they live like men”) and an astronomer who, although initially taken to be wise, is in fact mad (“perhaps”, opines Imlac, “no human mind is in its right state”). A visit to the Pyramids goes badly when Pekuah, who hadn’t wanted to join the others by going into the Great Pyramid, gets kidnapped – leading the others to reflect on guilt and loss before she is returned to them. Eventually, in the final chapter (entitled “The conclusion, in which nothing is concluded”), they decide to return to Abissinia after realising the futility of their search; complete happiness is, they have found, elusive.

It would be a mistake to assume that Rasselas is a travel story, though. It’s an examination of the human condition, with particular reference to the pursuit of happiness and the age-old question of whether (so to speak) the grass really is greener on the other side. Somewhat cynical about optimism while also reflecting on mankind’s seemingly infinite capacity for hope, it’s definitely worth reading, and I feel that it’s a book that can be returned to again and again. And there are, of course, some great Johnsonian pearls of wisdom to be had here, among them:

“A man used to vicissitudes is not easily dejected” (ch. XII – yes, he used Roman numerals for the chapters!)

“Of the blessings set before you make your choice, and be content. No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting is scent with the flowers of the spring: no man can, at the same time, fill his cup from the source and from the mouth of the Nile” (ch. XXIX)

“Our minds, like our bodies, are in continual flux; something is hourly lost, and something acquired … do not suffer life to stagnate; it will grow muddy for want of motion: commit yourself again to the current of the world” (ch. XXXV)

Three recently-read modern thrillers

Here are a few of the books I’ve been reading recently. Funnily enough, although these are all modern works set in the modern world, John Buchan crops up in my thoughts on all three of them, sometimes incidentally as I do like to use his definition of a thriller – ‘shocker’ would’ve been the term he used – being a story that marches “just within the bounds of the possible”, although in one case I reckon there’s a nod to the man himself. The fact that I am currently reading The Gap in the Curtain is of course coincidental.

The Righteous Men by Sam Bourne (2006)

Will Monroe is a half-English, half-American journalist, raised mostly by his mother in England after his parents split up. After studying at Oxford, he goes to the land of his father (a judge) to be a post-grad at Columbia and then work for the New York Times. A reporting assignment on a seemingly routine murder in a dodgy part of Manhattan takes on a new angle when someone has something good to say about the victim, a pimp who on one occasion pawned most of his possessions in order to give money to a woman who would otherwise have become a prostitute. For his next assignment, Will’s off to the Pacific Northwest to report on some flooding although he ends up reporting on another murder – this time a survivalist nutter in Montana who, it turns out, had previously donated one of his kidneys anonymously. Although they were rather unsavoury characters, both victims had performed selfless acts of generosity that led them to be described as ‘righteous’. Then Will’s wife gets abducted. This leads him into the world of the insular Hasidic Jewish community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where he’s introduced to an old Jewish legend about the well-being of the world being held up by thirty-six ‘righteous’ men who can exist anywhere in the world, and who often try to shield their inherent good nature; when one dies, a new one is born and so there are always thirty-six men making sure that the rest of us are OK. Trouble is, someone’s figured out who they are and is trying to murder them all between the Jewish holy days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in order to bring about the end of the world. This is the premise at the heart of The Righteous Men, a sub-Da Vinci Code thriller by Jonathan Freedland, a Guardian journalist writing under the somewhat Dan Brown-esque pseudonym of Sam Bourne. Will is aided by two friends, a computer geek and an ex-girlfriend called TC who he initially goes to because he needs to understand more about Judaism and she’s the only Jewish person he knows, but it just so happens that she was raised in Crown Heights before leaving that life behind to become a highly intelligent if slightly kooky artist (here I started to feel that the old Buchan rule about ‘shockers’ marching just within the bounds of the possible was being not so much stretched to the limit as broken). Amid a rising body-count, Will and TC try to figure out what’s going on via a series of cryptic text-messages sent by a person unknown (they think it’s someone Will met from within the Hasidic community, but after he gets killed the messages keep coming so it must be someone else). When the twists eventually come, they’re rather predicable but by this point I was over half-way through so I felt I had to carry on to the end – this is the sort of novel in which you just know that the people who Will initially thinks are behind the murders can’t possibly be the actual people responsible, and the climactic reveal of the Leigh Teabing figure who’s the evil genius behind it all doesn’t really come as much of a surprise, to be honest. Perhaps ‘generic’ is the word I’m looking for here, and at well over 500 pages it’s a tad over-long too. Would I be interested in anything else that this author has to offer? Probably not.

Shattered Icon by Bill Napier (2003)

