All posts tagged Kent

Miss Mapp by E.F. Benson (1922)

Anger and the gravest suspicions about everybody had kept her young and on the boil.
(Miss Mapp’s spiteful character, Chapter 1)

If there was a quality – and, indeed, there were many – on which Tilling prided itself, it was on its immunity from snobbishness.
(Comic irony, Chapter 2)

The correct attitude in Tilling was profound indifference to anybody of whatever degree who did not live at Tilling, and to anything that did not happen there.
(Chapter 2)

As far as she [Diva] was aware, passion, except in the sense of temper, did not exist in Tilling. Tilling was far too respectable.
(Chapter 6)

All semblance of manners was invariably thrown to the winds by the ladies of Tilling when once bridge began; primeval hatred took their place. The winners of any hand were exasperatingly condescending to the losers, and the losers correspondingly bitter and tremulous.
(Chapter 2)

Diva had ‘popped’ into the grocer’s. She always popped everywhere just now; she popped across to see a friend, and she popped home again; she popped into church on Sunday, and occasionally popped up to town, and Miss Mapp was beginning to feel that somebody ought to let her know, directly or by insinuation, that she popped too much.
(Chapter 2)

‘Our fair friends, you know, have a pretty sharp eye for each other’s little failings. They’ve no sooner finished one squabble than they begin another, the pert little fairies.’
(Major Flint on Tilling’s womenfolk)

There were smiles and smiles, respectful smiles, sympathetic smiles, envious and admiring smiles, but there were also smiles of hilarious and mocking incredulity. [Miss Mapp] concluded that she had to deal with the latter variety.
(Managing the malice behind social conventions, Chapter 7)

‘You wish to see me, Major Flint?’ she said, in such a voice as icebergs might be supposed to use when passing each other by night in the Arctic seas.
(Chapter 7)

When he first conceived of Miss Mapp, Benson was obviously following up the success of its predecessor comic novel, ‘Queen Lucia’. Only slowly did it dawn on him that these humorous books about monstrously snobbish women in English provincial towns offered a whole new subject. According to his biographer, Brian Masters, he realised that ‘his financial future might very well depend thenceforth upon his creation of monstrous women’ and that is indeed what happened, as he developed the Mapp and Lucia characters into a series which eventually consisted of six books and two short stories.

In the first novel, Emmeline Lucas aka Lucia lords it over the fictional village of Riseholme with its population of arty provincial ladies. Benson situated his new creation, Miss Elizabeth Mapp, in Tillingham, which is an only lightly fictionalised version of the twee tourist town of Rye, on the Kent coast.

Rye already had a reputation as being a bit of a writer’s resort, having played host to Joseph Conrad, Henry James and H.G. Wells among other luminaries. Obviously none of these appear in the book which is, instead, about the same kind of rivalrous, gossipy, bitchy women as ‘Queen Lucia’. With this difference: they’re poorer and nastier.

In the first couple of chapters Benson goes out of his way to describe how ‘straitened’ the circumstances of his little crew are. Lucia’s Risenholme set have dinner parties and evenings’ entertainments, they include an international opera singer and the local Lady of the manor. Elizabeth Mapp’s Tillingham circle is distinctly poorer and more constrained. Benson gives a detailed explanation why:

Dinner-parties entailed a higher scale of living; Miss Mapp, for one, had accurately counted the cost of having three hungry people to dinner, and found that one such dinner-party was not nearly compensated for, in the way of expense, by being invited to three subsequent dinner-parties by your guests. Voluptuous teas were the rule, after which you really wanted no more than little bits of things, a cup of soup, a slice of cold tart, or a dished-up piece of fish and some toasted cheese. Then, after the excitement of bridge (and bridge was very exciting in Tilling), a jig-saw puzzle or Patience cooled your brain and composed your nerves. In winter, however, with its scarcity of daylight, Tilling commonly gave evening bridge-parties, and asked the requisite number of friends to drop in after dinner, though everybody knew that everybody else had only partaken of bits of things. Probably the ruinous price of coal had something to do with these evening bridge-parties, for the fire that warmed your room when you were alone would warm all your guests as well, and then, when your hospitality was returned, you could let your sitting-room fire go out.

So their timid and limited social activities are in part determined by the price of coal. ‘Shabby genteel’ is, I think, the phrase. Google AI defines it as:

‘Shabby genteel’ describes a state of being where someone or something appears shabby or impoverished but still strives to maintain the appearance or manners of gentility.

Their limited circumstances explain why everyone in Miss Mapp’s little set cordially hates Mrs Poppit, who is richer than them, and does hold rather grand gatherings. She has a butler! And a car!! Everyone smiles and curtseys to her face but whispers all kinds of malicious gossip behind her back, because she doesn’t share what they consider their ‘good breeding and narrow incomes‘.

Although Isabel [Poppit] conformed to the manners of Tilling in doing household shopping every morning with her wicker basket, and buying damaged fruit for fool, and in dressing in the original home-made manner indicated by good breeding and narrow incomes, Miss Mapp was sadly afraid that these habits were not the outcome of chaste and instinctive simplicity, but of the ambition to be received by the old families of Tilling as one of them.

Accompanying the financial constraints is a similar restriction of horizons. Miss Mapp’s world is tiny, bounded by the view from her front room window from where she can keep an eye on people going to or from Tillingham church, on the front doors of the two retired military men, Major Flint and Captain Puffin, and see down the hill to the high street. She is a classic curtain twitcher, glued to her window and spying on everyone’s comings and goings.

There was little that concerned the social movements of Tilling that could not be proved, or at least reasonably conjectured, from Miss Mapp’s eyrie.

The microscopic parochialism of this tiny-minded community is very amusingly mocked by Benson:

The correct attitude in Tilling was profound indifference to anybody of whatever degree who did not live at Tilling, and to anything that did not happen there. In particular, any manifestation of interest in kings or other distinguished people was held to be a very miserable failing.

This is what makes a person ‘Tillingite to the marrow’.

Direct link with Lucia

Incidentally, early on the narrative makes an explicit link between Miss Mapp’s Tilling and Lucia’s Riseholme:

She [Miss Mapp] had heard it last month when on a visit to a friend at that sweet and refined village called Riseholme. It was rather looked down on there, as not being sufficiently intellectual. But within a week of Miss Mapp’s return, Tilling rang with it, and she let it be understood that she was the original humourist…

The ‘it’ in question is a jokey way of saying goodbye Miss Mapp has introduced into Tilling, substituting not the French au revoir but a jokey expansion of it to au reservoir. All the characters jokily say ‘Au reservoir’ on ending their countless little encounters in the street or at bridge parties throughout the novel. Just this one fleeting reference is enough to confirm your sense that Miss Mapp’s Tilling set is a distinct notch down the social and cultural scale from Lucia’s Riseholm set.

Miss Mapp

She’s a nasty piece of work, this Miss Elizabeth Mapp, 40, single and spiteful.

The Major cast an apprehensive eye on Miss Mapp seated just opposite, whose acuteness of hearing was one of the terrors of Tilling…

She presents a beaming smile to the world and has a friendly word for everyone, but behind her mask she is endlessly hatching new ways to catch out and humiliate her ‘friends’, a mind devoted to ‘distilling all sorts of acidities’.

In spite of her malignant curiosity and her cancerous suspicions about all her friends, in spite, too, of her restless activities, Miss Mapp was not, as might have been expected, a lady of lean and emaciated appearance. She was tall and portly, with plump hands, a broad, benignant face and dimpled, well-nourished cheeks. An acute observer might have detected a danger warning in the sidelong glances of her rather bulgy eyes, and in a certain tightness at the corners of her expansive mouth, which boded ill for any who came within snapping distance…

She is well known to all the shopkeepers of Tilling as a tight-pursed, cantankerous customer. She terrifies Major Flint:

‘A powerful woman she is, with a powerful tongue, and able to be powerful nasty…’ (p.197)

The comedy starts, as it were, with being amazed at just how much devious malice can fill the breast of one malevolent, hypocritical spinster woman. It is then elaborated as we (rather inevitably) see so many of her clever plans to humiliate her enemies blow up in her own face. In this, the basic structure of the comedy (malevolent schemer’s plans backfire) she is identical to Queen Lucia in the first book.

For example in Chapter 2 Miss Mapp devotes an inordinate amount of mental energy to calculating how to ruin the bridge evening being held by Mrs Poppit, only herself to be worsted. When she cheats at bridge she is discovered and criticised. And so on. The biter bit.

Miss Mapp’s enemies

Difficult to know who she hates more. Is it Mrs Poppit or Miss Coles or Godiva ‘Diva’ Plaistow?

Mrs Poppit

Posh Mrs Poppit has a butler – the amusingly lugubrious Boon – an offensively grand car – which she offensively refers to as ‘the Royce’. She and her daughter go to Switzerland every winter and Scotland every summer. In other words, compared to everyone else, they’re loaded!

Towering over everything in triggering the malicious envy of the genteel set is that, horrible to say, she has recently been awarded an MBE! Member of the Order of the British Empire! Tillingham is outraged because all she did to earn this ridiculous honour was put ‘the Royce’ and its chauffeur at the disposal of Tillingham hospital during the war, she herself didn’t lift a finger. Miss Mapp and her set quietly seethe with resentment at the way their war work – the work of the Tilling Working Club, which had knitted its fingers to the bone and made enough seven-tailed bandages to reach to the moon – received precisely no recognition! Unfair world! After one particularly mortifying humiliation, Miss Mapp feels:

If she had had a naval fifteen-inch gun handy, and had known how to fire it, she would, with a sense of duty accomplished, have discharged it point-blank at the Order of the Member of the British Empire, and at anybody else who might be within range…

Miss Irene Coles

As far as I can tell, Irene Coles is a portrait of a cigarette-smoking, masculine kind of lesbian. In Miss Mapp’s outraged view she is:

The Disgrace of Tilling and her sex, the suffragette, post-impressionist artist (who painted from the nude, both male and female), the socialist and the Germanophile, Miss Coles.

Miss Mapp has tried her utmost ‘to poison the collective mind of Tilling against this Creature’ but ‘the bitterest part of it all was that if Miss Coles was amused at anybody, and she undoubtedly was, she was amused at Miss Mapp’.

Miss Mapp keeps trying to humiliate and genteelly mock Miss Coles and yet, somehow, the chunky mannish woman artist, dressed like a jockey and puffing on a gasper, always laughs her off. Time and again, Miss Mapp is left seething with toxic rage.

Part of it is that she’s scared of her. Miss Coles is clever:

Irene called her Mapp because she chose to, and Mapp (more bitterness) felt it wiser not to provoke Coles. She had a dreadful, humorous tongue, an indecent disregard of public or private opinion, and her gift of mimicry was as appalling as her opinion about the Germans. Sometimes Miss Mapp alluded to her as ‘quaint Irene,’ but that was as far as she got in the way of reprisals.

Mock heroic

Reprisals, bitterness, scheming, malice – it makes it sound like international diplomacy during a crisis this is Benson’s trick, the series’ USP: to invest the minutiae of small town life, and its myriad petty rivalries and jealousies, with astonishing complexity, scheming and strategy. It is a version of the mock heroic, applying the highest, most serious style and tone and intellectual rigour, to the most ludicrously trivial incidents.

Thus the war of the two dresses (which I explain below) is said to involve ‘treachery and low cunning’, ‘fiendish revenge’, ‘malice and envy’ such as never known in all human history, as well as ‘the joy of battle’ and the sweetness of revenge (Chapter 4) – and all the other silly incidents and little bickerings are raised to the level of, and given the detailed analysis worthy of, full-blown military campaigns, very amusingly and hyperbolically.

Whatever attack she made on this mystery, the garrison failed to march out and surrender but kept their flag flying, and her conjectures were woefully blasted by the forces of the most elementary reasons. (p.136)

To one of Miss Mapp’s experience, the first step of her new and delightful strategic campaign was obvious, and she spent hardly any time at all in the window of her garden-room after breakfast next morning, but set out with her shopping-basket at an unusually early hour.

And, as in Queen Lucia, Benson even throws in a few mock heroic similes to amuse his literate readers, signalled by the poetic inversion at the end of the sentence:

Even as Athene sprang full grown and panoplied from the brain of Zeus, so from Diva’s brain there sprang her plan complete.

Cast

  • Miss Elizabeth Mapp – spies on all Tilling’s comings and goings with ‘her light aluminium opera-glasses’ – ‘old Mappy’ to Flint and Puffin (p.107)
    • Withers, her parlourmaid
  • Major Benjamin Flint – ‘was the more attractive to the feminine sense; for years Miss Mapp had tried to cajole him into marrying her, and had not nearly finished yet’ – when she feels soppy, Miss Mapp secretly calls him ‘Major Benjy’
    • Mrs Dominic – his maid
  • Captain Puffin – ‘He was lame and short and meagre, with strings of peaceful beads and Papuan aprons in his hall instead of wild tiger-skins, and had a jerky, inattentive manner and a high-pitched voice. Yet to Miss Mapp’s mind there was something behind his unimpressiveness that had a mysterious quality’ – irritating falsetto laugh, limp
    • housemaid
    • Mrs Gashly – his cook
  • Mrs Godiva Plaistow aka ‘Diva’ – carrying her wicker basket, ‘a short, stout, breathless body’, peculiar way of walking as if she has wheels instead of legs – endless rivalrous scheming against Miss Mapp – stuffs her face with chocolates at every opportunity (p.141) – bitter enemy in ‘the dress war’ – speaks in telegraphese: ‘Lucky birds,’ she said. ‘No teeth. Beaks’ – guaranteed to cause an argument at every bridge session
    • Janet – her parlourmaid
  • Mrs Susan Poppit – amazingly awarded an MBE, solely for lending her motor car to the local hospital – a social climber – has a butler, car and posh holidays – keeps a notebook of malapropisms and spoonerisms
  • Isabel Poppit – her adoring daughter
    • Boon, her butler
  • Miss Irene Coles – ‘Irene lived in a very queer way with one gigantic maid, Lucy, who, but for her sex, might have been in the Guards’ – presumably a lesbian (?)
  • Mr Kenneth Bartlett – the vicar, good at cards – ‘Mr Bartlett was humorously archaic in speech. He interlarded archaisms with Highland expressions, and his face was knobby, like a chest of drawers’
  • Mrs Evie Bartlett – his wife, aka ‘wee wifey’, mousey, emits high-pitched squeaks and squeals
  • Mr Algernon Wyse – generally seen as posh, spends long summers with his sister, the Contessa di Faraglione, at Capri – declines most invitations, but invites everyone to his weekly Thursday luncheons
    • Figgis – his valet
  • Amelia, the Contessa di Faraglione, when she arrives, fearlessly outspoken and flirtatious
  • Mr Dabnet – keeper of the Tilling toy shop
  • Mr Wootten – the coal merchant
  • Mr Twemlow – the grocer
  • Mr Hopkins – the fishmonger, who models for Irene Coles in the nude
  • Miss Greele – dressmaker
  • Mrs Brace – the doctor’s wife

Major incidents

The failed attempt to sabotage Mrs Poppit’s bridge

Mrs Poppit only casually invites Miss Mapp to a bridge afternoon, which Miss Mapp takes as an insult and triggers feverish calculations of how to screw up the occasion. During the course of the morning she casually introduces the topic with all the usual suspects in order to figure out precisely how many people have been invited. Eight is the ideal number, creating two tables of four. Miss Mapp decides she will ‘squeeze’ her visit in in such a way as to create too many guests and thus embarrass her hostess.

In the event, all these calculations are futile because she makes up the eighth guest with no confusion and so the party proceeds smoothly – exactly what she was hoping to prevent.

The abortive visit of the Prince of Wales

Because of her recent visit to Buckingham Palace to receive her MBE, Mrs Poppit lets slip her knowledge that the Prince of Wales will be passing through the town on Saturday, on his way to Ardingly Park. This is because Tilling is the nearest railway station for Ardingly.

Now the thing about all genteel Tillingites is they have this cult that absolutely nothing which happens outside Tilling, or anyone who comes from outside Tilling, is of the slightest interest. Except that, of course, a visit from royalty triggers their grossest snobberies.

So the comedy of this passage derives from the way all the seven or eight characters we’ve come to know all pretend to each other to not be giving the Prince’s fleeting visit the slightest thought, while secretly, of course, they are all buying the train timetable, getting our their best suits and frocks, even buying little Union Jack flags, and all plan to accidentally just ‘happen’ to be in the little square in front of the railway station.

Miss Mapp is among the most outstandingly hypocritical of the bunch, in conversations continually claiming to have forgotten all about it while, as the time of the most likely train approaches, she mounts to the roof window of her house and uses binoculars to identify that towards 4.15 (time of a train arrival) lots of others are assembling in the square. So she rushes downstairs, checks herself in the mirror and bustles along to the square. She arrives just as a swish car is pulling away and, deciding to show the hoi polloi what a proper curtsey looks like, stoops so low that she in fact loses her balance and clumsily sits down in the road just as the car sweeps by. Just in time to hear laughter coming from the people inside who saw her squat so clumsily into the street.

The others come up and crowingly tell her that wasn’t the Prince of Wales at all; he arrived on the one o’clock train so they all missed him, and has been happily playing golf all afternoon. Humiliation.

And there’s a comic coda. The next day is Sunday and the genteel set hope the prince might attend their church but he doesn’t show. The Major and the Captain go off to play golf and, given news of the Prince’s golf the day before, they are surprised to find every hole and bunker unusually populated with Tillingites, clearly hoping to catch a glimpse of Royalty, although all telling each other and themselves that they don’t care in the slightest. Miss Mapp is among them.

But the joke is that on the day that most of Tilling went out to the golf course to see the Prince, the Prince decided to go sightseeing in Tilling. When Miss Mapp returns exhausted from a day traipsing round the golf course, her servant tells her the Prince, had spent five minutes outside Miss Mapp’s very own garden room, and had even sat on the steps and smoked a cigarette. On her steps! Outside her house! She missed him. Again!

The humiliating battle of the decorated dresses

Miss Mapp discovers that Diva has taken down her shabby old chintz curtains and is carefully cutting out the roses from their pattern, with the aim of sewing the roses onto her blouse to jazz it up.

She was preparing, therefore, to take the light white jacket which she wore over her blouse, and cover the broad collar and cuffs of it with these pretty roses.

Miss Mapp is inspired by this discovery, not just to adapt it herself but – characteristically – to get one over on Diva and humiliate her, by doing the same kind of thing first! So she goes home, rummages around, finds a worn chintz cover that had once adorned the sofa in the garden-room and is covered with red poppies (very easy to cut out). She sets her maid, Withers, to cut out the poppy patterns and sew them onto one of her plain dresses, in a race to beat Diva.

By working her maid hard she has her poppy-strewn dress ready by the next day and goes swanking around Tilling, making sure to call into every shop (sometimes several times), swan up and down the high street, pop her head into all her friends’ front doors and generally demonstrate how fantastically original and creative she has been in creating such a wonderfully decorative dress!

This, when she sees it, of course, drives Diva wild with rage and mortification… until she has a brainwave, a drastic plan to get her own back. She will give the beautiful rose-decorated jacket she and her maid, Janet, are just getting to the end of creating to her maid. Janet is bowled over with gratitude. She doesn’t quite realise Diva has made this magnanimous gift solely to humiliate Miss Mapp.

Her plan works. When everyone sees Janet wearing the rose-studded dress they instantly associate it with the servant class and at a stroke Miss Mapp’s coup is turned into a public humiliation. Triumph for Diva!

Miss Mapp’s hoarding revealed

There are rumours of an impending coal strike. Since everyone’s homes and cookers are heated by coal this represents a real threat. The government gives out that nobody should hoard either coal or food. Miss Mapp genteelly warns Diva that there is a law against it and she might be prosecuted. But observing Miss M visiting the grocer every day, instead of every couple of days like normal folk, Diva starts to suspect that it’s old Mappy who’s hoarding.

She confirms the coal hoarding by cross-questioning the coal merchant, Mr Wootten. Then she racks her brains – she and Mapp are shown on pretty much every page, racking their brains and engaging in intense cerebration to puzzle out the secrets of each others’ behaviour, just as Miss Mapp devotes hours to speculating on what the Major and the Captain really get up to – to think where in Miss Mapp’s small house she could be hoarding food.

She has a brainwave when she realises that the big bookcase, against which the bridge table is usually pressed on tea dates, is fake – it’s just a facade of book covers with no depth. Next time she’s invited for bridge at Miss Mapp’s, Diva arrives early and while the maid is calling Miss M, she hurries to the bookcase in question, pushes the bridge table away, feels up and down it and locates the secret catch. Undoing it she confirms her suspicions for the whole facade of spines of books begins to open revealing a concealed larder.

Unfortunately, as she opens it a fraction she hears something fall off a shelf within and this means she can’t quite push it to enough to redo the catch. She hears Miss Mapp coming and squeezes it as shut as possible and wedges the bridge table back up against it, scooting away as Miss Mapp enters the room.

So far, so full of secrets and lies and hypocrisies and cunning plans for revenge and exposure and humiliation i.e. standard Tilling behaviour. What happens next turns comedy into farce. For before the bridge commences, Miss Mapp treats her guests to tea and chocolate cake and shows Mrs Poppit, whose first visit it is, round her house. Mrs Poppit closely inspects the fittings of the garden room and, when she comes to the bookshelf, innocently points out to her daughter that she thinks it looks fake and gives it a little tug and…

The fake frontage swings open and Miss Mapp’s entire illicit hoard of goodies comes tumbling forth, a sack of flour falling on the floor, followed by tins of corned beef, packets of Bath Oliver biscuits, jars of Bovril and a pack of dried apricots which promptly bursts and scatters numerous sticky fruits all over the floor where Miss Mapp’s astonished guests tread on them, getting them stuck to the soles of their shoes. Diva watches all this from a distance, absolutely delighted that she in no way can be blamed for the disaster:

The birthday of her life had come! (p.99)

Extremely typical of Miss Mapp and the whole world Benson has invented is the way Miss Mapp proceeds to cover herself by making up a cock-and-bull story about all these goodies, far from being hoarding – goodness me, no, dear Diva – was ‘my poor little Christmas presents for your needy parishioners, Padre’. Nobody believes her for a moment, but face is saved, a little.

The secret drinkers

A recurring comic theme is that both Major Flint and Captain Puffin are observed to stay up very late at night i.e. their bedroom lights are on till way past 11. They tell the town that they are ardently pursuing very serious studies, namely that the Major is editing the diaries of his imperial service in India while the Captain is carrying out in-depth researches into Roman roads and ruins. Miss Mapp, seeing herself in the role of a Guardian Angel, keeps a beady eye on their late lights and is always telling these old men (the Major is, in fact, only 54) that they should keep more regular hours and conduct their studies healthily, in the morning.

Except that half-way through the novel, after playing one of their rounds of golf, Flint and Puffin, hilariously confess to each other that neither of them are conducting these famous studies: Flint never kept a diary in India, Puffin knows next to nothing about Roman archaeology, they just stay up late drinking. So they resolve to henceforward do so in company, and take to visiting each other’s houses on alternate evenings. It becomes a schoolboyish private joke between them.

The Major said, ‘Well, I’ll step across, shall I, about half-past nine, and bring my diaries with me?
‘I’ll expect you. You’ll find me at my Roman roads.’
The humour of this joke never staled, and they parted with hoots and guffaws of laughter. (p.168)

This late-night drinking emerges as an unexpectedly major theme of the story. First of all, Miss Mapp, observing that at least one of their lights now goes off in the mid-evening on alternating evenings, is convinced that her words of advice are working half the time and the poor military men are getting early nights at least half the week. But the major outcome of these convivial nights together is the huge argument which leads to the duel!

The duel that never was

The argument On one particular night they are at Major Flint’s and the two men’s shabby genteel poverty triggers an argument about who is drinking most of the Captain’s bottle of whiskey. Like all their arguments it quickly escalates until the Captain drunkenly staggers out of Flint’s bedroom and across the street to his own house. He passes out on his bed. Early in the morning he hears the metallic clink of the flap of his letterbox, stumbles out of bed, and discovers the Major has hand delivered a challenge to a duel!

Sir,
My seconds will wait on you in the course of to-morrow morning.
Your faithful obedient servant.
Benjamin Flint

Captain Puffin panics He staggers back to bed and passes out but wakes up a few hours in the grip of fear, then panic. What if it’s literally true? The Major is a much better shot than him! It’s an invitation to certain death. In a hungover panic he packs his bags, leaves a note for the maid, and staggers out carrying a big Gladstone bag and along to the station to catch the first train to London, the 6.30am.

Meeting at Tilling train station Arriving 15 minutes early he undergoes agonies of anxiety when he hears heavy footsteps and… it is Major Flint, also carrying a big bag, arriving to catch the same train! Long story short, they both realise they are cowards and are running away from the duel which Flint so rashly threatened. After a few moments’ embarrassment they burst into laughter, agree never to be so silly again, and set off for the golf course where they go to play every day.

Word gets round However – Captain Puffin was silly enough to leave Major Flint’s note threatening the duel on his mantelpiece at home, where it is discovered later in the morning by Puffin’s maid, who promptly rings up Flint’s maid, they both discover their masters are absent, and word spreads like wildfire that the two men have gone off to the sand dunes near the gold course to fight a duel. When word spreads to the Mapp circle the vicar gets dragged in and ends up volunteering to rush off to the dunes to try and prevent a potentially tragic loss of life.

Vicar to the rescue He takes a taxi (agonising over the unwonted expense) and then spends the whole morning timidly peeping his head over the brow of every dune, half expecting to get it shot off by a stray bullet or, worse, coming across the bodies of one of the shot men. After an exhausting and anxious morning, hot and dirty and sweaty, the vicar arrives at the golf course proper, where he sees… Flint and Puffin just completing their morning game of golf in a jovial and merry way, and they invite him for drinks at the club. Comedy!

Anxious anticipation It doesn’t even end there because the good ladies of Tilling, now thoroughly alerted to news of the duel, are on tenterhooks back in town to find out what has happened. Miss Mapp carefully works out about ten possible scenarios and variations, which the text carefully numbers and describes, involving numbers of stretchers and bodies and doctors in attendance on the poor men etc. Imagine her disappointment when the after lunch tram arrives only for Major Flint, Captain Puffin and the vicar to all step off it large as life and obviously hale and hearty. More comedy!

Hippopotamus Incidentally, at the height of the squabble which started it all, Captain Puffin in his drunkenness struggled to pronounce the word ‘hippopotamus’ and they and the narrator all refer back to it as ‘the hippopotamus quarrel’ (p.165).

Was it for a woman? The duel gag continues for quite a long time, Benson stretches it out further than you’d think possible, which is itself an old comic trick but it’s also distinctively Bensonite to show how even trivial incidents have long, complex ramifications in such a closed, paranoid society of hyper-alert, hyper-curious people.

Was the duel for her? Because Miss Mapp can’t let this incident of the duel alone, and one aspect which dogs her is what was the duel about? She leaps to the sentimental conclusion that it must have been about a woman (instead of its banal real cause, which was squabbling about who’d drunk most whiskey from Captain Puffin’s bottle). And it’s only a small step from there to conclude that the pair must have been preparing to fight a duel… over her!

Spreading the word Yes, Miss Mapp leaps to the hilariously inapt conclusion that the two men must have been fighting a duel over her. It would be moderately comic if she just harboured this heroic misconception to herself and acted accordingly but instead, this being Tilling, and a Benson novel, she has to let everyone know and sets out on a campaign the next morning to accidentally-on-purpose bump into all the usual characters in the high street, and one by one take them into her confidence about the true nature of the duel i.e. her. This ramifies out for a bit before, with comic inevitability, she discovers she most definitely was not the subject of their argument and undergoes yet another self-inflicted humiliation.

Realisation Which triggers more intensive speculation about the real reason both men were seen at Tilling railway station at 6.30 on that fateful morning. And then she has the breakthrough and realises they were both running away. Far from being the heroic men of action she had painted them in her ‘duelling over her’ narrative, now they appear as two lily-livered weaklings. Once again she sallies forth to spread the gossip, buttonholing everyone she meets.

Daily gossip For the nature of Tilling gossip (or of this narrative) is that the best way to quash a rumour or news which humiliates you (the clashing dresses, the secret hoarding, the ‘they were fighting over me’ fiasco) is to replace it with an even juicier piece of gossip. And so she sallies forth again and tells Diva who is gossip on legs and soon the two men’s arrant cowardice is universally known.

By eleven o’clock that morning, the two duellists were universally known as ‘the cowards’, the Padre alone demurring, and being swampingly outvoted. (p.181)

With the result that when they arrive back from their morning golf they find themselves greeted by everyone with fake smiles and ironic references to early morning trains. So that it doesn’t take long for the pair to realise they’re secret is out and for them, in their turn, to consider how to win back Tilling opinion.

Anthropology

And so it rolls on: an endless list of incidents and events which each trigger intense scrutiny from, in particular, Miss Mapp and her frenemy Diva Plaistow, which give rise to feverish speculation and whispered gossip, generally leading to heroic misconceptions or campaigns, which result in the protagonist (generally Miss Mapp’s) very public humiliation; before everyone gets up the next morning and prepares for another day of warfare.

There’s serious articles to be written about the Mapp and Lucia novels viewed through the prism of anthropology, a Darwinian take on status and hierarchy in primate groups, a small clan riven by unending competition and minute analysis of everyone else’s actions and possible motives, an over-attention which converts everyone – in Benson’s comically hyperbolic style – into an analyst, strategist, campaigner and diplomat.

My quick view would be that Benson’s novels demonstrate how immensely overpowered our brains are for most of the situations we find ourselves in. I find myself using the modern phrase ‘over-thinking’ quite a lot at work but, in a sense, don’t all humans over-think everything? Life is pretty simple and yet you only need two people (in a relationship, say) and already you have a world of misunderstandings and confusions; add in one more, then another, then another, and you quickly have a chaos of misunderstandings, misconceptions, mixed messages and so on, and you are in Bensonworld.

Benson has put his finger on something very profound about human nature and created these big (the novels are all quite long and pretty dense) comic edifices out of human beings’ fatal tendency to over-think more or less everything.

And so on…

This takes us up to about page 200 of this 270-page long book. There’s more, as the season moves from high summer into the autumn, on to rainy winter, through an eventful Christmas and on into the new year, namely:

– A reprise of the dress war, wherein Miss Mapp and Diva yet again humiliatingly appear at social events with matching outfits:

Over the background of each mind was spread a hatred of the other, red as their tea-gowns, and shot with black despair as to what on earth they should do now with those ill-fated pieces of pride.

– The arrival of Mr Wyse’s sister, the grand Contessa, from Italy, on page 215, and all the ripples that causes. Mostly because she is completely uninhibited, speaks her mind about everything and is generally free of the terribly English curtain-twitching restraints all the ladies have imposed upon themselves:

Miss Mapp’s head was in a whirl. The Contessa said in the loudest possible voice all that everybody else only whispered. (p.232)

– And Mrs Poppit and Mr Wyse falling in love! with the vast scope for gossip and anticipation and misunderstanding which this entails.

– And, right at the end, a tragic and unexpected loss.

All embroidered at every stage, with the wild speculations, detailed analyses, cunning plans and clever strategising of Miss Mapp and various other Tillingites. But I’ll stop my summary here. There’s plenty more in the same vein, and you can read it online (link below).

Prose style

P.G. Wodehouse achieves his comic effects with a prose style which is as light and airy as his brainless characters. Benson is the exact opposite. His style is heavy and clotted and dense in order to reflect his characters’ never-ending scheming and plotting. His paragraphs can sometimes take up a whole page and his sentences can be very long, made up of numerous sub-clauses. Here’s just one sentence from early in the text:

General manœuvres in Tilling, the gradual burstings of fluttering life from the chrysalis of the night, the emergence of the ladies of the town with their wicker-baskets in their hands for housekeeping purchases, the exodus of men to catch the 11.20 a.m. steam-tram out to the golf links, and other first steps in the duties and diversions of the day, did not get into full swing till half-past ten, and Miss Mapp had ample time to skim the headlines of her paper and indulge in chaste meditations about the occupants of these two houses, before she need really make herself alert to miss nothing.

Much information has to be fitted in, and in a way which reflects the cluttered, busy, even hectic physical activities of the town and mental activities of its key inhabitants. Here’s a description of all Mrs Poppit’s guests maliciously wanting her to carry on talking about receiving her MBE so that she reveals herself as not understanding Tilling’s values of discretion and understatement

One reason for this, of course, as already indicated, was that they all longed for her to expose herself as much as she possibly could, for if there was a quality – and, indeed, there were many – on which Tilling prided itself, it was on its immunity from snobbishness: there were, no doubt, in the great world with which Tilling concerned itself so little kings and queens and dukes and Members of the Order of the British Empire; but every Tillingite knew that he or she (particularly she) was just as good as any of them, and indeed better, being more fortunate than they in living in Tilling…

Benson’s cluttered prose bespeaks an older, Victorian cast of mind, heavy and heavily decorated, ornate and over-furnished – except that instead of earnest Victorian moralising, Benson deploys it for comic purposes, each qualifying clause adding to the exquisite precision with which he itemises the micro-snobberies and mini aggressions of his venomous ladies.

Camp

Benson was gay. A lot of the famous fans who signed a petition to his publishers to republish the Mapp and Lucia novels after his death (in 1940) were themselves gay writers who loved the deeply camp, exaggerated bitchiness of all the characters.

My wife read the books when at school and tells me she never believed they were about women, bearing no relation to the women she knew in her household or extended family, at school or anywhere else. To her, it all read as gay male camp bitchiness. I’m no expert, so I’ll go along with her view. For me the comic bitchiness and endless rivalry is adequately embedded in the women characters, if that makes sense. It’s only very rarely that Benson applies even the minutest hint of campness to any of the male characters who are, by and large, solidly heterosexual e.g. the blustering major and quarrelsome captain and well-meaning vicar. Algernon Wyse is the exception that proves the general rule.

Without being in the least effeminate, Mr. Wyse this morning looked rather like a modern Troubadour. He had a velveteen coat on, a soft, fluffy, mushy tie which looked as if made of Shirley poppies, very neat knickerbockers, brown stockings with blobs, like the fruit of plane trees, dependent from elaborate ‘tops’, and shoes with a cascade of leather frilling covering the laces.

Why mention effeminacy at all unless, unconsciously, to draw attention to it?

Curiosity

The books can be seen as a reflection on the very human failing of curiosity, raised to a kind of pathological intensity, whipped up into a pathological and damaging obsession, and all the funnier for it.

[Miss Mapp’s] face was of high vivid colour and was corrugated by chronic rage and curiosity.

In spite of her malignant curiosity and her cancerous suspicions about all her friends…

Miss Mapp was seething with excitement, curiosity and rage…

The Padre was bursting with curiosity, but since his delicacy forbade him to ask any of the questions which effervesced like sherbet round his tongue, he propounded another plan.

Until she arrived at some sort of information, the excruciating pangs of curiosity that must be endured could be likened only to some acute toothache of the mind with no dentist to stop or remove the source of the trouble…

Curiosity rushed like a devastating tornado across Miss Mapp’s mind, rooting up all other growths, buffeting her with the necessity of knowing what the two whom she had been forced to leave in the garden were doing now…

Sometimes she took him into a shop in case there might be someone there who had not seen him yet on her leash; sometimes she left him on the pavement in a prominent position, marking, all the time, just as if she had been a clinical thermometer, the feverish curiosity that was burning in Tilling’s veins.

1920s slang

‘Ho! That’s how you got the idea then,’ said Diva. ‘I knew you had cribbed it from me.’
‘Cribbed?’ asked Miss Mapp, in ironical ignorance of what so vulgar and slangy an expression meant.
‘Cribbed means taking what isn’t yours,’ said Diva.

After the duel that never was, the gossips of Tilling hope:

that the whole affair was not, in the delicious new slang phrase of the Padre’s, which was spreading like wildfire through Tilling, a ‘wash-out‘. (p.126)

Used later:

Puffin said, ‘But I don’t see what you’re in such a taking about. We’re no worse off than we were before we got a reputation for being such fire-eaters. Being fire-eaters is a wash-out, that’s all. Pleasant while it lasted, and now we’re as we were.’ (p.184)

American slang:

Was there not some sort of corn called pop-corn, which Americans ate? (p.128)

And our old friend ‘cat’, meaning bitchy gossipy woman, which I first came across widespread in the works of Noel Coward.

Puffin yawned. ‘Mapp’s a cat,’ he said. ‘Stroke a cat and you’ll get scratched. Shy a brick at a cat, and she’ll spit at you and skedaddle.’

Lolz

In the church at Christmastime, Miss Mapp:

sat in her usual seat close below the pulpit, and the sun streaming in through a stained glass window opposite made her face of all colours, like Joseph’s coat. Not knowing how it looked from outside, she pictured to herself a sort of celestial radiance coming from within, though Diva, sitting opposite, was reminded of the iridescent hues observable on cold boiled beef. (p.241)

Credit

‘Miss Mapp’ by E.F. Benson was published by Hutchinson in 1922. Page references are to the 1984 Black Swan paperback edition.

Related links

Mapp and Lucia reviews

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Posted by Simon on November 10, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/11/10/miss-mapp-e-f-benson/

The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie (1922)

‘If that draft treaty turns up—we’re done. England will be plunged in anarchy!’
(Mr Carter, not stinting on the melodrama)

‘Neither of you will leave this room alive!’
(Mwah ha ha, laughed the fiendish baddie, twirling his moustaches)

Certainly Mr Brown’s organization was a far-reaching concern. The common criminal, the well-bred Irish gentleman, the pale Russian, and the efficient German master of the ceremonies! Truly a strange and sinister gathering!
(Yes, it’s the cosmopolitan members of a secret international organisation devoted to sowing anarchy and revolution!)

‘We’ve tried all the orthodox ways, yes. But suppose we try the unorthodox. Tommy – let’s be adventurers!’
(Tuppence coming up with the starting premise of the story)

Christie’s second novel

Published in 1922, ‘The Secret Adversary’ was Agatha Christie’s second novel. Her husband, Archie Christie, playfully encouraged her to write another one after the first one had been published to moderate success in 1920. That debut, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, had been a straightforward detective story and introduced what nobody yet suspected would become the phenomenally successful figure of Hercule Poirot.

By contrast, Christie’s publisher, John Lane, weren’t at all keen on the new one and the way it represented such a drastic switch of genres. Because ‘The Secret Adversary’ is a full-on, John Buchanesque thriller, a spy story, all about a sinister international organisation planning to overthrow the government and spread anarchy on the streets of England, complete with secret meetings, kidnap, fake identities, frantic car chases and shoot-outs. To call it melodrama is to understate the preposterousness of the plot. But it is also very funny.

