48. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch - 'The Mont-Bazillac' (1913)

'Here was another thing - I'd never been drunk before, and I haven't been drunk since: but all the same I knew that this wasn't the least like ordinary drunkenness: it was too - what shall I say? - too brilliant. The whole town of Bergerac belonged to me: and, what was better, it was lit so that I could steer my way perfectly, although the street seemed to be quite amazingly full of people, jostling and chattering. I turned to call Jinks's attention to this, and was saying something about a French crowd - how much cheerfuller it was than your average English one - when all of a sudden Jinks wasn't there! No, nor the crowd! I was alone on Bergerac bridge, and I leaned with both elbows on the parapet and gazed at the Dordogne flowing beneath the moon.'
(Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Selected Short Stories, Penguin Books, 1957, pp.112-3)

'Besides, the Conservative blogger Iain Dale has examined the TV schedules during this year's Lib Dem spring conference, when this incident is supposed to have taken place, and found that Strictly Come Dancing was not being shown - and nor was Strictly Dance Fever or any other such programme.

If this fable is typical of the communication agency's strategic advice then Campbell would do well to think twice before accepting it.

It is hard to imagine him prospering with an approach that treats any sign of education or enthusiasm for the finer things in life as a guilty secret to be hidden from the electorate.'
(Jonathan Calder, 'Let Ming be Ming', The Guardian, 31 July 2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2006/jul/31/liberaldemocrats.comment)

A palpably bourgeois excursion and a good deal more worldly than the M.R. James, with his protagonist's ascetic 'Evening Drink of small Ale in a silver vessel of about a pint measure.' I came upon this book at a Tynemouth book fair last year and, recalling the author's name and - it must be said - fetishizing the belisha orange Penguin design, I bought the musty smelling 52-year-old book (its inner cover inscribed 'R.H.H. Jones, MARCH 1965' in starchy red ink).

One could make obvious points regarding this being published with the world on the edge of the precipice.

I prefer to highlight Quiller-Couch's role as a pillar of the establishment past: educated, simultaneously liberal and conservative. Not tied to social conservatism; indeed open to the bohemian, but skeptical of 'modenity' in its economic sense. This story reflects Q-C's position as cultured cultural arbiter: telling the story of an Oxford undergraduate's rites of passage in the Loire Valley, south France. The story centres on Bergerac, a market town 'on the edge of claret country' and particularly on the unique drunken experience produced by a near-mythical, 'extinct' local white wine named Mont-Bazillac (one which produced no hangover). It is a delicately sweet wine, with almost a trace of the madeira about it - one of my favourite drinks, immortalised in English song by Flanders and Swann.

Ungodly Church of England vicars, gentle mockery of the 'teetotal craze', 'old boys with grizzled moustaches' and 'prize Baden-Powell scouts', ease among classicist porticos; these symbolise the culture inherited by the likes of the late Sirs Hugh Carleton Greene and John Mortimer, both critical figures in the liberalisation of Britain in the 1960s. One can easily trace the lineage through to the jocular Horace Rumpole, with his love of liberty and fine clarets. There is an instinctive, well-heeled Europeanism at play, not especially political but cultural.

Having recently finished Martin J. Wiener's English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit: 1850-1980 (Cambridge University Press, 1981), one can identify AQC as in the lineage of prominent figures who shaped our culture in that period through suspicion of industrialisation and materialism: John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, William Morris, G.K. Chesterton, Herbert Asquith, Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Aneurin Bevan, to name but eight. He is a not a Liberal in the free-market libertarian sense as Nick Clegg, but a Keynesian Liberal. Liberals tend to accept the prevailing consensus of their day, but their value is in achieving significant reforms - the like of which Roy Jenkins and David Steel achieved, but which it seems doubtful that Clegg will, hitched to a discredited economic programme.

'Q', as he was known, wrote novels and verse, as well as teaching and becoming a key player in English literary criticism pre-F.R. Leavis. He edited the vastly popular Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250-1900 (later extended to 1918), constantly referenced in Mortimer's Rumpole of the Bailey. His daughter was the inspiration for Kenneth Grahame's Ratty in The Wind in the Willows, he completed unfinished works by Robert Louis Stevenson and a certain Alastair Cooke was a notable student of his. In addition, this native of Cornwall was active in local Liberal Party politics.

An interesting footnote to this tale is that  the village of Monbazillac - near Bergerac - was designated in 1936 as an AOC (Appellation d’origine contrôlée), a specific regional wine classified by central government as adhering to traditional standards of wine production. The sort of preservationist ideal inherent in the controversial EU legislation, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and the popular Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) over here in the UK.

Ultimately, this is a light, jocund story; how much you enjoy it will largely depend on how partial you are to old-school liberal values, or indeed to sweet white wines from the Loire Valley.