Harry Blake is an antiquarian book-seller in Lincoln whose usual dull routine is interrupted by Sir Toby Tebbit, a minor aristocrat with whom he’s had dealings in the past, coming to him with an old manuscript that he’s inherited from a distant relative in Jamaica of whose existence he’d been unaware. As to the content of the manuscript, it’s been written in some sort of code. Unfortunately, some bad people are after said manuscript and will stop at nothing to get hold of it – before long, Sir Toby is dead (not by natural causes) and Harry becomes a fugitive as he tries to decode the manuscript with the help of Zola, an old friend of his (and an expert in maritime history, no less). As it gradually gets decoded, the manuscript becomes the story-within-the-story, relating to the adventures of a low-born but well-educated Scotsman called James Ogilvie who went to London and ended up as a sailor on the ill-fated Roanaoke expedition – a real-life unsuccessful early attempt to establish an English colony in what’s now North Carolina during the reign of Elizabeth I. It turns out, though, that there was an ulterior motive behind establishing said colony – all to do with a new calendar devised by the mathematician/astrologer/alchemist John Dee (an alternative to the Gregorian one; Dee, an advisor to Elizabeth I, really did come up with a Protestant alternative calendar although it was never implemented) which somehow required someone to be at the 77 degrees west line of longitude even though no-one knew how to figure out longitude back then. Into this mix is added a secret plot by England’s Catholics to wreck the whole thing, this act coinciding (they hope) with a successful outcome of the plot to put Mary Queen of Scots on the English throne. An ancient religious icon (a piece of wood that everyone believes to be a fragment of the cross on which Jesus was crucified) is at the heart of the mystery. Back in the present day, Harry and Zola are joined by Sir Toby’s daughter Debbie on a trip to Jamaica which becomes a race to find the icon before the afore-mentioned bad people – a group of decidedly nutty but seriously violent religious fanatics who are plotting an all-out religious war – can get their hands on it. At times, the plot twists are a tad eccentric, but they stretch rather than break the Buchan rule in the way that thrillers do these days thanks to Dan Brown even if this book, while being quite fun to read, wasn’t quite up to that standard. I did wonder if Napier had originally intended this to be an Elizabethan adventure, only for him to turn this into a story within a modern-day framework narrative, what with the prospect of religious war being a topical theme in the post-9/11 world and a modern plot concerning an ancient religious legend or (in this case) item being topical too in the early-to-mid-2000s thanks to The Da Vinci Code (which was published in the same year as Shattered Icon which, by the way, was published as Splintered Icon in the USA which makes more sense given what said icon is). But hey, it had me glued to the point where I was reading it into the wee small hours which is always a good sign where novels are concerned (assuming, of course, that I was genuinely interested and not just unable to sleep, not that I was really in a position to make a judgement call on that as it was too late, or rather too early, at the time). I was, though, amused to discover a discrete reference to Buchan himself amid the excitement – James, our Scottish Elizabethan sailor, hails from a Lowland village called Tweedsmuir, which was the title Buchan took when he was elevated to the peerage.

The Fifth Gospel by Ian Caldwell (2016)

I’d not previously heard of Ian Caldwell, and to be honest I only really picked up this book because it wasn’t long after I’d finished Conclave by Robert Harris (which I enjoyed right up to the last plot-twist, which I felt took things a step too far than they perhaps should have gone, violating the Buchan rule but not as much as Sam Bourne did) and quite fancied another Vatican-based thriller. This one doesn’t involve a papal conclave but I was intrigued by the information provided by the blurb on the back which stated that the protagonist is a Greek Catholic (Eastern liturgy but part of the worldwide Catholic church) priest who lives in the Vatican; that genuinely intrigued me. So – The Fifth Gospel. It is 2004. A mysterious exhibit is being planned in the Vatican Museum, but with a week to go before it opens the exhibit’s curator gets murdered at Castel Gandolfo, the Pope’s summer residence outside Rome. At the same time, the Vatican apartment of the victim’s one-time research partner is broken into. Said one-time research partner is our protagonist (and also narrator), Father Alex Angelou, who takes it upon himself to investigate who’s behind the murder and the break-in; also, his brother, who was largely responsible for his upbringing, has vanished and he reckons (correctly) that this is not coincidental. The brother, Simon, is also a priest – albeit a Roman Catholic, not a Greek Catholic, one (their family is of a mixed religious heritage; their father was a Greek Catholic priest, while on their mother’s side Uncle Lucio is a Roman Catholic cardinal). Thus are two brothers shown as a microcosm of the split in Christendom between Western Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy that forms the backdrop of this novel which also takes in the titular fifth gospel – a work known as the Diatessaron which combines elements of the four gospels and which the curator had been studying in some depth – and its links to a certain controversial holy relic. Father Alex’s quest for the truth takes him to all corners of the Vatican, including one memorable scene in the underground car park where he has to hide in the Popemobile! Admittedly that part sounds a bit ludicrous, but believe me Caldwell pulls off the trick of making it sound just about plausible or, if you prefer, within the bounds of the possible. This is compelling stuff, with Caldwell not just providing us with a highly believable murder mystery which is also religious thriller which has an interesting protagonist (Father Alex), in addition to which there’s a vivid picture of the insular world of the Vatican at the time when John Paul II’s papacy was drawing to a close (the ailing Pope himself is an unseen character until very late on, which works well). Even the persistent use of the present tense, which I sometimes find annoying, seems to work well here, and it definitely passed the reading-into-the-small-hours test. Out of the three books I’m looking at here, this is the one I would recommend the most, by some considerable distance.

Thoughts (and reading) on the World Cup

Football has a tendency to throw up the unexpected at times. When the World Cup started, for example, I hadn’t realistically expected that I would be sitting here with the semi-finals coming up and having to get my head around the prospect that England could actually do this. I’d reckoned on the quarter-finals (although I had, in a betting pool in which I’m taking part, predicted that England would get to the semi-finals – a rash and overly optimistic act, or so I thought), with a view to the team using that as a point from which to improve in time for the 2022 tournament.

I’m used to tabloid-fuelled unrealistic expectations pre-tournament, and I have over the years become cynical enough to distrust such hype, but this time there was not much by way of it; recent experiences like the 2014 World Cup and the Euros two years ago will do that. Now, the sense of optimism that has developed has been based on what the England team has done on the pitch. Some people started to believe that football might be coming home after the 6-1 win over Panama; yes it was only Panama, but when did England last put six past anyone at a World Cup? Never, that’s when (for those of us who’ve sat through such stuff as that awful 0-0 draw with Algeria back in 2010, to be five up at half time was very heaven). Even the defenders have been scoring in addition to Harry Kane. Out came the replica heavy-cotton red shirt with the three lions badge.