Setup

Prologue aboard a doomed ship

It was 2pm on the afternoon of May 7, 1915. The American ocean liner Lusitania had been struck by two German torpedoes in succession and was sinking rapidly. A young woman stands by the lifeboats when she is approached by a man who gets talking to her then asks a desperate favour. He hands her a bundle of papers and says they are vital to the safety of Britain. If he doesn’t make it, she must hand it in to the American embassy. She gets into a lifeboat. The ship sinks. The mysterious prologue ends…

Enter Tommy and Tuppence

The scene cuts to a London tea rooms and a completely different tone, as we are introduced to two spiffing young people, Tommy Beresford and Prudence ‘Tuppence‘ Cowley. They knew each other before the War and have now made an arrangement to lunch together.

Here’s Tuppence:

They were an essentially modern-looking couple as they sat there. Tuppence had no claim to beauty, but there was character and charm in the elfin lines of her little face, with its determined chin and large, wide-apart grey eyes that looked mistily out from under straight, black brows. She wore a small bright green toque over her black bobbed hair, and her extremely short and rather shabby skirt revealed a pair of uncommonly dainty ankles.

Later on:

‘Where’s this young lady I’ve been hearing such a lot about?’
Tommy introduced Tuppence.
‘Ha!’ said Sir William, eyeing her. ‘Girls aren’t what they used to be in my young days.’
‘Yes, they are,’ said Tuppence. ‘Their clothes are different, perhaps, but they themselves are just the same.’
‘Well, perhaps you’re right. Minxes then—minxes now!’
‘That’s it,’ said Tuppence. ‘I’m a frightful minx myself.’
‘I believe you,’ said the old gentleman, chuckling, and pinched her ear in high good-humour. Most young women were terrified of the ‘old bear’, as they termed him. Tuppence’s pertness delighted the old misogynist.
(Chapter 27)

Here’s Tommy:

His bared head revealed a shock of exquisitely slicked-back red hair. His face was pleasantly ugly—nondescript, yet unmistakably the face of a gentleman and a sportsman. His brown suit was well cut, but perilously near the end of its tether.

And later on, Mr Carter describes Tommy to no less a personage than the Prime Minister, who is (impressively) kept informed of their investigations:

‘Outwardly, he’s an ordinary clean-limbed, rather block-headed young Englishman. Slow in his mental processes. On the other hand, it’s quite impossible to lead him astray through his imagination. He hasn’t got any—so he’s difficult to deceive. He worries things out slowly, and once he’s got hold of anything he doesn’t let go. The little lady’s quite different. More intuition and less common sense. They make a pretty pair working together. Pace and stamina.’

Let’s be adventurers!

So here Tommy and Tuppence are together in this tea room and they quickly discover that neither of them can get a job and so they are both broke. Tommy had hopes of inheriting from his rich uncle but they’ve had a falling out and he can’t get a job no matter how hard he tries.

There was a silence, and then Tuppence burst out:
‘Money, money, money! I think about money morning, noon and night! I dare say it’s mercenary of me, but there it is!’
‘Same here,’ agreed Tommy with feeling.

Bantering conversation leads them to cook up the idea of forming a company – The Young Adventurers, Ltd – offering to hire themselves out, so they put an ad in The Times.

‘Two young adventurers for hire. Willing to do anything, go anywhere. Pay must be good. No unreasonable offer refused.’

High-speed summary

Whittington The plot is full of yawning holes from the beginning. Their first client, a Mr Whittington, approaches after overhearing them. He gives them his card and Tuppence goes to see him in his office at The Esthonia Glassware Co. Whittington offers her a large sum to impersonate someone in Paris but when he asks her name, on a whim she replies with the name ‘Jane Finn’, a name Tommy causally mentions having heard someone mention in the street on the way to his tea with Tuppence. She repeats it now as a lark and is astonished at the result, for it completely startles Whittington. It’s the first inkling we have that this Jane Finn is at the centre of the plot.

Advertising for leads Clearly perturbed, Whittington offers Tuppence £50. She realises that he thinks she’s blackmailing him. He asks her to return the next day for details of the job, but when she goes back, his office has been closed. Clearly there’s something in this woman’s name so Tommy and Tuppence advertise for information about Jane Finn and receive two replies, from a Mr Carter and a Mr Julius Hersheimmer.

Carter’s briefing When they go to meet Carter Tommy recognizes him from his wartime service in British Intelligence and also that it isn’t his real name. ‘Carter’ describes the story of the Lusitania, confirming our suspicion that in the scene in the Prologue, the girl who received the vital documents was this Jane Finn and the man who gave it to her, a British agent.

The secret treaty Carter explains that the document is a top secret diplomatic treaty and, if its terms were revealed, it would trigger widespread protests, a general strike and the fall of the government. As such, it is gold dust to enemies of Britain and any secret organisations devoted to sowing chaos and revolution! In fact, he goes on to explain, there is exactly such a secret organisation in operation, led by a fiendish mastermind known only by the name… Mr Brown! (Shame Christie couldn’t think up something more operatic, more James Bondish.)

‘Here is a certain man, a man whose real name is unknown to us, who is working in the dark for his own ends. The Bolshevists are behind the Labour unrest—but this man is behind the Bolshevists. Who is he? We do not know. He is always spoken of by the unassuming title of ‘Mr Brown.’ But one thing is certain, he is the master criminal of this age. He controls a marvellous organization. Most of the Peace propaganda during the war was originated and financed by him. His spies are everywhere. (Chapter 4)

Having explained all this, Carter hires Tommy and Tuppence to find her and, if possible, reveal the identity of the mysterious Mr Brown. But they must beware!

Those people are absolutely desperate and incapable of either mercy or pity. I feel that you probably underestimate the danger, and therefore warn you again that I can promise you no protection. (Chapter 9)

The first thing Tuppence does with the advance Carter gives them, is check into the Ritz Hotel and treat herself to a blowout meal.

Hersheimmer They then get in touch with the second replier, Julius Hersheimmer. He turns out to be a rangy, confident American multimillionaire, the kind of guy you want on your team. He replied to their ad because he’s none other than Jane Finn’s cousin.

If you think about it the Lusitania sank in 1915 and it is 1920…. hmmm… Where has Jane got to in the intervening years?

Rita Vandemeyer Tommy and Tuppence’s investigating leads them to the home of Mrs Marguerite ‘Rita’ Vandemeyer. She is a smooth, classy woman.

A woman was standing by the fireplace. She was no longer in her first youth, and the beauty she undeniably possessed was hardened and coarsened. In her youth she must have been dazzling. Her pale gold hair, owing a slight assistance to art, was coiled low on her neck, her eyes, of a piercing electric blue, seemed to possess a faculty of boring into the very soul of the person she was looking at. Her exquisite figure was enhanced by a wonderful gown of indigo charmeuse. And yet, despite her swaying grace, and the almost ethereal beauty of her face, you felt instinctively the presence of something hard and menacing, a kind of metallic strength that found expression in the tones of her voice and in that gimlet-like quality of her eyes.

Vandemeyer has powerful connections, including Whittington and Sir James Peel Edgerton, the famous King’s Counsellor i.e. lawyer.

Convinced she’s something to do with the missing girl, Tuppence (improbably enough) gets a job as Mrs Vandemeyer’s maid. She discovers a young lad hanging round Vandemeyer’s block of flats who earns money as a runner and fetcher, and persuades him to help her out, something he’s eager to do once he realises it’s all like something from the movies.

‘Lumme!’ came ecstatically from Albert. ‘It sounds more like the pictures every minute.’
(Chapter 9)

Edgerton is a frequent visitor to Mrs Vandemeyer’s apartment and realises Tuppence is more than she seems. He cryptically suggests that Tuppence might be better off working for someone else, which none of us understand but leads T&T to visit Edgerton at his office for a longer talk.

Found out But when Tuppence goes back to work at Vandemeyer’s apartment, the latter discovers she’s a fake and pulls a gun on her, until Tuppence, plucky gal that she is, wrests the gun away.

Locked up but murdered Tuppence offers Vandemeyer a large bribe to spill the whereabouts of Jane Finn, but when Hersheimmer and Edgerton arrive at the apartment, she screams and faints. They leave her in her bedroom but lock her in, because of their fear of Mr Brown. But when they return in the morning, Vandemeyer is dead! Someone got to her somehow, through a locked door!

Hersheimmer and Tuppence? In the middle of this mayhem, Hersheimmer is attracted to Tuppence and even makes a proposal of sorts, which throws her into confusion.

‘What about marriage?’ inquired Julius. ‘Got any views on the subject?’
‘I intend to marry, of course,’ replied Tuppence. ‘That is, if’—she paused, knew a momentary longing to draw back, and then stuck to her guns bravely—’I can find some one rich enough to make it worth my while. That’s frank, isn’t it? I dare say you despise me for it.’
‘I never despise business instinct,’ said Julius. ‘What particular figure have you in mind?’
‘Figure?’ asked Tuppence, puzzled. ‘Do you mean tall or short?’
‘No. Sum—income.’
‘Oh, I—I haven’t quite worked that out.’ (Chapter 15)

Boris The pair had learned that another of Mrs Vendemeyer’s contacts is a man named Boris Ivanovitch. Tommy tails Boris to a house in Soho but here the tables are turned. He smuggles himself in past the guard on the door, then hides himself so as to listen in on a meeting of the famous secret organisation, learning that the members assembled amount to ‘the Inner Ring’! Tommy overhears just enough to hint at large plans for chaos and disruption, when someone from behind coshes him and knocks him out. When he comes to, he’s in a windowless room like a cell. He’s been taken prisoner!

Annette helps Tommy Tommy’s incarceration in this windowless, lightless cell goes on for a surprising amount for time, for several days. Periodically he is served a meal by a French serving girl who he eventually discovers is called Annette. As you might expect, she develops a soft spot for handsome Tommy until, in a convoluted scene, she helps him to escape but, as they get to the door out into the London street, her nerve fails her and she refuses to leave. She’s obviously petrified of the gang. She’ll go back into the house and tell them that he (Tommy) overpowered her.

Tommy at liberty Surreally Tommy emerges from the incarceration which had become to feel genuinely claustrophobic to the reader into the cool night air of Soho. He walks back to the Ritz hoping to share everything he overheard in the Soho house, only to find that Tuppence has just left in a hurry.

Off to Yorkshire Tommy and Hersheimmer find the telegram that caused Tuppence to leave so hastily. It’s a note claiming to have been written by Tommy, although he’s never seen it before.

‘Come at once, Moat House, Ebury, Yorkshire, great developments—TOMMY.’

So she’s gone to get the first train to Yorkshire, so Tommy and Hersheimmer take a taxi to King’s Cross and catch the next train. From this point onwards they are on the trail of Tuppence, trying to find her. The boys get off at Ebury station and trudge out to the address in the message Tuppence was acting on only to find it a spooky, old abandoned house. The locals haven’t seen hide nor hair of Tuppence, despite the boys ransacking the locality. They waste a week looking. Obviously it was a decoy.

Jane discovered Back in London after all this, it is Edgerton who discovers Jane Finn, who is in hospital, recovering from losing her memory after an accident. So that’s how the five years since the Lusitania incident passed – Jane had an accident which gave her amnesia! Convenient.

Now she tells Edgerton, Tommy and Julius where she hid the treaty – in a picture frame back at the Soho house – but when they go there they find instead an ironic message from Mr Brown.

Earlier, While, searching for writing paper in Julius’s drawer, Tommy had found a photograph of Annette. Tommy concluded that Annette is the real Jane Finn and the Jane Finn they met was a plant to stop their investigation. He gets an original copy of the telegram which was sent to Tuppence and sees that her destination was altered on the copy he read, to the place in Yorkshire. Originally it read ‘Astley Priors, Gatehouse, Kent’. So, without Julius, Tommy and Albert proceed to the correct destination.

Comrade Kramenin Meanwhile Hersheimmer had pursued his own leads and discovered the arrival in London of a Russian conspirator, Kramenin who they know is associated with the secret organisation. Hersheimmer inveigles his way into Kramenin’s suite of rooms at Claridge’s (another grand London hotel) then pulls a revolver in the best American style (a gun, he later tells the girls, that he calls ‘Little Willy’ – paging Dr Freud!).

She’s in Kent So Hersheimmer terrifies Kramenin into revealing that Jane is being held at this place in Kent, Astley Priors, Gatehouse, Kent. It is a rest home or sanatorium. Jane is being housed there because she has severe amnesia. He forces Kramenin at gunpoint down through the hotel and into his car which he gets his chauffeur, George, to drive down to Gatehouse in Kent. So both Tommy and Julius are heading to Kent, separately.

At Gatehouse Julius forces Kramenin to knock on the door of the house in Kent, which is opened by none other than Whittington. Kramenin tells him there’s a big panic on and he needs both the young women he’s holding i.e. Finn and Tuppence. Whittington demands to know whether these are ‘his’ orders, before sending an orderly to fetch the two girls who emerge wrapped in cloaks. As Julius comes forward to help them some of Whittington’s gang suddenly recognise him. He pushes the girls into the car and tells George to floor it as one of the goons draws a gun and fire as the car screeches down the drive, with Julius standing up in the back and firing off shots at the baddies. All very cinematic!

Car chase The drive back to London is hairy, with the baddies’ car trying to head them off and a shootout, with shots only missing out heroes by a hair’s breadth, one of them nicking Julius – ‘Shucks, ladies, it’s only a scratch’ etc. When the car slows down at a crossroads, to everyone’s amazement, Tommy climbs in over the back. He had been hiding in the bushes at Astley wondering what to do when Julius’s car drew up. He watched the girls being brought out and, as the car pulled away, jumped on the back. He’s been clinging on for dear life for the last half an hour!

So the goodies are all reunited: Tommy and Tuppence and Julius and Jane, and you don’t need to be clairvoyant to see them pairing off very nicely. But things take an odd turn when Tommy forces the girls out of the car at gunpoint, tells them to go to the nearest train station and catch a train to London and make their way to Sir James’s house. He has a bone to pick with Hersheimmer, namely confronting him with the accusation that he is a fake and Mr Brown…

Jane’s story The girls’ journey to London is quite exciting as they become convinced someone on the train is tailing them, then that someone has spotted them at Charing Cross station, and then that the taxi they’re in is deliberately rammed, and then that a supposed drunk is in fact following them as they arrive at Sir James’s.

But they make it to Sir James’s door, knock and are admitted by the suave old lawyer and it’s here that Jane tells her story: after receiving the packet, she became suspicious. Mrs Vandemeyer had been on the Lusitania and took a suspiciously close interest in Jane in the lifeboats and then on the ship which took them to Ireland. So she placed blank sheets in the original packet which the spy had given her, and hid  the treaty inside a magazine. Travelling from Ireland, Jane was mugged and taken to the house in Soho. To fool her captors, Jane faked amnesia and took to speaking only in French. She hid the treaty in the frame of a picture in her room, a scene from Faust, and has maintained her role as ‘Annette’ ever since.

Is Hersheimmer the baddy? The photo of Annette in Hersheimmer’s drawer and some deliberately suspicious behaviour Christie gives him, persuade Tuppence that maybe the nice, friendly American is the mysterious Mr Brown. When she runs her suspicious past the impeccably trustworthy Sir James, the latter agrees, adding the revelation that the real Hersheimmer was killed back in America, that they’ve been taken in by an imposter, and it was this imposter who killed Mrs Vandemeyer before she could spill the beans about the Secret Organisation.

So the narrative is pushing us with all its might towards suspecting Hersheimmer.

Mr Brown revealed! Tuppence and Sir James rush to the Soho house where they find the treaty where Jane said it would be, in the frame of the picture depicting a scene from Faust. But it is here, in the cell where Tommy was incarcerated, that Sir James identifies himself as the true Mr Brown! He had befriended them and lulled them into a complete sense of security.

Threats and suicide Now Sir James announces his plan to kill them, wound himself, and then blame it on the elusive Mr Brown. But unbeknown to him, Julius and Tommy are hiding in the room (!) and they now jump out and overpower Sir James! The big talking they had on the drive back from Kent had confirmed for Tommy that Hersheimmer was not Mr Brown and is who he claims to be. Hooray.

Thus caught in the act and condemned by his own confession, before they can stop him, Sir James commits suicide using poison concealed in his ring. Carter arrives shortly afterwards on the scene of the suicide and is saddened to learn that his old friend was also his bitterest foe.

He had entered the squalid room to find that great man, the friend of a lifetime, dead—betrayed out of his own mouth. From the dead man’s pocket-book he had retrieved the ill-omened draft treaty, and then and there, in the presence of the other three, it had been reduced to ashes…. England was saved! (Chapter 27)

The revolution that never happened A week or so later, Labour Day, which the conspirators had intended to be a day of revolution and chaos triggered by the publication of the incriminating treaty, passes off peacefully. And the papers are full of obituaries for the great lawyer and potential political leader, Sir James Peel Edgerton. As so often in thrillers, the real truth is carefully concealed from a credulous public.

Wedding bells The novel ends with a slap-up dinner at the Savoy Hotel, both Hersheimmer and Jane, and Tommy and Tuppence, engaged to be married. Carter arrives for the dinner accompanied by Tommy’s uncle who has been informed what a patriotic deed he has performed, and who heals their breach, announcing he is formally making Tommy heir to his country estate and fortune. Which is nice.

Money Remember how they were both stony broke when the novel ended. Well, after their sterling work for king and country, Mr Carter informs them they’ll both received very nice cheques. Plus Tommy being made heir apparent to his rich uncle. And as to work, Tuppence asks him:

‘What are you going to do, accept Mr Carter’s offer of a Government job, or accept Julius’s invitation and take a richly remunerated post in America on his ranch?’

To which Tommy replies, Neither. He’s going to stay in London and marry Tuppence!

Summary

What a ridiculous farrago. It makes Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books look like War and Peace.

I can’t help thinking that the best part of these early comic espionage novels is the first chapter while the characters are full of brio and humour and you feel anything could happen, before the long, convoluted plots get going.

Cast

Goodies

  • Lieutenant Thomas ‘Tommy’ Beresford – early 20s – young redheaded Englishman who fought in the Great War, wounded twice – slow but steady type
  • Prudence L. Cowley – known as ‘Tuppence’ – young woman with black bobbed hair, fifth daughter of Archdeacon Cowley of Little Missendell, Suffolk – like Christie, served in the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) during the War – clever, quick and funny – ‘And as I’ve said before, and shall doubtless say again, little Tuppence can look after herself, thank you!’
  • Julius P. Hersheimmer, 35 – millionaire from America, seeking his first cousin Jane Finn, a girl he never met in America due to a family quarrel – ‘He was of middle height, and squarely built to match his jaw. His face was pugnacious but pleasant. No one could have mistaken him for anything but an American’
  • Jane Finn – 18, American woman we meet on the Lusitania being handed the packet of vital papers
  • Mr Carter – Englishman high up in the intelligence service and connected with the highest political powers – Carter is an alias
  • Sir James Peel Edgerton – MP and prominent London defence lawyer – socially and politically well connected, touted as a future prime minister – ”just a shade over average height, he nevertheless conveyed the impression of a big man. His face, clean-shaven and exquisitely mobile, was stamped with an expression of power and force far beyond the ordinary. Magnetism seemed to radiate from him’
  • Albert – lift boy at the building where Rita Vandemeyer lives, becomes helper to Tuppence (when she’s working undercover as a maid), then to Tommy (on his journey down to Kent)

Baddies

  • Mr Edward Whittington of the Esthonia Glassware Company – member of the conspirators who first encounters Tommy and Tuppence as they plan their joint venture over lunch in a restaurant – ‘a big man, clean shaven, with a heavy jowl. His eyes were small and cunning, and shifted their glance under her direct gaze’
  • ‘Mr Brown’ – the anonymous leader of the conspirators
  • Mr Kramenin – Russian Bolshevik agent in London, one of the conspirators, called Number One
  • Boris Ivanovitch, Count Stepanov – leading member of ‘the conspiracy’, who keeps in touch with Whittington and Rita
  • Mrs Marguerite Vandemeyer – a beautiful woman in society who followed Danvers on the Lusitania – the ‘Ruth’ referred to in a conversation between Winterton and Boris – takes her orders direct from ‘Mr Brown’
  • Dr Hall – runs the nursing home in Bournemouth where he took in the amnesia patient claimed to be a niece of Rita Vandemeyer, under the name Janet, for several years, where Hersheimmer goes to investigate and falls out of a tree (in a scene I haven’t included in my summary – of which there are many)
  • Conrad – the evil-faced doorkeeper of the house in Soho

Americans

Christie’s father was American – a wealthy stockbroker from New York – so she had a whole American side to her family and this explains why so many of her stories feature Americans, or have American connections. So it is here, where the imperilled heroine Jane Finn, and her handsome rescuer Hersheimmer, are true-blue Americans.

‘We’ll ask Miss Jane Finn to tell us the story that only Miss Tuppence has heard so far—but before we do so we’ll drink her health. The health of one of the bravest of America’s daughters, to whom is due the thanks and gratitude of two great countries!’

‘I love you now, Julius,’ said Jane Finn. ‘I loved you that first moment in the car when the bullet grazed your cheek…’

Bookishness

As I unfailingly point out, all Christie’s novels contain numerous ‘meta’ moments where the characters stop and comment that events, or thoughts or conversations are just the kind of thing that happen or are said in detective novels (or movies).

For the moment this paralysed the Young Adventurers, but Tuppence, recovering herself, plunged boldly into the breach with a reminiscence culled from detective fiction. (Chapter 5)

The sport was a new one to him. Though familiar with the technicalities from a course of novel reading, he had never before attempted to ‘follow’ anyone, and it appeared to him at once that, in actual practice, the proceeding was fraught with difficulties. Supposing, for instance, that they should suddenly hail a taxi? In books, you simply leapt into another, promised the driver a sovereign – or its modern equivalent – and there you were. In actual fact, Tommy foresaw that it was extremely likely there would be no second taxi. (Chapter 7)

But Tuppence had sharp eyes, and had noted the corner of a threepenny detective novel protruding from Albert’s pocket, and the immediate enlargement of his eyes told her that her tactics were good, and that the fish would rise to the bait. (Chapter 9)

Ten minutes later the lady was ensconced comfortably on her bed, smoking cigarettes and deep in the perusal of Garnaby Williams, the Boy Detective, which, with other threepenny works of lurid fiction, she had sent out to purchase. (Chapter 9)

Julius listened spellbound. Half the dishes that were placed before him he forgot to eat. At the end he heaved a long sigh. ‘Bully for you. Reads like a dime novel!’ (Chapter 18)

‘By the way, Julius,’ she remarked demurely, ‘I – haven’t given you my answer yet.’
‘Answer?’ said Julius. His face paled.
‘You know – when you asked me to – marry you,’ faltered Tuppence, her eyes downcast in the true manner of the early Victorian heroine. (Chapter 27)

Or the movies:

‘A crook?’ he queried eagerly.
‘A crook? I should say so. Ready Rita they call her in the States.’
‘Ready Rita,’ repeated Albert deliriously. ‘Oh, ain’t it just like the pictures!’
It was. Tuppence was a great frequenter of the cinema. (Chapter 9)

Dr Hall looked at Julius. Everything that he was for the moment incapable of saying was eloquent in that look.
‘No,’ said Julius, in answer to it, ‘I’m not crazy. The thing’s perfectly possible. It’s done every day in the States for the movies. Haven’t you seen trains in collision on the screen?’ (Chapter 14)

‘Because for the last two months I’ve been making a sentimental idiot of myself over Jane! First moment I clapped eyes on her photograph my heart did all the usual stunts you read about in novels.’ (Chapter 20)

You don’t mean as the crooks have got her?’
‘They have.’
‘In the Underworld?’
‘No, dash it all, in this world!’
‘It’s a h’expression, sir,’ explained Albert. ‘At the pictures the crooks always have a restoorant in the Underworld.’ (Chapter 23)

As well as at least one reference to the greatest fictional detective of them all:

‘Now, obviously this woman, whoever she was, was saved.’
‘How do you make that out?’
‘If she wasn’t, how would they have known Jane Finn had got the papers?’
‘Correct. Proceed, O Sherlock!’ (Chapter 6)

Two, in this case.

‘What have we for lunch? Stew? How did I know? Elementary, my dear Watson – the smell of onions is unmistakable.’ (Chapter 17)

Cunning stunts

Obviously ‘stunt’ was an active part of 1920s slang.

‘I did the usual stunt. Said: ‘What’s happened?’ And ‘Where am I?’
(Chapter 9)

‘I guess I’m a mutt,’ said Julius with unusual humility. ‘I ought to have thought of the false name stunt.’ (Chapter 13)

‘How about some high-class thought transference stunt? The way I reason is this: as a last chance they’ll let Jane Finn escape in the hope that she’s been shamming this memory stunt, and that once she thinks she’s free she’ll go right away to the cache.’ (Chapter 18)

As a last chance they’ll let Jane Finn escape in the hope that she’s been shamming this memory stunt. (Chapter 22)

I left a note for Julius, in case he was Mr Brown, saying I was off to the Argentine, and I dropped Sir James’s letter with the offer of the job by the desk so that he would see it was a genuine stunt. (Chapter 27)

Envoi

‘It has been fun, hasn’t it, Tommy? I do hope we shall have lots more adventures.’
‘You’re insatiable, Tuppence. I’ve had quite enough adventures for the present.’
‘Well, shopping is almost as good,’ said Tuppence dreamily.
(Chapter 28)

Credit

‘The Secret Adversary’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Bodley Head in January 1922.

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Posted by Simon on September 5, 2025

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One, Two, Buckle My Shoe by Agatha Christie (1940)

‘It’s just like a serial, isn’t it? What’s the next thrilling instalment?’
(Jane Olivera mocks Poirot’s exposition of the case so far, p.102)

‘That dentist chap shooting himself, and then this Chapman woman packed away in her own fur chest with her face smashed in. It’s nasty! It’s damned nasty! I can’t help feeling that there’s something behind it all.’
(The same sense of some hidden meaning or conspiracy expressed in all Christie’s novels, voiced here by Alistair Blunt, p.151)

Within the limits of her chosen genre, I admire Agatha Christie’s experiments and innovations. Lots of her novels try out novel scenarios and variations on the basic idea of a murder mystery. This one belongs to the sub-genre of ‘murder mystery inspired by a nursery rhyme’, a category which she virtually invented – see Other Agatha Christie books and short stories which share this naming convention, such as Hickory Dickory Dock, A Pocket Full of Rye, Five Little Pigs, How Does Your Garden Grow? and ‘And Then There Were None’.

‘One, Two, Buckle My Shoe’ obviously refers to the popular children’s nursery rhyme:

One, two, buckle my shoe.
Three, four, shut the door.
Five, six, picking up sticks.
Seven, eight, lay them straight.
Nine, ten, a good fat hen.
Eleven, twelve, men must delve.
Thirteen, fourteen, maids are courting.
Fifteen, sixteen, maids in the kitchen.
Seventeen, eighteen, maids in waiting.
Nineteen, twenty, my plate’s empty.

(Actually the version I remember from childhood departs from this at several points.)

So the gimmick is that each of the novel’s ten chapters corresponds to one line of the rhyme. This is made most explicit when Poirot himself applies the rhyme, stating about half way through that he has ‘picked up the sticks’ (i.e. various bits of evidence) and now needs to ‘lay them straight’ i.e. arrange them into a coherent order. To give the passage:

He remembered how he had sat before, jotting down various unrelated facts and a series of names. A bird had flown past the window with a twig in its mouth. He, too, had been collecting twigs. Five, six, picking up sticks…

He had the sticks – quite a number of them now. They were all there, neatly pigeonholed in his orderly mind – but he had not as yet attempted to set them in order. That was the next step – lay them straight.

What was holding him up? He knew the answer. He was waiting for something. Something inevitable, fore-ordained, the next link in the chain. When it came – then – then he could go on…

And also, I was slow to realise the significance when very early on a car pulls up, the door opens, a woman’s leg emerges, wearing a shoe with a buckle, which snags on the door and comes off. Buckle my shoe. Indeed, the detail of this loose shoe buckle will turn out to be the thread which Poirot uses to unravel the whole case. Clever.

Plot summary

Poirot is going to the dentist. There are half a dozen people in the waiting room, going in or coming out of treatment, for the two dentists at the practice he visits, Mr Morley and Mr Reilly.

Next day Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard rings Poirot up and informs him that this bland inoffensive dentist, Morley, was found dead of a gunshot wound an hour after he treated Poirot. Was it suicide or murder?

So Japp and Poirot team up to interview all the employees at the practice and then all the patients in the appointments diary.

But barely have they started this process than another body turns up. A dodgy middle-aged foreigner, Mr Amberiotis, is found dead at his hotel, apparently from an overdose of the kind of local anaesthetic a dentist prescribes. For Japp this confirms the suicide theory: Morley accidentally gave Amberiotis a fatal overdose of anaesthetics, realised what he’d done, and killed himself out of shame and mortification. Doesn’t sound very likely, does it? Surely even a fool like Japp wouldn’t believe such an improbable story. And that’s one of the things wrong with this book; it never really persuades or grips.

Then another person on the list, Miss Sainsbury Seale steps out of her hotel (the Glengowrie Court Hotel) the next evening and doesn’t return for dinner or at all.

So everyone who attended the dentist’s that morning seems to be being bumped off or disappearing. Why? A whole new complexion is out on everything when Poirot goes out to Ealing to visit another patient on the list, a Mr Reginald Barnes.

One of the key figures in the waiting room was a ‘big bug’ named Alistair Blunt. Barnes now explains that Blunt is a key figure in the City and in the network of Britain’s financial system. If you were a foreign power seeking to overthrow Britain, or a communist activist seeking to sweep away the existing capitalist system, bumping off Blunt would be a good starting point.

So Barnes’ testimony to Poirot transforms this from being a boring domestic murder which would probably turns out to be about sex or who stands to gain from the dead man’s will – into an International Intrigue with overtones of spying and espionage. It plunges us back into the feverish world of Christie’s preposterous early spy novels like The Big Four, The Seven Dials Mystery and The Secret of Chimneys.

Here’s how Barnes explains it, to show you the cartoon level of the discourse:

‘That’s why certain people have made up their minds that Blunt must go.’
‘Ah,’ said Poirot.
Mr Barnes nodded.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know what I’m talking about. Quite nice people some of ’em. Long-haired, earnest-eyed, and full of ideals of a better world. Others not so nice, rather nasty in fact. Furtive little rats with beards and foreign accents. And another lot again of the Big Bully type. But they’ve all got the same idea: Blunt Must Go!’

So Barnes’s theory is that ‘they’ (‘the organization that’s behind all this’) tried to persuade Morley to bump off Blunt but, when he refused, had to bump off him instead, and all the other people who, for one reason or another, might have seen or overheard something: Amberiotis, Miss Sainsbury Seal. So who actually shot Morley? His partner, Reilly.

So much for Mr Barnes’s theory. Is he right or is he paranoid and delusional? Poirot comes away wondering…

Next day Poirot goes to see Howard Raikes, a young American who was also waiting in the waiting room on the tragic morning (11.30 appointment). He finds him a firebreathing communist. I’m going to quote his big speech because of the way it echoes the sentiments expressed only a few years earlier by the writers of the Auden Generation, Auden himself and Louis MacNeice and especially Cecil Day Lewis who carried on being a communist after the war. When Auden wrote this kind of thing in verse in the early to mid-1930s it sounded thrilling and vivid; when Christie gives this speech to Raikes it sounds desperately immature and pathetic.

‘You’re Blunt’s private dick all right.’ His face darkened as he leaned across the table. ‘But you can’t save him, you know. He’s got to go – he and everything he stands for! There’s got to be a new deal – the old corrupt system of finance has got to go – this cursed net of bankers all over the world like a spider’s web. They’ve got to be swept away. I’ve nothing against Blunt personally – but he’s the type of man I hate. He’s mediocre – he’s smug. He’s the sort you can’t move unless you use dynamite. He’s the sort of man who says, “You can’t disrupt the foundations of civilization.” Can’t you, though? Let him wait and see! He’s an obstruction in the way of Progress and he’s got to be removed. There’s no room in the world today for men like Blunt – men who hark back to the past – men who want to live as their fathers lived or even as their grandfathers lived! You’ve got a lot of them here in England – crusted old diehards – useless, worn-out symbols of a decayed era. And, my God, they’ve got to go! There’s got to be a new world. Do you get me – a new world, see?’

Enquiries reveal that the missing Miss Sainsbury Seale was friends with a couple named Mr and Mrs Chapman and went to see them on the same day that Japp and Poirot interviewed her (at their flat in King Leopold Mansions, Battersea).

Enquiries reveal that Mr Chapman is currently abroad and that Mrs Chapman hasn’t been seen for weeks. In fact it’s over a month before one of the police investigators (Detective Sergeant Beddoes) becomes suspicious of Mrs Chapman’s lengthy absence and gets a pass key from the manager, and discovers a decomposed woman’s body locked in a trunk, presumed to be the missing Miss Sainsbury Seale.

When Poirot arrives, at Japp’s invitation, he sees that the woman’s face has been beaten to a pulp. All very disgusting but instantly made me realise – as always happens when anybody’s face has been smashed up in this kind of novel – that it’s been done to confuse the dead person’s identity and, sure enough, dental examination shows that the body is not Seale but Mrs Chapman.

Why? Maybe it’s just me but it felt like the story progresses at quite a slow pace. There are a lot of suggestive elements in it but somehow they don’t gel, and fail to create a sense of urgency or peril.

When he gets home, Poirot finds Mr Barnes waiting for him. He explains that Mr Albert Chapman, owner of the flat, is a spy! An agent for the British Intelligence Service, codename Q.X.912. The real question is why Barnes is telling Poirot all this? Out of the kindness of his heart, or has he been put up to it by someone?

Next thing Japp rings Poirot and tells him he’s been officially ordered to stand down the police enquiry into the murder. Clearly this has something to do with the Secret Service / espionage aspect of the whole thing. Japp is fuming at being stymied like this but Poirot, of course, being free of any official structure, can carry on investigating at will.

Next thing is Poirot receives a note from Alistair Blunt inviting him to come and stay at his country place at Exsham, in Kent. He’s barely finished reading the note when the phone rings and an unknown female voice tells him to give up his enquiries, steer clear of the case, keep his nose out of this business or else!

The narrative topples over into the ridiculous when there’s an attempt on the Prime Minister’s life. As he stepped out of Number 10 someone took a pot shot at him and missed. Now he just happened to be stepping out with what the press described as ‘a friend’ but Poirot quickly hears was the egregious Mr Alistair Blunt. Was the bullet meant for Blunt?

Not only that but the angry American communist Howard Raikes, one of the people in Morley’s waiting room that morning, just happened to be on the spot. He grabbed a man near to him and shouted to the police that he’d caught the shooter, only for this to be revealed as a mistake or decoy, because the person who fired the shot, a disgruntled Indian, was almost immediately caught with the gun on him. So what on earth was Raikes doing there and why on earth did he deliberately try to mislead the police?

As he prepares to go and stay with Blunt in Kent it becomes crystal clear that neither of Blunt’s womenfolk want him to go. Their relationship is a little complicated. Blunt was married to a woman named Rebecca Arnholt who was 20 years older than him, and a very successful financier in her own right, in fact critics said he only married her for her money. Julia Olivera was the niece of Rebecca Arnholt, being the daughter of Rebecca’s sister; and Jane Olivera is the daughter of Julia Olivera, and so Rebecca Arnholt’s grand niece.

Both of them are very superior creatures and loftily dismissive of Poirot who likens the scornful critical tones of old Mrs Olivera as like a ‘clucking hen’. It took me a moment to realise this is part of the joke or conceit or gimmick of the novel, whereby each chapter is named after – and to some extent cashes out or elaborates – a line from the rhyme, in this case ‘Nine, ten, a good fat hen’.

Poirot is driven down to the financier’s comfortable country house at Exsham in Kent in his chauffeur-driven Rolls (this is another obviously reassuring aspect of so many of Christie’s novels – it is that so many of the characters are reassuringly wealthy and upper class. It’s the same combination of nostalgia and fantasising about living that kind of life, that made the TV series ‘Upstairs Downstairs’ so popular when I was a boy, and more recently made ‘Downton Abbey’ such a hit. Petit bourgeois viewers and readers love fantasising about living the pampered lives of the Edwardian and Georgian upper classes, all country houses and huge staff.)

Anyway, the narrative had until now been all set in London and the urban setting gave the ridiculous spy story a kind of plausibility. Now setting switches to a plush country house, all gardeners and butlers, and changes tone entirely.

Here Poirot is introduced to Helen Montressor who is Blunt’s ‘cousin’. He interviews Blunt at great length, asking who would want to murder him etc. He discovers that one of the gardeners at the house is none other than Morley’s secretary’s fiancé, the touchy Frank Carter. He discovers that Jane Olivera a) hates and despises him (Poirot) for being so despicably bourgeois and b) reveals a surprising sympathy for Howard Raikes and his communist rhetoric.

The novel descends perilously close to farce when there is another assassination attempt on Blunt. Blunt is showing Poirot round his garden when a shot rings out. The bullet misses him but there is an immediate flurry in the laurel bushes and Howard Raikes falls through them, clutching Frank Carter who is holding a pistol. He claims he’s been framed, he was clipping some shrubs when the shot rang out and the gun was thrown at his feet.

When interviewed by the police, Frank claims he was offered the job by the Secret Service.

His instructions were to listen to the other gardeners’ conversations and sound them as to their ‘red’ tendencies, and to pretend to be a bit of a ‘red’ himself. He had been interviewed and instructed in his task by a woman who had told him that she was known as Q.H.56, and that he had been recommended to her as a strong anti-communist. She had interviewed him in a dim light and he did not think he would know her again. She was a red-haired lady with a lot of make-up on.

Poirot groaned. The Phillips Oppenheim touch seemed to be reappearing… (p.

E. Phillips Oppenheim (1866 to 1946) was a prolific writer of best-selling adventure fiction, featuring glamorous characters, international intrigue and fast action. So Christie’s two references to Oppenheim indicate how aware she was that her story, right from the start, verged on cheap populist melodrama.

Meanwhile, Raikes is on the scene both times someone fired a shot at Blunt. He is a communist hothead who thinks Blunt should be eliminated. Blunt’s posh niece Jane sympathises with him. Angry Frank Carter claims he’s some kind of fall guy for the Security Services. Behind all this lurks a series of unsolved murders and the involvement of a mystery British secret agent, Q.X.912. Could it get any more preposterous?

As usual, at this point I’ll stop summarising a) because it gets increasingly complicated before we arrive at the characteristically ludicrous and convoluted climax and b) I don’t want to give the game away.

 ‘I know, M. Poirot, that you have a great reputation. Therefore I accept that you must have some grounds for this extraordinary assumption—for it is an assumption, nothing more. But all I can see is the fantastic improbability of the whole thing.’ (p.225)

You can read the whole novel online.

Cast

  • Mr Henry Morley – dentist, ‘was a small man with a decided jaw and a pugnacious chin’
  • Miss Georgina Morley – Morley’s sister who keeps house for him, ‘a large woman rather like a female grenadier, ‘ tall and grim’
  • Gladys Nevill – Morley’s secretary, ‘a tall, fair, somewhat anæmic girl of about twenty-eight’
  • Frank Carter – Gladys’s fancy man, ‘ fair young man of medium height. His appearance was cheaply smart. He talked readily and fluently. His eyes were set rather close together and they had a way of shifting uneasily from side to side when he was embarrassed’ – turns out to be a blackshirt i.e. Fascist or, as the novel has it, ‘Imperial Shirt’
  • Agnes Fletcher – Morley’s house-parlourmaid
  • Mr Amberiotis – started as a Greek hotel keeper, known spy and possibly blackmailer
  • Alistair Blunt – quiet and modest and one of Britain’s great financiers
  • Rebecca Arnholt – Blunt’s dead wife, 20 years older than him, ‘a notorious Jewess’ in the words of Gladys Nevill
  • Julia Olivera – niece of Blunt’s deceased wife, Rebecca Arnholt, being the daughter of Rebecca’s sister
  • Jane Olivera – daughter of Julia Olivera and so Rebecca Arnholt’s grand-niece – American and offensive ‘She was tall, thin, and her face had an intelligence and aliveness that redeemed its lack of actual beauty. She was dark with a deeply tanned skin’ – madly in love with fellow American, Howard Raikes
  • Hercule Poirot
  • Alfred – boy assistant at the dentists’ surgery, ‘a boy in page-boy’s uniform with a freckled face, red hair, and an earnest manner’
  • Colonel Abercrombie – ‘a military-looking gentleman with a fierce moustache and a yellow complexion. He looked at Poirot with an air of one considering some noxious insect’
  • Miss Sainsbury Seale – posh, returned from India where she had unwisely married a Hindu who already had a wife, gives elocution lessons, keen amateur actress, ‘nearer fifty than forty. Pince-nez. Untidy yellow-grey hair’ – ‘a woman of forty odd with indecisively bleached hair rolled up in untidy curls. Her clothes were shapeless and rather artistic, and her pince-nez were always dropping off. She was a great talker’
  • George – Poirot’s butler
  • Chief Inspector Japp – of Scotland Yard, familiar figure from ten or so previous Poirot novels
  • Mr Reilly – Morley’s partner at the dental practice, young and flippant – ‘a tall, dark young man, with a plume of hair that fell untidily over his forehead. He had an attractive voice and a very shrewd eye’
  • Reginald Barnes – another patient (12 noon) who turns out to be a former Home office official and fantastically well informed about the international conspiracy to bump off Blunt
  • Mrs Harrison – proprietor of the Glengowrie Court Hotel
  • Mr Howard Raikes – American, embittered communist – ‘A lean hungry face, an aggressive jaw, the eyes of a fanatic. It was a face, though, that women might find attractive’ cf Ferguson in ‘Death on the Nile’
  • Mrs Merton – friend of Mrs Chapman, in whose flat at Battersea Miss Sainsbury Seale’s body is found
  • Mrs Adams – friend of Mrs Chapman, her name found on a letter in the murdered woman’s flat, lives in Hampstead, Poirot visits and questions

Method

‘You’re an odd man, M. Poirot.’
‘I am very odd. That is to say, I am methodical, orderly and logical—and I do not like distorting facts to support a theory—that, I find—is unusual!’

Women

Mrs Olivera clacked on. She was, thought Poirot, rather like a hen. A big, fat hen! Mrs Olivera, still clacking, moved majestically after her bust towards the door. (p.142)

Bookishness

Poirot asks the boy Arthur what he was reading:

What were you reading?’
‘Death at Eleven-Forty-Five, sir. It’s an American detective story. It’s a corker, sir, it really is! All about gunmen.’

‘Alfred reads detective stories – Alfred is enamoured of crime. Whatever Alfred lets slip will be put down to Alfred’s morbid criminal imagination.’

‘I’ve been looking forward, M. Poirot, to hearing a few of your adventures. I read a lot of thrillers and detective stories, you know. Do you think any of them are true to life?’
(Alistair Blunt)

As I’ve said, I think that Christie’s novels contain so many references to detective stories and thrillers in order to lower our standards of plausibility, help us suspend our disbelief and generally soften the reader up, ushering us into an imaginative world of preposterous goings-on.

Mr Barnes went on, tapping a book with a lurid jacket that lay on a table close at hand: ‘I read a lot of these spy yarns. Fantastic, some of them. But curiously enough they’re not any more fantastic than the real thing . There are beautiful adventuresses, and dark sinister men with foreign accents, and gangs and international associations and super crooks! I’d blush to see some of the things I know set down in print – nobody would believe them for a minute!’

The references to other detective stories, far from hiding the book’s artificiality, emphasise it, all the better to immerse the reader in the simple caricatures and preposterous plots of MurderMysteryWorld. As Japp remarks, citing the popular spy authors of the day:

As they went down the stairs again to No. 42, Japp ejaculated with feeling: ‘Shades of Phillips Oppenheim, Valentine Williams and William le Queux, I think I’m going mad!’ (p.122)

Sherlock Holmes

‘Talking of jobs, I’ve always been interested to know how you private detectives go about things? I suppose there’s not much of the Sherlock Holmes touch really, mostly divorce nowadays?’

The English

Among many other things, Poirot became vehicle by which Christie could express her amused fondness for her own nation and people. When Mr Morley’s secretary, Miss Gladys Nevill, comes to see him all of a-flutter, he knows how to calm her down.

Profiting by a long experience of the English people, Poirot suggested a cup of tea. Miss Nevill’s reaction was all that could be hoped for.
‘Well, really, M. Poirot, that’s very kind of you. Not that it’s so very long since breakfast, but one can always do with a cup of tea, can’t one?’
Poirot, who could always do without one, assented mendaciously.

Christie’s unfeminism

Glady’s boyfriend is unreliable, keeps losing jobs etc. But Gladys is naively confident that her love will redeem and change him, as so many women before her have made the same mistake.

‘But it will be different now. I think one can do so much by influence, don’t you, M. Poirot? If a man feels a woman expects a lot of him, he tries to live up to her ideal of him.’

Poirot sighed. But he did not argue. He had heard many hundreds of women produce that same argument, with the same blithe belief in the redeeming power of a woman’s love. Once in a thousand times, he supposed, cynically, it might be true.

In fact it is a running thread through all Christie’s books, this opinion that lots of women are attracted to bad men, to wrong ‘uns.

It was not as though he had any particular belief in, or liking for, Frank Carter. Carter, he thought dispassionately, was definitely what the English call a ‘wrong ’un’. He was an unpleasant young bully of the kind that appeals to women, so that they are reluctant to believe the worst, however plain the evidence. (p.171)

English sentimentality

‘It is not I who am sentimental! That is an English failing! It is in England that they weep over young sweethearts and dying mothers and devoted children. Me, I am logical.’ (p.204)

You only have to look at most Victorian art to see how vast a slab of sugary sentimentality used to be a central characteristic of the English.

Bookishness

Japp mocking Poirot’s claims that Morley was murdered triggers the self-mocking of her own genre and style which Christie deploys in every one of her novels.

‘If—only if, mind you—that blasted woman committed suicide, if she’d drowned herself for instance, the body would have come ashore by now. If she was murdered, the same thing.’
‘Not if a weight was attached to her body and it was put into the Thames.’
‘From a cellar in Limehouse, I suppose! You’re talking like a thriller by a lady novelist.’
‘I know—I know. I blush when I say these things!’
‘And she was done to death by an international gang of crooks, I suppose?’ (p.107)

After a minute or two, Japp went on with his summing up of the Sainsbury Seale situation.
‘I suppose her body might have been lowered into a tank of acid by a mad scientist—that’s another solution they’re very fond of in books! But take my word for it, these things are all my eye and Betty Martin. (p.109)

Wittgenstein

Poirot insists that solving a murder mystery requires a certain amount of fact finding, obviously yes yes yes – but then what is really required is thinking long and hard so as to arrange everything that is known into a logical sequence which fits all the facts and matches the psychology of the people involved i.e. is psychologically plausible. Hence his repeated insistence in all the books on the imperative importance of sitting back and thinking.

To be more precise, you have to find the right angle, the right vantage point, from which all the facts fit into a logical and psychologically consistent pattern. And so it is here, again.

A snare cunningly laid—a net with cords—a pit open at his feet—dug carefully so that he should fall into it.

He was in a daze—a glorious daze where isolated facts spun wildly round before settling neatly into their appointed places.

It was like a kaleidoscope—shoe buckles, 10-inch stockings, a damaged face, the low tastes in literature of Alfred the page-boy, the activities of Mr Amberiotis, and the part played by the late Mr Morley, all rose up and whirled and settled themselves down into a coherent pattern.

For the first time, Hercule Poirot was looking at the case the right way up… (p.176)

Now this idea, that a mental problem is only a problem because we are looking at it from the wrong perspective, and that what is required is not finding a solution so much as finding the right angle from which to regard the facts – this reminded me exactly of the later philosophy of the twentieth century’s greatest philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein. In my review of the brilliant biography of Wittgenstein by Ray Monk, I summarise his later attitude thus:

Wittgenstein isn’t about making theories or coming up with theoretical foundations. He wants to release people from their confusions and perplexities by making them see the ‘problem’ in a new way, from a different perspective. There are no solutions. But if you see problems from the right angle, they cease to be problems any more and so the lack of solutions, also, ceases to cause you anxiety and worry. Philosophy is the therapy which cures anxiety about philosophical problems.

Apparently Wittgenstein was fond of quoting the physicist the German physicist Heinrich Herz who struggled with the problems in mechanical theory bequeathed by Isaac Newton’s notion of ‘force’. But in his book ‘The Principles of Mechanics’, Herz explained that if you dumped the notion of force altogether and simply observed the wide variety of events which used to be corralled together to create the definition – if you actually just looked at what was in front of your eyes – then all the ‘problems’ raised by hanging onto Newton’s out-dated notion simply disappeared.

“When these painful contradictions are removed, the question as to the nature of force will not have been answered; but our minds, no longer vexed, will cease to ask illegitimate questions.” (Quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk, 1991, page 446)

Wittgenstein was delighted by this passage because it exactly epitomised his own approach to the so-called ‘problems’ of philosophy.

Which all closely matches the approach of the great fictional detective.

‘Me, I have dealt with crime for many years now. I have my own way of regarding things.‘

Poirot has a way, an angle, a perspective, which again and again solves complex mysteries which all his peers, whether professional or amateur, find impossible to solve. And he nearly always ends up by saying that, once regarded from the correct angle, most of these ‘insoluble’ puzzles turn out to be astonishingly simple.

So the twentieth century’s greatest detective and its greatest philosopher shared this fundamental approach in common 🙂

1930s slang: ‘lay’

Christie always lards Inspector Japp’s speech with plenty of Cockney slang to emphasise his lower class, not-so-well-educated character. I was struck in this novel by use of the word ‘lay’ which I don’t think I’ve seen used in this way before.

He was in close touch with some of our Central European friends. Espionage racket.’
‘You are sure of that?’
‘Yes. Oh, he wasn’t doing any of the dirty work himself. We wouldn’t have been able to touch him. Organizing and receiving reports – that was his lay.’

And:

‘Did you know that Miss Sainsbury Seale was a close friend of the late Mrs Alistair Blunt?’
‘Who says so? I don’t believe it. Not in the same class.’
‘She said so.’
‘Who’d she say that to?’
‘Mr Alistair Blunt.’
‘Oh! That sort of thing. He must be used to that lay.’ (p.108)

Thoughts

‘One, Two, Buckle My Shoe’ is a reversion to the preposterous atmosphere of international intrigue, secret crime organisations, spies and espionage, which characterised The Secret of Chimneys and The Seven Dials Mystery. Only with measurably less of the charm and humour which made those early novels so hilarious.

Credit

‘One, Two, Buckle My Shoe’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in November 1940.

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Three Act Tragedy by Agatha Christie (1935)

‘You’re a thundering good chap, Charles, but you do let your imagination run away with you.’
(The upper class milieu: Sir Bartholomew Strange addressing Sir Charles Cartwright in Chapter 3 of ‘Three Act Tragedy’)

‘You believe in me?’ said Sir Charles. He was moved.
‘Yes, yes, yes. We’re going to get at the truth. You and I together.’
‘And Satterthwaite.’
‘Of course, and Mr. Satterthwaite,’ said Egg without interest.
(Young Lady Egg Gore flirting with old Sir Charles Cartwright, Chapter 12)

‘You must forgive us badgering you like this. But, you see, we feel that there must be something, if only we could get at it.’
(Classic expression of the frustration and bewilderment expressed by the investigators in all Christie’s novels, Chapter 13)

‘My God,’ burst out Sir Charles. ‘It’s a nightmare – the whole thing is utterly incomprehensible.’
(The same sense of complete perplexity expressed in all Christie’s novels as they approach their climax, Chapter 25)

‘Think! With thought, all problems can be solved.’
(The core of Poirot’s method, Chapter 23)

He was the sort of gentle creaking gate that would have lived to be ninety.
(Sweet old Reverend Babbington, Chapter 4)

‘Three Act Tragedy’ is the ninth Hercule Poirot novel (there were 2 non-novel books – a collection of short stories and the novelisation of a play by a different author – so strictly speaking it’s the 11th Poirot book).

Previous ones have contained passing mockery of the English police, solicitors and other professions or, alternatively, have used a strongly themed setting (the obvious ones being the train-bound stories ‘The Mystery of Blue Train’, 1928, and ‘Murder on the Orient Express’, 1934).

This one, as the title suggests, is dominated by theatrical metaphors and comparisons. The central protagonist is a former star of the London theatre, Sir Charles Cartwright who, very amusingly, treats every setting as a Stage on which he frequently plays one of his Famous Parts, from the Hearty Sailor to the Intrepid Detective. All of which gives the entire narrative a kind of theatrical, stagey feel which, seeing as the whole thing is preposterous bunkum, makes it all the more enjoyable. Leading up to Poirot’s clever explanation of the mystery which divides it, as per the title, into three acts, and allows him to conclude with a flourish, right at the end:

‘It is nothing – nothing. A tragedy in three acts – and now the curtain has fallen.’
(Chapter 26)

Talking of Poirot, though, the book is notable for One Big Thing which is that he very much takes a back seat. He is, for random, unexplained reasons, present at the first murder, of the harmless vicar at Sir Charles Cartwright’s dinner party. And he bumps into Mr Satterthwaite in a public park in Monte Carlo just long enough to discuss the case and then, completely gratuitously (obviously because Christie thought it was about time she did so) gives us a potted account of his life story.

But then he disappears from the narrative. All the running i.e. the discussing theories behind the two murders, and going off to interview witnesses and related characters, is carried out by the triumvirate of Cartwright, Satterthwaite and Egg. It is only when they are all back at the Crow’s Nest, in the very Ship Room where Babbington’s death occurred, and are in the middle of a ‘conference’ to pool their latest findings that there’s an unexpected knock on the door and Poirot pokes his head round.

Magically, he knows that they are having just such a ‘conference’ and accurately predicts what they’ve discovered up to now and so are thinking. He admits that when they talked here in this room, weeks earlier, later in the evening of Babbington’s death, he thought Sir Charles’s theory that it was murder was just theatrical hyperbole. But Sir Bartholomew’s death changes everything and he has returned to apologise.

‘And so, Sir Charles, I have come up to you to apologise – to say I, Hercule Poirot, was wrong, and to ask you to admit me to your councils. (Chapter 15)

Cartwright and Satterthwaite are delighted, though all three men notice that Egg is reluctant. She had been hoping, via the investigation, to get closer to her hero, Sir Charles. But after a moment’s hesitation she has to acquiesce, and Poirot is on the team!

But he promises to take a back seat, not to get involved in any of the active sleuthing, and act in a purely advisory or consultative capacity.

So ‘Three Act Tragedy’ is by way of being another of Christie’s experiments with the form or narrative of the detective story – one in which the famous detective appears but is, for long stretches, invisible and uninvolved, while other characters dominate the narrative and conduct most of the footwork.

Plot summary

  • Cornwall
  • Monte Carlo
  • Yorkshire
  • London

Sir Charles Cartwright is a larger-than-life former actor; two year who has retired to the English Riviera where has had a luxury mansion constructed overlooking the sea (pretentiously named the ‘Crow’s Nest’).

House party Here he invites twelves guests to join him for a house party, half of whom have made the trip down from London, half who are locals. Rather randomly, one of the guests is the famous detective Hercule Poirot. When Cartwright’s friend Sir Bartholomew ‘Tollie’ Strange learns about Poirot attending, he jokes that they better watch out because murder seems to follow the little Belgian everywhere.

The vicar dies The party assembles and haven’t even sat down to dinner, are still enjoying cocktails in the ‘Ship Room’, when the local vicar, Mr Stephen Babbington, starts to choke, staggers to a nearby couch, collapses and dies. Who? Where? Why? What?

‘But why?’ cried Mrs. Babbington. ‘Why? What motive could there be for anyone killing Stephen?’ (Chapter 13)

Well Alan Manders for one. He revives the fact that, as a supposed communist, not so long ago he had a flaring argument with the vicar about the awful influence of Christianity, calling on churches all around the world to be swept away. But is that kind of political argument enough to murder someone?

Egg in love An important thread is that ‘Egg’ Gore, daughter of the impoverished aristocrat, Lady Mary Gore, appears to be passionately in love with old Sir Charles while, according to his observant friend, Satterthwaite, Sir Charles feels the same.

Interlude in Monte Carlo Again, with disarming randomness, Cartwright and Satterthwaite go on holiday to Monte Carlo where, by a boggling coincidence, Satterthwaite bumps into Hercule Poirot who confesses that he is bored. It’s here that he gives a potted account of his life story, explains that he is rich enough to retire, but is bored. Much later, when Satterthwaite is interviewing Manders, there’s a little exchange about Poirot.

‘That man!’ The expression burst from Oliver. ‘Is he back in England?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why has he come back?’
Mr. Satterthwaite rose.
‘Why does a dog go hunting?’ he replied. (Chapter 22)

Strange dies Luckily enough the English newspapers tell them that Cartwright’s close friend, Sir Bartholomew Strange, has also dropped dead at a dinner party he was giving at his home in Yorkshire, Melfort Abbey, with many of the same guests as attended Sir Charles’s ill-fated dinner in Cornwall. Can the two deaths be linked? In which case are they not from natural causes?

Nicotine poisoning When Sir Bartholomew’s death is attributed to nicotine poisoning, the authorities are persuaded to exhume Babbington’s body to see whether he died from the same cause.

The triumvirate Satterthwaite and Cartwright return to England, to Cornwall, where they meet up with Egg Gore and the threesome form a triumvirate a) agree that there’s more to this thing that meets the eye and so b) organise themselves as a team of sleuths, with different members tasked with interviewing various witnesses and connected persons.

Poirot reappears It’s in the middle of this conference, that Poirot makes the unexpected appearance I’ve described above, in Chapter 15 i.e. half way through the novel.

To Yorkshire Thus Satterthwaite and Cartwright travel up to Yorkshire, where they meet the country’s chief constable, the inspector in charge of the investigation, then visit the scene of Strange’s death (i.e. his grand country house), where they extensively interview the staff.

The missing butler In particular they follow up the local police’s main focus which is that Sir Bartholomew had recently retired his butler of long standing and taken on a new man, John Ellis. This Ellis disappeared from the house on the night of Strange’s death and no-one has seen him since.

The blackmail letters Poking around in Ellis’s room, Cartwright is struck by an ink stain on the carpet right in the corner of the room and, using his acting skills to impersonate a person huddled there, speculates that they were writing something when they heard footsteps coming along the hall, and so probably stuffed whatever they were writing under the gas heater. Sure enough they discover in just that location several drafts of what is obviously a blackmail note. Ellis knew something incriminating and planned to blackmail someone about it although, frustratingly, his drafts don’t include an addressee or any details.

The sanatorium They also visit the sanatorium set up at the nearby old Grange by Sir Bartholomew (who was a nerve specialist) for the treatment of patients with nervous breakdowns etc. As we all know, such places, in detective stories or thriller movies, are hotbeds of rumour and conspiracy. They interview the calm efficient matron.

Mrs De Rushbridger But they also learn of the recent arrival of a new patient, a Mrs De Rushbridger suffering from a nervous breakdown and loss of memory. And the inexplicable fact that, when Sir Bartholomew was informed by phone that she had arrived at his sanatorium, he was overcome with delight and congratulated the butler, Ellis, who had brought the news, something considered very odd by the housemaid who witnessed it. Why did Mrs De Rushbridger’s arrival at his sanatorium bring Sir Bartholomew so much pleasure? And a lot later on, when Miss Wills mentions that Sir Bartholomew had told her he was experimenting with hypnotism in restoring lost memories… Is that significant?

Alan Manders At the same time, a glaring oddity about the Yorkshire dinner is that Egg’s sometime beau, the suave young Alan Manders, who had attended the Cornwall dinner, had contrived to crash his motorbike into the wall of Sir Bartholomew’s country estate, had been taken into the house and so invited along to the dinner.

Anyone who’s read Christie’s preceding novel, the comedy thriller ‘Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?’ will remember how a leading character fakes a crash into the wall of a grand estate in order to be invited to rest and recuperate up at the big house. It seems that she’s used the exact same plot device in her very next story. These stories being arch, knowing comedies, she has her characters comment on the plot device’s obviousness, as Sir Bartholomew comments to his friend Angela Sutcliffe:

‘A new method of gate crashing,’ he called it. ‘Only,’ he said, ‘it’s my wall he’s crashed, not my gate.’ (Chapter 20)

Anyway, it puts us the alert that this Mandel went to great and rather absurd lengths to get himself invited to the fatal dinner. Was it in order to poison Sir Bartholomew? But why?

Egg interviews Meanwhile, Egg goes up to London where she interviews in quick succession two key attendees of both dinner parties, Mrs Dacres the fashionable dress-maker, and her wastrel husband Freddie Dacres, plus a model at Mrs D’s boutique who discloses that: 1) the company, despite its gleaming facade, is actually in dire financial straits; 2) Mrs D was chatting to if not having an affair with a handsome rich young man who she hoped to persuade to invest in her company but that 3) this likely fellow had been ordered off on a long sea voyage by none other than the noted Harley Street nerve specialist, Sir Bartholomew Strange. Mrs Dacres can’t possibly have murdered Sir Bartholomew out of revenge for the despatch of her lover / financial saviour… can she?

Freddie Dacres’ slip I’ve forgotten to mention that when Egg talks to Freddie (who takes her to a nightclub where he gets steadily more drunk) he goes into a kind of drunken memory which seems to imply that he himself has been consigned to, or locked up in, Sir Bartholomew’s sanatorium:

‘Sir Bartholomew Strange. Sir Bartholomew Humbug. I’d like to know what goes on in that precious Sanatorium of his. Nerve cases. That’s what they say. You’re in there and you can’t get out. And they say you’ve gone of your own free will. Free will! Just because they get hold of you when you’ve got the horrors.’ (Chapter 19)

Before going on to suddenly remember that his wife (Cynthia Dacres) not to tell anyone about this. Because then someone, or the police, might suspect him of bumping off old Sir Bartholomew…

Stop It’s at this point, with half a dozen possible suspects identified and a number of storylines nicely bubbling away, that I will – as in all my Christie reviews – stop summarising the plot. Because 1) they get steadily so much more complicated that summarising them becomes impossible, and 2) I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who decides to read it (see link to the online text, below).

Cast

In Loomouth

Murder 1: The Reverend Stephen Babbington dies soon after drinking a cocktail during drinks prior to dinner at Sir Charles Cartwright’s seaside house at Loomouth in Cornwall.

  • Mr Satterthwaite – ‘a dried-up little pipkin of a man’ with a ‘little wrinkled face’
  • Sir Charles Cartwright – 52, ‘an extraordinarily good-looking man, beautifully proportioned, with a lean humorous face, and the touch of grey at his temples gave him a kind of added distinction’ – has fallen in love with young ‘Egg’ Gore (below)
  • Sir Bartholomew ‘Tollie’ Strange – ‘a well-known specialist in nervous disorders’
  • Angela Sutcliffe – ‘a well-known actress, no longer younger, but with a strong hold on the public and celebrated for her wit and charm. She was sometimes spoken of as Ellen Terry’s successor’ – ‘How dull men are when they decide to settle down! They lose all their charm’
  • Captain Freddie Dacres – dissolute, gambler, drinker, drug taker – ‘He spent a lot of time on racecourses – had ridden himself in the Grand National in years – ‘a little red, foxy man with a short moustache and slightly shifty eyes’
  • Mrs Cynthia Dacres – owner of Ambrosine Ltd, a high-class, pretentious dress-making company and boutique in Bruton Street; Egg finds out from one of her models that the company is actually in dire financial straits
  • Anthony Astor – pen-name for the female playwright Miss Muriel Wills, author of ‘One-Way Traffic’ – ‘tall and thin, with a receding chin and very badly waved fair hair. She wore pince-nez and was dressed in exceedingly limp green chiffon. Her voice was high and undistinguished’ – distinctly less classy than all the other bourgeois characters, as indicated by the location of her home, in downscale Tooting
  • Lady Mary Lytton Gore – ‘Left as a widow very badly off with a child of three, she had come to Loomouth and taken a small cottage where she had lived with one devoted maid ever since. She was a tall thin woman, looking older than her fifty-five years. Her expression was sweet and rather timid’
  • Hermione Lytton ‘Egg’ Gore – young and foolish and in love with Sir Charles Cartwright, a genuine Christian – ‘twice as alive as anyone in that room. She had dark hair, and grey eyes and was of medium height. It was something in the way the hair curled crisply in her neck, in the straight glance of the grey eyes, in the curve of the cheek, in the infectious laugh that gave one that impression of riotous youth and vitality’
  • The Reverend Stephen Babbington – ‘quite a good fellow, not too parsonical,’ – ‘a man of sixty old, with kind faded eyes and a disarming diffident manner’
  • Mrs Margaret Babbington – the reverend’s wife, ‘a big untidy woman. She looked full of energy and likely to be free from petty mindedness’
  • Robin Babbington – their son, killed in India (they have three other sons: Edward in Ceylon, Lloyd in South Africa, and Stephen third officer on the Angolia)
  • Oliver Manders – 25, a good-looking young fellow, ‘a handsome lad, with his dark, heavy-lidded eyes and easy grace of movement’ – with something foreign about his appearance triggering this exchange: Egg Lytton Gore says to him: ‘Oliver – you slippery Shylock -‘ and Mr Sattersthwaite, observing the exchange, thinks: ‘Of course, that’s it – not foreign – Jew!’. Later we find out his mother had an affair with a married man whose wife refused a divorce i.e. he’s a bastard, he was taken up by his rich uncle in the City
  • Miss Milray – Sir Charles’s secretary: ‘Neither sudden deaths nor sudden changes of plan could excite Miss Milray. She accepted whatever happened as a fact and proceeded to cope with it in an efficient way’
  • Hercule Poirot
  • Temple – Sir Charles’s maid, ‘a tall girl of thirty-two or three. She had a certain smartness – her hair was well brushed and glossy, but she was not pretty. Her manner was calm and efficient.’
  • Dr MacDougal – the principal doctor in Loomouth

In Yorkshire

Murder 2: Sir Bartholomew Strange dies during a dinner party he’s hosting for much the same guests who attended Cartwright’s party in Cornwall.

  • Colonel Johnson – ’Yorkshire chief constable: ‘a big red-faced man with a barrack-room voice and a hearty manner’
  • Superintendent Crossfield – managing the investigation into Sir Bartholomew’s death: ‘a large, solid-looking man, rather slow of speech, but with a fairly keen blue eye’
  • Sir Jocelyn Campbell – local GP and toxicologist who was a guest at the dinner, who calls Strange’s time of death and suggests nicotine poisoning
  • Doctor Davis – police doctor
  • John Ellis – Sir Charles’s butler who disappears on the night of the death; later, letters threatening someone unknown with blackmail are found in his room
  • Mr Baker – Sir Bartholomew’s usual butler, for the last seven years, but who had been taken ill, given a holiday, and been replaced by Ellis
  • Miss Lyndon – Strange’s secretary
  • Mrs. Leckie – Strange’s cook: ‘a portly lady, decorously gowned in black’
  • Beatrice Church – Strange’s upper-housemaid: ‘a tall thin woman, with a pinched mouth, who looked aggressively respectable’
  • Alice West – Strange’s parlourmaid ‘a demure, dark-eyed young woman of thirty’
  • The Matron of the sanatorium – ‘a tall, middle-aged woman, with an intelligent face and a capable manner’
  • Strange’s lodge keeper – ‘a slow-witted man of middle age’

In London

Where Satterthwaite, Cartwright and Egg plan their investigations and are joined by Poirot, in an advisory capacity.

  • Sydney Sandford – the newest and youngest decorator of the moment, designed Mrs Dacres’ dress boutique
  • Doris Sims – model at Mrs Dacres’ boutique who Egg interviews, and tells her Mrs Dacres is hard up but she had been schmoozing a young rich man in a bid to get investment, but then he was ordered to take a long sea voyage, by his physician, the nerve specialist Sir Bartholomew Strange (!)

In Kent

  • Old Mrs Milray – Sir Charles’s secretary’s mother, ‘an immense dumpling of a woman immovably fixed in an armchair conveniently placed so that she could, from the window, observe all that went on in the world outside’ (Chapter 24)
  • Serving woman at the bakers where Egg and Sir Charles have a simple lunch

Love

Satterthwaite observes the love that cannot speak its name between Sir Charles Cartwright, 52, and young Egg Gore, young enough to be his daughter. Daddy issues.

It was, he [Satterthwaite] thought, an odd situation. That Sir Charles was overwhelmingly in love with the girl, he had no doubt whatever. She was equally in love with him. And the link between them the link to which each of them clung frenziedly was a crime a double crime of a revolting nature.
(Chapter 12)

Poirot’s life story

Early in the novel the setting moves to Monte Carlo where Mr Satterthwaite comes across Poirot sitting in a public park. Suddenly, for no very good reason, the Belgian tells him his life story:

‘See you, as a boy I was poor. There were many of us. We had to get on in the world. I entered the Police Force. I worked hard. Slowly I rose in that Force. I began to make a name for myself. I made a name for myself. I began to acquire an international reputation. At last, I was due to retire. There came the War. I was injured. I came, a sad and weary refugee, to England. A kind lady gave me hospitality. She died – not naturally; no, she was killed. Eh bien, I set my wits to work. I employed my little grey cells. I discovered her murderer. I found that I was not yet finished. No, indeed, my powers were stronger than ever. Then began my second career, that of a private inquiry agent in England. I have solved many fascinating and baffling problems. Ah, monsieur, I have lived! The psychology of human nature, it is wonderful. I grew rich. Some day, I said to myself, I will have all the money I need. I will realise all my dreams.’ (Chapter 6)

So that explains why he is retired and able to dally.

‘My time is all holidays nowadays. I have succeeded. I am rich. I retire. Now I travel about seeing the world.’ (Chapter 6)

Poirot’s motivation

‘Like the chien de chasse, I follow the scent, and I get excited, and once on the scent I cannot be called off it. All that is true. But there is more… It is – how shall I put it? – a passion for getting at the truth. In all the world there is nothing so curious and so interesting and so beautiful as truth…’ (Chapter 17)

Poirot’s method

‘I see the facts unbiased by any preconceived notions.’ (Poirot, Chapter 16)

‘My friend, do not ask me to do anything of an active nature. It is my lifelong conviction that any problem is best solved by thought.’ (Chapter 16)

‘Mon ami,’ said Poirot, ‘be guided by me. Only one thing will solve this case – the little grey cells of the brain. To rush up and down England, to hope that this person and that will tell us what we want to know – all such methods are amateurish and absurd. The truth can only be seen from within. (Chapter 25)

‘You mean it’s a lie?’ asked Sir Charles bluntly.
‘There are so many kinds of lies,’ said Hercule Poirot.
(Chapter 23)

And comparing his approach with his fellow investigators’:

‘You have the actor’s mind, Sir Charles, creative, original, seeing always dramatic values. Mr. Satterthwaite, he has the playgoer’s mind, he observes the characters, he has the sense of atmosphere. But me, I have the prosaic mind. I see only the facts without any dramatic trappings or footlights.’ (Chapter 25)

And once again we find him building houses out of cards as a way of meditating or letting his thoughts flow, much to Egg’s disgust (Chapter 26).

And, just as in every Poirot story, there comes the Eureka moment:

‘Mon dieu‘ cried Poirot.
‘What is it? Has anything happened?’
‘Yes, indeed something has happened. An idea. A superb idea. Oh, but I have been blind – blind –’
(Chapter 26)

Poirot’s pride

Mr. Satterthwaite studied him [Poirot] with interest. He was amused by the naïve conceit, the immense egoism of the little man. But he did not make the easy mistake of considering it mere empty boasting. An Englishman is usually modest about what he does well, sometimes pleased with himself over something he does badly; but a Latin has a truer appreciation of his own powers. If he is clever he sees no reason for concealing the fact.
(Chapter 17)

Poirot’s subterfuge

But behind these latter qualities turns out to be cunning. Obviously Christie was in an explanatory mood because she not only inserts into this novel an overview of Poirot’s career, but also a clever explanation of his manner:

‘Ah, I will explain. It is true that I can speak the exact, the idiomatic English. But, my friend, to speak the broken English if an enormous asset. It leads people to despise you. They say – a foreigner – he can’t even speak English properly. It is not my policy to terrify people – instead I invite their gentle ridicule. Also I boast! An Englishman he says often, “A fellow who thinks as much of himself as that cannot be worth much.” That is the English point of view. It is not at all true. And so, you see, I put people off their guard. Besides, he added, it has become a habit.’ (Chapter 27)

Cunning as a serpent.

The English class system

Hercule Poirot, the little bourgeois, looked up at the aristocrat. He spoke quickly but firmly.

Bookishness

‘Mrs de Rushbridger was killed before she could speak. How dramatic! How like the detective stories, the plays, the films!’ (Poirot in Chapter 27)

In previous reviews I’ve developed the idea that Christie having her characters regularly compare their situations and scenarios to the stereotypes and clichés of detective stories (or movies) serves several purposes. 1) It pre-empts criticism from critics or readers who may be tempted to complain about the corny (or preposterous) plot developments. 2) But at the same time it draws attention to the artificiality of the whole genre and nudges you away from even trying to compare anyone or anything that happens to ‘real life’, gently nudging you into the entirely fictional land of Detective Stories, where anything can happen, where anyone can disguise themselves as anyone else in order to carry out the most ludicrously complicated crimes.

Hence the succession of ‘nudges’ in this story.

‘You know, Egg, you really are detestably hearty. And your tastes are childish – crime – sensation – and all that bunk.’ (Manders to Egg, Chapter 5)

‘How superior detective stories are to life,’ sighed Sir Charles. ‘In fiction there is always some distinguishing characteristic.’ (Chapter 9)

‘What was his manner on the night of the tragedy?’ asked Mr Satterthwaite in a slightly bookish manner. (Chapter 9)

They left it in a somewhat disconcerted fashion. Their zeal as detectives was momentarily damped. Possibly the thought passed through their minds that things were arranged better in books. (Chapter 10)

‘The idea of gain we can now put definitely away,’ he said. ‘There does not seem to be anybody who (in detective story parlance) could benefit by Stephen Babbington’s death.’ (Chapter 15)

‘I’m afraid,’ said Lady Mary, ‘that that’s rather too clever for me.’
‘I apologise. I was talking rather bookishly.’ (Chapter 14)

‘Dash it all,’ went on Sir Charles with feeling, ‘in detective stories there’s always some identifying mark on the villain. I thought it was a bit hard that real life should prove so lamentably behindhand.’
‘It’s usually a scar in stories,’ said Miss Wills thoughtfully.
‘A birthmark’s just as good,’ said Sir Charles. (Chapter 21)

As Egg and Mr. Satterthwaite stood waiting for the lift, Egg said ecstatically: ‘It’s lovely – just like detective stories. All the people will be there, and then he’ll tell us which of them did it.’ (Chapter 23)

But these narrow quotes risk missing the bigger picture which I mentioned at the start, which is the book’s relentless comparison of lots of scenes to The Stage, with Sir Charles Cartwright ready, at the drop of a hat, to step into character as The Intrepid Detective, much to the amusement of his wry, observing friend, Mr Satterthwaite.

The new woman

Every generation going back to the 1880s thinks it has invented The New Woman, fearlessly defying the conventions of a Man’s World, and competing with men on their own terms etc etc. Christie’s independent novels almost always feature a variation on this type. In ‘Three Act Tragedy’, Egg Gore is a kind of caricature of the modern young woman, headstrong, impatient, taking the lead.

Egg Lytton Gore had got him [Mr Satterthwaite] securely cornered on the fishing quay. Merciless, these modern young women – and terrifying! (Chapter 4)

‘Have patience,’ counselled Mr Satterthwaite. ‘Everything comes right in the end, you know.’
‘I’m not patient,’ said Egg. ‘I want to have things at once, or even quicker.’ (Chapter 12)

1930s diction

‘I hate women. Lousy cats. Did you see her clothes – that one with the green hair? They made me gnash my teeth with envy. A woman who has clothes like that has a pull – you can’t deny it. She’s quite old and ugly as sin, really, but what does it matter. She makes everyone else look like a dowdy curate’s wife. Is it her? Or is it the other one with the grey hair? She’s amusing – you can see that. She’s got masses of S.A…’ (Chapter 5)

‘I always think,’ said Egg, ‘that Mrs Dacres looks a frightful cat. Is she?’ (Chapter 18)

‘I’m not at all sure that I’m not a little jealous of her… We women are such cats, aren’t we? Scratch, scratch, miauw, miauw, purr, purr…’ She laughed. (Chapter 20)

Where ‘cat’ means gossipy bitch, and SA stands for sex appeal.

‘And so he’s legged it.’

Which I thought was a lower-class phrase from my own youth, but is obviously older.

Mrs. Dacres, looking as usual marvellously unreal, was (as Egg put it to herself) doing her stuff. (Chapter 18)

Penetrating

Her words came drawlingly, in the mode of the moment.
‘My dear, it wasn’t possible. I mean, things either are possible or they’re not. This wasn’t. It was simply penetrating.’
That was the new word just now – everything was ‘penetrating‘. (Chapter 2)

‘Now, do you like this? Those shoulder knots – rather amusing, don’t you think? And the waistline’s rather penetrating.’ (Chapter 18)

‘My dear, it was too penetrating for words!’ (Chapter 18)

‘Extraordinary fat women come and positively goggle at me. Too penetrating.’ (Chapter 18)

Modern psychology

Presumably, as the years passed from 1916 when Christie wrote her first novel, modern psychology became more and more well known, extensive, covered in newspapers and magazines, and so filtered into popular fiction, especially when the lead character (Poirot) is himself so interested in psychology, as he tells anyone who will listen.