For the knock-out stage, there was the small matter of winning a penalty shoot-out, another thing that England have never previously managed to do at a World Cup (following which I hugged three complete strangers, one of whom had just completed a victory dance on a table), and all of a sudden we were into the last eight, in addition to which Germany, Argentina and Portugal were already out and all that stood between England and the World Cup final were Sweden, followed by Croatia or Russia.

How can one not dare to dream in such circumstances?

The Sweden game, billed in advance as a tough one, was class, a game in which England never looked like losing (not that that’s stopped us before, and it required some good defending and goalkeeping as well as those two goals at the other end). Optimism and hope surge to the surface; there is a very real sense that, wonderful though it’s been so far, the best is yet to come. When was the last time that I was this optimistic about England at a World Cup, or any tournament for that matter? Probably after the second-round demolition of Denmark in 2002, even though we had Brazil next, back then. Now it’s Croatia in the semi-final. 

The semi-final of a World Cup! This hasn’t happened since I was in primary school, and we are now at the point where there are Internet memes involving ‘Three Lions’ being incorporated into everything from The Matrix to Only Fools and Horses. I’ve even played that song (the original Euro ’96 version, not the 1998 re-write) to a minibus full of tourists from overseas. More than once. One of them sang along. Did I think that this would be happening when the tournament started, less than a month ago? No I did not.

Watching the football aside, I’ve just finished reading a book about the England team. It’s called Fifty Years of Hurt and it’s by the football journalist Henry Winter, a writer of much experience who I’ve always found to be one worth reading (he did twenty-odd years at The Daily Telegraph before getting snapped up by The Times in 2015, which you could say provides more evidence for what Private Eye’s been saying about the Torygraph for a few years now with regard to it getting rid of its decent journos). The book’s title should be enough to tell you that it was published in 2016, just before the European Championships to be precise (the run-up to a major international tournament is always a good time to bring out a new book about football); I, for what it’s worth, picked up the hardback copy in a charity shop for a couple of quid, a bargain given the undoubted quality of the author and the fact that the original retail price is given on the dust-jacket as £20.

Worth reading? Oh yes. On picking it up, I assumed that it would be a chronological account of England’s post-1966 woes, but it’s not that. It’s more a thematic study, taking in many interviews with players (Alan Mullery, Steven Gerrard, Ian Wright, Jack Charlton, Alan Shearer, etc, etc) as he looks at diverse aspects that seek to explain why England haven’t won anything since 1966 (expect Le Tournoi, the France ’98 warm-up tournament which doesn’t really count). There are penalty shoot-outs, of course (“Fifty years of hurt are pockmarked by 12 yards of hurt. Names and shoot-out dates hang like tattered regimental flags over the battlefield of tournament football”), along with discussions about academies, the ‘bubble’ in which England players become ensconced (a source of much ridicule; “I think of players’ past failures to open their eyes to the world outside the Bubble, embarrassing episodes” – like at the 2010 World Cup, which the squad mainly spent in “a retreat surrounded by high-wire fences … so cut off from the tournament in South Africa it could be South Mimms … England want seclusion, to be able to train in peace, but they miss out on the World Cup party”), ‘flair’ players both of the English and foreign varieties (“analysis of the fifty years of hurt must pay due homage to the merchants of menace who wreck English ambitions … Maradona, [Cristiano] Ronaldo, Pirlo and Suárez provide a painful reminder to English football of an obligation to breed world-class performers who spread sustained distress among opponents … England’s inability to deal with that special quartet also underscores the importance of adopting a more sophisticated game-plan to stifle them”) and of course the pervading importance of what Winter calls ‘the Show’, by which he means the Premier League which dominates all as far as English football is concerned.

Much of the emphasis is from the Nineties onwards, which ties in with the years in which Winter himself has been following England. He seems to skip effortlessly through the years, back and forth as required. the chapter on the mistrust or mis-use of English ‘flair’ players goes directly from Glenn Hoddle as a player to Glenn Hoddle as the England manager at France ’98. My one quibble is his constant use of the present tense which can get a little confusing when he’s digressing from present (2016) to past, but other than that it is worth a read, one of those book that anyone with an interest in the England football team should take a look at.

He touches a bit on something that we’ve been hearing a lot of at this World Cup, about teams being ‘streetwise’. That’s the notion of not breaking the rules but bending or stretching them; for example, if you’re down after a challenge, stay down while the ref appraises the situation, and while he’s doing that several of your team-mates will be on at him to point out that a foul has been committed and ask what he intends to do about it. It’s not outright cheating but it certainly seems to be a way-point on the road to it; there is a fine line between a team being ‘streetwise’ and a team being just plain ‘dirty’. Nevertheless, some teams are very good at this sort of behaviour. England are not (“Although not averse to milking contact in the area to obtain penalties, England tend not to react theatrically outside the box”) and it has often worked against us. In Winter’s book, Michael Owen has some interesting things to say on this (with particular regards to the Beckham sending-off against Argentina in 1998), while Roy Hodgson has some wise words on it as well. Having been brought up on English football, I’m torn. I don’t really like this sort of behaviour (being ‘streetwise’ really is just gamesmanship by another name), but I’m enough of a realist to know that it is a part of the modern game that isn’t going to go away, and teams that have this streetwise streak to them do tend to do better.

What really surprised me about Winter’s book is how much this bloke actually cares. When switching the focus from the players to the supporters – not the armchair/pub ones like me but the ones (often supporters of lower-division clubs, tellingly) who part with more money than they probably have in order to travel the world to watch England – he writes of his pride in having “attended 250 England games on the spin, including six as a supporter when placed on gardening leave by the Telegraph. The thought of missing a game induces palpitations … I’ve been spat at by a fan outside Wembley for daring to criticize the team I admire most. I’ve had players’ parents vilifying me to my face, on the phone and via email for slating their offspring for underperforming for England. It’s all worth it. It’s a privilege to cover England, to travel the world from Sapporo to Rio and see them play, and to appreciate the passion they still inspire.” The passion comes out, and I like the writer all the more for that. Funny really, the fans don’t usually get to see the journalists as fellow-fans but in a sense that’s what they are, for the most part. However this World Cup pans out, I would love it if Henry Winter were to bring out a follow-up to Fifty Years of Hurt about Gareth Southgate’s England at Russia 2018.

One last point, that is not about Henry Winter’s book: the England-Croatia semi-final will also be a deciding match in the Unofficial Football World Championship (UFWC). This competition, which is not sanctioned by FIFA in any way, shape or form, uses a boxing-style method of deciding which team is the best in the world (ie. you have to defeat the reigning champion to become the champion). It was created in 2003 but has been back-dated all the way back to the birth of international football in the 1870s. Peru held the title going into the World Cup, only to lose the title to Denmark in the first round; as Denmark were subsequently knocked out by Croatia in the second round, they are currently the unofficial world champions although such is the nature of knock-out tournaments that whoever wins the World Cup on Sunday will (perhaps unknowingly) leave Russia as the unofficial as well as the official world champions.

Come on England. It’s coming home.

A visit to a ruined manor house in the Cotswolds

In the Cotswolds, the ruins of a medieval manor house can be found by the banks of the Windrush, a tributary of the Thames. Minster Lovell Hall is located behind St Kenhelm’s church in the Oxfordshire village of Minster Lovell (located between Burford and Witney) and it’s a pleasant place to visit and wander among the ruins if the weather’s nice. The place was built in or around 1440 and was used as a manor house until the mid-eighteenth century, after which is was partly dismantled and abandoned. The ruins are listed and administered by English Heritage, but there’s no charge to visit.

The original owners, after whom the hall and the village are named, were the Lovell family. The most interesting member of this noble family is the last of them, Francis Lovell, the ninth Baron Lovell who lived at the time of the Wars of the Roses. He was a friend of Richard, Duke of Gloucester – to whom he was also linked by marriage, their respective wives being cousins. Richard had him knighted in 1481, and when he seized power and became King Richard III two years later he upgraded the Lovell peerage; it was as the first Viscount Lovell that Francis held the Sword of State at his friend’s coronation. Lovell’s closeness to the King resulted in him being mentioned in a famous piece of doggerel which was posted on the door of St Paul’s Cathedral by a Lancastrian supporter in 1484:

“The Catte, the Ratte and Lovell our dogge rulyth all Englande under a hogge.”

To explain: the ‘hogge’ refers to Richard himself, his personal badge being a white boar. Lovell is of course ‘Lovell our dogge’, his coat-of-arms having included a silver wolf. The ‘catte’ and the ‘ratte’ were two of Richard III’s other principal supporters, Sir William Catesby and Sir Robert Ratcliffe.

Naturally, the fates of the King’s main followers were intertwined with his own. Richard III, as is well known, was killed at the battle of Bosworth Field in Leicestershire on 22^nd August 1485 – the last King of England to die in battle; what happened to his body afterwards would remain a mystery until 2012, when his remains were found underneath a Leicester car park. Ratcliffe died on the battlefield with his king, while Catesby survived, only to be captured and subsequent executed by the victorious Lancastrians (a notable descendant of his was Robert Catesby, one of the leaders of the Gunpowder Plot).

Lovell also fought at Bosworth, following which he was able to evade capture. He went on to become a leading figure in the Yorkist revolts that plagued the early part of Henry VII’s reign. He’s reckoned to have been behind an attempt to have Henry murdered at York in 1486, and a year later he played a leading role in the attempt to put the pretender Lambert Simnel on the throne – an attempt that came to an end at the battle of Stoke Field in June of that year. Lovell survived that battle too, but after that he disappears from the pages of history.

Some said that he lived in hiding for many years afterwards – and it is at this point that the history of Minster Lovell Hall crosses into legend. In 1708, the skeleton of a man was found in a secret chamber at Minster Lovell Hall, and it was assumed that that was the skeleton of Francis himself – who, so the story goes, hid out at his ancestral home with only one faithful servant who knew that he was there; the plan was that Lovell would be kept under lock and key with the servant bringing him food. Unfortunately for him, the servant died without letting slip about his master and so Lovell, locked in and with no-one left to bring him food, starved to death. It’s an interesting tale but it does seem unlikely, as Francis Lovell’s estates were forfeit after Bosworth, with the hall being given to Henry VII’s uncle, Jasper Tudor. Hardly somewhere for a Yorkist fugitive to go into hiding.

I was also interested in the place because the hall also has a literary association, playing a key role in John Buchan’s 1931 historical adventure The Blanket of the Dark which is set in the Cotswolds during the reign of Henry VII’s son, Henry VIII. This story, not one of Buchan’s better-known works but still highly readable if you like historical fiction and can get hold of a second-hand copy (I got an old Penguin one, original retail price 2s 6d), concerns a young Oxford scholar by the name of Peter Pentecost who is told that he is in fact the son of the Duke of Buckingham (Edward Stafford, who in real life was executed for treason in 1521). Buchan was always a master of describing the countryside in which his stories were set, and with The Blanket of the Dark he showed that he was as at home in rural Oxfordshire (for many years he lived in Elsfield, about three miles north of Oxford; his ashes are buried in the churchyard there) as he was in his native Scottish Lowlands. The ordinary people who appear in the novel – beggars, small farmers, foresters and suchlike – are treated with a high degree of empathy and, as is the case with Katrine in Witch Wood, there’s an intriguing but ultimately elusive love interest (as they usually are in Buchan’s novels; in this case, she’s called Sabine and one contemporary of Buchan’s was moved to comment that the one quibble he had with The Blanket of the Dark was that Buchan didn’t spice things up a bit with Peter and Sabine, but one can hardly have expected the son of a Free Church of Scotland minister to have done that).