‘How much crime depends, too, on that psychological moment. The crime, the psychology, they go hand in hand.’ (Chapter 17)

But in this story it is not only Poirot who talks about psychology, but other characters as well. The subject crops up when Mr Satterthwiate goes to see / interview staid old Lady Mary. Here’s Satterthwaite confidently describing an inferiority complex, a concept first developed by Freud’s follower Alfred Adler, around 1907 but which had, quite clearly, percolated through to the wider culture by 1934 if not some time before:

‘An inferiority complex is a very peculiar thing. Crippen, for instance, undoubtedly suffered from it. It’s at the back of a lot of crimes. The desire to assert one’s personality.’ (Chapter 14)

Surprisingly, maybe, Lady Mary turns out to have read up on the subject:

‘Some books that I’ve read these last few years have brought a lot of comfort to me. Books on psychology. It seems to show that in many ways people can’t help themselves. A kind of kink. Sometimes, in the most carefully brought-up families you get it. As a boy Ronald stole money at school – money that he didn’t need. I can feel now that he couldn’t help himself… He was born with a kink…’ (Chapter 14)

‘Every woman adores a fascist’ (Sylvia Plath)

Lady Mary fell for a wrong ‘un. Her father told her so and tried to forbid her from marrying ‘Ronald’ but, according to her, many women are attracted to problem men.

‘There doesn’t seem to be anything that warns girls against a certain type of man. Nothing in themselves, I mean. Their parents warn them, but that’s no good – one doesn’t believe. It seems dreadful to say so, but there is something attractive to a girl in being told anyone is a bad man. She thinks at once that her love will reform him.’
(Lady Mary, Chapter 14)

Her daughter, Egg, is a chip off the old block, although she’s much more forward and confident and cynical about it, in the modern style:

‘I like men to have affairs,’ said Egg. ‘It shows they’re not queer or anything.’
(Chapter 4)

Nonetheless, despite all this modern self-awareness, she seems to have fallen in love just as inappropriately, with an older man, with Sir Charles.

This theme was aired extensively in ‘Murder on the Blue Train’ where young Ruth Kettering is said to be attracted to Comte Armand de la Roche precisely because he had such a bad reputation. And in the novel after this, ‘Death in the Clouds’ where sweet Jane Grey is attracted (without knowing it) to the serial killer, Norman Gale:

‘A killer,’ said Poirot. ‘And like many killers, attractive to women.’
(Death in the Clouds, Chapter 26)

It’s tempting to attribute the belief to Christie herself, but I’m more inclined to think it’s one of the many standardised clichés and stereotypes which she used to construct her ludicrous stories.

Dinner menu

I’ve read thousands of novels in which characters have thousands of breakfasts, lunches and dinners but it never ceases to amaze me how little detail most authors give of the specific dishes consumed at any meal. This novel features a very rare description of the actual dishes served at a dinner, and so an interesting sidelight on social history.

Soup, grilled sole, pheasant and chipped potatoes, chocolate soufflé, soft roes on toast.
(Chapter 7)

Cornwall’s reputation

‘I always think Cornwall is rather terribly artisty… I simply cannot bear artists. Their bodies are always such a curious shape.’
(Mrs Dacres in Chapter 18)

Poirot and Wittgenstein

Right at the end of his neat explanation of the crime, how it was done and why, Poirot draws a general conclusion. Solving a murder mystery requires a certain amount of fact finding, obviously yes yes yes – but then what is really required is thinking long and hard so as to arrange everything that is known into a logical sequence which fits all the facts and matches the psychology of the people involved i.e. is psychologically plausible. Hence his repeated insistence in all the books on the imperative importance of sitting back and thinking.

To be more precise, you have to find the right angle, the right vantage point, from which all the facts fit into a logical and psychologically consistent pattern.

‘Now here I admit that Sir Charles was right and I was wrong. I was wrong because I was looking at the crime from an entirely false angle. It is only twenty-four hours ago that I suddenly perceived the proper angle of vision – and let me say that from that angle of vision the murder of Stephen Babbington is both reasonable and possible.’ (Chapter 27)

Now this idea, that a mental problem is only a problem because we are looking at it from the wrong perspective, and that what is required is not finding a solution so much as finding the right angle from which to regard the facts – this reminded me exactly of the later philosophy of the twentieth century’s greatest philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein. In my review of the brilliant biography of Wittgenstein by Ray Monk, I summarise his later attitude thus:

Wittgenstein isn’t about making theories or coming up with theoretical foundations. He wants to release people from their confusions and perplexities by making them see the ‘problem’ in a new way, from a different perspective. There are no solutions. But if you see problems from the right angle, they cease to be problems any more and so the lack of solutions, also, ceases to cause you anxiety and worry. Philosophy is the therapy which cures anxiety about philosophical problems.

Apparently Wittgenstein was fond of quoting the physicist Heinrich Herz who struggled with the problems in mechanical theory bequeathed by Isaac Newton’s notion of ‘force’. But in his book The Principles of Mechanics, Herz explained that if you dumped the notion of force altogether and simply observed the wide variety of events which used to be corralled together to create the definition – if you actually just looked at what was in front of your eyes – then all the ‘problems’ raised by hanging onto Newton’s out-dated notion simply disappeared.

“When these painful contradictions are removed, the question as to the nature of force will not have been answered; but our minds, no longer vexed, will cease to ask illegitimate questions.” (Quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk, 1991, page 446)

Wittgenstein was delighted by this passage because it exactly epitomised his own approach to the so-called ‘problems’ of philosophy.

And closely matches the approach of the great fictional detective.

‘Me, I have dealt with crime for many years now. I have my own way of regarding things‘

Poirot has a way, an angle, a perspective, which again and again solves complex mysteries which all his peers, whether professional or amateur, find impossible to solve. And he nearly always ends up by saying that, once regarded from the correct angle, most of these ‘insoluble’ puzzles turn out to be astonishingly simple.

So the twentieth century’s greatest detective and its greatest philosopher shared this fundamental approach in common 🙂

Credit

‘Three Act Tragedy’ by Agatha Christie was published in 1935 by the Collins Crime Club.

Related links

Related reviews

‘I’d never seen a murder at close hand before. A writer’s got to take everything as copy, hasn’t she?’
‘I believe that’s a well-known axiom.’ (Chapter 21)

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Posted by Simon on August 1, 2025

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Noël Coward: A Biography by Philip Hoare (1995)

Philip Hoare’s hefty 1995 biography of Noel Coward is vast, encyclopedic and immensely enjoyable. It feels like it tells you every detail you ever wanted about The Master’s life and yet manages at the same time to be brisk and pacey and immensely readable.

The central take home is Coward’s awesome drive from the earliest age to be a star, a success, to take London’s theatreland then New York’s Broadway by storm, and how this fed his relentless drive to network, know everybody, work the room, schmooze and socially climb climb climb, baby. One minute he’s occupying the poky attic in his mother’s Pimlico boarding house, the next he’s hobnobbing with the greats of British theatre, dining with Somerset Maugham, hanging with Tallulah Bankhead, his understudy is John Gielgud, and then it’s off across the Atlantic to party with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, get to know Ben Hecht and Katherine Hepburn, then a luxury liner back across the pond during which he charms Earl Mountbatten and his notoriously promiscuous wife, Edwina. (Hoare has a gossipy page about the scandal caused by her libel case against People magazine which accused her of having an affair with the Black actor Paul Robeson.) He writes a musical with Ivor Novello and his breakthrough play is turned into a film by Alfred Hitchcock, he performs with a young Laurence Olivier, becoming such good friends with him and his wife that there is speculation to this day about whether they had a homosexual fling. Olivier is on the record as saying emphatically not.

And all this culled from just a few years in the mid-1920s. But Coward’s career was to last another 40 years, as he mined a new historical vein in the 1930s (Cavalcade), then made the great patriotic movies of the 1940s (In Which We Serve, This Happy Breed), then reinvented himself as a cabaret star after the war. At each stage, on every page, we meet a host of characters from each era, from Ivor Novello, Cecil Beaton and Michael Arlen, Rebecca West and Virginia Woolf in the 1920s, to his bizarrely close friendships with both Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo in the ’30s, and so on and so on, in a never-ending carnival of high grade showbiz gossip.

Coward’s life is like a silver thread guiding us through the glittering worlds of music and entertainment, theatre and film, of his era, as well as the gay underworld scenes in London, New York and select spots around the Mediterranean (Capri, Algiers) and Hoare treats us to and endless supply of fascinating and often hilarious anecdotes. I laughed out loud at the story of American producer Jed Harris in England to cast a production of The Green Bay Tree and going to loads of Shakespeare productions, claiming he was getting very tired of seeing English kings being played by English queens (p.195).

And this is just the socialising and the gossip, before you get to the actual work. Coward’s work ethic was phenomenal and his output prodigious. If this or that play was a disaster, don’t worry darling, there’s always another revue or musical or operetta just round the corner, or a new hit song about to take the gramophone and radio by storm, or a new movie just about to hit the screens, and then there are his books of short stories. And the novel.

He was a phenomenon, able to act, dance, write ravishing musicals, smash hit songs and era-defining plays, and then the great wartime movies. I don’t think genius is quite the right word, but man of phenomenal, extraordinary talents and, above all, the burning, quenchless drive to succeed succeed succeed. As his friend Esme Wynne said, he was:

‘frightfully ambitious… He was full of determination and willpower’ (p.43)

Or as he archly put it in his autobiography:

‘It was a matter of pressing urgency… that I should become as rich and successful as soon as possible.’ (quoted p.63)

Distinctive speech

When a girl, his mother, Violet (1863 to 1954), developed a fever which left her with poor hearing in one ear. This was one reason he developed such an idiosyncratic manner of speech, clearly enunciating every syllable of every word, for her benefit.

Closeness to mother

Violet’s first child, a boy, Russell, died at the age of 6 from spinal meningitis, and this made her especially protective of her second child, Noel (p.10). She cosseted him, and dressed him nicely, and danced attendance. He grew up emotionally spoiled, though not materially, for the family was poor.

Distance from father

Noel’s father, Arthur (1856 to 1937), was a failure. After a series of jobs he became a piano salesman which took him away from home a lot, so was absent during Noel’s boyhood. He was also ineffectual. Eventually he dwindled down to being a sort of servant at the boarding house Violet ended up running.

Suburban

Noel was born in Teddington but the family moved a lot, sometimes out as far as Chobham, living for a while in the Battersea/Clapham area of London, settling in Ebury Street in Pimlico, just north of Victoria Station. I was struck by the fact that next door lived the Evans family, whose daughter, Edith, was to become a dame of the theatre.

He was always aware of his origins in the impoverished lower middle class. Hoare quotes Gertrude Lawrence after they had danced a number in his 1922 review London Calling, standing in the wings and listening to the loud applause and excitedly saying: ‘That’s for us, the two kids from the suburbs. We’ve definitely arrived’ (quote p.119).

Noel

He was named Noel because he was born on 15 December i.e. close to Christmas.

Poverty

When his father’s work petered out, Violet was forced to turn their house in Pimlico into a boarding house, with Alfred helping with the serving and chores. Whenever he made money Noel was quick to pay off the family debts and never lapsed in his attachment to his mother.

But their poverty was easily used as a slur by anyone who wanted to hurt or denigrate him. Before meeting Noel, Cecil Beaton was told his mother was a charlady (p.123). (Compare the universal snobbery against H.G. Wells whose mother was housekeeper at a grand country seat.) For me, it’s this unashamed loyalty to his mother and humble roots which I found the most winning element in Noel’s character, far richer than the so-called wit.

Precocity

What really comes over very quickly is how precocious Noel was and how extraordinarily determined to succeed. He started acting at the age of five and his mother was taking him to auditions and local amateur talent shows before he was 10. At home in Clapham he made a toy theatre and spent the day writing plays for the little puppet figures he made to act out. His first professional engagement was in 1911 at the age of 14, where he appeared in the children’s play The Goldfish in London. By the time he hit his teens he had acted, danced and sung onstage and had a vivid sense of his own potential. He wanted to be a star.

Vicars and sex

He was put off religion by several groping vicars he encountered as a boy. Last year the Archbishop of Canterbury was forced to resign after admitting to not doing enough to sanction or report a paedophile vicar. It is a long tradition within the Church of England but also, of course, within the Catholic Church. Noel never respected either.

Homosexuality

He had homosexual experiences before heterosexual ones. Girls were so much more closely chaperoned and protected whereas boys were encouraged to play, share rooms, go camping etc together. And all without the heart-stopping risk of the life-ruining risk of getting pregnant.

(The ever-present threat of pregnancy is echoed a lot later in the book, when Hoare describes Coward meeting the man who was to be the love of his life, Graham Payn, towards the end of the Second World War. Payn had previously been heterosexual and had numerous affairs with chorus girls. But after the third abortion – ‘and they cost £75 in those days’ – he’d had enough and was ready for a change of orientation, p.358. Compare and contrast Kingsley Amis’s horrible depictions of abortion in his early novels, and the squalid abortion scenes in the 1966 movie, Alfie. Gays were well out of the whole thing. )

Uranians

The Uranians was one of numerous names given to late-nineteenth century associations of homosexuals in the arts who wrote about the love of adolescent boys.

Young Noel was introduced to this world when still a boy via the figure of the painter, Bohemian and prominent Uranian Philip Streatfeild. One version of the story goes that Noel’s mother, Violet, was working as a cleaner, cleaning Streatfeild’s Chelsea studios and one day brough along her 14-year-old son. With his eye for adolescent boy beauty, Streatfeild was taken with Noel and asked him to sit for him. Streatfeild introduced to other artists and performers in his circle (which included Robbie Ross, Alfred Douglas and other survivors from the Wilde circle of the 1890s).

Then, in 1914, Streatfeild asked Violet’s permission to take the boy on holiday with him to Cornwall. Knowing Streatfeild and obviously trusting him, and also concerned for her son’s ongoing health issues in the polluted London air, Violet gave her permission and young Noel was whisked off to Cornwall to meet more stylish gay artists who probably included the distinguished painter of young men Henry Scott Tuke. Here he could sunbathe and swim nude, and be worshipped by older men.

Nobody knows whether he had sex with any of these men but it must have shown the impressionable young boy that homosexuality and the wonderfully sybaritic lifestyle these men led, was possible, was a lifestyle option. Here’s a photo of Streatfeild and Noel.

Philip Streatfeild

Photo of Philip Streatfeild and a teenage Noel Coward

They were in Cornwall when war broke out in August 1914. Coward just seemed to have a magic touch when it came to making contacts. As soon as the war broke out Coward was sent back to London in the charge of a friend of the group, the novelist Hugh Walpole.

Streatfeild enlisted and died a year later from tuberculosis contracted in the army. He was just 35 (p.44). But not before he’d introduced Noel to other members of his regiment, especially the gay officers, who took part in what sound like orgiastic parties (p.36). Thus began Coward’s lifelong attraction to men in uniform and comfortableness around members of the forces of all classes and all sexual persuasions.

Hambleton Hall

Coward’s social ascendancy began thanks to Streatfeild who, before his death, asked wealthy socialite Mrs Julia Astley Cooper to take Coward under her wing. Mrs Astley Cooper continued to encourage her late friend’s protégé, who remained a frequent guest at her estate, Hambleton Hall in Rutland (pages 39 to 43). Among her guests were notables like CK Montcrieff, the translator of Proust, the conductor Malcolm Sargent, the diarist James Lee Milne and so on.

But young Noel not only met and learned how to talk to high-powered members of the literati, but was also trained in the rhythms and decorum of country house living, numerous details of which were crucial to his plays of the 1920s. Mrs Astley Cooper even claimed, a lot later, that he had a little black notebook with him and took down remarks and whole conversations between the Bohemian members of her family and that these turned up wholesale in plays like Hay Fever and The Young Idea. Hoare says his experiences there were ‘pivotal to Coward’s progress’ (p.43).

Penetrative sex

As to sex with any of these Uranians, his close friend throughout his boyhood, Esmé Wynne, decades later insisted that Noel was not homosexually active as a boy. In fact Hoare broadens this out to the claim that he had a lifetime aversion to penetrative sex (p.34). Much later in the book I laughed at the story that he and American producer Jed Harris were having a late night conversation about sex and when Jed asked him if he’d ever slept with a woman, Noel replied: ‘It would be like going to bed with a porpoise’ (p.195). Well, I dare say porpoises can be sexy 🙂

Saki

At Hambleton Hall Noel picked up from Proust as a name to drop (he later named a cat Proust) but the real revelation was the writings of the camp humourist Saki, real name Hector Hugh Munro. Saki’s humorous contempt for the values of the older generation, his worship of camp young men, yet all drenched with a sentimental fondness for the English countryside and the quirks of English life, all of these were things Noel would adopt wholesale. He never got to meet his hero because Munro was killed in the trenches in November 1916, when Noel was just 17.

Esmé Wynne

Noel had a deep boyhood and adolescent friendship with Esmé Wynne (1898 to 1972). They met at child auditions and in 1914 both appeared in the first production of Clifford Mills’ Where the Rainbow Ends. Soon after Wynne attended Coward’s 12th birthday party and their friendship blossomed. In 1912 Wynne had her first writing success at the age of 13 when her first play The Prince’s Bride was put on for one night by Charles Hawtree at the Savoy, including Coward in the cast. From then on they were inseparable, spending time together whenever possible and writing to each other constantly. In 1915 they were part of the cast which undertook a lengthy British tour of Brandon Thomas’s play Charley’s Aunt.

Between acting appointments collaborated on sketches and songs together and wrote a number of one-act plays under the joint pen-name of Esnomel; Ida Collaborates (The Last Chapter) (staged 1917), To Have and To Hold (not staged) and Women and Whisky (staged 1918). They also got up to teenage pranks.

A very naughty boy…

As an adolescent Noel got into all kinds of trouble. He bit teachers, answered back.

He was addicted to shoplifting, pulling off amazing feats of theft, one time simply walking out of Fortnum and Mason with a suitcase, strolling along to Piccadilly to Hatchards, filling it with books and walking out (p.48). On numerous occasions he nearly got caught and had to leg it. This kind of behaviour associates him much more with the urban tearaways of the working class than the soignée upper classes he realised he wanted to move among.

On page 202 Hoare has a passage describing how Noel, arguably, never really grew up, from the childish tantrums he threw in the theatre or with his ‘family’, to his impish subversive sense of humour, his quickness to ridicule royalty, church of state. Kenneth Tynan is quoted as saying he was never entrapped by maturity (p.202). And Hoare thinks Private Lives shows its protagonists having endless wildish tantrums (p.223).

No education

An important point is that he had little or no formal education. He was educated briefly at a choir school and later received dance lessons, but more or less left school at 11 and had no formal schooling thereafter. Forget university, he didn’t get anywhere near finishing secondary school. Instead The Theatre was his education and his teachers and his life. To this lack may fairly obviously be attributed the legendary thinness of his plays and their almost complete lack of depth or meaning beyond the hour and a half’s distraction they provide.

When he published his first volume of autobiography, Present Indicative, in 1937 the novelist St John Ervine was staggered at its shallowness: ‘I was amazed and disturbed at the slenderness of his intellectual resources. [I wonder if he has] ever read a great book, seen a fine picture or a notable play, listened to music of worth, observed a piece of sculpture, or taken any interest in the commonplaces of a cultured man’s life.’ (quoted, p.276)

Piano

He learned some good striking chords with which to open almost any song to get the audience’s attention (p.54). Although he never learned to play the piano very well. I was struck when he himself admits he was only comfortable in three keys, E flat, B flat and A flat. He joked that the sight of sharps on sheet music threw him into a tizzy (p.14).

First World War

In 1918, Coward was conscripted into the Labour Corp. He bribed his way to a day pass and spent it tracking down every contact he’d made via Streatfeild or Mrs Cooper and eventually persuaded a sympathetic officer to phone the CO and get him transferred to the Artists Rifles. But he was useless. Having not attended school since 1918 he had no sense of discipline and esprit de corps. He developed headaches and insomnia, fell and cracked his head and was sent to a hospital in Camberwell mostly filled with shell shock victims. Esme thought he was malingering and even here he made influential friends, and discovered a way of escaping for evenings back in the West End. In June 1918 he was discharged from hospital and sent back to the Artists Rifles camo in Essex where he was given light duties such as cleaning the latrines. Not surprisingly, he developed psychosomatic symptoms again and again was sent to hospital. This one includes lots of epileptic patients and Noel briefly worried that he was one too. Weeks passed and he drafted a bad novel. Eventually, in August 1918 he was given a discharge. He was free to resume his career in his beloved theatre.

In the 1930s Coward wrote as flippantly as possibly about his period in the army, exaggerating for comic effect the extent to which he had faked his symptoms to escape service. This came back to bite him very hard when the Second World War kicked off, not only among his enemies in Britain but also in the States, where his endless foreign travel in the war’s first few years drew extensive criticism.

Elsie April

In 1922 he met Elsie April who worked with many composers to improve and orchestrate their compositions. She was prodigiously gifted. She had perfect pitch. If someone hummed a tune to her in a noisy rehearsal room she was able to notate, harmonise and transcribe it on the spot. Her biographer credits her with introducing ‘the unusual key changes and poignant angularities of phrase’ to be found in Coward’s mature music. I think I know what he means. If you listen to the songs in Conversation Piece it’s rare that a song stays in the same key for more than two lines and the vocal line often jumps dramatically. Although the orchestration is sickeningly sweet, the actual vocal lines are often strikingly jarring and angular.

Burning ambition

He had an extraordinary commitment to becoming successful and famous. In his discussion of heroin and cocaine a propos of The Vortex, Hoare gives the impression that, although mixing in circles which took drugs, he never did himself. He was not the sort. He never lost control. He was always watching and alert and driven.

He devoted himself to making contacts and social climbing while still a teenager. There isn’t space to describe the extraordinary range of artists, writers, poets, playwrights, producers, designers, directors, other actors, as well as aristocrats and even royalty that he met. On a trans-Atlantic liner he managed to get on first name terms with the Earl Mountbatten and his wife. He became so friendly with the dissolute brother of the Prince of Wales that people speculate to this day whether they had a gay affair!

The family

Noel early gathered around him a coterie of friends and collaborators who became known jokily as ‘the family’. One of the earlier members was the actress Lorne Lorraine who became his devoted secretary for 40 years, and is captured as the long-suffering secretary Monica Reid in Present Laughter, and later friends such as his assistant Cole Lesley (recruited when he was working as a shop assistant in Kent, p.272), and his life partner Graham Payn.

‘Bubbers’ is what he called his sacred afternoon nap.

Backchat and bickering

I was astonished when I first read Noel Coward’s plays at the almost complete absence of the famous wit and humour I’d heard so much about. Instead I discovered almost nothing but argument and bickering rising, from time to time, to really angry exchanges and even, in Private Lives, physical attacks.

This view felt a bit like blasphemy against the great man, and I worried I had profoundly misread him, so it’s reassuring to have Hoare quote so many, many critics and contemporaries who entirely agree with my own reading.

The swift, hard, rattling farcical-comedy, at which he aimed so many shots, is brought to glittering perfection in Private Lives. It is technically a masterpiece – not of writing plays but of writing Noel Coward plays. For, as I think we have discovered by now, Mr Coward’s plot is the contrast between brilliant cosmopolitanism and stodgy Anglo-Saxondom, his standby is Infidelity and his device of stagecraft is the Bicker… (author and critic A.G. MacDonnell, quoted p.213)

The Times wrote of Private Lives that the dialogue ‘which might seem in print a trickle of inanities’ became onstage ‘a perfectly times and directed interplay of nonsense.’

The Observer found the play superficial and that the characters’ ‘style is mainly in their clothes; as conversationalists they are mere back-chatterers‘. Looking up back-chat I find it defined as ‘To respond in a disputative, often sarcastic manner’, ‘rude or cheeky remarks made in reply to someone in authority’, ‘the act of answering back, especially impudently.’

Brooks Anderson: the playwright ‘has nothing to say and says it with competent agility for three acts.’

New York Review: ‘They are only adults under the skin. They are really adolescents on long legs.’ (p.229)

But what did Noel care what the critics said? That year (1930) he was declared the highest paid author in the world. Nothing succeeds like success.

Fame and extraordinary output

The Vortex, written in 1923, performed in late 1924, shot him to fame. Hoare cites contemporaries recording that young people started to dress like him, affect his clipped speech, attempted never to be seen without a cigarette or a cocktail in one hand, wore Cowardesque dressing gowns. Like the earlier fad for Valentino and later crazes over Sinatra, Elvis, the Beatles.

The mass media – with the arrival of ever-increasing numbers of newspapers, magazines, radio and silent movies – demands stars and celebrities to write about and he basked in dizzy fame from the premier of The Vortex in November 1924.

And it was followed by a giddy rush of productions, plays, reviews, musicals and some silent movie adaptations of the plays. Old plays he’d written were dusted off and eagerly sought by producers. He turned out new plays at a dizzying rate, alongside songs and music, as well as working on screenplays. It’s a dizzyingly record of work and achievement.

Plays

  • Sirocco (1921) (Revised in 1927)
  • The Young Idea (1922)
  • The Better Half (1922)
  • The Queen Was in the Parlour (1922) (first Produced in 1926)
  • The Vortex (1923) (first Produced November 1924)
  • Easy Virtue (1924) (first Produced in 1925)
  • Fallen Angels (1925)
  • Hay Fever (1925)
  • Semi-Monde (1926) (too rude to be licensed in Britain; first produced in 1977)
  • This Was a Man (1926)
  • The Marquise (1927)
  • Home Chat (1927)

Musicals

  • London Calling! (1922, 1923)
  • Weatherwise (1923) (first produced in 1932)
  • On With the Dance (1924, 1925)

Songs

He wrote lots of songs for the musicals including some wonderful hits, namely:

Failures

But there were failures too. In fact it seemed for a moment like there was a steady decline: after the runaway rave success of The Vortex (1924) and Hay Fever (1925) came two plays which did OK, Easy Virtue (1926) and The Marquise (1927) had been modestly successful. And then two disasters, Home Chat (25 October 1927) and Sirocco (November 1927).

Regarding Home Chat, the Illustrated London News called the play ‘an amusing little trifle on the whole – but it is thin in its material and there are signs about it of hasty and careless composition’.

In the Observer St John Ervine took a similar view: ‘Had Mr Coward spent another week in writing his play it would have been a much wittier one than it is.’

This is very much the view I took of even his most successful plays. Knocked off in a matter of weeks or even days, they all show it in their thinness of plot and characterisation and astonishing lack of wit, of funny or quotable lines. Instead, as I’ve said in my reviews, even his most famous plays basically rely on people getting angry and shouting abuse at each other (true of Hay Fever, Easy Virtue, Fallen Angels, Private Lives).

Anyway, Sirocco did even worse. The first night was a famous theatrical disaster, the worst night of Coward’s professional career, 24 November 1927, pretty much three years to the day after the barnstorming success of The Vortex (25 November 1924). The audience booed and hissed. When he went out the stage door he was spat at. The reviews were uniformly disastrous.

But Hoare draws an interesting point. Coward, he says, realised a great truth from this experience. The media, the press, like to build up celebrities and then knock them down but this isn’t because the press is particularly malevolent. It’s just stupid. In the popular press everything is either black or white, good or bad. You’re either up or down. Coward had had several years of being The New Thing, super-fashionable, adored by his fans. But in the moron press it doesn’t take much to tip you over and as soon as you’re not at the top, you’re at the bottom. Black or white. Up or down. And so it was that just a couple of so-so plays led to excoriating notices and the critics (and some of his cattier friends) saying it was all over, Noel was a busted flush (p.189).

Of course he wasn’t, as the next 45 years (he died in 1973) were to show.

Cavalcade

Philip Hoare sees the 1932 extravaganza Cavalcade as a turning point in Coward’s ideas, that he consciously moved on from the provocative and controversial attitudes of the 1920s plays, with their incessant references to cocktails and cocaine, with their clever riffs on infidelity and sexual immorality. Cavalcade‘s sentimental patriotism inaugurated a new feeling of respect and avoidance of controversy. Those bastions of conservative conformism and backward-looking philistinism, the Daily Mail for the lower middle classes and the Telegraph for the pompous upper middle classes, praised it and the Mail even serialised the script/book.

In 1932 Coward was at the height of his success with Cavalcade making a mint with provincial tours of Private Lives and Bitter Sweet all contributing to the coffers. He bought a mews cottage, Burton Mews in Belgravia, and had it gutted into a huge space appropriate for big parties of the great and the good from the worlds of theatre, movies, aristocracy and even royalty.

I laughed when I read, on page 254, Virginia Woolf writing to her nephew Quentin Bell, complaining that she had to go to dinner with Coward, whose work she ‘despised’. Good old Virginia. His ubiquity as a celebrity turned her against him. And Hoare goes on to quote her quoting Aldous Huxley at some dinner describing Coward as beating an omelette with no eggs: beating and beating and beating, but with nothing there, just the action of the beating. That actually gets close to Coward’s essence: a kind of quintessence of pure ambition, with all the plays and songs and revues merely tools, expedients, to raise their author to that level of superstardom. But when you look at the works closely: nothing there except the frantic beating. The subtext of all of them isn’t Queer, it’s Burning Ambition.

E.M. Forster dined with Coward at Lady Colefax’s, a pushy society hostess, and reported that he spent the entire time talking the most awful drivel. You can easily see how, from Forster’s cultured perspective, this would be true. Hoare entertainingly says that for all their differences in style and depth, Forster and Coward were both middle-class mummies boys.

Second World War

The Second World War came at a good time for Noel Coward. After the madcap Twenties and bleak Thirties, the war redefined Britishness and served as an antidote to the disillusion and decadence of the inter-war period. Its revival of the values of empire and Britain’s greatness was congenial to Coward: the quality of fortitude required (and mythologised) by the war neatly coincided with the fortitude displayed by Noel… the values he espoused dovetailed with the Dunkirk / Blitz / ‘Britain can take it’ spirit and he was able to exploit them fully. Cavalcade had announced his patriotism; the films, plays and concert tours of the early 1940s helped cement his image in the hearts and minds of the British public. (p.329)

In fact it was quite a bit more complicated than that and Hoare gives a fascinating account of how unpopular Coward became in the first few years of the war. He was quickly involved in spying combined with morale boosting trips to France, then America several times, then as far afield as Australia and New Zealand. I was struck to learn that he met President Roosevelt not once but twice, on charm offensives to persuade him to support embattled Britain.

But these busy trips don’t seem to have had much practical outcome and mainly generated critical articles in the press and even questions in the House from MPs asking why he was gallivanting round the globe at public expense. Hoare shows how the deliberate misreporting of his activities and hostile press conferences steadily put him off the small-minded, carping tone of British public life, especially the vendetta against him pursued by the Beaverbrook newspapers, namely the Daily and Sunday Express. Coward got his own back by having a scene in ‘In Which We Serve’ when, after the ship is sunk by Germans, we see a copy of the Daily Express float by with the headline ‘No War This Year’. Lord Beaverbrook was incensed.

There was also an anti-queer undertone. Hoare quotes Joyce Grenfell of all people lamenting in a letter to her mother that Britain should be represented abroad by someone everyone knew was ‘queer’ (p.313) and other commentators, less party to theatrical insider knowledge, still criticised a figure most associated with dainty young things in dressing gowns and slippers mocking all their parents’ values. ‘God, what enemies I must have,’ he wrote in his diary.

When his lovely mews house was bombed out he moved into the Savoy, widely thought to be safe because constructed of steel girders. He overheard a street seller and promptly knocked out the song ‘London Pride’, a popular hit with the people who didn’t read or care about gossip columns and querulous MPs. According to Hoare, a ‘soundtrack to Coward’s war, banal but touching.’

He met Churchill on a number of occasions, lobbying to be given more intelligence work. He was frustrated when Churchill told him not to but to go and sing and entertain the troops i.e. to do what he did best, to entertain and raise morale.

Blithe Spirit

He had been mulling over a comedy about a haunted house, went to stay at Portmeirion in Wales on a brief holiday with Joyce Cary, and wrote Blithe Spirit in just seven days (!). It quickly went into production, opened in the West End on 2 July 1941 and proceeded to break box office records, running for a record 1,997 performances.

In Which We Serve

Soon after Blithe Spirit was premiered Coward was introduced to the producer Anthony Havelock-Allan who was working for Two Cities Films. This company was set up by two Italians, Filippo Del Giudice and Mario Zampi. Two Cities played an important role in British wartime films, producing a series of classics which helped bolster morale including adaptations of Coward’s plays ‘This Happy Breed’ and ‘Blithe Spirit’, along with ‘The Way Ahead’, Laurence Olivier’s ‘Henry V’, ‘The Way to the Stars’.

Noel was asked for a scenario and drew on the recent incident of his friend Louis Mountbatten, captain of a ship that was sunk. This became the germ of the wartime classic movie ‘In Which We Serve’ where the sinking of the ship becomes a pretext for flashbacks to their civilian lives of a cross-section of the crew, and thereby of British society.

Coward was introduced to the established cameraman Ronald Neame, and the editor and wannabe director David Lean, then 33. He brought with him his loyal set and costume designer, Gladys Calthrop.

On the writing front it’s amusing to learn that Coward’s initial idea of a screenplay, starting off in the Far East and featuring a huge cast, would have ended up with a film 7 or 8 hours long. He had to learn what worked and didn’t work on the job.

On the gossip front, I was a bit amazed to learn that during the production Coward had a passionate affair with the glamorous male actor, Michael Wilding, nine years his junior. Reading a book like this makes you wonder whether any of the actors from the classic era were not gay.

In ‘Which We Serve’ premiered in September 1942. In 1943 Coward was awarded an Academy Award for ‘outstanding production achievement’.

After the film was launched, he embarked on a provincial tour playing his three most recent plays – Present Laughter, This Happy Breed and Blithe Spirit – in a package titled ‘Play Parade’. During the day they visited munitions factories and hospitals. When the plays arrived back in London they were triumphant.

Wartime tours

Of the Middle East, then to America for radio broadcasts and to meet Roosevelt (again), a pit stop in Jamaica which he fell in love with, then back to North Africa and then a tour of South Africa, with piano accompaniment from Norman Hackforth and valet and dogsbody by a new employee, the frank and often foul-mouthed Bert Lister. Then is invited by his old friend Mountbatten to tour the Far East, which he does dutifully and exhausts himself, eventually having collapsing and taking R&R in Ceylon.

The film of ‘Blithe Spirit’ opened in April 1945. Coward hated what David Lean had done to it, but it was a box office success.

Post-war

The hectic pace of Coward’s work life doesn’t let up in the immediate post-war years which saw a constant round of revivals of his plays in London, New York and Paris, interspersed with the writing of another musical and a steady stream of new works, which pass almost in a blur.

Jamaica The standout fact is that he fell in love with Jamaica and bought a plot of land on the island’s fashionable north coast, just down the road from Ian Fleming, and had a house built there which was named Blue Harbour. Ironically it was, according to all the guests who stayed, uncomfortable and unhygienic but Coward loved it. The food was, by all accounts, terrible. Said John Pringle:

‘The food was awful, always covered in pickled walnuts… The deserts looked like they’d been made in toilet seat moulds.’ (p.397).

Nudity was almost compulsory, especially round the swimming pool, which some guests found bracing.

The King and I He was offered but turned down the part in The King and I which was then given to Yul Brynner.

Ace of Clubs His musical, Ace of Clubs, was a flop. Hoare implies because his musical director, the immensely talented, Elsie April, had died (1950) and she was the secret ingredient of all his musicals.

Farewell Jack Wilson He finally severed business relations with his former lover Jack Wilson, who had for decades represented him in the US but had become an alcoholic and presided over a run of failed productions.

The Astonished Heart 1950: the film version of ‘The Astonished Heart’, in which he starred, was panned. He had asked Michael Redgrave to play the lead, as the psychiatrist who finds himself torn between wife and lover and ends up committing suicide. But when, in late 1949, Coward saw the rushes, he thought Redgrave was doing it all wrong and squeezed him out of the production. Nonetheless it failed. The original one-act play moves so fast you don’t notice the basic implausibility but stretched to nearly three times the length, the play’s thinness of characterisation became obvious. Variety magazine accurately summarised: ‘While film has a clever veneer, yarn lacks the more basic quality of credibility due to insufficient motivation of the central character.’

Relative Values The next genuine hit was Relative Values (1951), a satire on the Labour government and the new ideas of social equality which the war had seen triumph. It was ten years since he’d written Blithe Spirit. Reviews were mixed but many critics just didn’t like the monologue where the lead character mocks dreams of equality.

Joke Although people go on and on about his tremendous wit, there is in this biography, as in the plays, not a lot of evidence of it. One slight anecdote made me laugh. Walking across Leicester Square with a friend, Coward saw the hoarding for a new film starring Dirk Bogarde and Michael Wilding called ‘The Sea Shall Not Have Them’. ‘I don’t see why not.’ Noel said to his friend, ‘Everyone else has.’

Ann Rothermere Interesting that Ian Fleming’s mistress, who he subsequently married, Ann Rothermere, was a real aristocrat, and so quite disdainful of Noel with his airs and graces and painful reminders that he was on first name terms with various Royals. Trying too hard. Arriviste. On the other hand, what do you expect from a boy from Battersea who would never have the genuine, bred-in-the-bone aristocratic hauteur. Coward attended Ian and Ann’s wedding.

Musicals In 1946 his musical, Pacific 1860, had not been a success. In 1951 another musical, The Globe Review, starring his boyfriend Graham Payn, opened to good reviews. Whereas the next play, Quadrille (1952), was panned.

Churchill visited and they spent time painting together for painting, we now learn, had been a hobby of his since boyhood (p.398). He painted local Black men, looking muscular (p.399). You can see quite a few of them on the Noel Coward website.

Cabaret In October 1951 he undertook an experiment, to perform a solo show of songs at the Café de Paris. This was the start of a new type of career. Over the coming years he slipped in more runs of these kinds of performances before, of course, succumbing to the lure of America.

Apple Cart In 1952 he was persuaded to star in a revival of Shaw’s political satire, The Apple Cart (p.400). The musical After The Ball (1953) was badly directed and performed (p.404).

The coronation He watched the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II (2 June 1953) on television. It was the occasion of his most famous quip. As the carriages of visiting dignitaries rolled past one came into view bearing the huge Queen of Tonga beside a small man. When someone asked who the little man sitting beside the queen was, Noel quipped ‘her lunch.’ The only snag with this bon mot is that Coward himself denied actually saying it. He said it was David Niven (p.401).

Nude with Violin He was working on Nude with Violin, a satire on contemporary art which thinks it is all a hoax. It was 30 years since The Vortex and he had become a crusty old reactionary (p.402). Hoare makes the sweeping and controversial statement that Coward might well have been a run-of-the-mill entertainer and playwright if it wasn’t for his outsider status as a homosexual. It was this outsiderness which gave everything he wrote its edge (p.402). Really? What this book shows is just how many other playwrights, novelists, artists and actors were gay as well starting, for example, with Somerset Maugham and Ivor Novello. If it was his gayness which gave him his ‘edge’, why didn’t the other two popular entertainers have the same ‘edge’? No. As a theory or explanation for Coward’s style it’s a non-starter.

One thing which didn’t change was his amazing facility. He wrote Nude with Violin in just over three weeks.