Like many a fictional character before and since, Peter gets caught up in events that he cannot hope to control; at the time of the Pilgrimage of Grace, he becomes the subject of an ill-fated plot to put him on the throne which climaxes when king and pretender meet face-to-face at an abandoned Minster Lovell Hall after the latter has rescued the former from an over-flowing Windrush. Henry is portrayed in less-than-flattering fashion, with Buchan adding some compelling descriptions of him: “the face was vast and red as a new ham, a sheer mountain of a face ... this vast being had the greatness of some elemental force ... power of Mammon, power of Antichrist, power of the Devil, maybe, but someone born to work mightily in the world.” The Blanket of the Dark is a really good, perhaps even great, work of fiction that, although Henry VIII does make an appearance, focuses more on the ordinary people of rural England (the Cotswolds, specifically) than on high intrigue even though there is something of that; this is at heart a story of what Buchan succinctly called “a world of which there has never been a chronicle; the heaths and forests of old England”, and it’s the better for it.

Fools and Mortals: on and off the stage with Shakespeare's brother

Bernard Cornwell’s got a new book out, and I’m not taking about the latest instalment in the Saxon saga (or, as it’s now being billed thanks to the TV series, the Last Kingdom saga). It’s a stand-alone adventure set in Elizabethan England, and the protagonist is a brother of one William Shakespeare.

He’s not a soldier or a government agent or anything like that. The world of historical fiction does have a Shakespeare brother who’s a government agent, though – John Shakespeare, an entirely fictional older brother of the Bard who’s working for Sir Francis Walsingham to make sure that Elizabeth I is safe from assorted Catholic plotters who’d rather have her Scottish cousin on the throne. He is the creation of Rory Clements, who has set out to do for Elizabeth I’s reign what C.J. Sansom’s excellent Shardlake novels have done for that of Henry VIII – provide a series of thrillers (Revenger, The Queen’s Man, etc) that explore the more dangerous side of Tudor England. They’re not bad but there are a lot of Tudor-era thrillers around these days, and if you try to compare any of them with the Shardlake books then there’s only going to be one winner.

Bernard Cornwell’s latest is not about threats against the crown. It’s set on the stage, or rather in and around the world of the theatre, and the Shakespeare brother who leads the action does at least have the merit of being a real person. Well, based on a real person at least. Richard Shakespeare is the narrator of Fools and Mortals which is set in London in 1595. Little is known of the real-life Richard Shakespeare, a younger brother of the Bard who is thought to have spent most of his life in Stratford-upon-Avon and who predeceased his famous brother by three years. This, in a way, makes him an ideal candidate for being a character in a Bernard Cornwell novel as the author has a more or less blank canvas to play with. At Cornwell’s hands, he’s a bit of a tearaway who, rather than be apprenticed to a brutal Stratford merchant, ran away to London to become a ‘player’ like his brother, who was less than pleased to see him show up in the big city. He’s shown some talent for acting but he is in a bit of a rut; although a boy no longer, he’s only considered for the female roles in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. What with having to resort to the occasional act of petty theft to supplement his meagre pay, he is growing ever more resentful of his big brother (who, as is the case of William Shakespeare as depicted in Upstart Crow, is on the cusp of fame here).

Despite being disapproved of by Puritans, going to the theatre is very popular in Elizabethan London (theatre-goers come from all walks of life and seem surprisingly willing to suspend their disbelief for the duration of a play, which can last for several hours although Cornwell reckons that they would have been edited for performances in order to get them down to the two-hour mark). As audiences get bored with repeat performances of plays they’ve seen before, the playing companies are always in need of new material. Play manuscripts are therefore jealously guarded by the company (not the playwright) that owns them; other than getting closed down by the Pursuivants (quasi-official ruffians on the look-out for the merest hint of sedition against the Queen, this being less than a decade after the defeat of the Spanish Armada), the worst thing that can happen to a theatre company is a manuscript going missing.

One such company is the Lord Chamberlain’s Men – named for their patron, Lord Hunsdon (who, being a son of Mary Boleyn, is a cousin of Elizabeth I as well as being the Lord Chamberlain). Will Shakespeare originally joined them as an actor but has since become a partner of the company; he may not be the most handsome chap (as his better-looking brother often tells the reader), but he’s definitely the brains of the operation. He’s recently written a new comedy which will be performed indoors at his lordship’s grand-daughter’s wedding which, it is thought, will be attended by none other than Good Queen Bess herself. Funnily, he uses this play – A Midsummer Night’s Dream – to mock his fellow-actors, having written parts for them that allude to some of their foibles; brother Richard finally gets a male part, but it’s that of Francis Flute – the ‘mechanical’ who is disappointed to learn that he’s been given a female part in the play-within-a-play.

His resentment towards his brother is therefore higher than ever when the manuscript of Will’s recently-completed tragedy about two star-crossed lovers in Italy gets stolen, thus driving the plot of Fools and Mortals. This happens at around the half-way point, the first half having set the scene with plenty of detail about Elizabethan society and the politics of the time, with emphasis on theatres (which have to be outside the City of London; as the Globe won’t be built until 1599, the theatre where the on-stage action takes place is the, ah, Theatre, located off Bishopsgate) as well as sufficient background concerning how Richard ended up in London and why he resents his brother. He’s even been tapped up by a rival acting company, offering him male roles provided he steals his brother’s manuscripts, but has turned them down. But the very fact that he was approached means that the finger of suspicion points towards Richard, who must prove his innocence by figuring out who’s actually nicked it and then getting it back. The former is fairly straightforward, the latter considerably less so.