Autobiographies The second instalment of his autobiography, Future Indefinite was published in 1954. There’s a puzzle here. Coward wrote three volumes of autobiography but they left big gaps. Present Indicative (1937) ends in 1931 while Future Indefinite (1954) starts in 1939 and only goes up to 1945. Why the big gap in the ’30s? He was maybe attempting to fill it with the third volume, Past Conditional, which he left unfinished at his death and which only covers 1931 and 1932.

Violet His beloved mother, Violet, died, aged 91. She had been his uncomplaining rock.

Idiotic I noticed this word recurring in ‘Blithe Spirit’ and then noticed it cropping up in quotes from Coward’s diaries or reported speech, in this biography. I think ‘idiotic’ may have been his favourite word.

  • ‘This week has been fairly idiotic.’
  • ‘I have made one of the most sensational successes of my career and to pretend that I am not absolutely delighted would be idiotic.’
  • In 1956 in Paris he met the Duke of Windsor, now deaf, who he found ‘completely idiotic’.
  • He was in Jamaica during the filming of ‘Dr No’ which was ‘enjoyable but idiotic’.
  • When he learned that half of Hollywood was having Dr Niehans’s rejuvenating injection of goat placenta, he commented ‘They can’t all be idiotic!’

Marijuana We learn that when Laurence Olivier visited Coward, he sought out a neighbour, Morris Cargill and demanded the best ganja. Who knew that Laurence Olivier smoked dope? (p.408)

Jamaica II He moved to a new retreat at a place called Firefly Hill, on the ruin of a lookout tower built by the pirate Captain Morgan (p.397), with a magnificent view of the Blue Mountains sweeping down to the sea, and a sandy beach. He commissioned a local architect to design it but it turned out as ugly as Blue Harbour. According to Ian Fleming its walls all leaked resulting in permanent damp.

Local Jamaican politics inspired him to start what turned into a satirical comic novel, ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ (p.409).

Las Vegas American producers came calling, with offers for salaried writing jobs in Hollywood etc but he didn’t want to be tied down. Instead he opted for a 3-week run of performances in Las Vegas, as his friend Marlene Dietrich had done. His usual accompanist was forbidden a visa so he took up Dietrich’s suggestion of using her accompanist, Peter Matz. According to Hoare, Matz rearranged many of Coward’s songs, giving them a more American swing and arrangement. Coward’s success in Vegas owed a lot to Matz (p.410). $15,000 a week. A bit like the Beatles, his set only lasted half an hour, but was enough to wow the crowd with his presence and charisma. The concerts were recorded and edited into the record Noel Coward in Las Vegas.

He was persuaded to play a cameo part in the movie Around The World In Eighty Days in exchange for a Bonnard painting valued at £4,500.

He rehearsed and performed live on TV a musical special, despite fierce arguments with the crass American sponsors (Ford).

Exile His tax affairs became more and more complicated, with him paying tax in Britain, plus supertax, and tax in America as well sometimes. Now that his mother was dead, his last real tie with the home country, his accountant and tax advisers told him to leave. So he sold up everything, the London house and Goldenhurst in Kent, resigned all his positions, and moved permanently to Bermuda. This was because it was in the sterling zone but had different tax laws. In reality he was to spend more and more time in America, especially Hollywood.

1956 ‘South Sea Bubble’ was one of the three works set in his fictional Pacific country of Samola. It is a comedy built around a strong Diana Cooper-Edwina Mountbatten type figure. As long ago as 1950 Coward had asked Vivien Leigh to play it, and in April 1956 she did, to very good reviews. In September he saw the premiere of ‘Nude with Violin’ in Dublin and was, as usual, sniffy about John Gielgud’s performance, but then Gielgud was sniffy about the play.

But the press continued very anti-Coward, publishing cartoons lampooning the great tax avoider and accusing him of unpatriotism – all of which confirmed Noel in his decision to leave the country and made him more reluctant than ever to return. It depressed him but he was cheered up by publication of the ‘Theatrical Companion to Coward’, latest in a series which had covered Shaw and Maugham.

Osborne The first night of John Osborne’s ‘Look Back in Anger’ on 8 May 1956 sounded the death knell of the old school of drama. It was as radical a breath of fresh air as Coward’s ‘The Vortex’ had been 32 years earlier. The future lay with the Angry Young Men and kitchen sink dramas.

Volcano Coward was working on ‘Volcano’, a play about the storm and stress of a problem marriage, largely based on Ian and Ann Fleming’s marriage with infidelities on both sides.

Bill Traylor He had a disastrous love affair with young actor Bill Traylor who he cast, against advice, in the Broadway run of ‘Nude with Violin’. The play bombed and such as Coward’s insensate pursuit of Traylor that the young actor tries to commit suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills, a scandal which was only just kept out of the papers. Coward was miserably unhappy for months, first at lowering his ferocious self-discipline and then worrying that he would never find true love.

1958 He was tired of Bermuda and thought Jamaica was on the turn. He travelled to France and visited Switzerland, realising he wanted to settle in Europe, in a temperate climate.

Cuba He agreed to a bit part in Carol Reed’s film of Graham Greene’s novel ‘Our Man in Havana’. He had Alec and Merula Guinness to stay first, then they all flew to Havana. Here they met Graham Green and Ernest Hemingway. Namedropping doesn’t get much better. Hemingway hated Noel’s affected manner and endless theatre gossip. Quelle surprise.

Switzerland He finally bought a house overlooking Lac Leman. It was to become his final home. It was dubbed Chalet Coward or, amusingly, the Shilly Chalet.

‘Our Man in Havana’ was released on 30 December 1959 and his role was praised. This opened the door for more cameo roles which were to become a useful source of income (p.453).

Meanwhile his attempt at a serious ballet ‘London Morning’, completely flopped, the music and scenario completely out of date. And his play ‘Look After Lulu’, a translation of a Feydeau farce, also bombed, despite starring Vivien Leigh.

1960 His refusal to exercise, give up smoking or eat sensibly began to catch up with him, as he was stricken with various ailments including phlebitis.

Pinter Surprisingly when he saw The Caretaker in 1960 he was thrilled by it and when he met its author, Harold Pinter, they both realised they had a lot in common: the use of incomplete patter or banter as a style; more deeply, a feel for the theatre not as the expression of the self but as an objective medium for expressing any given situation to the full. In 1963 he put up some of the money to finance a movie version.

Waiting in the Wings about a home for ageing actresses, opened in August 1960. It was savaged by the critics, much to Coward’s anger. The times really had changed and he was de trop.

Pomp and Circumstance His novel was published in November 1960. It wasn’t intended to be literature but entertainment and was reviewed as such. I wonder what it’s like.

Sail Away Hoare describes the immense amount of effort which went into not just writing but staging and funding a lavish musical called ‘Sail Away’ which he hoped would compete with the classic American musicals and provide a tidy pension. it did not. Despite bringing in the same choreographer who’d done West Side Story (1957) and the larger-than-life Elaine Strich. It opened to packed houses in London but was similarly panned. By now Coward loathed theatre critics.

  • The Girl Who Came To Supper
  • High Spirits, a musical version of Blithe Spirit – ran for 373 performances and became one of the smash hit musicals of the season

In the mid to late 1960s his work underwent a revival and a reconsideration. Hay Fever and Private Lives were successfully revived, the National Theatre and then the BBC staged Coward seasons.

He was finally awarded a knighthood in 1970. Apparently Harold Wilson was not too keen, largely because of his brush with the law over tax evasion, but the Royal Family insisted. He was on very friendly terms with Elizabeth, Margaret and their mother.

His health steadily deteriorated. Eventually he could barely walk. He retreated to Firefly on Jamaica where he was looked after by a Black man named Miguel (married, not gay). He suffered from stomach pains, variously diagnosed as cancer or kidney stones. He died one night, collapsing on the bathroom floor, being carried to his bed by Miguel and passing with just this illiterate Black man for company.

Turned out that burial in England was out of the question because of the legal and tax implications. After worrying and consulting friends, Lesley Cole and Graham Payn decided to have him interred in the grounds at Firefly. Later there was a memorial service at the actor’s church in Covent Garden. Several years later a tablet was placed on Poets Corner in Westminster Abbey.

He worried about being forgotten but Coward is still very much remembered. His best songs endure and his best plays are regularly revived. He lived on as he would have wanted to. As to soul and an afterlife and all the rest of it, he despised Christian belief. When he left the stage, he left it, and that was that.

Quips

He found it difficult rehearsing with Claudette Colbert for a TV production of Blithe Spirit, leading to several good jokes. When she apologised for fluffing her lines and said she knew them backwards the night before, Noel said ‘and that’s the way you’re speaking them this morning.’

Colbert was sensitive about having a short neck, so took umbrage when Noel quipped to someone else that ‘if she had a neck he’d wring it.’

When asked on the Ed Murrow show to describe the style of his painting (he’d brought one along to show) Noel joked that it was ‘erratic’. In fact his friends called it his ‘Touch and Gauguin’ style.

Omissions

This is an excellent biography and its thoroughness helps it weigh in at an impressive 605 pages long. It seems churlish to say it, then, but in the last hundred pages I had an increasing sense of how much had been left out. Not about Coward himself, but about the context around him. I realised this when Hoare mentioned the premiere of John Osborne’s play ‘Look Back in Anger’ in 1956, and later mentioned Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker (1960). Later he mentions Coward reading Waiting for Godot. Of course Hoare has to stick to his brief of describing Coward’s life, the writing and production of his musicals and plays, his relations with umpteen producers, directors and actors and backers for them all, and then, of course, developments in his private life – mother dies, lovers come and go.

I think it’s that in the first 400 pages of the biography, up to and including the patriotic films he was involved in during and just after the war, there’s an assumption that Coward in some sense represented the wider times, was the new young thing, represented the febrile 1920s, and popular theatre of the 1930s and then managed to strike a national patriotic mood during the war. Working with David Lean and Laurence Olivier represented the peak of his timeliness.

Then some time during the 1950s he loses it. Play after play, musical and ballet, fail or underwhelm. And then, only very casually and in passing, Hoare mentions Osborne, Beckett and Pinter and we suddenly realise, with a jolt, that the outside world has moved on light years beyond Coward’s light cocktail entertainments.

But this had been going on all the time. For example, his close neighbour and friend in Jamaica, Ian Fleming first appears on page 328, during the war, and Coward knows him from 1948 onwards. But it’s only on page 473, and 13 years later, that Hoare even mentions the James Bond books. Yes the first of these had been published back in 1953 and so the success of the almost annual new Bond book must have transformed their relationship. And yet it isn’t mentioned until the biography is almost over.

What I’m getting at is that at moments like this you realise with a bit of a shock how very narrowly and parochially and blinkeredly the biography has focused entirely on Coward. God knows he was so hard working and prolific there’s easily enough material to fill the 600 pages but it’s here, in the closing passages, that you realise that while we’ve been locked in the Coward bunker, the real world outside has been changing at tremendous speed. (Incidentally, Coward had been offered the role of playing Dr No in the movie, but turned it down. Imagine if he’d said yes!)

Best moment

There are lots of memorable moments but the best one must be the scene of the 66-year-old Noel and the Queen Mother singing a duet of ‘My Old Man Said Follow The Van’ at Sandringham. Hard to beat.

Credit

‘Noël Coward: A Biography’ by Philip Hoare was published by Sinclair-Stevenson in 1995. References are to the 1996 Mandarin paperback edition.

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Tonight at 8.30 by Noel Coward (1936) – 3

‘Tonight at 8.30’ is a cycle of ten one-act plays by Noël Coward. It was first staged in London in 1936 with Coward himself and Gertrude Lawrence in the leading roles.

The plays are mostly comedies but three – ‘The Astonished Heart’, ‘Shadow Play’ and ‘Still Life’ – are serious. Four of the comedies include songs, with words and music by Coward.

One play, ‘Star Chamber’, was dropped after a single performance. The other nine plays were presented in three programmes of three plays each. There have been numerous revivals of many of the individual plays, but revivals of the complete cycle have been much less frequent. Several of the plays have been adapted for the cinema and television.

Background

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Coward wrote a succession of hits, ranging from the intimate comedies ‘Private Lives’ (in which Coward also starred alongside Gertrude Lawrence) and ‘Design for Living’, to the operetta ‘Bitter Sweet’ (1929) and the historical extravaganza ‘Cavalcade’ (1931).

After performing in ‘Private Lives’, Coward felt that the public enjoyed seeing him and Lawrence together on stage, and so he wrote the play cycle ‘Tonight at 8.30’ expressly as ‘acting, singing, and dancing vehicles for Gertrude Lawrence and myself’. But he also had the conscious motive of reviving the moribund form of the one-act play. As he wrote in the Preface to the printed plays:

A short play, having a great advantage over a long one in that it can sustain a mood without technical creaking or over padding, deserves a better fate, and if, by careful writing, acting and producing I can do a little towards reinstating it in its rightful pride, I shall have achieved one of my more sentimental ambitions.

Ten plays

The cycle consists of ten plays. In order of first production they are:

  1. We Were Dancing: A comedy in two scenes
  2. The Astonished Heart: A play in six scenes
  3. Red Peppers: An interlude with music
  4. Hands Across the Sea: A light comedy in one scene
  5. Fumed Oak: An unpleasant comedy in two scenes
  6. Shadow Play: A play with music
  7. Family Album: A Victorian comedy with music
  8. Star Chamber: A light comedy in one act
  9. Ways and Means: A comedy in three scenes
  10. Still Life: A play in five scenes

This blog post summarises and comments on numbers 7, 8, 9 and 10.

7. Family Album: A Victorian comedy with music

It is the evening of an autumn day in 1860. The entire 20-page play takes place in the same setting, the drawing room of a house in Kent belonging to the Featherways family. The play depicts this prosperous middle-class Victorian family, all wearing mourning and gathered after the funeral of their father. The group comprises his five children (in bold) and their spouses, if they have them:

  • Jasper Featherways, the facile flippant one, played by Coward
  • Jane, married to Jasper
  • Harriet Featherways now married to…
  • Charles Winter
  • Emily Featherways, now married to…
  • Edward Valance
  • Richard Featherways, unmarried
  • Lavinia Featherways, unmarried

They reminisce and call for madeira wine to drink a toast in. This is brought in by the ancient butler, Burrow, who is very hard of hearing which leads to utterly predictable and very enjoyable misunderstandings.

Jasper takes the lead in proposing toasts and is given a stream of comic and flippant remarks throughout. Lavinia is the most stern and Victorian of them all, strongly objecting to drinking after a funeral, and to many of the jokes and flippant remarks – ‘This is so wrong, so dreadfully wrong.’ As he proposes the toasts, Jasper breaks into song, the first of four songs in the piece:

At which point Jasper suggests it’s time to get the big old family trunk down from the attic. Jasper asks Burrows to fetch the box, to which Burrows comically replies that, yes, he’s wound them all up, to which Jasper says significantly louder, The box not the clocks.

So Jasper and Richard go up into the attic and fetch down a bog old dusty box. But when he goes to unlock it, discovers it’s already open and then realises it’s an old box full of their toys and dressing-up costumes. The Featherways offspring get these all out and start playing an old favourite game of theirs, Princes and Princesses which, again, triggers a song, ‘Princes and Princesses’, which I can’t find on the internet.

Incidentally, they have all continued drinking the madeira very liberally and have now finished the first bottle so ring for Burrows to bring another one which they pour out with gusto. This strikes me as not very 1860s behaviour, much more the drunken behaviour of Leo and Otto in ‘Design for Living’ or Elyot and Amanda in ‘Private Lives’.

They drink a toast to Burrows, who was so sweet and kind to them when they were all children. Any the next thing they find in the old trunk is a musical box which they wind up and which, of course, provides music for more songs, which they sing, amid more drinking. Here’s a medley of two of the songs, ‘Hearts and Flowers’ and ‘Music Box’.

The others are continuing uttering pious sentiments about their dead father when Lavinia amazes them and the audience by declaring she hated him.

LAVINIA: I hated Papa, so did you … He was cruel to Mama, he was unkind to us, he was profligate and pompous and worse still, he was mean.

Worst of all, he kept her at home as if imprisoned in the dark old Victorian home, counting his bills and sorting his linen and putting up with his silence or his insults. She hated him and she’s glad he’s dead.

(All this resonated with me much more since I read Virginia Woolf’s searing feminist polemic Three Guineas which, among other things, gives a horrible sense of how the Victorian home was a prison and a tomb for countless million unmarried middle class women, a plight dramatised by the case of Eleanor Pargiter in her novel, The Years.)

She then astonishes the others by telling them that the will read out to them that morning, the one which distributed family fortune equally among the five children, was not the old man’s final will. Just a week before he died he had made a new one, leaving the children nothing but dividing his fortune among his three mistresses and the rest to pay for a new church containing a grandiose memorial to himself in black marble.

This will was witnessed by Lavinia and Burrows, but now, she tells the flabbergasted family, precisely seven minutes after the old man expired, they burned it! Flabbergasted Jasper calls Burrows in to ask if all this is true but the deaf old retainer wisely and diplomatically states that his deafness is getting worse so that he will never be able to hear questions about the will.

They all realise what an excellent chap he is and invite him to join them for a (yet another) glass of madeira although it is Burrows himself who has the last toast, drinking to the whole family as, to the tune of the musical box, they dance round him hand in hand.

Comment

Immensely enjoyable because it’s one of the few Coward plays where the characters don’t spend a lot of the time shouting at each other or feeling miserable. It is wonderfully warm and happy and the plot, too, is simple but charming.

8. Star Chamber: A light comedy in one act

This is the one play in the set which was quickly dropped only being performed once. Maybe this was because it had by far the largest cast, with ten named parts.

It’s set on a West End stage around noon i.e. no question of a performance taking place. Instead one by one the ten or so characters arrive and we learn that they are all members of a ‘committee’ including its secretary. It takes a while to learn it’s the committee of the ‘Garrick Haven Fund’. The characters are:

  • Jimmie Horlick, stage manager
  • J. M. Farmer, secretary of the Garrick Haven Fund, amiable looking man between 30 and 40 carrying a briefcase stuffed with papers
  • Hester More, a vague, absent-minded and fanciful actress, ‘vague to the point of lunacy’
  • Johnny Bolton, a star comedian, middle aged, of working class origin, outlandishly dressed in ‘plus fours, a camel-hair coat, a check cap and a very bright scarf’
  • Julian Breed, the leading young actor in London
  • Violet Vibart, an elderly actress of considerable reputation
  • Maurice Searle, an exceedingly handsome virile young actor, mortally embarrassed because he’s had to grow long hair for a film role
  • Dame Rose Maitland, a grande dame of the theatre, majestic and autocratic, a vice president of the committee
  • Elise Brodie, an actress, pretty and respectable, another vice president of the committee
  • Xenia James, an actress, president of the Fund

I loved all these caricatures, very enjoyable. I loved Hester’s wild flights of fantasy (flights which I’ve noted running like a thread through so many of his plays), I loved the way the Johnnie character sticks out a mile because of his Cockney accent and the way he keeps trying to tell people long boring scenarios which everyone drifts off and ignores and so which are never finished.

I love the lofty way the grande dame ignores everyone and fails to hear anything she doesn’t want to. It takes a while for all these thespians to arrive and settle down and it’s funny how they’ve just agreed that, in the absence of the chair, Xenia James, Dame Rose will chair the meeting when the very same Xenia James makes a grand entrance dragged along by a vast great Dane, who she’s named after a fellow actor who passed away, Atherton.

Synopsis

Anyway, on the bare stage of a West End theatre the stage manager, Jimmie Horlick, is arranging chairs round a large table in preparation for a meeting of the committee of the Garrick Haven Fund. The committee members arrive in dribs and drabs.

First, Mr Farmer, Secretary of the Fund, briefcase packed with papers, methodical and harassed. Next Hester More, a dizzy young actress; Johnny Bolton, ‘a star comedian of middle age but perennial youthfulness’; Violet Vibart, an elderly actress of great distinction; Julian Breed, a popular juvenile lead; Maurice Searle, a character actor who has grown his hair to shoulder length for an historical role and feels self-conscious about it; the majestic Dame Rose Maitland; the preoccupied Elise Brodie; and finally, and very late, Xenia James, chairman of the committee, with her dog, Atherton.

The whole thing from start to finish is characterised by all the characters’ complete inability to concentrate, focus or obey rules. Instead the continually gossip, talk over each other, interrupt whoever else is speaking, undermine the chair and ignore Farmer’s long boring presentation.

In a nutshell, this is a meeting of the Garrick Haven fund, established in 1902 to provide a home for destitute actresses. The fund is well off, with a balance of £58,000, largely generated by the annual fun fair. Mention of this characteristically triggers all present to wander off into memories of the fair and complaints about all aspects of its management.

With difficulty, Farmer tries to quieten them down and get their attention back onto the issue the meeting’s been called for which is to give formal consent for much-needed structural alterations to the retirement house (notably an extra bathroom and inside toilet).

At this point Atherton starts farting and Xenia gets nice Mr Horlick to take him (very gingerly) off to the props room. Farmer reads a letter from the residents politely asking for the extra loo and bathroom and then proceeds to read out, at very great length, the precise and exact quote for the building works which he’s received from the builders (Messrs Joyce and Spence) and the committee has to sign off on, amounting to £3,082, 17 shillings and fourpence.

The comedy derives from the way it’s like herding cats: the actors are completely incapable of concentrating on anything without wandering off into digressions and lots of private conversations, in one instance a suggestion that the new buildings be decorated with framed posters from old play productions.

Xenia sneaks off to check on Atherton and finds her darling fast asleep and twitching as though chasing rabbits in a dream.

Farmer attempts to read out a further quote for the plumbing work but by now the actors have had it. A press photographer arrives and they are all instantly distracted by this, As Farmer drones valiantly on all the others arrange themselves with much fussing for a group photo.

The actors start to leave in ones and twos as they arrived, Julian and Maurice leaving with the photographer. Xenia makes a speech appealing for donations and promises to give £100 to set the ball rolling not having really grasped that donations are not at all needed, what was needed was attention and responsibility. Then, without formally closing the meeting, she too dashes off, forgetting her dog.

Johnny gets to his feet to second Xenia’s fine sentiments and is droning on about what a worthy cause it is, and how we may all suffer poverty one day etc but he is drowned out by the sound of the remaining thespians all saying goodbye to each other, giving air kisses, promising to meet again soon etc until he becomes utterly demoralised and gives up.

Only valiant Mr Farmer is left to Johnny, with no-one else to snare, invites him to lunch at his club and Farmer is incautious enough to accept. As they walk off he tells Jimmie to turn off the lights, thus providing a mirror of the opening of the play (lights on, enter Jimmie, then Johnny, then Farmer).

And, in a last gag, after everyone has exited the bare stage and the lights have gone off, we hear the mournful howling of the dog Atherton, locked up and abandoned in the props room.

Maybe I’m in a relaxed mood today, but I found this as entertaining and funny as Victorian Album.

9. Ways and Means: A Light Comedy in Three Scenes

We are in the South of France, on the fashionable Cote d’Azur. We are in the house of the very well-off Mrs Lloyd-Ransome. The curtain opens to reveal a bedroom and in the bed, having breakfast off a tray, are the unhappy married couple Toby and Stella Cartwright.

Briefly: he has gambled away all their money. They’re in debt to their banks and everyone they know including their hostess in this house. The dialogue mostly consists of despair at being so broke, alternately flippant / humorous and genuinely despairing.

Toby tells their Nanny (‘a capable looking, middle-aged woman’) to pawn Stella’s jewellery and the gold buttons off his waistcoat. They then go back to the casino to gamble with the cash but in the second scene we find them a few hours later, back in the bed, and utterly despairing, since they have lost everything they got from the pawnbrokers in four minutes flat. Toby had got a place at the big table and was feeling lucky when he was asked to give up his place by an American lady, Mrs Irving Brandt. Ever the gentleman, he gave up his place when a lady requested it and Mrs Irving Brandt went on to ‘run the bank’ 17 times and win 175,000 francs. When she had utterly cleaned up she graciously let Toby have the seat and he promptly lost everything.

Angry, he goes into the bathroom where he manages to bang his head on the mirror and cut himself. There’s a big song and dance while Stella tells him not to be such a baby and gets some iodine to dress the wound.

After much more fuss and flippancy and lamenting, they go to bed and put the lights out. This sets the scene for the third and final scene in which they’re awakened by a burglar. When they call out and put the lights on he pulls a gun on them. However, he’s not a very good burglar and they first demoralise him by telling him they have no money and then manage to disarm him, seize the gun and turn the tables.

When they take his mask off they discover it’s the chauffeur of posh people in their circle, a man named Stevens. Now we understand why there’d been some chat in the first scene, among their posh friends, about some scandal involving this chauffeur. He had been dismissed for having a fling with his employer (Mrs Bainbridge)’s daughter, May. Now he explains that, thus thrown out of work, he decided to try his hand at crime.

So, as in these posh comedies, as for example in P.G. Wodehouse, the posh protagonists turn out to be on good terms with their would-be burglar, and have a civilised chat and a drink. Suddenly a plan occurs to Toby. Remember the 175,000 francs won by Mrs Irving Brandt? Toby suggests Stevens sneaks down the hall and into her room and steals that 175,000 francs.

Despite Stevens’ and Stella’s initial objections, this is what he ends up doing, returning five minutes later not only with all the cash but with some diamonds he pinched as well. They secrete the money in their clothes to look like it’s theirs, then get Stevens to tie them up.

The plan is to look like he broke into their room, tied them up, burgled them, then onto Mrs Brandt, before returning to their room and escaping. So this is what he does, ties them to their chairs and finally ties gags over their mouths. Up to that point they’d been conducting a comic Wodehouse-style conversation in which they promised to help him out with his choice of a new career and he answered all their requests with yes sir, yes ma’am.

He bows politely and leaves them tied to their chairs, gagged, and laughing hysterically.

The way the whole thing is a kind of conspiracy or scam which leaves the actors hooting with laughter is identical with the end of ‘Design for Living’ where the more the outraged husband preaches old-fashioned morality, the more Leo, Otto and Gilda fall about laughing.

In one sense his plays are a kind of conspiracy by imaginative tricksters against the conventional values and morality of the older generation and the poor saps among the current generation who still believe them.

Thoughts

His fans and blurb writers endlessly praise Coward for the wit and stylishness of his writing and dialogue. The plays certainly are almost entirely about posh upper-middle-class people, and they contain much 1) posing and prancing and characters drawing attention to their own poshness with their drawling flippancy and ‘wit’. But this summary or cliché ignores two other major elements of his approach or style or schtick, which are 2) arguments and abuse and 3) flights of fantasy.

1. Wit

STELLA: You seem to forget that one a certain bleak day in 1928 I gave my life into your keeping.
TOBY: Marriage is a sacrament, a mystic rite, and you persist in regarding it as a sort of plumber’s estimate.

TOBY: You play bridge too merrily, Stella.
STELLA: My merriment is entirely a social gesture. I loathe bridge.
TOBY: That is no excuse for playing it as if it were lacrosse.

TOBY: From now onwards I intend to live in the past – the present is too unbearable. I intend to go back to the happy scenes of my boyhood.
STELLA: I’m sorry I’m not a rocking horse.
TOBY: You underrate yourself, darling.

2. Abuse

It had previously been axiomatic that a gentleman never lost his temper and was chivalrous and respectful to woman. The Coward male is neither of these things. The Coward male loses his temper all the time, every few minutes flies into a frothing spitting rage, see ‘Private Lives’ or ‘Design for Living’ or Toby, here.

The furious Coward male also doesn’t mince his words, hurling the most astonishing abuse, insults and threats at his woman. The level of hatred, cursing and threats in ‘Private Lives’ staggered me.

The couple at various moments say:

STELLA: Be quiet… Oh shut up!.. Don’t be so idiotic… Don’t be so silly… Don’t be so childish… Shut up… Toby, don’t be such a fool…

TOBY: Shut up!.. Be quiet, Stella… Don’t be an idiot Stella…

A bit more elaborately:

STELLA: You have the moral values of a warthog… You have a disgusting mind, Toby…

3. Fantasy

The really characteristic thing about Coward, I think, is when his lead characters go off on wild imaginative flights of fancy. Mad frivolous fantasies were Elyot’s distinguishing feature in ‘Private Lives’ and all three protagonists in ‘Design for Living’ cook up fantastical scenarios, and it crops up again here, as Toby in particular expresses his unhappiness in terms of far-fetched similes and scenarios.

TOBY: It is possible, in my present state of splendid detachment, that I might go off into a yogi trance and stay upside down for several days.

Or ridiculous plans:

TOBY: Let’s go quietly but firmly along the passage and murder Pearl Brandt.

Stella’s suggestion that maybe she could do a little light prostitution to earn the money they need. Or her absurd exaggeration:

STELLA: We’ll deliver ourselves over to Olive bound and gagged in the morning.

Coward’s imaginative characters are always overflowing with absurd and fantastical scenarios. It’s this, I think, the vein of fantasy which pops up, a smaller or larger ingredient of each play, much more than the alleged ‘wit’, which makes his plays so entertaining. (Cf ‘Shadow Play’ which is one big fantasy.)

10. Still Life: A play in five scenes

Executive summary

The play portrays the chance meeting at a suburban railway station, the subsequent love affair and eventual parting of a married woman, Laura Jesson, and a doctor, Alec Harvey. The sadness of their secretive affair is contrasted throughout the play with the boisterous life of the tea shop and station staff. ‘Still Life’ differs from most of the plays in the ‘Tonight at 8.30’ cycle by having an unhappy ending. It was also, of course, the basis of the 1945 film, ‘Brief Encounter’, directed by David Lean and starring Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson, which is regularly cited as one of the top ten British films of all time.

Synopsis

The five scenes are set in the same location, namely the tea room at Milford Junction railway station, which is dominated by the elaborate refreshments counter / station buffet, overseen by the strict Myrtle Bagot who bosses around her downtrodden assistant Beryl Waters, and flirts in an imperious dismissive way with Albert the ticket inspector. The action takes place in five scenes across the span of a single year, from April to March.

Scene 1 5.30 on an April afternoon. Myrtle’s character is established as she bosses around her assistant Beryl and rebuffs the attempts of Albert, the ticket-inspector, to flirt with her. Laura is waiting for her train home after shopping. She goes out onto the platform as an express races by with an enormous noise and re-enters moments later complaining of having a smut of grit in her eye. Myrtle gets some water and Albert offers advice but it’s the handsome young Alec introduces himself as a doctor and uses his hankie to remove it for her. She thanks him and goes to catch her train, he goes back to his cup of tea.

Scene 2 Three months later, in July. The ‘rude mechanicals’ i.e. the working class characters provide a foil or backdrop for the main love story. (The phrase ‘rude mechanical’ comes from Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ where it refers to the working class artisans who have their own farcical love story which parallels the love story of the main protagonists who are lords and ladies. Three hundred and forty years later Coward is still using much the same device.)

And so the scene opens with Myrtle telling Beryl about a fortune teller who told her love life accurately before Albert breezes in wanting tea and cakes for some travellers on the platform. Against this bright and breezy background, enter Alec and Lara together. He buys two teas and two bath buns.

It becomes clear that after their first meeting they encountered each other a second time by chance and like each other’s company and have had lunch and gone to the pictures together. He took an afternoon off work. Now he’s praising her as ‘awfully nice’, but she feels guilty. When she was a girl living in Cornwall, she and her sister used to sneak out the house at night to go swim in the sea but always felt guilty. Now she feels the same. She’s ‘a respectable married woman with a husband and a home and three children.’

They ask each other to describe their spouses, as people having affairs often do, out of guilt and also to make it seem more homely, more real. She gets him to talk about his work and he explains his passionate interest in preventive medicine, and then goes into more detail about his interest in lung diseases. She sits entranced until it’s time for his train. Suddenly he wants more than to bump into each other by accident but begs that she’ll meet him the following Thursday, in a week’s time, and after initial reluctance, as he takes his hand and prepares to run for his train, she agrees.

Scene 3 Another three months have passed so it’s October. As usual the scene opens with the proles, Albert and Myrtle, flirting. They seem to have reached a new level of intimacy, as he asks her for a kiss over the counter and, on entering, slaps her behind as she’s bent over. She scolds him but permits it. In his tussle to get a kiss they know some cakes on the floor and are picking them up when Alec and Laura come in.

As usual, Alec buys two teas and takes them to their usual table. From their conversation it becomes clear that they have seen a good deal more of each other and have fallen in love. He accepts it and wants her to but Laura is fighting against it, says it’s wrong, ‘dreadfully wrong’. He wants to arrange an afternoon at a friend, Stephen’s, house, presumably to have sex. She, of course, thinks it’s horrible and squalid and will be spoiled by the fear hanging over them. He tells her they’ve both been in love before but neither of them have known this ‘something lovely and strange and desperately difficult’ and, as usual, when she listens to him she is entranced.

As with so many of these Coward plays it’s a question of hermeneutics, of clashing and competing interpretations. They both feel a tremendous attraction to each other but whereas Alec argues strongly for giving into it, Laura bridles and argues against it. She vividly describes going home after their Thursday meetings, and feeling adrift and alien in her house, weirdly detached from all the humdrum objects of her normal domestic life. He becomes more ardent and passionate, holding her hand, saying how he counts the hours till Thursday comes round again.

This intense conversation is completely overshadowed by two loud soldiers entering the room and asking Myrtle for some alcohol. She can’t serve it because it’s out of hours and this develops into an extended argument with them making all kinds of reasons why they need a nice drop, why can’t she put it in the tea etc, while she absolutely refuses to break the law. Eventually she tells Beryl to fetch Norman who takes charge of the situation and tells the two squaddies to ‘op it, before saying he has to return to his gate. Myrtle asks Beryl to get her a glass of brandy for her nerves and tells Beryl that Norman Godby may be on the short side ‘but ‘e’s a gentleman.’

After this extended interruption we return to Alec and Laura at their table. He delivers a speech about how they have to be strong enough to live up to their love, ‘clean and untouched’ by other people’s knowledge, ‘something of our own forever’.

He scribbles the address of his colleague’s flat on a piece of paper for her, says he’s going to miss his train and go to the flat and he’ll be waiting for her and leaves. Laura stares at the paper, then we hear a train steaming in and Myrtle comments on the time, making it quite clear that it’s Laura’s train. Laura gets up, goes to the platform door, pauses, the whistle blows and the train starts to puff out, while she slowly exits the tea room.

I.e. she is going to keep her rendezvous with Alec at his friend’s flat. Presumably to have sex and thereby break her fidelity to her husband, and also the law.

Scene 4 It’s December. As usual the scene opens with comic business among the working classes. If tea room boss Myrtle is carrying on with Norman the ticket collector, Beryl is continuing to be wooed by the man who carries a tray of refreshments round the platforms, Stanley. He asks if he can walk Beryl home, asks her to lock up early, so they can have an extra five minutes, presumably for snogging. Thus the mating game, played at every level of society. In all three relationships, it’s the men who are constantly pushing for more, and the women who, in their various ways, are reluctant or refuse. Is that true of ‘real life’? Or just the convention of the time, and of many times, but not of our modern liberated age?

Laura comes in looking pale and anxious, asks for a brandy, and a pen and paper, which Beryl reluctantly gives her, then sits down to write – presumably an important message to Alec – but breaks down in tears and then Alec comes in anyway. We quickly learn that they were together (presumably for the umpteenth time) at this friend of Alec’s flat, when he came home unexpectedly early and caught them. At least, Alec darted out to chat to the fellow while Laura had to get dressed in a hurry and nip out the back, feeling like a prostitute. She bets they chatted and had a good laugh about her, like men of the world.

He apologises then we get to the heart of the matter, the clash of worldviews or values. Because Alec claims that nothing else matters except their love, except their knowledge that they love each other. But Laura says that other things matter too, such as self respect and decency. So he is the voice of unbridled passion, she, as so often, embodies the weight of social convention, conventional morality etc.

Alec walks over and faces a picture on the wall because he can’t face her as he agrees that this thing will have to end: not their love, he will go on loving her to the end of his life; but their being together. He returns to the table and tells her he is going away. He’s been offered a post at a hospital in Johannesburg, South Africa. It’s a golden opportunity. He’s been agonising for weeks but now he can see this thing is ending and so… Should he go or should he turn it down? This, of course, is cruel of him, handing the whole responsibility of ending the affair to her, specially as she’s shown how vulnerable and conflicted she is. Of course she tells him to go.

He asks her to meet him one last time. Not at the flat, that’s now out of bounds, but at a café in town and they’ll go for a drive in the country. His train chuffs in and he has to go. He apologises for ever meeting her, falling in love with her, for causing her so much misery and she apologises back.

Even this scene, obviously designed to be heart-wringing, is interwoven with comedy from the proles because, before the moments, Alec has to bribe stroppy surly Beryl not to close the café at 10pm as she ought to do, but leave it open for just a few minutes more, so that he can have these final words with Laura.

In other words, this device, of paralleling the main love affair with the shenanigans of the rude mechanicals does a number of things: it provides comic relief for the high emotion of the central couple; but it also sets off and heightens their emotional moments; and it creates a vivid sense of the pressure and constraints under which an affair is carried out. The mechanicals are emblematic not only of society’s moral constraints but of the busyness of life, all the timetables of work and spouses and children and responsibilities and duties which any affair has to find time amid, stolen moments, always limited, which eventually come to seem sordid and sneaky, and make the protagonists, like Laura, feel cheap and miserable.

Scene 5 The fifth and final scene is set in March. Albert is more cocky and confident with Myrtle and sends Beryl into the back room ready to steal a kiss, when Alec and Laura enter. It’s a lovely touch that the station staff have, of course, noticed their romantic trysts, and have taken to calling them Romeo and Juliet. To ourselves, in our own minds, we live intense and tragic lives. To other people, we barely register or only as comic figures of fun.

Obviously this is the last scene between Alec and Laura and meant to be intensely moving but it is typical of the play that almost half of it is taken up with a great palaver among the proles. Mildred, who keeps the newspaper and bookstall comes running in to bring the message that Beryl’s mum’s been taken ill again and they’ve rushed her off to hospital. This leads to a cascade of consequences as Beryl is told, gets in a fret, Myrtle says she’d better go to the hospital straightaway, Mildred better go with her for moral support, she (Myrtle) will stay till locking up time (10pm). Which irritates Albert because he’d bought them tickets to see a show, Broadway Melody of 1936, and he slams his teacup down in exasperation.

Only after this extended palaver do we get to Alec and Laura. This is the last time they’ll meet before he leaves for South Africa and she has come to see him off. He asks if he may write but she says no, better not.

He tells her he loves her with all his heart and she quietly whispers that she wants to die. God. Tortured illicit love.

It is their last few minutes together and they are utterly ruined by the entrance of a friend of Laura’s, the fussy and talkative Dolly, who is overjoyed to bump into her old friend, joins them at their table, and sets about telling her all about her day’s doings, while Laura and Alec can only stare into each other’s eyes.

With the result that their last few minutes together before his train arrives are completely swamped and their goodbye is cruelly limited to a formal handshake. And so Alec goes out while Laura remains, trapped listening to prattling Dolly, who now whitters on about a couple they know who are getting divorced because he had a mistress up in town, the wife spotted it then it all came out etc.

You can imagine how this is daggers to the heart of Laura who has always been more conscious of how society sees these things i.e. crudely, dismissively, heartlessly.

They all hear the express through train approaching and Dolly goes to the counter to buy some chocolate for her son, when Laura suddenly snaps and rushes out onto the platform. Dolly turns and notices her missing and Myrtle says she didn’t see her go.

For a moment there is the strong implication that Laura has run out onto the platform to kill herself by throwing herself in front of the train. For a minute. But then the café door opens and she comes back in, looking ‘very white and shaky’.

Solid practical Dolly asks if she’s alright and when Laura says she feels a bit sick, persuades Myrtle to pour some brandy for Laura (tenpence). They hear the sound of their train, the stopping suburban train coming, Dolly gathers up her parcels and accompanies Laura out as the curtain falls. Masterpiece.

Brief Encounter

Various of the plays were adapted for TV or cinema. Coward himself adapted ‘Still Life’ for the screen as ‘Brief Encounter’, one of the most famous British films of all time.

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Posted by Simon on June 11, 2025

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Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul by H.G. Wells (1905)

You figure him a small, respectably attired figure going slowly through a sometimes immensely difficult and always immense world.
(Wells describing the simple, overwhelmed protagonist of this novel, page 212)

The first edition bore a preface by the author:

Kipps is essentially a novel, and is designed to present a typical member of the English lower middle-class in all its limitations and feebleness. Beneath a treatment deliberately kindly and genial, the book provides a sustained and exhaustive criticism of the ideals and ways of life of the great mass of middle-class English people.

From which you can see that Well’s social novels (his realistic depictions of Edwardian life as opposed to his scientific romances) all have an agenda and a program. This is what people like Virginia Woolf didn’t like about him: in her ideal, a novel is a self-contained aesthetic object carefully crafted to be an exquisite thing of beauty, beautifully capturing the beautiful thoughts of beautiful sensitive people, mostly women. For Wells, the novel was the exact opposite, a device or tool designed to convey social satire, sociopolitical criticism, highlight abuses and issues, in stories and prose designed to appeal to a mass audience, to be popular, mostly featuring lower class, under-educated and often quite shallow men, in plots which ramble and shamble with a cheeky chappy narrator pushing and prodding and pointing the moral in case you missed it.

Woolf was a snob and deplored the fact that Wells’s novels depicted ‘counter jumpers’, literally sales assistants in shops who, in Woolf’s view, ought to know their place in the social hierarchy, ought to remain silent functionaries serving her beautiful sensitive friends, instead of having vulgar futile ambitions for a better life. But to Wells, people who worked in shops, in retail, in domestic service, on the railways, on ships, the clerks and receptionists and so on, the great army of functionaries who made society run smoothly, these were people too, people who had had rough starts in life, been let down by a ruinous ‘education system’, and been condemned to lives of shabby poverty and small horizons.

‘Love and Mr Lewisham’ is the story of a very young and naive pair of impoverished lovers: it has many lovely things in it but left me feeling poor and downtrodden. And ‘Kipps’, also, starts off lovely, light and breezy when Kipps is a boy playing carefree on Romney Marsh, but also turns into a bit of a grind. Initially ‘Kipps’ is funnier. Wells maintains his facetiously comical attitude to all his characters, but his phrasing comes off more often:

The eldest Quodling lisped, had a silly sort of straw hat and a large pink face (all covered over with self-satisfaction)…

Mrs. Woodrow — a small partially effaced woman with a plaintive face and a mind above cookery…

Quite regardless of the subject matter I find Well’s throwaway phrasing wonderfully vivid and suggestive:

His own knowledge of French had been obtained years ago in another English private school, and he had refreshed it by occasional weeks of loafing and mean adventure in Dieppe.

Half-way to the wreck Kipps made a casual irrelevant remark. ‘Your sister ain’t a bad sort,’ he said off-handedly. ‘I clout her a lot,’ said Sidney modestly…

He was a youngster of fourteen, thin, with whimsical drakes’ tails at the poll of his head, smallish features, and eyes that were sometimes very light and sometimes very dark, gifts those of his birth; and by the nature of his training he was indistinct in his speech, confused in his mind, and retreating in his manners.

‘Retreating in his manners’, that’s just not the kind of thinking or phrasing you find in modern fiction – curious, odd, unexpected, highly expressive.

Affairs of clothes and vanities they were, jealousies about a thing said, flatteries and mutual boastings, climaxes in the answering grasp of hands, the temerarious use of Christian names… (p.39)

Kipps felt himself a creature of outer darkness, an inexcusable intruder in an altitudinous world. (p.46)

‘You’re right,’ he said, and then looked at her with an entire abandonment of visage. (p.54)

‘You’ll have a good time,’ he said abruptly, with a smile that would have interested a dentist. (p.114)

Sometimes there are thoughts which have strayed in from the scientific romances and have a sudden depth or power:

He wondered where he could be. He had a curious fancy that the world had been swept and rolled up like a carpet and that he was nowhere. (p.105)

When he’s like this I find Wells highly readable.

‘I like gardenin’,’ said Kipps, with memories of a pennyworth of nasturtiums he had once trained over his uncle’s dustbin. (p.135)

Mrs. Walshingham turned a little beam of half-pathetic reminiscence on the past. (p.146)

Sid spoke offhand as though there was no such thing as pride. (p.160)

There was an interlude of matches. (p.205)

He saw them clasp their hands, heard Coote’s characteristic cough—a sound rather more like a very, very old sheep, a quarter of a mile away, being blown to pieces by a small charge of gunpowder than anything else in the world… (p.234)

A faint, tremulous network of lights reflected from the ripples of a passing duck, played subtly over her cheek and faded away. (p.245)

He dismissed their previous talk with his paragraphic cough. (p.258)

For a while they abandoned themselves to ejaculating transports. (p.287)

It was like the rush of water when a dam bursts and washes out a fair-sized provincial town; all sorts of things floated along on the swirl. (p.296)

I’ll return to Woolf’s critique at the end of my plot summary.

The shadow of Dickens

The influence of Charles Dickens haunts the novel: 1) beginning with the basic conception of focusing on very common people, leagues below the lords and ladies of James or EM Foster, the permanently embarrassed lower middle classes and lower, as Dickens did.

2) Then there are Dickensian echoes in the setting of rural Kent, which continually reminds you of ‘Great Expectations’. Pip grows up on the edge of Romney Marsh and Kipps grows up in a sweetshop in New Romney.

3) Wells has a Dickensian way of expressing character through dialogue and, in particular, through idiolects or distinct turns of speech, which really bring out a character. He pays a lot of attention to Kipps’s working class speech, or what he calls ‘his clipped defective accent’ (p.138)

‘Isn’t it a Go!’ said Kips. ‘I ‘aven’t nearly got to believe its reely ‘appened yet. When that Mr. Bean told me of it you could ‘ave knocked me down with a feather…. It’s a tremenjous change for me.’

Even more so Uncle Kipps’s mangled accent:

‘Ain’t bort a dog yet?’
‘Not yet, uncle. ‘Ave a segar?’
‘Not a moty car?”
‘Not yet, uncle.’

4) And then there are Dickensian tricks, such as making a house or its furnishings into living, comic entities.

The rug, the fender, the mantel and mirror conspired with great success to make him look a trivial and intrusive little creature amidst their commonplace hauteur, and his own shadow on the opposite wall seemed to think everything a great lark and mocked and made tremendous fun of him…. (p.113)

And later in the same scene:

He picked a piece of cotton from his knee, the fire grimaced behind his back, and his shadow on the wall and ceiling was disrespectfully convulsed. (p.119)

5) And then the carefree direct address of the author to the reader:

Coote, a sort of master of the ceremonies. You figure his face, blowing slightly with solicitude, his slate coloured, projecting but not unkindly eye intent upon our hero.

Book 1. The Making of Kipps

I. The Little Shop at New Romney

As to the plot it certainly opens with a sort of ‘Great Expectations’ vibe with young Artie Kipps being abandoned by his parents to the care of his aunt and uncle who kept a sweetshop in New Romney. I really enjoyed the description of him running wild across the marshes with the boy next door, Sid Pornick, playing at cowboys and Indians, exploring mysterious shipwrecks. Sounds wonderful. He develops a puppy love for the girl next door, Sid’s sister, Ann. As they hit adolescence their friendship suddenly takes on a mysterious new depth which is puzzling to both of them. Ann swears that they’ll never be apart and:

Then a great idea came to him, in a paragraph called ‘Lovers’ Tokens’ that he read in a torn fragment of Tit Bits. It fell in to the measure of his courage – a divided sixpence! He secured his aunt’s best scissors, fished a sixpence out of his jejune tin money-box, and jabbed his finger in a varied series of attempts to get it in half.

In fact, Kipps fails to cut it and it falls to Ann to manage this task and, when Kipps is getting on the bus to Folkstone, to rush after him and thrust the half a sixpence into his hand.

For then he is sent to a ludicrous private school, ‘Cavendish Academy’, run by a preposterous charlatan:

George Garden Woodrow, F.S.Sc. – letters indicating that he had paid certain guineas for a bogus diploma

Part of Wells’s sustained criticism of the dire state of English education for anyone below public school level.

2. The Emporium

Age 14 Kipp is bound an apprentice to a haberdasher and draper’s shop in Folkestone run by a Mr Shalford who lacks all innovation, planning or intelligence, and whose idea for business is not to innovate in any way but to screw the maximum surplus labour out of his extensive staff.

Mr. Shalford rose, and handing Kipps a blotting-pad and an inkpot to carry – mere symbols of servitude, for he made no use of them – emerged into a counting-house where three clerks had been feverishly busy ever since his door handle had turned.

Nicknamed the Emporium, this establishment is like a department store and has sleeping quarters for most of the staff, including a dormitory for the apprentices like Kipps.

3. The Wood-Carving Class

Long years of soul-destroying drudgery pass, running errands for the older staff and being routinely shouted at and nursing a huge resentment against the world. As he turns 20, the only door into a wider world is a woodwork class Kipps takes with a symbol of the wider world and all the culture he knows nothing about, young woodwork teacher Helen Walshingham.

Kipps shyly falls in love with her, a situation commented on by a freckly girl who adores Helen and points out to her that Kipps loves her. There’s a central symbolic incident where Miss Walshingham tries to open a window in the classroom, can’t, Kipps enthusiastically volunteers and manages to push his hand through the glass, making a long cut down his arm, quickly bleeding profusely. Miss W and the freckled girl both take this as an example of his heroism.

But the class comes to an end and it’s back to work work work, long hours on his feet and complete subservience to hoity-toity customers.

Then three things happen in a hurry, a flurry of coincidences which the characters make much of, as if Wells the author is a little embarrassed by them:

‘It’s about the thickest coincidence I ever struck,’ said Chitterlow…

[Chitterlow] threw out a number of long sentences and material for sentences of a highly philosophical and incoherent character about Coincidences. (p.127)

4. Chitterlow

Kipps is out walking on his afternoon off when he’s run over (or bumped into) by a fellow named Chitterlow riding a bicycle. Sort of posh, or posher than Kipps, this chap apologises effusively and takes him back to his room to offer a drink and to sew up Kipps’s trousers which have been ripped. They become friends. Kipps learns that Chitterlow is a wanna-be playwright who’s been working for years on a Great Tragedy and a Wonderful Farce, neither of which quite get written.

Their early conversation involves a drink, then two, then a top-up, then a lot more conversation about plays and theatre and critics and so on and it turns into a chapter to Kipps and Chitterlow getting completely plastered. Maybe this was intended as a comic tour de force with its description of Kipps’s increasingly confused perceptions but I found it a bit trying. Long story short: Kipps gets do disgustingly drunk that he ends up spending the night on Chitterlow’s sofa thus not returning to the Emporium before lockup at 11pm.

5. ‘Swapped’

Next morning Kipps has a thumping headache and makes his way timidly to the Emporium, only to be called into Mr Shalford’s office and told that, for this breach of the rules governing his apprenticeship, he is being immediately ‘swapped’. This term is never explained by appears to mean sacked.

6. The Unexpected (i.e. Kipps inherits a fortune)

It’s Chitterlow who draws Kipps’s attention to an ad in a newspaper asking for anyone with the surname Kipps, with a mother named Euphemia, and born in September 1878, to get in touch. Long story short: Kipps inherits a fortune. We piece together from scattered conversations with his uncle and aunt that Grandfather Kipps was a stern successful businessman, that his son got Kipps’s mother, Euphemia, pregnant; that Grandfather Kipps sent his son off to Australia and Euphemia gave birth before handing the child over to the uncle and aunt who raised him. Then, on his deathbed, Grandad Kipps realised what a mistake he’d made in preventing the couple from ever marrying, and decided to try and make it right, and so changed his will at the last moment, charging his lawyers, Watson and Bean, to track down his grandson and make him his heir.

And so Kipps inherits property (houses in Folkestone) and other assets which give him an annual income of £1,200. The narrative cuts to five days later and Kipps wearing fashionable dress strolling round town and admiring his main house, an impressive stucco-ed pile.

A scene where Kipps goes back to the Emporium and the entire staff rally round and insist on breaking open champagne and toasting him (obviously only possible because dictatorial Mr Shalford is away in London), featuring some of the named characters he’d been rooming with, ‘Buggins, Carshot, Pierce and the rest of them’. A warm vision of lower middle class solidarity.

Book 2 Mr. Coote, the Chaperon

1. The New Conditions

Mr. Chester Coote. You must figure him as about to enter our story, walking with a curious rectitude of bearing through the evening dusk towards the Public Library, erect, large-headed—he had a great, big head full of the suggestion of a powerful mind, well under control—with a large, official-looking envelope in his white and knuckly hand. In the other he carries a gold-handled cane. He wears a silken grey jacket suit, buttoned up, and anon he coughs behind the official envelope. He has a prominent nose, slatey grey eyes and a certain heaviness about the mouth. His mouth hangs breathing open, with a slight protrusion of the lower jaw. His straw hat is pulled down a little in front, and he looks each person he passes in the eye, and directly his look is answered looks away.

Kipps obviously has no idea to do with his inherited wealth and the impression given by the opening chapters of part 2 is that he is co-opted by people who want to get their hands on it. He had met Chester Coote at Helen Walshingham’s wood-carving class where he gave a sense of lofty superiority. He offers to take Kipps under his wing and guide him through the world of etiquette required of a gentleman in his position.

As the evening wore on Coote’s manner changed, became more and more the manner of a proprietor. He began to take up his rôle, to survey Kipps with a new, with a critical affection. It was evident the thing fell in with his ideas. ‘It will be awfully interesting,’ he said. ‘You know, Kipps, you’re really good stuff.’ (Every sentence now he said ‘Kipps’ or ‘my dear Kipps’ with a curiously authoritative intonation.)

As Coote slowly inveigles his way into role of Kipps’s mentor, I don’t think we’re meant to think of him as a crook exactly, but kind of sinister:

That sinister passion for pedagoguery to which the Good Intentioned are so fatally liable, that passion of infinite presumption that permits one weak human being to arrogate the direction of another weak human being’s affairs, had Coote in its grip. He was to be a sort of lay confessor and director of Kipps, he was to help Kipps in a thousand ways, he was in fact to chaperon Kipps into the higher and better sort of English life. He was to tell him his faults, advise him about the right thing to do… (p.119)

2. The Walshinghams

Coote invites Kipps for tea, shows him books and art, discusses his future. When they go down for tea they discover Miss Walshingham has been invited. Coote had attended Miss W’s wood-carving class periodically. Now there is a very strong feeling that Coote is pushing Kipps towards Walshingham, almost as if he might get a commission for pairing them off.

Kipps is invited for tea at the home of Helen Walshingham and is introduced to her discreet scheming mother. Although it’s all told from Kipps’s point of view the plot is as old as the novel, namely eligible young woman angling to marry well i.e. money. There is no mistaking that Helen and her mother both have their beady eyes on the newly rich Kipps (note her mother’s ‘quiet watchfulness’, p.138). This ought to be funny but I found it sad. Apart from anything else we discover that Helen, who Kipps perceived as a window onto the great world of ‘Culture’ when he attended her classes, in reality lives in a dingy little house, with cramped little rooms and a tiny little back garden.

Even sadder is the refrain repeated by both Helen and her mother that she’s a woman with a lot of potential who never had the opportunities, never had the springboard to become what she ought to.

3. Engaged

Under gentle pressure from Coote and Helen, Kipps changes his lawyer from respectable old Mr Bean who had dealt with his inheritance and gives full charge of his affairs to Helen’s brother, an insignificant detail here, which is to have large consequences at the end of the story…

Fifty-three days later Coote organises a day outing to Lympne, to the romantic ruined castle on the marshes, and while he himself makes a play for the freckled young woman who’s come along, Helen inveigles Kipps into climbing to the turret of the castle with her and in the subtlest way possible makes it clear that she’s in love with him, calls him ‘dear’ (which, apparently, in Edwardian England clinched the matter) because Kipps replies, ‘You mean…you’ll marry me’ (p.144).

It’s been a running joke since he inherited that Kipps has bought several books of etiquette (with titles like ‘Manners and Rules of Good Society’) and pores over them late into the night, but nonetheless is paralysed by fear of making a social faux pas, even when making the slightest social visit, and also that he keeps wearing very expensive and obviously brand new polite clothes.

Well, Helen Walshingham now sets about the work of every wife, which is to reform her future husband and begin to house-train him into what to wear and how to behave (p.154). In among this satire about small people with cramped horizons, what you could Wells’s visionary tendency keeps intruding:

Something like awe at the magnitude of his own fortune came upon him. He felt the world was opening out like a magic flower in a transformation scene at the touch of this wand of gold. And Helen, nestling beautiful in the red heart of the flower. (p.149)

4. The Bicycle Manufacturer

Kipps buys a car and, as far as I can tell, hire a chauffeur, who promptly drives him out to Romney where he announces his magnificence to his aunt and uncle. It is taken for granted that Kipps will share his good fortune with them and they can sell the family toyshop and retire.

In New Romney high street he bumps into his boyhood friend, Sid Pornick, now running his own bicycle manufacturing company in Hammersmith. He is not pleased to hear Kipps has inherited so much money because he is now a Socialist and delivers a bit of a rant about unearned income and the class system.

5. The Pupil Lover

Subtle analysis of the way Kipps’s feeling for his fiancée change which is that, somehow even he doesn’t understand or is really aware of, he’s stopped loving her. Partly due to her growing tendency to mother and boss him about. Somehow they’ve persuaded Kipps to hand over legal responsibility for his affairs from his grandfather’s firm to Helen’s brother. Mrs Walshingham refers to her children as her Twin Jewels. Somehow it is assumed that he will come to live with them when they move to London.

The scene where Kipps is airing himself at Folkestone bandstand when he is bumped into by old mates from the Emporium, Buggins and Pierce, but when Coote turns up he is distinctly cool towards these men who are obviously not gentlemen and Kipps finds himself very embarrassed caught in the middle, and being pressed into denying his past and his character in order to ‘get on’.

6. Discords

Having mastered the skills of the bicycle, Kipps cycles from Folkstone to Romney to announce his engagement to his uncle and aunt when who should he bump into by Ann Pornick. She’s 7 years older, taller, a proper woman, but oh how easily he falls into conversation as they walk together, how happy and relaxed he feels. She mentions the half a sixpence they shared, and he feels an overwhelming urge to kiss her.

With some reluctance they part, he goes onto his uncle’s and can’t remember a thing they talked about then cycled back to Folkestone thinking about Ann all the way, and into the evening and wakes up the next day thinking about ‘Ann, the bright, the desirable, the welcoming’ (p.185).

A few days later he’s back in Romney, finds Ann again in the high street, they go walking down to the sea, talk about the old days, mention the half sixpences again and then, in the poppy-strewn pebbly beach, he kisses her. The rest of the chapter describes his steady alienation from Helen, who now fills the days with criticism and tips for his improvement. He is pestered by Chitterlow who invites himself round, gets drunk and somehow implies that Kipps is to be the new main investor in his forthcoming play at the bargain price of £2,000. That night he is almost in a panic, which is clinched the next day when he receives a letter from aunt and uncle telling him they’re coming to Folkstone to be introduced to his lady love (meaning Helen). Kipps’s feelings for Helen have now curdled to dislike sometimes bordering on hatred. This letter throws him into a panic and he packs a bag and catches a train to London.

7. London

Obviously on the train he feels bad about running out on his aunt and uncle. Then has a panic that they’ll track down the Walshinghams and visit without him as mediator. (He’s ashamed of their roughness.) Now Kipps had visited London precisely once before, when he was taken by Helen’s brother, had stayed at the Grand Hotel at Charing Cross (the London station for Kent) and gotten used to taking hansom cabs everywhere.

He takes an expensive room at the hotel but is intimidated by the formal dining room so goes wandering down the Strand then up to Clerkenwell but is intimidated by either being too ignorant of etiquette or too smartly dressed, to go in anywhere. He’s getting hungry when he is tapped on the shoulder by his old mate, Sid Pornick, who takes him by tube to Hammersmith where Mrs Sid has made a lovely mutton dinner and he meets their adorable baby boy, who repeats his name over and over while banging a spoon on the table. He’s never been so happy.

Then Sid takes him upstairs to meet their lodger, Masterman, who Sid insists is a great Socialist and intellectual, author of a book about ‘Physiography’, reviewer of books for magazines and so on. Masterman is knackered, slumped in a shabby bedroom, but as he gets fired up he sits up and becomes inspired, delivering a long monologue about the evils of capitalism, the rottenness of society, class, corruption, all the usual.

Cut to Kipps mooching moodily along Rotten Row in Hyde Park, torn between two lovers, Helen who’s he’s come to really dislike for her bossy ways, and Ann, who he’s ashamed of. As Sid said goodbye he told Kipps that Ann (who works as a servant) had taken a position in Folkestone – in other words, Kipps might be out strolling arm-in-arm with Helen when they come across Ann! Before you even get to the kissing, there’s the enormous social embarrassment of telling Helen he’s good friends with a member of the servant class etc etc. nightmare. If only he could break free.

There is a set-piece scene where he goes down for dinner at the Grand Hotel and is comprehensively humiliated in every way imaginable, by lofty waiters, menus in French, incomprehensible dishes and swanky neighbours tittering at him, until he retreats in embarrassment and humiliation. This scene reminded me of Charlie Chaplin who made his first short movie 9 years later, in 1914, and introduced the character of The Tramp the following year.

The last section is another scene of humiliation in the hotel, this time on a day when he decides it would be a smart move to tip all the stuff which backfires as he realises them all in groups in corridors, dining room and foyer, sniggering at him. It’s cast as a competition between Kipps and the hotel to score points and in the end Kipps retires, having been comprehensively defeated.

8. Kipps Enters Society

So, thoroughly defeated by London after just three days, Kipps catches the train back to Folkestone. Here he attends a posh party where the guests each have a card with an anagram on it to break the ice. Inevitably, the servant who opens the door to him is Ann and both young people stand there frozen, till the hostess sweeps past to greet him. He has another attack of class hatred:

Here were all these chattering people, with money, with leisure, with every chance in the world, and all they could do was to crowd like this into a couple of rooms and jabber nonsense…Abruptly resolution stood armed in his heart. He was going to get out of this! (p.228)

God, I know that feeling.

He tries to explain to Helen that he hates this life but she happily bats away his objections, explaining that he has to learn to swim in the small insipid pool of Folkestone before they move to a flat in London and set about creating their own social circle

The climax comes at a dinner given by a Mrs Wace, attended by a supposed author and luminary, Revel. First of all Helen is wearing a dazzling evening dress which brings out her wonderful figure and, for some reason, finally exterminates all traces of affection for her in Kipp’s breast. Second, conversation turns to unreliable servants and one of the guests, Mrs Bindon Bott, tells about a servant at her house who, at the end of the anagram party of a few days earlier, had burst into floods of tears and gave her notice at the end of the evening. Kipps realises this must be Ann and realises she must have learned that Kipps was engaged to Helen, which so upset her.

Long story short, Kipps flees the dinner party, goes right round to Mrs Bindon Bott’s house where Ann opens the door and tells him to come back to the servant’s door and after 9pm, when she’s ‘off’. When he comes back, he proposes, asking her to run away to London with him and get married and, after much hesitation and tears, she says YES!

9. The Labyrinthodon

So they flee by train to London and then by cab to Sid’s house in Hammersmith, who’s delighted to see them, delighted to learn they’re to get married, delighted to put them up.

A labyrinthodon is a type of dinosaur. The chapter title derives from the fact that there’s a life-sized plaster model of one in Crystal Palace and that’s where they go on a day out and to discuss their future, namely marriage and a nice little house in Hythe. And so they get married with no description at all of the ceremony.

Book 3. Kippses

1. The Housing Problem

Once married they have to find their dream house. This proves impossible, most English housing, then as now, being crap, so Kipps conceives the extravagant plan of building his own house, eventually persuaded to hire an architect for the actual design.

It’s an unhappy process designed to show how spoiled Kipps has been, not by the money but by the snobs who gathered round him, Coote and Walshingham. Ann dreams of a cosy little cottage but Kipps finds himself being bamboozled, influenced by his aspiring Uncle, into agreeing to an 11-bedroom mansion, though by the time building commences, neither he nor Ann really want it.

2. The Callers

They are miserable. They are bored. They live in a rented house with a view of the grey relentless sea and nothing to do. Kipps goes for a walk and is cut by Coote, plunging him into unhappiness. He walks on to the muddy building site for the house which is bereft of workers or activity, is surprised the marked-out rooms look so small, has a strong suspicion that the builders are bilking him.

When he gets back his misery is made complete when he discovers that, in his absence, Ann was on her hands and knees enamelling some tiles which their servant, Gwendolin, had made a hash of, and it was at that moment that they had their first callers, the wife and daughters of the local vicar. And Ann had gone down to answer the door dressed like a skivvy and the vicar’s wife asked whether Mrs Kipps was in and Ann acted the part of a servant and said ‘no ma’am’, took their cards and closed the door. Now she can never face them and is humiliated.

But Kipps gets unusually angry with her for behaving so badly and putting off their first ever callers! (These poor babies, with their ‘ their poor little troubled heads’, lost in the big world of grown-ups.) They were going to have a nice tea of buttered toast but end up arguing and going to bed in silence where, in the dark of the night, Kipps hears Ann crying.

3. Terminations

In the final chapter, Kipps discovers that Walshingham – Helen’s sister and his lawyer – has been speculating with his money and lost it all! Kipps is completely broke! He goes of walking across the Downs to process the disaster.

But next day goes to see the old lawyer, Bean, who tells him it’s not a total loss. Walshingham couldn’t speculate away the half-built house so they can probably sell that for £500 and there’s rent and half a mortgage on the house in Folkestone. All told they might clear £1,000. Kipps shares with Ann a dream he’s been nurturing of opening a shop. Drapery? asks Ann. No, a nice little bookshop.

Three things happen: 1) Kipps does indeed set up a bookshop, though there’s loads of boring detail about his getting involved in an American chain of bookshops called the ‘Associated Booksellers’ Trading Union (Limited)’ which may have been a satire on a contemporary concern but now appeared unnecessarily clotted and complicated.

2) Ann has a baby. There was no mention of her pregnancy and his description of her after labour is embarrassingly patronising and obtuse, but maybe reflects Kipps’s naivety and obtuseness.

She had the look of one who emerges from some strenuous and invigorating act. (p.293)

Well, of course she bloody did!

3) Remember Chitterlow with his madcap schemes for plays, and him inveigling Kipps into investing in one: well, it turns out to be a wild success and Kipps is assured of profits.

Two years later

An abrupt jump and the narrative quickly explains that Chitterlow’s play really did become a runaway success, playing to packed houses every night, so that the return on Kipps’s investment has brought him back to being about as rich as he was before Walshingham ran off with his money.

Nothing changes

Globalisation

‘Man is a social animal with a mind nowadays that goes around the globe, and a community cannot be happy in one part and unhappy in another. It’s all or nothing, no patching any more for ever.’ (Masterman)

World run by and for the rich

‘Today,’ he said, ‘the world is ruled by rich men; they may do almost anything they like with the world. And what are they doing? Laying it waste! Collectively, the rich today have neither heart nor imagination. No! They own machinery, they have knowledge and instruments and powers beyond all previous dreaming, and what are they doing with them?… God gives them means of communication, power unparalleled of every sort, time and absolute liberty! They waste it all in folly! … They grudge us our schools, they grudge us a gleam of light and air, they cheat us and then seek to forget us…. There is no rule, no guidance, only accidents and happy flukes…. Our multitudes of poverty increase, and this crew of rulers makes no provision, foresees nothing, anticipates nothing…’

Global warming

‘Very hot,’ said this lady. ‘Very hot, indeed – hot all the summer – remarkable year – all the years remarkable now – don’t know what we’re coming to – don’t you think so, Mr. Kipps?’ (p.227)

Housing crisis

A whole chapter describing how English houses in 1905 were built to poor standards by penny-pinching developers.

When the houses were not too big, then they were almost invariably the product of speculative building, of that multitudinous hasty building for the extravagant multitude of new births that was the essential disaster of the nineteenth century. The new houses Ann refused as damp, and even the youngest of these that had been in use showed remarkable signs of a sickly constitution, the plaster flaked away, the floors gaped, the paper mouldered and peeled, the doors dropped, the bricks scaled and the railings rusted…There were occasions when it seemed to them that they must be the victims of an elaborate conspiracy of estate agents… (p.253)

And, strikingly:

Everyone hates estate agents. (p.254)

The Woolf critique

You can understand the criticism made of Wells the ‘popular’ novelist by ‘serious’ novelists such as Henry James, Joseph Conrad or Virginia Woolf, writers (in their different ways) committed to turning the novel into an Art Form.

1. Wells’s novels seem episodic and, a word frequently used, improvised, meaning you often get a strong sense that he had another bright idea for a satirical swipe at Edwardian society and so chucked in a new 3 or 4 page section, heedless of the overall design or flow.

2. Wells directly addresses the reader in the manner of 18th century authors, in a way which seemed clumsy and vulgar to artists like Woolf who were trying to make the novel into self-contained artworks. Direct address:

Perhaps you know those intolerable mornings, dear Reader, when you seem to have neither the heart nor the strength to rise, and your nervous adjustments are all wrong and your fingers thumbs, and you hate the very birds for singing. (p.191)

Or:

Mrs. Kipps is the same bright and healthy little girl woman you saw in the marsh; not an inch has been added to her stature in all my voluminous narrative. (p.252)

An attitude demonstrated at greater length in part 2, chapter 5, section 4:

But you must not imagine that the national ideal of a gentleman, as Coote developed it, was all a matter of deportment and selectness, a mere isolation from debasing associations. There is a Serious Side, a deeper aspect of the true, True Gentleman. The True Gentleman does not wear his heart on his sleeve. He is a polished surface above deeps… (p.177)

Initially I liked this, but came to find it irritating and arch. It doesn’t have the freshness of Henry Fielding or Dickens and ended up feeling lame. This is particularly true of the last couple of pages where the narrator comes clean and says Kipps is based on a real person and you can visit his bookshop in Hythe today, and have a chat with him, only don’t tell him that Wells has put him in a novel and his name is Kipps. I can appreciate the meta aspects of this but it felt lame, it undermined the force of what went before. I can understand the Woolf objection.

3. If the intrusive narrator feels like watered-down Dickens the same is true of many of the characters – I had the strong sense that the handful of recurring characters (Coote, Uncle Kipps, Walshingham, Chitterlow) should all have been more vivid. Surely Dickens would have made all of them more colourful, given them more vivid quirks of speech or odd hobbies. Wells just gives them very cursory distinguishing features, such as Coote’s thick jaw, and that’s it. Actually the uncle is given the mildly amusing habit of buying up rubbish antiques which he assures Kipps are priceless bargains, a fairly comic indication of the hopeless ignorant optimism of his type. But this kind of mild quirk lacks the manic energy of Dickens’s mad imagination.

4. The most effective part of the critique is the accusation that Wells’s characters are extremely shallow, have no souls and that these social novels all-too-accurately capture:

The stupid little tragedies of these clipped and limited lives. (p.279)

The accusation is that the characters are boring and given to little or no thought, no ideas, nothing for the intelligent reader to latch onto. After a while you realise the problem of having a central protagonist who is, as Wells describes him, ‘simple’, who lacks all education or depth, who is a bundle of nerves in all social situations, with no knowledge of books, culture, politics or current affairs, the wider world or any interesting friends, is that it’s very…limiting. Kipps is a ‘simple soul’ but the book is, in the end, also rather simple, in content and form. Simple-minded. Towards the end the narrator says that, due to their lack of education or experience:

It was a tortuous journey when the Kippses set out to explain anything to each other. (p.288)

But he doesn’t follow through to the obvious conclusion that it is often a tortuous journey to watch them trying to explain anything, to themselves or each other. Periodically Wells describes, very well, what it’s like to be stupid and unreflective:

Out of the darknesses beneath the shallow, weedy stream of his being rose a question, a question that looked up dimly and never reached the surface. It was the question of the wonder of the beauty, the purposeless, inconsecutive beauty, that falls so strangely among the happenings and memories of life. It never reached the surface of his mind, it never took to itself substance or form, it looked up merely as the phantom of a face might look, out of deep waters, and sank again to nothingness.

This is haunting and poetic but moments like this are rare. 300 pages is a long time to spend in the company of a character who can barely fashion a thought and struggles to express himself at even a basic level.

5. And finally, as a novel, it justifies its existence via its humour – I found it fairly humorous, fairly often, as indicated by the odd or humorous sentences I listed at the start of this review – but, in the end, not funny enough, nowhere near as funny as Wells, I think, intended. There are long passages which aren’t particularly funny and aren’t particularly interesting. I liked the first 50 pages of his carefree childhood on the marsh then all the rest was an effort to read.

The film

Kipps was made into the 1967 movie Half a Sixpence, conceived as a vehicle for English song and dance star Tommy Steele, featuring its hit song, the brilliant pastiche of Edwardian music hall, ‘Flash, Bang, Wallop!’

Credit

Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul by H.G. Wells was published in 1905 by Harper Brothers. References are to the 1993 Everyman paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on December 20, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/12/20/kipps-h-g-wells/

Amy Foster by Joseph Conrad (1901)

‘Amy Foster’ is one of Joseph Conrad’s early short stories. It was written in 1901, first published in the Illustrated London News in December 1901, then collected in ‘Typhoon and Other Stories’ (1903). It is 12,334 words long.

The plot

The unnamed first-person narrator returned to England from abroad ‘a good many years ago now’. Soon after he was invited to go and stay with his friend Kennedy, who is a country doctor, living in Colebrook, on the shores of Eastbay in Kent. Kennedy began his career as a surgeon in the Navy before becoming the companion of a famous explorer. He invites the narrator down to stay with him and so the narrator finds himself accompanying the doctor on his rounds.

Amy

In the fifth paragraph they are out riding in the doctor’s gig when they see Amy Foster in her garden, hanging out her washing, ‘her dull face, red, not with a mantling blush, but as if her flat cheeks had been vigorously slapped, and to take in the squat figure, the scanty, dusty brown hair drawn into a tight knot at the back of the head. She looked quite young’ (p.150) and the doctor calls out a friendly greeting to her. Somewhere playing is her little boy, Johnny.

Amy’s biography

He goes on to tell the narrator that Amy is the daughter of one Isaac Foster, who from a small farmer has sunk to be a shepherd. The beginning of his misfortunes dated from his runaway marriage with the cook of his widowed father – ‘a well-to-do, apoplectic grazier, who passionately struck his name off his will, and had been heard to utter threats against his life’ (p.151). The story of her father’s failed marriage anticipates Amy’s own tribulations.

Despite the homely English setting, Conrad almost immediately falls into familiar, hyperbolical and pessimistic ways of thinking, as Kennedy remarks of Amy that you’d think she lacked all imagination:

It’s enough to look at the red hands hanging at the end of those short arms, at those slow, prominent brown eyes, to know the inertness of her mind – an inertness that one would think made it everlastingly safe from all the surprises of imagination. And yet which of us is safe?

This is the moral of ‘Lord Jim’, the nagging fear that none of us live up to our moral values and idealised self images, what Freud would later call the punishing superego. In the same vein, Kennedy continues:

‘There are other tragedies, less scandalous and of a subtler poignancy, arising from irreconcilable differences and from that fear of the Incomprehensible that hangs over all our heads – over all our heads…’

Kennedy now launches into the life story of Amy which makes up the text. At the age of 15 she was put out to service, to the New Barns Farm, tenanted by Mr and Mrs Smith. Mrs Smith was ‘a genteel person with a sharp nose [who] made [Amy] put on a black dress every afternoon. She also owned a grey parrot.

Amy falls in love

Amy lived for four years at the Barns, faithfully serving the Smiths, and never going further than the two mile tramp back to her mother’s house. Then she fell in love, not casually of course, but in a Conradian way, with the maximum of hyperbole.

She fell in love silently, obstinately – perhaps helplessly. It came slowly, but when it came it worked like a powerful spell; it was love as the Ancients understood it: an irresistible and fateful impulse – a possession! Yes, it was in her to become haunted and possessed by a face, by a presence, fatally, as though she had been a pagan worshipper of form under a joyous sky. (p.152)

The immigrant

Who did she fall in love with? Well, thereby hangs the majority of the tale. The man in question is the survivor of a shipwreck, washed up on the Kentish shore, who blunders round the countryside terrifying honest citizens. Because he speaks no English but a harsh East European language, then Kentish country-people think he’s a tramp or even a dangerous madman.

The gift of bread

Until he’s cornered by Mr Smith in one of the outhouses on New Barns Farm. Smith keeps him locked in his wood-lodge while he ponders what to do with him. During this interval Amy shyly offers the scared, exhausted and hungry vagrant some pieces of bread.

‘No wonder that Amy Foster appeared to his eyes with the aureole of an angel of light. The girl had not been able to sleep for thinking of the poor man, and in the morning, before the Smiths were up, she slipped out across the back yard. Holding the door of the wood-lodge ajar, she looked in and extended to him half a loaf of white bread.’ (p.163)

This gesture of compassion and acceptance goes right through the vagrant, staying with him, and is the basis for their eventual relationship and marriage.

The immigrant is taken in by Old Mrs Swaffer

Smith arranges for the vagrant to be taken in by his nearest neighbour, old Mr. Swaffer. Here he is washed and dressed and put to work. In exchange for board and keep, he is employed in the fields and proves a solid worker even if no one can understand a word he says and his progress in English is very slow. Kennedy remarks on his handsomeness:

He was very good-looking, and most graceful in his bearing, with that something wild as of a woodland creature in his aspect.

The immigrant is named Yanko Goorall

And around about this time the community gets to learn his name. It is Yanko, which means ‘little John’, Goorall (p.169).