This is a pretty interesting departure for Cornwell, probably the best living historical novelist at the moment but one more associated with military adventures (in various historical periods). Fools and Mortals is more of a slow-burner than your usual Bernard Cornwell novel, and when the action does come there’s not actually a lot of it; those expecting a Tudor-era version of Sharpe or Uhtred will be disappointed. I liked it, though. There was plenty of historical detail (Cornwell, as ever, is second to none in this regard) and Richard Shakespeare made for an interesting and multi-layered character. William Shakespeare himself remains somewhat elusive, even a bit dislikeable – there’s little on why he has acted the way he has done to cause his brother’s resentment, and his domestic life is merely hinted at (he seems to have a mistress or two in London, while Anne Hathaway is back in Warwickshire with the kids). Perhaps it’s better that way. At least Cornwell is depicting William Shakespeare as the writer of Shakespeare’s plays; on top of having produced an engaging historical novel, he is fully deserving of top marks for refusing to buy into that ‘Shakespeare was written by someone else’ conspiracy nonsense.

Getting my name in print

The other day I got an email advising me of the fact that a couple of articles that I wrote for the excellent Londonist website have made it into print form by way of a new book that they have out.

Well, naturally we had to buy the book. Londonist Mapped is now on display in our lounge; a hardback with 96 pages, it’s a really cool book adorned with lots of lovely and fantastically-detailed hand-drawn maps that accompany some of Londonist’s best articles. On that particular subject, I’m pleased to say that my article about how London’s docks got their names has become ‘A Brief Guide to London’s Docks’ on page 16, accompanied by a map drawn by London-based artists Luke Agbainmoni, while a couple of entries from my one about how London’s castles and palaces got their names have made it into ‘Stately Homes of Southwest London’ on page 64.

It really is a superb book for anyone interested in London … but I say it who shouldn’t, of course!

Recent reads - four second-hand novels

A fascinating quartet of second-hand novels has been receiving my attention recently…

The Path of the King by John Buchan

Fan of John Buchan though I am, I sometimes come across works of his that I have not previously encountered; he did, after all, write a lot of books and not all of them are still in print. This one, The Path of the King (first published in 1921), comes in the form of a smart-looking red hardback which was published by Thomas Nelson (an Edinburgh publisher, which as well as publishing Buchan’s books employed him as a director; the Thomas Arthur Nelson to whom The Thirty-Nine Steps was dedicated was a descendant of the company’s founder in addition to being a friend of Buchan’s). Later described by Buchan himself (in his autobiography Memory Hold-the-Door) as “my first serious piece of fiction”, it is an interesting tale of how greatness in people can be transmitted down the family tree; sometimes, it  lies dormant for generations before re-igniting at the right time. The story begins with a prologue set some time after the American Civil War, in which three men around a remote campfire theorise on how the “spark” of “masterful men” can be found in the most unlikely places: “The things we call aristocracies and reigning houses are the last places to look for masterful men … who is more likely to inherit the fire – the eldest son with his flesh-pots or the younger son with his fortune to find? … The spark once transmitted may smoulder for generations under ashes, but the appointed time will come, and it will flare up to warm the world. God never allows waste. And we fools rub our eyes and wonder when we see genius come out of the gutter. It didn’t begin there.” I guess we modern folk would say it was all about genetics. This story begins with Biorn, a Viking prince, before jumping down a few generations to Jehan, a Norman knight – and so on. Rather like Buchan’s Sir Walter Raleigh, The Path of the King is less a coherent novel than a collection of short stories held together by a unifying thread or theme, which in this case is what happens to Biorn’s descendants down the centuries – men and women, some of them noble, some of them very ignoble indeed, all united by blood and by their possession of a family heirloom in the form of a gold ring, made from the amulet Biorn received from his father and which I suppose acts as the physical manifestation of the “spark”. They get caught up in events like the Norman Conquest, the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre and the Popish Plot, and they encounter real people like Joan of Arc, Sir Walter Raleigh, Oliver Cromwell and Daniel Boone. Eventually, the “spark” resurfaces in nineteenth-century America, in the form of Abraham Lincoln who is descended from Biorn on his mother’s side. He loses the gold ring, but it is no longer needed as it is he in whom the long-dormant “spark” will reignite – something his dying mother recognises. The epilogue has three men witness Lincoln’s funeral parade following his assassination; one of them (an American professor) remarks that “there goes the first American”, to which another (a British diplomat) replies: “I dare say you are right, Professor. But I think it is also the last of the Kings.” As novels go, this is very much one for those who are interested in history, and it reflects Buchan’s fascination with the New World and its ancestral links with the Old – particularly in his treatment of Lincoln and the admiration expressed for him by the British character at the end, which can be looked at in the context of people like Buchan looking to promote a spirit of cohesion between English-speaking peoples on both sides of the Atlantic. Reading this as an historical novel, it has to be noted that the the fact that so many real people and events over different centuries can be successfully woven into the plot in a way that it doesn’t feel like they’ve been crow-barred into it is testimony to Buchan’s great skill as an author.