Yanko saves Swaffer’s grand-daughter

In a crucial event, Yanko looks up from his work in a field and notices that Swaffer’s toddler grand-daughter has fallen into a local horse pond, drops everything, runs over and saves her life (p.167). As you can imagine Swaffer and the entire community upgrade their opinion of him. Swaffer now gives him a regular wage, which the vagrant uses to go to the local pub where he tries to get people interested in the exotic folk songs of his native land. Slowly he learns to speak halting English.

The immigrant’s story

In one of those stories within a story, Kennedy now tells the narrator what he pieced together of Yanko’s story. Yanko was a mountaineer of the eastern range of the Carpathians, brought up in an East European country by his devout peasant parents. He was recruited by an agency which offered young men and women a new life in America. And so he is transported by train (which he finds novel and bewildering) then put up overnight in a tenement house in Berlin, before travelling again by train to the north German coast, at Hamburg.

Then they were loaded aboard a ship, which Kennedy later found out was the Hamburg emigrant-ship Herzogin Sophia-Dorothea, and set off through the Baltic. Kennedy picks up the story when he says he saw the ship anchor off the Kent coast. That night is dark and stormy and in the middle of it another steamer sought shelter in the bay and rammed the emigrant ship, splitting it in half so that it quickly went down with all hands, drowning hundreds of emigrant men, women and children. Yanko alone survived and swam to shore, emerging half dressed, covered in mud and weed, and traumatised. (Over the coming days hundreds of the drowned corpses would wash up ashore and be taken on stretchers to be laid out in a row under the north wall of the Brenzett Church.)

Anyway, it was in this state that he washed up, stumbled about the countryside terrifying everyone till Mr Smith of New Barns managed to lock him in his wood-lodge, where Amy fed him.

Yanko’s marriage proposal

All through the weeks and months as he works for Old Swaffham, Yanko retains the impression of compassion from when Amy gave him his first piece of bread and moonily worships her from afar. Eventually he asks Old Swaffer to intercede with her father (Foster) for her hand.

Foster thinks it’s as good an offer as he’s ever liable to get for his simple daughter and accepts. Old Swaffer makes over a cottage to the couple as reward for saving his grand-daughter.

Marriage and child

And so the couple get married and she bears him a son. But then the tone of the story markedly changes. Quite abruptly Conrad has Dr Kennedy tell the narrator that the village began to hear rumours of discord. Slowly it leaks out that Amy dislikes Yanko talking his language to the baby and reciting the Lord’s Prayer to it, as his father had to him (p.172).

Yanko gets tuberculosis

The reader wonders where this marital discord theme will go when Conrad bottles out with one of the easiest ends to a story like this – he dies. To take it a bit more slowly, Yanko comes down with tuberculosis and lies in a bed in the downstairs room, tended by Amy (p.173). But she is no longer the angel of simple-minded compassion who gave him the bread, but worn down by nerves and anxiety.

The night of terror

Indeed she feels a growing fear which, in classic Conrad style, in the course of just one night, turns into an unreasoning terror. So that when, in his fever, Yanko begs her for water, she’s too genuinely terrified to give him any, but she snatches up the baby, paralysed with fear.

She sat with the table between her and the couch, watching every movement and every sound, with the terror, the unreasonable terror, of that man she could not understand creeping over her. She had drawn the wicker cradle close to her feet. There was nothing in her now but the maternal instinct and that unaccountable fear. (p.174)

In his fever Yanko shouts at her in his guttural language then staggers up out of his bed – at which point terrified Amy seizes the baby, runs out the door and doesn’t stop running till she arrives at her parents’ house.

Yanko dies

Next morning Kennedy finds him lying face downwards outside the house with the door open. He had obviously staggered a few paces after his fleeing wife then collapsed. He’s not quite dead so Kennedy and his servant carry him inside where, exhausted by the fever, he does finally expire. Or, as Conrad puts it:

The fever had left him, taking with it the heat of life. And with his panting breast and lustrous eyes he reminded me again of a wild creature under the net; of a bird caught in a snare. She had left him. She had left him – sick – helpless – thirsty. The spear of the hunter had entered his very soul. ‘Why?’ he cried… (p.175)

And died. Dr Kennedy wrote heart failure caused by fever on his death certificate.

Puzzlement

The story ends with the very Conradian tone of puzzlement as Dr Kennedy wonders how much red-faced peasant woman Amy every thinks about the one great love of her life, the man who was her true love but then became her terror.

‘Is his image as utterly gone from her mind as his lithe and striding figure, his carolling voice are gone from our fields?… It is impossible to say whether this name recalls anything to her. Does she ever think of the past?’

And the very last phrase in the entire story luxuriates in the characteristically Conradian sense of futility and despair:

‘I have seen her hanging over the boy’s cot in a very passion of maternal tenderness. The little fellow was lying on his back, a little frightened at me, but very still, with his big black eyes, with his fluttered air of a bird in a snare. And looking at him I seemed to see again the other one – the father, cast out mysteriously by the sea to perish in the supreme disaster of loneliness and despair.’

Yes Joseph, truly we are all birds snared in the traps of our tragic lives etc.

People smuggling

Critics are always claiming that this or that author or artist was ‘prophetic’ or ‘anticipated’ or ‘predicted’ issues which are still with us but this, in my view, is a profound misunderstanding about society and history. These people didn’t set out to prophecy anything. Instead they are describing issues which were problems in their own day (the only day they knew) and if they appear to us, looking back, to have ‘anticipated’ some of our modern social or political problems, it is, in fact, because we have failed so solve them.

Thus one aspect of the tale is Conrad’s surprising revelation about unscrupulous people smugglers operating in eastern Europe in the 1880s.

‘A few months later we could read in the papers the accounts of the bogus “Emigration Agencies” among the Sclavonian peasantry in the more remote provinces of Austria. The object of these scoundrels was to get hold of the poor ignorant people’s homesteads, and they were in league with the local usurers. They exported their victims through Hamburg mostly.’

One hundred and forty years later the issue is still with us, and has become one of the defining political issues of our time. Conrad didn’t predict anything, he was just reporting a theme of his own time. It is not his fault or to his credit, that the same issue remains a hot button issue 140 years later. All that indicates is our complete failure as a society and international community, to solve it.

Other cast members

No matter how simple the basic plot of a Conrad story, and no matter how much it is focused on a central protagonist, they are always surprisingly densely populated with numerous secondary and tertiary characters. I think this is for two reasons: 1) it damps down the hyperbolic hysteria Conrad is so prone to whereby his protagonist ends up taking on the powers of the universe or representing the futility of human existence. Including a number of other people who are going about their normal business, pushing prams or shopping or chatting down the pub helps ground Conrad’s stories and make them more plausible. 2) But having adopted this approach of numerous extra characters, Conrad is often very sly in making them, their behaviour or their stories compare and contrast with the central narrative, so they are not utterly random, but often part of a carefully wrought pattern.

Miss Swaffer, who keeps house frugally for her father, ‘a broad-shouldered, big-boned woman of forty-five, with the pocket of her dress full of keys, and a grey, steady eye… She dressed severely in black, in memory of one of the innumerable Bradleys of the neighbourhood, to whom she had been engaged some twenty-five years ago, young farmer who broke his neck out hunting on the eve of the wedding day’ (p.166). She is almost completely deaf.

So Miss Swaffham’s story –a tragic love affair leading to her being on her own, is very directly comparable with Amy’s case.

The young ladies from the Rectory who come to visit snooty Miss Swaffer. One of them is reading Goethe with the help of a dictionary and the other ‘had struggled with Dante for years’ (p.164). Their bourgeois education and ambition contrast starkly with Amy’s uneducated simplicity.

In the hours after Yanko is washed up he manages to terrify a range of locals including:

  • Hammond, owner of the pig-pound where Yanko takes shelter after staggering up out of the sea.
  • The Brenzett carrier who takes him for a tramp sleeping under a hedge.
  • The schoolmistress who goes out to remonstrate with the vagabond when he scares her children.
  • The driver of Mr Bradley’s milk-cart who lashes out at Yanko with his whip.
  • Three boys who later admitted to throwing stones at him.
  • Mrs Finn, the wife of Smith’s waggoner, out walking with her baby in a perambulator; outraged by the approach of this muddy phantom she hits him with her umbrella and runs away.
  • Old Lewis hammering away at rocks, who Mrs Finn gets to join her watching the vagabond flee across the fields.

Then there’s the two brothers, who went down to look after their cobble hauled up on the beach, found, a good way from Brenzett, a hencoop from the wrecked ship lying high and dry on the shore, with eleven drowned ducks inside, which they took home to their family and ate.

You can see how all these sometimes comic types help to ground the story, while creating the sense of a wider community that his central protagonists operate in.

Swaffer’s younger daughter, married to Willcox, a solicitor and the Town Clerk of Colebrook. It is her 3-year-old daughter, Bertha, who fell into the horsepond and Yanko saved (p.167).

In the tap-room of the Coach and Horses:

  • Preble, the lame wheelwright
  • Vincent, the fat blacksmith
  • the strange carter who can’t be doing with Yanko performing some weird dance and takes his half-pint outside
  • the landlord who tells Yanko he doesn’t want no ‘acrobatic tricks in the tap-room’ (p.169)

Mystery

Conrad’s fiction is based on the premise that everyone is a mystery to everyone else: Kurtz is a mystery, Jim is a mystery, Falk is a mystery to the puzzled narrators of their stories. And so is the unnamed emigrant, sole survivor of a tragedy at sea, who’s washed up on their shore. The first time Kennedy sees him is described in a phrase which could have come from the stories of Kurz or Jim:

‘It was there that I saw him first…’

Portentous words which inaugurate the long puzzle, the investigation and piecing together which we are familiar with from so many Conrad stories.

It’s in this spirit that, even as he tells her story, Kennedy admits to the narrator that Amy is a mystery to him (just as Kurz and Jim remain, to the bitter end, mysteries to Marlow).

‘How this aptitude came to her, what it did feed upon, is an inscrutable mystery…’

She lives for 4 years at New Barns with the Smith family, never went further than back to her parents’ house. Then she fell in love, which, in Conrad’s hands, is a diabolical business:

‘It came slowly, but when it came it worked like a powerful spell; it was love as the Ancients understood it: an irresistible and fateful impulse – a possession! Yes, it was in her to become haunted and possessed by a face, by a presence, fatally, as though she had been a pagan worshipper of form under a joyous sky – and to be awakened at last from that mysterious forgetfulness of self, from that enchantment, from that transport, by a fear resembling the unaccountable terror of a brute…’

Conradian hyperbole

Conrad can’t help himself from adopting a hyperbolic or cosmic tone, readily resorting to talk about terror, horror, fear or idiot imbecility, or invoking the mighty powers which govern the world and even the universe, at the drop of a hat.

Hyperbole

Conrad’s mind always leaps to extremes. Pondering Yanko’s complete alienation from the people who take him in, Kennedy remarks:

Conceive you the kind of an existence overshadowed, oppressed, by the everyday material appearances, as if by the visions of a nightmare. (p.166)

Dr Kennedy and the narrator are pottering along in his cart and they see some labourers walking home from a day’s work. You can imagine how, in many Edwardian authors, this might prompt nice thoughts of home, hearths, fires, wives and good meals, but not for Conrad. Everything is cranked up to an Edgar Allen Poe level of shrillness:

‘One would think the earth is under a curse, since of all her children these that cling to her the closest are uncouth in body and as leaden of gait as if their very hearts were loaded with chains…’ (p.153)

Later, when Smith first sees the shipwrecked man:

Smith, alone amongst his stacks with this apparition, in the stormy twilight ringing with the infuriated barking of the dog, felt the dread of an inexplicable strangeness.

At the drop of the smallest hat everything in Conrad becomes about lunatic, inexplicable strangeness, weirdness, insanity, rage, despair, horror and agony.

Conrad’s cosmic similes

The Doctor came to the window and looked out at the frigid splendour of the sea, immense in the haze, as if enclosing all the earth with all the hearts lost among the passions of love and fear. (p.172)

And then there is Conrad’s frequent tendency to go cosmic, to invoke the entire universe in his metaphors and comparisons, to such an extent that, to my mind at any rate, he sometimes steps into science fiction territory.

It was as if these had been the faces of people from the other world…

He was different: innocent of heart, and full of good will, which nobody wanted, this castaway, that, like a man transplanted into another planet, was separated by an immense space from his past and by an immense ignorance from his future. (p.168)

But this is not to say this is bad. On the contrary, Conrad has a brazen boldness about talking about life, the universe and everything which his stiff-upper-lipped British contemporaries mostly lacked, and which helps to give all his stories their sense of symbolic depth and resonance, so unusual in English literature.

The hyperbole as it were sets a tone, allows the stories to contain greater allegorical or symbolic force than their straitlaced English contemporaries. Thus it is that, among numerous other themes and images, the story recurs to the image of humans as birds caught in traps.

1) When Dr Kennedy is called in by Smith to examine the vagabond who he’s just locked up in his wood-lodge, Kennedy observes ‘his glittering, restless black eyes reminded me of a wild bird caught in a snare’.

2) Years later when Kennedy is called in to treat Yanko in his final fever, he observes that, ‘with his panting breast and lustrous eyes he reminded me again of a wild creature under the net; of a bird caught in a snare’.

3) A preparation of images which make it all the more haunting and effective when, at the very end of the story, Kennedy leans over the cot of Yanko and Amy’s baby son and observes ‘The little fellow was lying on his back, a little frightened at me, but very still, with his big black eyes, with his fluttered air of a bird in a snare’. (p.175)

The narrator as jigsaw solver

The Conradian storyteller is always a detective, a man who pieces together his narrative from fragments told him by their parties or the protagonist himself, which always require pondering, assessing and carefully stitching together.

‘I have been telling you more or less in my own words what I learned fragmentarily in the course of two or three years, during which I seldom missed an opportunity of a friendly chat with him.’

‘Perhaps it was just that outlandishness of the man which influenced Old Swaffer. Perhaps it was only an inexplicable caprice. All I know is that at the end of three weeks I caught sight of Smith’s lunatic digging in Swaffer’s kitchen garden.’

This is acknowledged at the start of the story, where the narrator tells us that:

‘His papers on the fauna and flora made him known to scientific societies. And now he had come to a country practice – from choice. The penetrating power of his mind, acting like a corrosive fluid, had destroyed his ambition, I fancy. His intelligence is of a scientific order, of an investigating habit, and of that unappeasable curiosity which believes that there is a particle of a general truth in every mystery.’

He is, then, an investigator and puzzle solver by disposition.

The language barrier

‘He could talk to no one, and had no hope of ever understanding anybody. It was as if these had been the faces of people from the other world – dead people – he used to tell me years afterwards.’ (p.166)

Figures at the heart of Conrad stories often, like their author, suffer from a language barrier. Yanko is, among other things, an extreme example of the difficulties with language which so many Conrad protagonists suffer.

‘A sudden burst of rapid, senseless speech persuaded him at once that he had to do with an escaped lunatic. In fact, that impression never wore off completely. Smith has not in his heart given up his secret conviction of the man’s essential insanity to this very day.’

With the profoundly alienating effect that:

‘All these faces that were as closed, as mysterious, and as mute as the faces of the dead who are possessed of a knowledge beyond the comprehension of the living…’

Even when he slowly painfully acquires some grasp of English, it is always marked by his alien origins:

‘He told me this story of his adventure with many flashes of white teeth and lively glances of black eyes, at first in a sort of anxious baby-talk, then, as he acquired the language, with great fluency, but always with that singing, soft, and at the same time vibrating intonation that instilled a strangely penetrating power into the sound of the most familiar English words, as if they had been the words of an unearthly language.’

With the result that:

His foreignness had a peculiar and indelible stamp. (p.168)

Impossible not to read into this the experience of Conrad the exile, the immigrant who obtained a stunning fluency in English but always with an alien flavour.

Thoughts

‘Amy Foster’ is, at first, a convincingly gritty portrait of rural life into which the powerful figure of Yanko stumbles… and yet, by the end, in fact at the very end, it feels forced.

The initial slow sections about Amy’s character are the eclipsed by the colourful piecing together of the account of the man washed ashore, and there is a slow logic to the love between Yanko and Amy, as the doctor tells it… but right at the end the tempo completely changes and the speed with which Conrad has the couple fall out and argue, and then the sudden note of horror which grips her on the night of the storm, all this feels too rushed. Conrad devotes barely a page to describing how Amy is transformed from doting lover to feeling anxious about, then scared of, then terrified by, her husband. It feels forced and rushed.

Notes

Originally Conrad toyed with calling the story ‘The Castaway’ or ‘A Husband’. It’s interesting how he gravitated away from focusing on the handsome mysterious immigrant and came to realise that the story would have more power if told for its impact on the simple, monosyllabic peasant girl.

No specific location has been identified for the story. It’s somewhere on the Kent-Sussex border. The fictional town of Brenzett is based on Dymchurch.

Yanko is a transliteration of the Polish Janko. Goorall corresponds to Góral, the Polish word for ‘highlander’.

Credit

Conrad wrote ‘Amy Foster’ in 1901. It was first published in the Illustrated London News (December 1901) and collected in Typhoon and Other Stories (1903). Page references are to the Oxford World’s Classics paperback edition of ‘Typhoon and Other Stories’, 2008 revised edition.

Related links

Conrad reviews

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by Simon on November 29, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in English literature, Short stories
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Posted by Simon on November 29, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/11/29/amy-foster-joseph-conrad/

Boy: Tales of Childhood by Roald Dahl (1984)

Born in 1916, Roald Dahl had his first short text (an account of crashing his RAF plane in the desert) published in 1942 i.e. aged 26.

As we all know, this marked the start of a long and stunningly successful career during which he wrote over 60 (increasingly macabre and gruesome) short stories, brought together in a series of collections for adults, most successfully under the brand name ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ to tie in with the 1970s TV adaptations – but more famously, from 1961 onwards, a series of books for children which made him one of the best selling and best known authors in the world.

Forty-two years after that first published piece, at the age of 68, Dahl published this, the first part of his autobiography. Except it isn’t a continuous and comprehensive autobiography at all. Instead it is, as he carefully explains in the preface, a series of memorable incidents and events which have stuck with him since boyhood. It is more like a series of episodes, hence the subtitle ‘Tales of Childhood’.

Boy follows a chronological order and is divided into sections mostly named after the teaching institutions he progressed through:

  1. Family background
  2. Kindergarten
  3. Llandaff Cathedral School, 1923 to 1925 (age 7 to 9)
  4. St Peter’s, 1925 to 1929 (age 9 to 13)
  5. Repton and Shell, 1929 to 1936 (age 13 to 20)

The first sentence sets the tone:

An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details.

So this, also, is a book for children, pitched to, what age group would you say? 7? 11?

Taken in the way it is intended, it is a brilliant read. Why? For its wide-eyed, childlike candour. For his tremendous excitement about everything he describes. Everything is the best, everything is vivid with excitement and enthusiasm. Everything overflows with child-like glee.

Looking a bit more closely, every sentence says something interesting. There’s no padding or fat. People and places are summed up with skill and economy. This gives the narrative tremendous pace because things are always moving on, stuff is always being discovered and described, and all with the winning enthusiasm of boyhood.

1. Family background

When his father, Harald, was 14 he fell off the roof while fixing some tiles and broke his arm. A drunk doctor injured it further and it had to be amputated.

His father and brother, Oscar, decided they had to leave the small Norwegian town they’d grown up in so they left for France. Uncle Oscar ended up in La Rochelle, a fishing port, where he ended up owning the biggest fishing fleet and canning factory.

Harald moved to Paris and set up a shipbroking company. The main fuel for shipping was coal. Where was the biggest coal port in the world, Cardiff, so Harald moved there with his young wife, Marie. Here Harald’s business thrived and he bought a big house at Llandaff, just outside Cardiff. Marie bore him two children but died soon after giving birth to the second. Heartbroken, Harald went back to Norway and found a second wife, Sofie, who bore him 4 children, one of whom was Roald.

Business boomed and in 1918, when he was 2, the family moved to a grand house in the village of Radyr. It had a small farm attached and was full of servants. Harald led a vigorous life, mountaineering and was an expert wood carver.

In 1920, when Roald was 3, his sister Astri died from appendicitis, aged 7. She was his father’s favourite and when Harald went down with pneumonia he didn’t put up much of a fight and died.

This left Sofie without a husband and provider and father to the remaining five children, and pregnant again. She could have sold up and gone back to Norway, where her father, mother and unmarried sisters would have helped out.

2. Kindergarten

Instead she sold the big house, bought a smaller one and, a few years, later, sent Roald, aged 6, to his first school, a kindergarten run by two old ladies. He remembers vividly the excitement of travelling there in his brand new tricycle!

3. Llandaff Cathedral School, 1923 to 1925 (age 7 to 9)

Two memories: one is of seeing an older boy cycle past him, taking his hands off the handlebars and crossing them on his chest. Oh how he wanted to be that boy!

Second memory is the sweetshop where he and his friends bought sherbet suckers and liquorice bootlaces, gobstoppers and tonsil ticklers. Unfortunately this sweetshop is kept by Mrs Pratchett who is ‘a skinny old hag’ with a moustache on her top lip and a terrible temper.

The Great Mouse Plot

He and his friends discover a dead mouse and conceive the wicked idea of slipping it into one of Mrs Pratchett’s big sweetjars. And that’s what they do, while his friend Thwaites distracts her, Roald lifts the lid of the gobstopper jar and drops the dead mouse into it, quietly replacing the lid. What an achievement!

Mr Coombes

Next day they walk past the sweetshop to discover it closed. At school the headmaster calls the boys to an identity parade where, to their horror, Mrs Pratchett identifies them.

Mrs Pratchett’s revenge

Mr Coombes then canes them while Mrs Pratchett looks on approvingly. Worth quoting in full:

As the first stroke landed and the pistol-crack sounded, I was thrown forward so violently that if my fingers hadn’t been touching the carpet, I think I would have fallen flat on my face. As it was, I was able to catch myself on the palms of my hands and keep my balance. At first I heard only the crack and felt absolutely nothing at all, but a fraction of a second later the burning sting that flooded across my buttocks was so terrific that all I could do was gasp. I gave a great gushing gasp
that emptied my lungs of every breath of air that was in them.

It felt, I promise you, as though someone had laid a red-hot poker against my flesh and was pressing down on it hard.

The second stroke was worse than the first and this was probably because Mr Coombes was well practised and had a splendid aim. He was able, so it seemed, to land the second one almost exactly across the narrow line where the first one had struck. It is bad enough when the cane lands on fresh skin, but when it comes down on bruised and wounded flesh, the agony is unbelievable.

The third one seemed even worse than the second. Whether or not the wily Mr Coombes had chalked the cane beforehand and had thus made an aiming mark on my grey flannel shorts after the first stroke, I do not know. I am inclined to doubt it because he must have known that this was a practice much frowned upon by Headmasters in general in those days. It was not only regarded as unsporting, it was also an admission that you were not an expert at the job.

By the time the fourth stroke was delivered, my entire backside seemed to be going up in flames. (p.50)

Roald’s mother discovered the welt marks at that evening’s bath time and went straight round to the school to complain. Roald stayed till the end of that term but then his mother took him out of the school.

Going to Norway

From 1920 to 1932, from the ages of 4 to 17, the family spent every summer holiday in Norway. The many islands and the freedom and innocence remind of Tove Jansson’s memoirs.

Roald gives an exciting account of the complexities of packing all the baggage and travelling first to London, then by train to Newcastle, then by boat to Oslo where his grandparents lived.

He loved his Bestepapa and Bestemama, they always hosted a celebration feast when he and his family arrived, which features ‘a mountain of ice cream’. See what I mean by the way everything sounds brilliant, the sweets, the food the family, the journey, everything!

The magic island

Day after the feast the Dahl family caught a steamer to the magic island. Like everything, it is the bestest of the best!

Late in the afternoon, we would come finally to the end of the journey, the island of Tjöme. This was where our mother always took us. Heaven knows how she found it, but to us it was the greatest place on earth. (p.61)

And:

Breakfast was the best meal of the day in our hotel, and it was all laid out on a huge table in the middle of the dining-room from which you helped yourself. There were maybe fifty different dishes to choose from on that table. There were large jugs of milk, which all Norwegian children drink at every meal. There were plates of cold beef, veal, ham and pork. There was cold boiled mackerel submerged in aspic. There were spiced and pickled herring fillets, sardines, smoked eels and cod’s roe. There was a large bowl piled high with hot boiled eggs. There were cold omelettes with chopped ham in them, and cold chicken and hot coffee for the grown-ups, and hot crisp rolls baked in the hotel kitchen, which we ate with butter and cranberry jam. There were stewed apricots and five or six different cheeses including of course the ever-present gjetost, that tall brown rather sweet Norwegian goat’s cheese which you find on just about every table in the land.

Yummy! Then they’d take the small boat and go exploring the islands, hundreds of them, looking for ones with a little sandy back when he and his sisters were small, later on rocky ones which they could jump off into the sea. In the evenings they went fishing for mackerel and cooked them fresh.

I tell you, my friends, those were the days. (67)

A visit to the doctor

When he was 8, a gruesome trip to a local doctor who takes out his adenoids with no anaesthetic, slashing inside his mouth and extracting great clumps of flesh covered in blood. The child-focused nature of the text is made explicit:

That was in 1924, and taking out a child’s adenoids, and often the tonsils as well, without any anaesthetic was common practice in those days. I wonder, though, what you would think if some doctor did that to you today. (p.71)

4. St Peter’s, 1925 to 1929 (age 9 to 13)

First day

This was in Weston-super-Mare, from which you can look across the Bristol Channel and see Wales. Every boy had a Tuck Box containing all his treasures. Boarding schools were money-making machines and fed the boys as little as possible while encouraging them to write to their parents for ‘treats’. The school is long and low sitting in front of its sports pitches and the headmaster is a giant with a grin like a shark.

Writing home

Every Sunday morning every boy had to write a letter home. With Dahl the habit stuck and he wrote his mother at least one letter a week for the next 20 years, from 1925 to 1945, and she kept them all. When she died, in 1957, she left him a huge bundle of his letters, some 600 in total.

The matron

The dormitories are ruled with a rod of steel by the matron who is an ogre. One boy has a bright idea of scattering castor sugar along the corridor so they can hear the crunch-crunch of her arrival. This drives her into a fury and she calls the headmaster who goes red in the face with anger and confiscates all their Tuck Boxes with the result that the boys go hungry for the last 6 weeks of term.

Young Roald is terrified. He sleeps facing the Bristol Channel and therefore his family. It is a great comfort.

A boy called Tweedie snores in his sleep. the matron hears, is disgusted and tips soap shavings into his mouth, so he wakes up blowing bubbles. You can see where all the vicious tyrants in Dahl’s children’s fiction come from.

Homesickness

He is so homesick he decides to fake appendicitis to escape. The matron and headmaster fall for it so he is put on the paddle steamer across the channel to Cardiff, collected by his mother and taken to the family doctor who immediately realises that he’s faking it. He is kind, though, and tells Dahl that it was his (the doctor’s) idea to send him to boarding school. It will toughen him up and get him ready for life.

A drive in the motor-car

Home for the holidays and a hilarious account of a drive in the family’s new car, a De Dion-Bouton, with his eldest step-sister driving, which ends in quite a bad crash, with the glass windscreen half slicing Dahl’s nose off, hanging by ‘a single small thread of skin’ (p.103)! His mother sticks it back in place and they hurry as fast as the unnerved sister can drive, to the doctor’s, Dr Dunbar.

Here he has another operation, this time with a primitive chloroform cotton wool mask to knock him out. The doctor sewed his nose back on and it took. His mother hives him a gold sovereign for being so brave.

Captain Hardcastle

The stock monster teacher, Captain Hardcastle is short and wiry with vermillion hair drenched in brilliantine and parted in the middle. He has a giant orange moustache, teaches Latin and football, and has it in for Roald from day one.

The disaster comes during evening Prep (all the boys sit at desks in the big hall for exactly one hour in complete silence doing whatever task is assigned them) when the nib on Roald’s pen breaks halfway through writing an essay and he incautiously asks his neighbour for a spare. Hardcastle spots this and goes mad.

(This all occurs in 1926, the same year Evelyn Waugh was struggling to be a teacher at a boys preparatory school in Wales, the unfortunate experience which became the basis of his first novel, Decline and Fall.)

Dahl is given a slip to take to the headmaster who, despite all his attempts to explain, gives him six of the best. For the second time he gives a really super-vivid description of the different stages and level of agonising pain which result from caning.

Little Ellis and the boil

Roald is in the sick room with flu when he observes the doctor ‘treating’ the only other boy, young Ellis who has a huge boil on his inner thigh. The doctor throws a towel over Elli’s face and stabs the boil, turning the blade, so that Ellis screams his lungs out. Hardly anybody used anaesthetic on those days, even for dental procedures.

Goat’s tobacco

His eldest half-sister, the one he calls the ancient sister, starts dating an Englishman who accompanies them on their big family holiday. The entire family is irritated by his manly behaviour and poses and way of talking, and particularly by the way that he never removes the manly pipe he smokes from his mouth. So Roald plays a prank. The manly man has just stuffed his perishing pipe when the ancient sister asks him to go for a swim. He does at which Roald, in full sight of the rest of the family, tips the tobacco out and replaces it with goat pellets which he breaks up with his fingers and stuffs in the pipe before putting a thin layer of tobacco back over the top, with, as they say, hilarious consequences.

5. Repton and Shell, 1929 to 1936 (age 13 to 20)

Getting dressed for the big school

By now the family has moved to Bexley in Kent. His mother asks whether he’d rather go to Repton or Marlborough, two grand public schools. He chooses Repton because it’s easier to pronounce. It was September 1929 when, aged 13, he went off to boarding school. The entire chapter is devoted to the ridiculous school uniform he had to wear.

Boazers

Repton slang for ‘prefects’. These big boys could cane the small ones for almost any infringement. Yet again Dahl describes the mechanics of caning and the different techniques of the different ‘boazers’.

The headmaster

Dahl takes malicious pleasure in explaining that the headmaster of Repton, a charmless ‘shoddy bandy-legged person’, was later selected to be Bishop of Chester, and then Bishop of London, and then Archbishop of Canterbury, and it was none other than he who crowned Queen Elizabeth in 1953.

For he was a notorious deliverer of phenomenally painful and sadistic canings. Roald’s best friend, Michael, describes how the victim had to take down his trousers, kneel on the sofa in the head’s study with their head over one end, and then the head delivered ten severe strokes, in between filling his pipe and delivering a rambling lecture about sin and punishment.

On chapel the head maundered on about forgiveness but showed no forgiveness whatsoever when it came to caning young boys’ buttocks so hard that they bled – at which he handed over a basin, sponge and towel and told them to clean up the blood before leaving.

That this man was a vicar, and then a bishop, and then the Archbishop of Canterbury goes a long way to explaining Dahl’s lifelong atheism.

Chocolates

Surprisingly, boys at Repton were used as guinea pigs for new ranges of chocolates by Cadbury. they were sent boxes containing one standard and nine new experiments, and then asked to fill out forms. In a characteristically enthusiastic chapter he recalls this as the basis of his second children’s book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Corkers

There were about thirty or more masters at Repton and most of them were amazingly dull and totally colourless and completely uninterested in boys. But Corkers, an eccentric old bachelor, was neither dull nor colourless. Corkers was a charmer, a vast ungainly man with drooping bloodhound cheeks and filthy clothes. He wore creaseless flannel trousers and a brown tweed jacket with patches all over it and bits of dried food on the lapels. He was meant to teach us mathematics, but in truth he taught us nothing at all and that was the way he meant it to be. His lessons consisted of an endless series of distractions all invented by him so that the subject of mathematics would never have to be discussed. (p.151)

These distractions involved getting the whole class to help him with the Times crossword or bringing in some live snakes to hand round.

Fagging

The humiliations of fagging including being one of the three fags who, every Sunday morning, had to clean Carleton’s study until it was as clean as an operating theatre. And he actually performed the cliché task of sitting on a freezing toilet seat in an outhouse to warm it up ready for a senior boy, Wilberforce, to use. In fact he becomes Wilberforce’s favourite bog seat warmer.

Games…

Dahl turns out to be brilliant at fives, a public school ball game quicker than squash. He becomes captain of fives which entitles him to wear a special colour on his straw hat and braid round his blazer etc. He ought to have been made a prefect or ‘boazer’ on account of this eminence but:

But the authorities did not like me. I was not to be trusted. I did not like rules. I was unpredictable. I was therefore not Boazer material. There was no way they would agree to make me a House Boazer, let alone a School Boazer. Some people are born to wield power and to exercise authority. I was not one of them. I was in full agreement with my Housemaster when he explained this to me. I would have made a rotten Boazer. I would have let down the whole principle of Boazerdom by refusing to beat the Fags. (p.162)

…and photography

Dahl turned out to be a very gifted photographer. He got permission to construct his own dark room and took it very seriously. The sensitive art teacher helped him organise a final year exhibition of his work. When still only 18 he won prizes from the Royal Photographic Society in London.

Goodbye school

He doesn’t want to go to Oxford or Cambridge but to get a job in as remote and magical a distant land as he can. To his own astonishment he gets a job with Shell. He leaves school in July 1933 and starts the new job in September, just as he’s turning 18.

In his last term he’d bought a motorbike, stashed it in a garage up the road from school, and used to go out for wild rides around Derbyshire disguised in helmet and goggles. On the last day he hurtles away from Repton with no regrets.

He goes on a public school outward bound adventure to Newfoundland, which he discovers to be inhospitable and cold, but returns fit and resilient.

Two years as a trainee with Shell in Britain and then several months in head office learning the business. He commuted in from the family home in Bexley. And here he makes some quotable remarks about the appeal of a regular job, salary, predictable commute etc as against the commitment needed to be a fiction writer, worth quoting in its entirety.

The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn’t go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him. If he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not. Two hours of writing fiction leaves this particular writer absolutely drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been somewhere else, in a different place with totally different people, and the effort of swimming back into normal surroundings is very great. It is almost a shock. The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it. (p.171)

Then Dahl gets his first placement abroad. To the managing director’s amazement Roald turns it down because it is Egypt. Flat and desert and sand and old relics – Dahl wants lions and tigers and excitement! To his surprise the managing director gives into his wish, gives Egypt to another intern, and a week later gets in touch to say Dahl’s posting will be to East Africa. He jumps up and down with excitement.

And that is where this book ends and its sequel, Going Solo begins.

Thoughts

A masterpiece of children’s storytelling, the book is notable for what it leaves out such as:

  • puberty and sex
  • friendships
  • intellectual development, discussion and debate
  • or even the basic central aspect of school, which is the subjects and the exams – none of these make an appearance

Old man blues

All this, you must realize, was in the good old days when the sight of a motor-car on the street was an event, and it was quite safe for tiny children to go tricycling and whopping their way to school in the centre of the highway. (p.23)

You must remember that there was virtually no air travel in the early 1930s. Africa was two weeks away from England by boat and it took you about five weeks to get to China. These were distant and magic lands and nobody went to them just for a holiday. You went there to work. Nowadays you can go anywhere in the world in a few hours and nothing is fabulous any more. (p.166)

But he’s right, of course. Cars have destroyed childhood and anyone can go anywhere now, often at Ryan Air prices, so that everywhere feels like the same huge shopping mall.

Credit

Boy: Tales of Childhood by Roald Dahl was published by Jonathan Cape in 1984. References are to the 1986 Penguin paperback edition.

Related link

Roald Dahl reviews

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by Simon on May 27, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Autobiography
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Posted by Simon on May 27, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/05/27/boy-tales-of-childhood-roald-dahl/

An Ice-Cream War by William Boyd (1982)

Nothing today had been remotely how he imagined it would be; nothing in his education or training had prepared him for the utter randomness and total contingency of events.
(Gabriel Cobb reflecting on the chaos of the Battle of Tanga, An Ice-Cream War, page 172)

This is a long, deeply researched and immaculately described historical novel, set during the Great War in British East Africa, filling 383 densely printed Penguin pages.

Boyd is a lovely writer. His style is clear and polite, in a very English way. It’s obviously less funny than ‘A Good Man in Africa’, which is a full-on comedy, but it also feels more formal, somehow more old fashioned, appropriately for its historical setting. There are moments of psychological acuity or observational detail or deft phrasing to give pleasure on every page.

Part 1. Before the war

Chapter 1. 6 June 1914, Dar-es-Salaam, German East Africa

Introduces us to Temple Smith, ‘a very fat man with a thick black walrus moustache’ (p.310), the American owner of a sisal plantation in the south of British East Africa (what will later become Kenya). Smith has travelled down to Dar es Salaam, which is in the adjoining colony of German East Africa, in order to collect a consignment of coffee plant seedlings. He is ambitious and wants to expand his farm from just growing and processing sisal

Through his eyes we see Dar as it was in 1914 and the arrival of several German ships at the harbour. Smith is greeted by his nearest neighbour from across the border in the German colony, one Erich von Bishop. An efficient crop-haired man, Bishop is here to greet his wife, Liesl, who has been on an extended holiday to her relatives in Europe (where she has put on a lot of weight).

(There’s a bit of backstory, which is that we learn why Smith is in Africa. He was bored being manager of an iron foundry in Sturgis, New Jersey, and had applied to an advertisement to be the manager of a big game hunt to Africa, in this case for the ex-US president Theodor Roosevelt and his son Kermit when they came on a big game safari back in 1909. When he questioned the need to massacre quite such huge numbers of wild game he was sacked but had come to like Africa and decided to stay on and try to make it as a farmer.)

There is an odd, apparently inconsequential episode, when Smith visits a local prostitute in a bordello. She is rake thin, covered in bangles and ointment and smells. When she spits something out the window which lands with a clatter on some nearby roof he chickens out and doesn’t go through with it…

Chapter 2. 8 June 1914, The Northern Railway, German East Africa

Bishop invites Smith to share the train journey from Dar back inland to the nearest station to their farms. We see the long uncomfortable railway journey through the eyes of Liesl von Bishop who is not happy to be back in Africa and, as angry women do, finds both the men pitiful and pathetic. Smith alights at Moshi station where he is met by his native foreman, Saleh.

Chapter 3. 10 June 1914, Taveta, British East Africa

Smith’s farm (which he has named Smithville) with its acres of sisal plants, barns, warehouse to house the massive decorticator machine, some tramlines. His placid wife, Matilda, and two yapping little boys, Glenway and Walker (p.45).

Chapter 4. 24 July 1914, Ashurst, Kent, England

Long chapter introducing us to the Cobb family through the eyes of the spoilt younger son, Felix, who’s just left private school before going up to Oxford next term. Felix has come under the influence of a charismatic boy called Holland, at school, and so fancies himself as a fashionable, progressive intellectual.