The Courageous Exploits of Doctor Syn by Russell Thorndike

Having recently touched on this particular character when looking into smuggling on Romney Marsh, I was delighted to find a couple of old Doctor Syn paperbacks in a charity shop recently; the adventures of this most extraordinary of fictional clergymen, written by Russell Thorndike, ran to seven in total and have long been out of print. They make no claim to be great literature but as adventure stories they are most definitely up there with the exploits of (say) the Scarlet Pimpernel, Horatio Hornblower and Richard Sharpe. Published in 1939, Courageous Exploits was the fifth Doctor Syn book to be written, but if the novels are to be read in sequence it’s the fourth. By this stage in the series, the Reverend Doctor Syn is well established at Dymchurch as the much-loved local vicar and, under the identity of the ‘Scarecrow’, the ruthless leader of the Night Riders, the local smuggler gang (the secret of his identity is known only to a select few). Exasperated by the Night Riders’ continued success, the Admiralty has sent the ruthless Captain Blain down to Romney Marsh to defeat them and bring the Scarecrow to justice; his men are to be billeted in a local barn, while the captain himself moves into the vicarage! There follows a series of cat-and-mouse adventures, which could stand alone as short stories as well as parts of a coherent whole, as Blain tries to do his duty while Syn, or rather his alter ego the Scarecrow, rises to the challenge by growing ever bolder. A real historical person, the Prince of Wales (the future George IV), makes an appearance – as he does, funnily enough, in the adventures of the other three fictional heroes I have mentioned above. As is the case with “that demmed, elusive Pimpernel”, in Courageous Exploits HRH manages to encounter both Doctor Syn and the Scarecrow and respect the pair of them while at the same time remaining blissfully ignorant of the fact that they are the same person. This is good, old-fashioned adventure; a modern version would doubtless dwell more on the duality of Syn himself, the upstanding community leader who is also its most notorious criminal, and there would doubtless be a lot of trying to impose the values of the present onto late-eighteenth-century England which would mean that it would not be anywhere near as much fun to read. The Doctor Syn books may be out of print, but they are still worth looking into.

The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

As was the case with John Buchan, I first discovered P.G. Wodehouse when I was in my early teens, at first because of the superb Jeeves and Wooster TV series with Melchett and George from Blackadder – sorry, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie – in the title roles. They were brilliant in that, by the way, and it was but a short step from watching Jeeves and Wooster to discovering the books on which the series was based, of which the school library had a plentiful supply. Oddly, though, I never really progressed much beyond the Jeeves stories – the other Wodehouse creations, like Psmith and the Blandings crowd, didn’t really hold much appeal and while I have tried over the years to expand my horizons in the world of Wodehouse I always find myself coming back to the Jeeves stories. Maybe it’s because they are told in the first person, with that upper-class twit par excellence Bertie Wooster as the narrator, he being not so much an unreliable narrator but one who is not in full grasp of everything that’s going on. Luckily, though, he has Jeeves, the incredibly clever manservant who is able to extract his master, and at times his master’s friends, from the most unlikely and desperate of scenarios, allowing them to continue to amuse themselves, and us readers, at the Drones Club and various country houses. There are a lot of things going on in The Inimitable Jeeves, what with Bertie’s chum Bingo Little falling in love with every woman he meets, his rather scary Aunt Agatha trying to get Bertie married off at every conceivable opportunity, the mental-health specialist Sir Roderick Glossop (who, naturally, thinks Bertie’s off his rocker) putting in the odd appearance and his cousins Claude and Eustace (“the curse of the human race”) getting up to all sorts of shenanigans. Unlike some of the Jeeves books, The Inimitable Jeeves is actually not so much a novel as a collection of short stories (they first appeared in The Strand Magazine before coming out in book form in 1923), although some of them do follow on from one another. Some showcase Wodehouse at his best, with the humour deriving from the most unlikely sources. For example, ‘The Great Sermon Handicap’ is all about a group of young men, led by Claude and Eustace, placing bets on which of the local vicars in a corner of rural Gloucestershire will preach the longest sermon on a particular Sunday; naturally, Bertie and Jeeves get drawn into the mayhem that ensues. More of the same can be encountered in ‘The Purity of the Turf’ which involves bets being placed on, and attempts being made to rig, the races in a rural parish’s sports day (Mothers’ Sack Race, Choir Boys’ Hundred Yard Handicap, etc). There are some great set-pieces too, like the time Bertie has Sir Roderick for lunch on the same day that Claude and Eustace hide three cats and the top hat that they have stolen from Sir Roderick in Bertie’s flat, Bingo pretending to be a communist and Bertie actually getting one over on Aunt Agatha when the woman she’s been trying to set him up with turns out to be a jewel-thief. Finally, Bertie’s ongoing claim to be an author of romantic fiction under the pen-name of Rosie M. Banks (originally done in order for him to impress Bingo’s uncle so that he can persuade him to increase the ever cash-strapped Bingo’s allowance) gets exposed as a sham when it emerges that the woman whom Bingo has just married is not a waitress as he had supposed but none other than Rosie M. Banks herself. Only Jeeves can sort out this unholy mess. Hilarious.