Holland’s sway over Felix had been established in their final year at school, and Felix had accepted it with the zeal of a disciple acknowledging the messiah. (p.189)

With the result that Felix finds his family, and everything about the impressive country estate in Kent, unbearable – his father the permanently bad-tempered retired Major Hamish; his sisters Cressida, Yseult and the twins Albertine and Eustacia; his conventional mother and his various male in-laws, namely:

  • Lieutenant Nigel Bathe married to Eustacia
  • Sammy Hinshelwood
  • the honourable Greville Verschoyle married to Albertine
  • Lt Col. Henry Hyam, married to Yseult (who, when war starts, bags a job in the Committee of Imperial Defence)

The only person he likes, adores even, is his older brother, 27-year-old Captain Gabriel Cobb who collected him from the station and with whom he goes for a swim in the old willow pool while filling him in on the latest family gossip. As part of their banter Gabriel chats about his time in the army in India where he hasn’t seen any fighting but he has stuck a few wild pigs. Felix is disgusted and asks whether they squeal. Well, you’d squeal if you were stuck with a spear, laughs Gabriel. This is a characteristically clever piece of prolepsis by Boyd for Gabriel will, himself, be stuck like a pig in the upcoming war (in Part 2, chapter 6).

This grand country pile is, we learn, the reward from a metal company in Wolverhampton which produces items like Felix’s electro-plated nickel-silver cigarette case (pages 52 and 209).

Chapter 5. 25 July 1914, Stackpole, Kent, England

Felix’s jaundiced jealous view of his brother’s marriage to Charis. He is mightily pissed off because at the last minute brother Gabriel told him he was being replaced as best man by Sammy Hinshelwood, Felix being downgraded to chief usher.

Chapter 6. 26 July 1914, Trouville-sur-mer, France

Gabriel and Charis’s honeymoon, filled with details about hotels and seabathing in 1914, but centring on Gabriel’s inability, on two successive nights, to get an erection, despite clambering on top of Charis and sort of rubbing his groin against her (still in his pyjamas) to her complete bewilderment. It’s only on the third night that he bangs his knee, navigating across the bedroom in the dark, she loses her temper and tells him to ‘come and let mummy rub it, you silly boy’ when, to both their surprises, he suckles her like a baby and gets a proper erection, which is a definite improvement, even if he then ejaculates prematurely before he has penetrated her. Sigh. A vivid imagining of the bad old days of total ignorance about almost every aspect of sex.

Next morning he reads a French paper and announces to an astonished Charis that Austria has declared war on Serbia and they must return to Britain immediately, that same day.

Part 2. The war

Chapter 1. 9 August 1914, Smithville, British East Africa

Officious army and customs officer Reggie Wheech-Browning – ‘a ludicrous beanpole of a man’ (p.338) – drops by to tell Smith that war has broken out and to leave his farm immediately. Smith thinks it’s stuff and nonsense and doesn’t budge.

A week later a force of German askaris (African soldiers) led by two German officers marches onto his land and up to his beloved factory. It is von Bishop who he met in the opening chapter. Very politely von Bishop announces he is commandeering Smith’s farm, as his men set fire to his sisal crop and start pulling up the short length of tram track he had lain down. It’s all he can do to prevent von Bishop from vandalising his precious decorticating machine. When asked, von Bishop very politely signs an affadavit itemising all the things he’s burned or is confiscating, but insists he will also be commandeering the farmhouse. Smith has one hour to pack his belongings, wife and two small boys into a mule-drawn buggy, and told to shamble off down the track towards Voi.

On the outskirts he is, ludicrously, fired on by the ramshackle force of askaris led by Wheech-Browning. Once he’s yelled who he is he’s allowed to proceed to Voi where he puts his family up at the government dak, with a view to himself journeying on to Nairobi to establish who’s going to pay him compensation.

Chapter 2. 20 August 1914, Nairobi, British East Africa

Ensconced in snobbish, pretentious, half-built Nairobi, Smith discovers that well-heeled Brits and various foreigners have set up a volunteer defence force while they wait for the relief force to arrive from India but have become disillusioned by two weeks of inactivity. In Voi he’s been greeted by Matilda’s father i.e. his father-in-law the slope-shouldered Reverend Norman Espie.

Smith goes to see his insurance company, the grandly named African Guarantee and Indemnity Company which is in fact a small office above a butcher’s shop on Sixth Avenue run by one immigrant Indian, Goolam Hoossam Essanjee Esquire. Essanjee explains that Smith’s claim of theft of his farm and equipment will have to be confirmed the company’s assessor who is also Goolam Hoossam Essanjee Esquire.

Chapter 3. 30 August 1914 ,Voi, British East Africa

10 days later. Wheech-Browning drives Smith and Essanjee in an early motorbike with sidecar out of Nairobi, past Voi. They stop in the open scrub an hour or so from Smith’s farm when they suddenly come under fire from Germans hiding in a rocky hill 600 yards away. As the reader anticipated, the Indian, Essanjee – the lieutenant dispensable of the situation – is hit twice and dies. Wheech-Browning and Smith bundle his body into the sidecar, and hightail it away from the ambush.

Chapter 4. 26 October 1914, SS Homayun, Indian Ocean

56 days later, and we join Gabriel aboard a tramp steamer sailing from Bombay to British East Africa. He had hung around in Britain waiting for news, then been sent out to India, to Bombay then up to Rawalpindi to join his regiment, the West Kents. But then to his disgust he was separated from them and posted to a subaltern regiment, the 69th Palamcottah Light Infantry, part of Indian Expeditionary Force B, and has to entrain all the way back down to Bombay and then board the smelly old SS Homayun for a hot slow boring voyage across the Indian Ocean.

Everyone is seasick. Incidents including a concert party interrupted by a rainstorm and the flogging of a mutineer. Sammy Hinshelwood distinguishes himself by his coarse stories about sex which, of course, embarrass but also arouse the only recently blooded Gabriel. He becomes friendly with the eccentric, intense Dr Bilderbeck who gives him the best advice for life in the front line: always have a pillow and a basin.

Chapter 5. 2 November 1914, Tanga, German East Africa

Tanga was a major port on the northernmost part of German East Africa, close to the border with British East Africa. Description of Gabriel and his troop loading into a lighter, being towed to the beach, jumping into the neck-high water, making their way to the beach and a little inland. Then the confusing long delay as they wait all through a hot day for instructions, their air of chaos when Gabriel goes up to the ‘red house’ on a hill which is staff headquarters. The constant sound of gunfire from ahead of them. Initial intelligence said the town had been abandoned. Now they realise the Germans have heavily fortified it and are fighting off all attacks.

Chapter 6. 3 November 1914, Tanga, German East Africa

Plausible sounding account of the battle Tanga in that it’s mostly Gabriel stuck in charge of his 70 or so scared Indian soldiers with a cheerfully naive number two, Gleeson. When they are told to go forward they blunder through dense undergrowth, are dispirited by a flight of Indian troops running back from the front, then blunder into an area of bees nest which attack and sting them very severely. At one point in the sequence of events he bumps into Bilderbeck again, who orders the handful of remaining Indian sepoys to advance. When they don’t move Bilderbeck calmly shoots one in the head at point blank range, a spatter of fresh brain landing on his boot.

Eventually it’s just Gabriel and Gleeson left as they make their way forward, are shot at by people with northern accents who they realise are the Lancashire regiment, identify themselves and discover the Lancs are pinned down by a load of Indian soldiers who take shots every time they try to retreat. Gleeson can speak Hindi so he is sent to the side of the house facing the Indians and starts shouting to them that they’re British.

Around then Gabriel sees a German officer emerge from a house a few hundred yards away, leading his men, in plain view and takes the opportunity to fire a shot. It completely misses but triggers an immense fusillade on the house they’re holed up in. When it dies away Gabriel turns to escape the house and comes across Gleeson lying on the floor with his lower jaw show away to reveal the enormous human tongue, glugging down his own blood and still blinking and moving his eyes.

Dazed with horror Gabriel leaps out the back window of the house and runs for the tree cover, telling himself all the time that he’ll come back to rescue Gleeson which we know he won’t. En route back to the beach he stumbles across a troop of German askaris who chase him, (grotesquely enough, through a graveyard), catch up, then slash at him with bayonets, one severing a thigh muscle so that he falls to the ground, taking two other severe stab wounds in the abdomen before he passes out. I assumed he was dead.

Chapter 7. 6 November 1914, Tanga, German East Africa

The Germans win the Battle of Tanga i.e. repulse the British attack. Bilderbeck is the British representative sent to supervise the handing over of British stores to the victorious Germans and ferrying the British wounded back to the ships, liaising with a German officer named Hammerstein, assisted by von Bishop whose eyes we see everything through. After the British had been forced to flee from the beaches, their battleships subjected the town to a heavy barrage. A shell landed near von Bishop giving him loud tinnitus so he asks the German medic Dr Deppe to examine him. Bilderbeck discovers Cobb is still alive though severely injured from the pig sticking he got from the bayonets and has a few words with him, in his hospital bed, before he returns to the beach and thence the British ships.

Chapter 8. 16 March 1915, Oxford, England

Six months later. Cut back to Felix who is now in his second term at Oxford. Things are not well. He continues to copy his hero, Holland, but neither of them make much impact in wartime Oxford. All the able-bodied students have volunteered and gone off to war. Felix has a slight astigmatism, Holland an unspecified ailment. Both are regularly handed white feathers by old Edwardian ladies in the street for being cowards. Felix is horribly embarrassed by this and has taken to wearing an eye patch to visibly excuse himself; Holland, true to his provocative aesthetic attitude, wants to be given white feathers and is jokily jealous because Felix has more than him. It’s that kind of jokey, studentish relationship.

But other things about Oxford are disappointing, too. Felix is at war with his scout, a wizened con-man named Sproat and his mute son, Algy. And his tutor is an ancient decrepit don named Jock Illiffe whose overheated rooms pong of cats. Once Felix read him the same essay that he’d read the previous week and Illiffe, sitting back in his chair with his eyes closed, didn’t even notice. With the result that he’s failed his Moderations or ‘Mods’ in History.

To cap it all he’s developed a cold sore at the corner of his mouth, the size of a sixpence, which refuses to go away, which solidifies into a scab, which breaks when he smiles and bleeds. Very unsightly.

So this chapter is a successfully evocative painting of Oxford in the first year of the Great War. It also gives us a Felix-eye view of the Cobb family. The splenetic Major has pinned up a big map of northern France in the study and forces the entire family and all the servants to attend a daily update on the progress of the war. The family have, of course, taken the news about Gabriel being severely wounded, very badly. There’s also news about the various other brothers-in-law and family hangers-on.

Holland has acquired a mistress in London, an artist’s model named Enid who takes morphine and makes his life hell, so he’s writing some jolly good poetry about it. Felix, very much still the shy virgin, has a crush on Holland’s sister, Amory, who’s at art school, and is invited to a party she’s giving.

Chapter 9. 18 March 1915, Stackpole Manor, Kent

Felix catches the train back to the family home in Kent. Charis is living there, now, in the former servant’s cottage, which was to have been her and Gabriel’s newlyweds home. She keeps bursting into tears about Gabriel. His father is still short and angry, but his flesh hangs off him. He looks like a demented Victorian cleric.

What a horrible old man, Felix thought. (p.199)

The Felix chapters are drily comical, with overtones of Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh. Cyril, the sweary working class man Felix liked, his son now tells him has been killed on the Western Front. Felix is genuinely shocked and upset. Then Charis springs it on him that the family have arranged a birthday party for her on 29 March, he’s invited, in fact everyone’s expecting Felix to ‘squire’ Charis. But it clashes with Amory’s party. Family duty or the (remote) possibility of sex. Decisions decisions for a young man.

Chapter 10. 29 March 1915, Café Royal, London

We meet Felix and Holland in the stylish Café Royal, whence they catch a cab to Cheyne Walk in Chelsea and upstairs to a sordid flat where Amory lives and which is hosting a very bohemian party, packed with artists and models, all smoking and drinking heavily, a girl playing guitar to an adoring coterie etc. Felix is introduced to Pavelienski or ‘Pav’, the east European model Amory models for. Amory herself is a thing chestless woman who almost completely ignored Felix and is irritated when Holland insists he accompanies them to the famed bohemian nightclub, the Golden Calf, as Amory had booked a table for 16 and Felix is supernumary.

(The Cave of the Golden Calf was a real nightclub, a consciously bohemian creation decorated by leading artists of the time – Wyndham Lewis, Charles Ginner and Spencer Gore – praised by Ezra Pound and frequented by Katherine Mansfield, Ford Madox Ford, and Augustus John. Wikipedia)

Anyway, Felix’s attempts to seduce Amory go disastrously awry as she shakes him off and calls him a ‘silly boring little boy’, getting up to go and dance with Pav. Suddenly sober and realising what a fool he’s made of himself, Felix goes wandering through the dark streets of London feeling poetic and soulful till he comes to a baked potato stand, buys one, is propositioned by an old prostitute, taken back to her squalid digs, is fleeced £2 for a horrible experience, unable to get an erection (like his brother Gabriel, in Trouville) so the hooker starts to masturbate him and he climaxes almost immediately (like his brother in Trouville), ejaculating over the sheets, prompting the outraged prossie to tell him to ‘fuck orf out of it’. Felix stumbles into his clothes and down the steep stairs and out into the bleak streets. Sex, eh.

Cut to Felix having taken the milk train back down to Kent and, having been cleaned out by the whore, forced to walk through the dew-drenched countryside to Stackpole. Here he’s surprised to see the light on in the cottage, knocks and is admitted by Charis who is still wearing her gown from the night before, the night of her party, the party Felix rudely missed in order to undergo his series of humiliations in London, as he now ruefully thinks. Sitting in her small front room in front of the fire sipping tea he suddenly feels intimately close to her, his brother’s wife, and tries to stifle the thoughts. The reader wonders whether they’ll end up becoming an item, two damaged ingenues…

Chapter 11. 17 June 1915, Nanda, German East Africa

Three months later. We discover that von Bishop’s wife, Liesl, has been nursing the injured. Kicked out of her house on the border with the British colony, she spent a few months in Dar until, out of boredom, she volunteered to help at the hospital but was then evacuated with all the long-term patients to a hospital far in the south and inland, at a place called Nanda.

A new clutch of patients arrived along with their doctor, Dr Deppe. One is Captain Gabriel Cobb. He is still alive, recovering from severe wounds, learning to walk with crutches. Liesl is a bad-tempered fat woman. So pale and freckled, she sweats continually. Her only pleasure is the brief shower at the end of the day when her maid, Kimi. pours several buckets of water over her head. Then she dries on a frayed towel, slips into casual clothes, eats and goes to bed early. Teutonic joylessness.

Chapter 12. 21 November 1915, Voi, British East Africa

Back to Temple Smith. It’s about a year after he was evicted from his farm. He joined the East African Mounted Rifles but has done nothing except practice drills and acquire more bits of uniform which barely cover his fat frame, while Voi expands into a vast armed camp containing Indian force B, South African coloureds and whites, Kings African Rifle blacks, a huge heterogeneous force.

He’s been called in to meet the head of this force, Brigadier-General Pughe. He’s s short pompous man who turns out to be drunk on brandy and promptly ignores his advice about the lie of the land. Serves the stupid British right.

Talking of which Smith walks back towards the enormous camp, past the fenced areas for donkeys and horses (dying by the dozen due to tsetse fly) to the aerodrome which amounts to a big area of flat, cleared scrubland and a couple of warehouses made out of canvas awning. The entire presence of the Royal Air Force is just two BE2C biplanes.

To Smith’s immense irritation the officious twerp Wheech-Browning is dressed up in flying gear with a reversed cap and flying goggles and about to go for his first flight with flying officer Drewes. it’s a disaster. They bounce along the ‘runway’ but after lifting about 12 feet slowly sink back to the ground. It’s too hot, the air is too thin. But it carries trundling along towards a drainage ditch, pitches head first into it and Drewes is killed. Bystanders rush over to the wreckage to pull his body out but Wheech-Browning, indestructible, emerges as blithe and jolly as ever.

Chapter 13. 10 December 1915, The King’s Arms, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire

Felix and Charis have ended up becoming an item. We find them in bed in a pub 30 miles or so away from Stackpole. They have had eight sexual encounters and are familiar with each other’s body. We watch Charis inset a tiny sponge dabbed in an unnamed solution attached to a fine thread into her vagina, the thread just sticking out. Contraception 1915. They both know the ghost of Gabriel hovers over their couplings but neither has the guts to raise the subject.

Nigel Bathe came back from Mesopotamia where he lost both arms in a bomb-throwing training exercise when one went off in his hand. Christ. The casual horror not of war but the incompetent preparations for it.

A recap of how Charis and Felix became lovers i.e. he repeatedly kissed her and wore down her rejections. In the end she’s lonely want wanted comforting. They devised stories about visiting distant relatives as excuses for meeting up in remote inns for weekends of love.

On the train back from Aylesbury to London Felix admits he feels dreadfully guilty. Charis reassures her that they have created their own bubble of love. But inside she is full of remorse and guilt. Humans and their ridiculous emotions. But then this is a novel. A verbal artifice created with the aim of describing extreme or complex emotions, all for our entertainment.

Chapter 14. 11 March 1916, Salaita Hill, British East Africa

Detailed description of the war in Africa. Temple Smith is obviously going to be our eyes and ears for this. On 12 February the Brits launch a headlong assault on Salaita Hill where 600 South Africans are mown down by German machine gunners. A second attempt finds the hill abandoned, the Germans have withdrawn from the town of Taveta to scrub country and two hills beyond General Smuts from South Africa is put in charge of the campaign. A month later, against Smith’s advice, the Brits insist on trying to storm the two hills. He watches the whole sorry fiasco and watches the obstinate stupid British officer in command, Colonel Youell, shot in the neck and quickly bleed to death.

Smith accompanies his body in a field ambulance back to staff HQ, reports to General Pughe who is completely drunk then, in utter disgust, goes into town, gets his mule-handler to saddle up his mule and heads off towards Smithville, his homestead which he hasn’t seen for 18 months.

First of all, there are no Germans there. After a lot of tense creeping towards the farmhouse in expectation of being shot he discovers that every surface in every single room has been covered in human faeces. Then he encounters Saleh, the old chief servant, Saleh shows him that a) the grave of his dead baby daughter has been opened and the bones scattered everywhere (they collect them together and rebury them) and b) the Germans have taken the decorticator – almost as soon as Smith left, according to Saleh. Smith vows revenge against von Bishop. The tone and intemperance of his vow reminded me fleetingly of Morgan Leafy’s tone of permanent rage in Boyd’s novel, ‘A Good Man in Africa’…

Chapter 15. 24 June 1916, Nanda, German East Africa

Back at the German hospital several things have happened to Gabriel. He has recovered enough to be able to walk around freely. The research base had been converted not only into a hospital but a prisoner of war camp. The British officer in charge had conceived a plan for Gabriel to keep infecting his thigh wound with dirt in order to remain an invalid and therefore outside the prison camp and in the hospital. He also suggested that Gabriel help out with basic nursing activities, for example washing German wounded or holding them as they evacuated their dysenteric bowels – because from this privileged position he was able to a) pilfer supplies and b) find out the latest military situation (which is that the Germans are slowly withdrawing along the railway line in face of solid British advances, towards Dar).

But the chapter starts a few weeks after all the British POWs have been evacuated to the coast. There is no military reason why Gabriel should continue malingering. The truth is he’s fallen in lust with Liesl. She doesn’t give a toss about him, is a big, solid, no-nonsense German Frau who goes about her duties with angry efficiency. but a few weeks previously Gabriel, dropping off some of the cigarettes he’s taken to rolling from local tobacco for both of them, glimpsed her stripped naked having her evening shower – and was seized with raw lust. Now he can barely be in her presence without trembling although she, of course, is completely oblivious to his behaviour.

Chapter 16. 25 June 1916, Stackpole Manor, Kent

Charis is finding the affair unbearable. She’s spent 18 months writing letters to Gabriel and never had a reply. She stops and feels dreadfully guilty, so guilty that she has a second wind and writes Gabriel a long letter explaining that she’s been having an affair and why – but not naming Felix as the lover, and posts it to the Ministry of Defence as usual.

As usual, Felix drops by the cottage late that night. He’s taken to doing this, taking Charis’s sexual availability more and more for granted. After their latest midnight sex and Felix has returned to his room, Charis writes Felix a simple note saying she is going away, she has written Gabriel telling him everything.

Except that she didn’t tell Gabriel everything in her letter to him, she didn’t identify Felix as her lover. I predict the discrepancy between the two letters will cause trouble. I predict Felix will think Charis has written to Gabriel about naming him and be stricken with panic.

Chapter 17. 26 June 1916, Stackpole Manor, Kent

Felix opens Charis’s letter at an otherwise typical family breakfast, reads its few lines, jumps to his feet yelling ‘Jesus Christ!’ and runs down to the cottage to find Charis long gone. Turmoil. Panic. He is of course distraught that she’s told Gabriel everything but something in the tone of the note makes him panic think she’s killed herself so her runs to the ornamental fish ponds they spent so much time mooning beside. Notices the big stone bust of the emperor Vitellius is missing. Leaps into the freezing water and discovers her body. She had tied round her neck with twine then tied it multiple times round the bust and chucked it in. She looks peaceful in submarine death, her hair floating calmly round her face. Well, this is a fine pickle!

Chapter 18. 1 July 1916, Sevenoaks, Kent

There’s an inquest. Felix lies his face off and claims to have lost the letter in the frenzy of searching for Charis, maybe in the pond. Everybody believes this except the local doctor who Charis had been doing refugee work with, Dr Venables. Venables asks him for a drink at a bar in a hotel not far from the magistrates’ court in Sevenoaks where the inquest is held. Here he asks Felix point blank if he was having an affair with Charis. It takes all Felix’s self possession to try and appear calm as he pretends to be outraged and deny it. Venables then asks whether Charis was having an affair with anyone else, which Felix says he doubts. Thoughts are rampaging through his head. The calm reader, used to this sort of thing, realises that Charis was probably pregnant.

Part 3. The Ice-Cream War

Chapter 1. 25 January 1917, Dar-es-Salaam, German East Africa

It is six months later. Unsurprisingly Felix has enlisted. Equally unsurprisingly, it’s in a regiment which is fighting in Africa and we now meet him on deck the troop ship as it steams into Dar es Salam harbour. He’s with the Fifth Battalion, the Nigerian Brigade, being cobbled together from African conscripts, not at all fashionable. But it is Africa. He is driven by guilt, the need to do something, out of which slowly formed the idea of a quest to find brother Gabriel.

Anyway, long uncomfortable train journey to a station in the middle of nowhere called Mikesse. He’s collected her by a Scot with an impenetrable accent named Gilzean. Five hours bumpy driving to a camp where he’s informed his regiment are the other side of the river Rufiji. Since the British invaded German East (as it’s known) at Kilimanjaro in the campaign Smith had witnessed the scrappy start of, they had driven the Germans steadily south and across the Rufiji river when the rains came and fighting stopped.

From this camp Felix has to continue riding a mule along muddy tracks alongside porters, sometimes through swamps, eventually reaching the wide Rufiji river, across which he is taken by ferry, then into his regimental camp, outside which porters are burning a huge mound of horses and mules which are killed off in epic numbers by tsetse fly. He’s arrived at the dump named Kibongo.

Chapter 2. 15 April 1917, Kibongo, German East Africa

Three months later it has rained every single day, food has run low because the trails to the river on the north side have been flooded and the ferry has been washed away. Felix and his battalion are stuck on the south side and on emergency rations. They’re all wasting away, reduced to eating the few monkeys they can shoot. Some black troops regularly die from eating the corpses of horses or mules. Wretched. Except for the ongoing comedy of Felix’s inability to understand Gilzean’s impenetrable Scottish accent.

Chapter 3. 15 July 1917, Nanda German East Africa

With Gabriel in Nanda. The Germans are losing the campaign. Gabriel is keeping a secret record of everything he hears. Dr Deppe has been moved on and Gabriel has stopped rubbing dirt in his wound to keep it infected. Deppe’s replacement tries to get Gabriel incarcerated with the new contingent of POWs but Liesl insists he is left free to carry on his medical assistance. Ongoing comedy because Liesl appears to have no idea that Gabriel burns with almost uncontrollable lust for her big full-breasted, thunder-thighed body.

The British have landed at Kilwa south of the mouth of the Rufiji so will be fighting their way towards Nanda. Something about the way the narrator keeps reminding us that Gabriel is keeping a secret record of everything he hears begins to make me suspect it will be found and Gabriel will be arrested and shot as a spy. Will he get to kiss Liesl before then or cup her huge breasts in his shaking hands? Doubt it.

Chapter 4. 19 October 1917, Lindi, German East Africa

The British advance, fighting increases, more Germans are taken prisoner, but it is the fate of Felix’s company to do peaceful duties far from the fighting, building latrines or walls, flattening land for airfields, accompanying supplies to supply depots near the front line etc. Felix gets time off from supervising the digging of latrines to go to HQ at Lindi on the coast to see if he can discover anything about Gabriel. Here he bumps into fat Smith and, in a coincidence, it turns out they’re both looking for Bilderbeck. And in an outrageous coincidence the first (unmarked) door Smith opens is to an office occupied by Reggie Wheech-Browning, his nemesis.

Wheech-Browning is able to inform Smith that von Bishop is still alive or that the British Army has no notification of his death (so Smith can continue his quest to kill him for despoiling his farm) and Felix that no news has been received of Gabriel’s death (so Felix can continue his quest to find him).

He tells them about Bildebeck’s end; he was in a siege of some German troop, went up onto the walls to harangue them every night, and one night snapped and charged the German lines shouting how they were preventing him from ‘finding his girl’, one of the many odd obsessions which made Bilderbeck such unnerving company for Gabriel and everyone else on the ship from India.

Chapter 5. 19 November 1917, Nanda German East Africa

Chapters 5 to 10 take place over the course of 6 days and form one continuous episode, the arrest, escape and trek of Gabriel Cobb.

The German army in German East has been commanded by Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. Now his HQ has arrived at Nanda which is swollen with staff, soldiers and askaris. Liesl and Gabriel discuss the fact that the British are now only 50 miles away. In a few days, chances are, he’ll be liberated. Gabriel is surprised to discover this makes him unhappy. Here in the hospital, as a glorified orderly, he feels safe and secure. He decides to sneak round the back of Liesl’s bungalow for one last surreptitous look at her nakedness but when he sees it packed with German officers realises his folly.

He is caught, lightly interrogated, found guilty of spying but not shot as I expected. Instead he is locked in an old mealie sack shed for several days. On the first night Liesl comes to see him. She says they’re going to take him with them. He almost cries and begs her help. She comes back the next night with a metal hinge. It takes Gabriel ten minutes to dig a channel under one of the loose wooden walls.

He trembles with lust and fear and panic standing so close to that large body, those trembling breasts. Liesl, apparently still unaware of his feelings, gives him a sack containing food and water and tells him not to try to get through the lines to the British but hide somewhere for a couple of days till the Germans have left, then slip back into Nanda and find her.

Chapter 6. 22 November 1917, Nanda German East Africa

To his vast irritation von Bishop is tasked by Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, head of the entire East German Army no less, with recovering the escaped prisoner. He says goodbye to Liesl and notices how big and manly she has become. He doesn’t know her any more. He chooses three of the ruga-ruga, natives with filed teeth reputed to be cannibals, and sets off north to find the fugitive.

Chapter 7. 22 November 1917, The Makonde plateau, German East Africa

Day one of Gabriel’s trek north. He is in poor shape generally, worse after three days locked in a shed. It’s hot, the thorn bushes scratch him, his injured leg starts to seize up. Locals in villages he passes notice him, the children throw stones. His plan is to press on across the wide flat plateau till nightfall.

Chapter 8. 22 November 1917, near Nambindinga, German East Africa

Unusually for once Felix’s company is in the vanguard of an advance. Much good it does them as one of his fellow officers, young Loveday with the irritating habit of peppering his conversation with French phrases, is blown in half by a landmine.

Anyway, suddenly arrives Wheech-Browning, that bad penny, ‘that ludicrous bean-pole of a man’, to inform Felix they’ve heard news of Gabriel. Smith was in an advance force which has taken Nanda, discovered the POW camp and some of the soldiers told them Gabriel had been there for years, had been arrested, had escaped just the day before.

Wheech-Browning drives Felix into Nanda, where they come across Smith questioning Liesl who, of course, he met right back at the start of the novel. He wants to know where Bishop is but now, as WB and Felix arrives, informs them of the enormous coincidence that von Bishop (who Smith is after) is chasing Gabriel (who Felix is after).

Felix introduces himself and asks the all-important question: Did his brother ever receive a letter from home? Liesl answers promptly and authoritatively NO, and Felix feels a wonderful sense of sweet relief flood his body. So Gabriel never learned about his affair with Charis. In fact, the reader knows he wouldn’t have in any case, as Charis never mentioned Felix by name. But Felix doesn’t know this.

He needs to go out into the bush to find Gabriel. Smith wants to find Bishop. They both ask WB but the latter says that if, as they claim, it’s a case of security / intelligence well, he’ll jolly well have to come, too. Is there no limit to the man’s irritatingness?

Chapter 9. 24 November 1917, The Makonde plateau, German East Africa

Exciting description of Bishop and the ruga ruga’s pursuit of Cobb across the plateau. They see a fire as dusk falls. They creep up but one trads on a stick, the mule hears and starts hee-hawing, and they see the figure flee. By the time they get there the small base by the fire is deserted, with Cobb’s sack of stuff, bread, a book, abandoned. Bishop sends the three natives to capture Cobb. Why does the book Cobb had belong to von Bishop. Mysteries. He falls asleep, wakes at dawn next morning. After some time the three natives return. One is carrying a sack. As Bishop sits with his rifle, one of them throws severed Cobb’s head into the dirt at his feet.

And that, children, is what you get for peeping at naked women having a shower!

Chapter 10. 25 November 1917, The Makonde plateau, German East Africa

Smith, Felix and Wheech-Browning come across the camp the next day. There’s a small burial mound. Half a mile away a business of vultures and big birds. When they ride over to it they see it’s a body without a head, already half eaten. Going back to the camp they dig into the mound and find Gabriel’s head buried wrapped in a blanket. Felix is convulsed with weeping. Both he and Smith are plain puzzled: who would do a thing like that?

Part 4. After the war

Chapter 1. 15 May 1918, Boma Durio, Portuguese East Africa

Six months later and the German forces have retreated into Portuguese east Africa but are still at large. Felix’s Nigerian regiment is decommissioned, the men sent back to Nigeria, but he wants to stay on and hunt von Bishop, so he takes up Wheech-Browning’s offer of a job in Army Intelligence. But, in the classic style, instead of being anywhere near the fighting he is turned into a supplies officer at a nowhere dump in the middle of rich agricultural land, Boma Durio, where he makes ragged friendships with some of the Portuguese officers

The chapter opens with the arrival of, you’ve guessed it, Intelligence Officer Wheech-Browning. He gets Cobb to give instruction to the Portuguese officers in how to use the (very simple) Stokes mortar. It doesn’t work very well so he goes to pace out the distance and is horrified when he hears the lick and sees a puff of smoke meaning a mortar has been launched. He yells at the Portuguese captain who’s accompanied him to run but the mortar detonates, ripping his clothes off, covering him in bruises and cuts. Dazed he staggers to the crater and realises it was a direct hit on Captain Pintao who has been vaporised.

Then appears Wheech-Browning who apologises profusely and explains that he had the lanyard in his hand when he sneezed. Terribly sorry, old chap. Wheech-Browning, his rise and rise, might, in a funny sort of way, be emerging as the central subject of the entire novel.

Chapter 2. 13 November 1918, Kasama, Rhodesia

Von Bishop is still with the German army commanded by Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. After going south into Portuguese, capturing supplies, they’d doubled back north into the German colony then headed west into Rhodesia which is where they now are, having captured a town full of provisions.

Many men and some of the officers are coming down with and quickly dying from the Spanish flu. Von Bishop is still haunted by the horrible killing of Cobb on the plateau. The ruga ruga spoke no English and he didn’t speak their language. They did what they thought would please him (like Pharaoh beheading Pompey for Caesar). Next night the three natives disappeared, leaving von Bishop to rendezvous with von Lettow-Vorbeck’s main force at the river crossing into the Portuguese colony. He lied that they found Cobb’s body dead from exposure and buried it.

Von Bishop is strolling round town when a motorbike courier arrives. He is British so von Bishop informs him he is arrested while the courier gets out his case and hands von Bishop a note announcing that the war is over and hostilities have ceased. At last, he thinks, with huge relief.

Chapter 3. 2 December 1918, Nairobi, British East Africa

Felix is recuperating at a convalescent home for officers in Nairobi. He’s just received a letter from his mother telling him his father has been sent to a sanatorium, and that his friend Holland recently telephoned from Russia to announce that he’s joined a revolution there. Turns out Felix was hit in the occiput by shrapnel from the mortar and it badly affected his sight, which was fragmented but has, mercifully, almost completely recovered as the wound healed. He regrets not writing earlier to inform them of Gabriel’s death.

He had been reading a newspaper when the letter arrived. It had an account of the final surrender of Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and his vexatious German Army. They had all been transported to Dar. It listed the 30 or so officers and included von Bishop’s name. At that moment Felix conceived a plan. He was going to travel to Dar, find von Bishop and shoot him dead in revenge for the gruesome murder of his brother.

Chapter 4. 5 December 1918, Dar-es-Salaam, German East Africa

Description of how von Bishop, along with the other captured officers, surrendered at Abicorn, were shipped up Lake Tanganyika to the port of Kigama and then the long train journey to the coast. Here they are greeted as heroes by the German community and von Bishop is reunited with Liesl who, he immediately notices, has lost a lot of weight, is back to the slim figure she had when he saw her off to Europe in 1913. They go to the small bungalow she is being allowed as a German civilian. The maid gets him a beer and almost immediately Liesl asks what happened to Gabriel.

Von Bishop tells the prepared lie, that he found Gabriel dead of exposure. Liesl apparently believes him. For a second she was going to say something – ‘Erich, I…’ – probably going to admit that she helped Gabriel escape, but Erich doesn’t want to hear it and talks over her. Liesl changes tack and goes on to say that she recognises one of the British men who came after von Bishop, saw him here in Dar just the day before. We know she’s referring to Felix.

Chapter 5. 9 December 1918, Dar-es-Salaam, German East Africa

The climax of the book. A few nights later Felix sneaks up on the bungalow now inhabited by von Bishop and his wife. He is full of confused moral contradictions like human beings so often are, at least in fictions. He has a great big service revolver. He climbs noisily in through an open window and sees a prone body on the bed and whispers, then pokes, then shouts at the unresponsive German. The door opens a light goes on and von Bishop’s wife tells him Erich is dead. Died three hours ago of Spanish flu.

Felix improvises an excuse for being there, something about wanting to talk to him about his brother’s death. He asks Liesl if Erich told her how Gabriel died and she says ‘Yes’ in a calm manner, so calm that Felix instantly realises she knows nothing about the beheading. Erich must have lied to her. She is ignorant. On the spot, he decides not to tell her. It doesn’t matter any more. Why carry on spreading suffering?

Epilogue

Epilogue. 3 January 1919, Mombasa, British East Africa

Felix and Temple Smith have met up and review the whole story. They’re on the quayside at Mombasa as Felix prepares to get his boat back to England.

Both smile wryly at the flu beating them to the revenge they wanted to wreak on von Bishop. The narrative ends on a comic note for while Felix is still puzzled by Liesl’s complete indifference to her husband’s death, Smith is vexed about the disappearance of his precious decorticator. He’s scoured the farms of the entire region round his homestead and never found it.

They wave him off as he gets the small lighter out to the steamer and he mounts to the railings. Then the decorative canon onshore fire a salute to a battalion of Indian troops preparing to embark on a steamer. The loud noise triggers Felix’s optical problem, the result of the mortar injury, his sight becomes fragmentary and patchy, the sea and sky, the land and the people on it, all reduced to jagged fragments.

Thoughts

English scenes

Of the 18 chapters in the section titled ‘The War’, no fewer than seven are set in England and feature Felix Cobb. Of the total 40 chapters, 10 are set in Britain (or Trouville). My point is there’s a lot of scenes and events set in England for a book supposedly about the war in Africa. Not complaining or criticising, just pointing out that a lot of these scenes are as – if not more – effective than the African ones. I felt I got to know Charis, Felix and Holland better than most of the African characters.

Conveying information

Giles Foden has written five novels set in Africa, each incorporating large chunks of history, including one set in the same region of East Africa during the Great War (‘Mimi and Toutou Go Forth’). So I’m able to do a direct comparison and say Boyd is much better at integrating lots of factual backstory with a complex plot. In Foden it feels like the plot stops while a character clumsily invokes the historical facts. In Boyd the third person narrator tells us everything we need to know then smoothly goes on with the plot. Boyd is a much smoother, more accomplished writer in this technical sense of arranging his plot and integrating factual material. His prose is also much more smooth and finished and not odd and cranky as Foden’s is. He also has a continual dry sense of humour which peeks out at all kinds of moments, unlike Foden who is heavy and humourless throughout. When Foden tries to be amusing, as in ‘Mimi and Toutou Go Forth’, it’s like watching Gordon Brown try to tell a humorous anecdote i.e. you feel embarrassed for him.

Comic coincidences

Stories need coincidence of a kind which don’t happen in real life: old lovers bumping into each other etc. In Foden’s stories the coincidences are unbelievable because he takes them, like everything else, with deadly seriousness. Boyd has a lovely sense of humour which helps you accept his coincidences. Thus, Smith’s life is bedevilled by a tall officious British officer named Wheech-Browning but the way they keep bumping into each other, instead of undermining the story (as it does in Foden), because Boyd plays it for dry laughs, somehow the comedy takes the edge off the improbability and laughs you into believing it. It has (it occurs to me) the same kind of comedy of coincidences Waugh deploys so well in his novels, with the same scapegraces popping up in unlikely places.

Influences and echoes

Isn’t there a scene in D.H. Lawrence where posh people die in the pond of their big posh house? I remember it from the movie version of ‘Women in Love’. The memory of this made me think of the English scenes as a kind of nexus of tropes from Lawrence (for the passion), Huxley (for the social comedy) and Waugh (for the withering satire). Boyd is a very good, very entertaining writer, but maybe the reason he’s never had a breakthrough work and never become a really big name is because what he’s good at is refreshing existing tropes and memes: the comedy of ‘A Good Man in Africa’ contained multiple echoes of English farceurs from Kingsley Amis to Tom Sharpe. I’ve mentioned the English writers who the English scenes in this book bring to mind. Even the war scenes, in their ridiculous futility, remind me of Evelyn Waugh’s (surprisingly numerous) war scenes.

So he’s a very good, very entertaining writer, full of echoes.

Credit

An Ice-Cream War by William Boyd was first published by Hamish Hamilton in 1982. References are to the 1983 Penguin paperback edition.

William Boyd reviews

  • A Good Man in Africa (1981)
  • An Ice-Cream War (1982)

Africa reviews

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by Simon on January 10, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 10, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/01/10/an-ice-cream-war-william-boyd/

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