Who Pays the Ferryman? by Michael J. Bird

The TV series of this name was before my time, but I’d vaguely heard about it from somewhere – it is set in the mid-to-late Seventies and concerns Alan Haldane, a middle-aged Englishman returning to Crete, the island where as a young man he spent part of the Second World War fighting in the mountains with the andartes of the Greek Resistance. He wants to try and reconnect with his wartime lover, but soon finds out that she is dead although she did bear him a daughter who is unaware of her true parentage. While many see ‘Leandros’ (Haldane’s nom de guerre among the andartes) as a returning hero there are a few who wish him ill because of what happened during the war. Seeing this in a charity shop, I was interested as I have previously read and enjoyed books about occupation and resistance during the War, both fictional (Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, The Guns of Navarone, etc) and factual (Ill Met by Moonlight, and for what it’s worth the real-life Kriepe kidnapping gets referred to in Who Pays the Ferryman?, the implication being that the fictional Haldane was somehow involved in this operation along with Billy Moss and Paddy Leigh Fermor). The novel version of Who Pays the Ferryman? is based on the TV series, not the other way round (Bird, whose TV dramas were usually set in the Mediterranean, wrote both). It is pretty good, although there are some annoying typos which might indicate that publication was a somewhat rushed job, the TV series having been very popular in its day (1977). As for the plot itself, a slow-burner of a relationship between Haldane and Annika, the sister of his old love (she being unaware that Haldane is her niece’s biological father, and he being reluctant to commit to her for that very reason) plays out alongside sub-plots like an Australian visitor trying to lay the past (in the form of his late Cretan grandfather) to rest, the sudden appearance of Haldane’s (English) ex and Haldane’s restoration of an old caique (sailing-boat), while in the background a vendetta against Haldane establishes itself. The characters are well-rounded and very believable. It’s a good story which shows us that war casts shadows which continue to fall long after the guns have stopped, and that while actions always have consequences, it can sometimes take decades for the consequences to make themselves known. I liked this book enough to find some episodes of the TV series on YouTube, and very good it is too.

Welsh rarebit, courtesy of Ainsley Harriott

Browsing in a charity shop a couple of weeks ago, I happened across a cookery book by Ainsley Harriott. Remember him? He was a TV cook back in the Nineties, appearing on shows like Can’t Cook, Won’t Cook and Good Morning with Anne and Nick. I recall that one year, Alex and I bought one of his books, Ainsley Harriott’s Barbecue Bible, as a birthday present for Dad. Like quite a few other things that were big in Britain in the Nineties, such as Frank Skinner and Red Dwarf, his star may have waned but he’s still doing stuff, having resurfaced on Strictly a couple of years ago (Frank Skinner and Red Dwarf, by the way, are also still going, although the former isn’t as funny as he used to be and the latter is on Dave rather than the BBC these days).

Ainsley is still keeping his hand in with the cooking, for the book that I found was a (relatively) recent offering, published in 2009 by BBC Books no less. Just Five Ingredients is just what it says on the cover, offering (so says the blurb) “a collection of mouth-watering dishes that use a maximum of five ingredients – perfect for the time-short, budget-conscious cook.” Funnily enough, that’s the concept behind Jamie Oliver’s latest book, so you could say that Ainsley is ahead of the curve.

On flipping through Just Five Ingredients I saw a few recipes that I liked the sound of, so I bought the book which now stands next to another recent acquisition, Rick Stein’s Long Weekends. The first recipe as made from the book was Welsh rarebit – cheese on toast, but with the cheese grated and made into a sauce of sorts before being put onto the bread and toasted. No rabbits are involved (much like the toads that are absent from toad-in-the-hole and the woodcock that doesn’t appear in Scotch woodcock), and quite why it’s spelt ‘rarebit’ rather than ‘rabbit’ I am not entirely sure, although this dish is the only time when ‘rabbit’ is spelt as ‘rarebit’.

What goes into the sauce as well as grated cheese is a matter for debate; looking through some of our other cook books, there are a few variations although Worcestershire sauce and mustard of some sort (usually but not always English) are common features. Nigel Slater (in Real Fast Food) complains of “mixtures that will not thicken or that turn irretrievably lumpy”; he reckons on adding butter and a couple of tablespoons of beer, with the result to be eaten “as a snack with the rest of the beer”. Delia Smith has a Welsh Rarebit Soufflé (in Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course) and Welsh Rarebit Jacket Potatoes (in Delia’s How to Cook: Book One); the former includes butter, flour, French mustard, milk, eggs and cayenne pepper, while the latter has finely grated onion and “1 tablespoon Red Onion, Tomato and Chilli Relish (see page 188)”. Jamie Oliver’s, which can be found in Jamie at Home, is not just Welsh rarebit but “Welsh rarebit with attitude”, containing eggs, crème fraiche and “4 tablespoons of cheeky chilli-pepper chutney (see page 321) or shop-bought chilli jam”; like Slater, he says it’s best to have it with beer. Common consensus is that the cheese to be used is Cheddar, although Slater hedges his bets; “Stilton or Cheddar have enough of a tang to be interesting, Caerphilly or Wensleydale less so”. Going way back, Mrs Beeton calls for Cheshire or Gloucester cheese (she, of course, was writing at a time before Cheddar became the nation’s cheese of choice); she didn’t grate it, advocating that the cheese be sliced, toasted and then have “a little made mustard and a seasoning of pepper” spread over it. Mrs Beeton also has a recipe for Scotch Rarebit which involves a contraption called a “cheese toaster with hot-water reservoir”.

Ainsley’s five ingredients are vintage Cheddar cheese, eggs, English mustard, Worcesteshire sauce and, or course, bread (as far as he’s concerned, salt and pepper aren’t counted among the five ingredients, which is fair enough). The cheese is grated, the egg is separated. The yolk, along with the mustard and the Worecestershire sauce, is mixed in with the cheese. Then the egg white is whisked into stiff peaks – on reading this I groaned, for here was a job for the electric mixer which would in turn involve more washing-up afterwards than I’d hoped. Anyway, once whisked, the egg whites are folded into the mix (just like in Delia’s soufflé; Jamie, by contrast, only uses the yolks). It’s then baked in the oven until “risen and lightly browned”.

The result was very nice indeed. On the basis of this, I shall be using other recipes from this book, or maybe even using this one for other recipes, for Ainsley says that it can also be used to cover his salmon fish pie “(see page 130)”, or for “an interesting twist on cauliflower cheese!”

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.