6/10

47. M.R. James - 'The Ash Tree' (1903)

'there is also this passage, which I transcribe for the sake of the light it throws upon the course of events, and also upon the common beliefs of the time: [...]'
M.R. James, Collected Ghost Stories (Ware, Herts: Wordsworth Classics, 1992, p.33)

'The Ash Tree' is a mixture of historical investigation, travelogue and drama: 'And so ends the first act of the Castringham tragedy'. (p.34)

The oddly Italianate Suffolk is perfectly evoked in a lengthy, digressive opening. Past misdeeds, learnedness and loneliness seem intrinsic to this adventurous county of Benjamin Britten and Brian Eno. There are few landscapes as odd in blighty: the juxtaposition of purplish Dunwich Heath with beach and apocalyptic Sizewell Nuclear Power Plant. Time-frozen parish churches that reminded me of Dad's Army, secretive WW2 and Cold War radar sites, villages of 17th century timber housing oddly familiar from Lovejoy; genteel seaside resorts like the becalmed Aldeburgh and the slightly more bustling Southwold, both with distinctively pastel coloured beach huts and houses. Strong, dark Adnams Broadside ale. Weird examples of architectural planning, such as in Thorpeness.

The dating of the different occupants of the house is typically precise: 'Those who are interested in the details will find a statistical account in a letter to the Gentleman's Magazine of 1772, which draws the facts from the Baronet's own papers.' (p.35)

M.R. James ploughs the most English of furrows, in playing upon the mythical and historical exactitude, and their discordance. There is the antiquarian's concern with old books and libraries, inevitably worked into the opening reverie on Suffolk: 'I like the library, too, where you may find anything from a Psalter of the thirteenth century to a Shakespeare quatro.' (p.30) Several of the protagonists have scholarly leanings, as is usual in James; for example, William Crome, the grandson of the erstwhile vicar.

The Michael Reeves film Witchfinder General (1968), almost exclusively filmed in Jamesian Suffolk, comes to mind in Sir Richard's foolhardy burning of Mrs Mothersole's empty coffin, reviving 'for a time all the stories of witch-trials and of the exploits of the witches, dormant for forty years.' (p.35) History will not relinquish its grip, its fascination; James's characters and landscape (from whatever stage in time) resound with the past. It seems natural for James to set the climactic part of his story in 1754 and then have characters who have never previously met striking up an acquaintance based upon familial history: upon meeting William Crome, Sir Richard says, 'the name of Crome is always a passport to Castringham. I am glad to renew a friendship of two generations' standing.' (p.37)

The 'Castringham sickness'. Matter-of-fact, localised tragedy. There is an unknowable quality to the sequence of events which is chronologically related; as ever in MRJ, there is no visible violence, but rather the suggestion of malevolence; no marks of violence, but a window left open. The initial suggestion that it might a squirrel running up and down the stem of the ash seems plausible enough, and even when we get clearer elucidation of the threat, it is left opaque, mystical almost: 'Such a nest of catarrhs and agues was never seen.' (p.37) Ultimately, as is the case in other good weird fiction - and indeed pure cinema - 'the reader must judge for himself.' (p.31)

The topography of the house and its grounds is methodically set out, James creating an eerie atmosphere. It will be interesting to see whether David Rudkin's Ghost Story for Christmas version (TX: BBC1, 23/12/1975) manages to capture the subtle dread of the Jamesian prose. From watching Rudkin's previous Play for Today, Penda's Fen (TX: 21/03/1974), it would seem Rudkin would be an ideal adaptor of this sort of English piece, which is so much about the pull of landscape and ghosts of the past.

9/10

46. Ted Hughes - 'The Suitor' (1962)

To János Csokits 6 August 1967 [János Csokits was a Hungarian poet friendly with TH]

[...] The Suitor is a story of death & the maiden & is a prophecy – I wrote it in 1962, ?January, almost under dictation. The Suitor is me, the man in the car is me, the girl is Sylvia, the Stranger is death, & the situation turns me into an animal – as Gog. Also, the girl is my spirit of light, my Ophelia.'
(The Daily Telegraph, 'Ted Hughes: A life thrown into turmoil', 7 October 2007, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3668391/Ted-Hughes-a-life-thrown-into-turmoil.html)

'She's whispered to me that she might be
All things bright and beautiful tonight'
(Jake Thackray, 'Salvation Army Girl', 1967; Jake in a Box, 2006)

'And here I am, hopeful of a beginning. As yet, I have not spoken to her.'
(Ted Hughes, Difficulties of a Bridegroom: Collected Short Stories, Faber and Faber, 1995, p.126)

Now this is powerful stuff, a great modern poet crafting an almost mythical tale. The story is simple - rival suitors waiting for a girl - but is rather more than just a mood piece.

Written in 1962 and published in Wodwo (1967), it is of course productive to view from a biographical angle - see Hughes's letter above - but this should not obscure the craft and other wider resonances.

Hughes perceives himself as split into two, a powerful, seemingly repressive figure - with an official, professional air - and a solitary, game-playing youthful suitor. The tall man inspects the vistas 'officially', 'gigantic in the tricky light', whereas the youth is ever crouching, hiding or creeping around. (p.131)

It is a first-person narrative, and the youthful narrator - presumed to be fifteen, as he first encounters the girl at school, and she is said to be that age - allocates plenty of emphasis to his feelings about the man (who has, it is ambiguously suggested, left the girl in the house, imprisoned). 'He glances at me and I recognise the type of face, I recognize a familiar category of face. Ah, no! I like him less and less, in these seconds. I like what I infer less and less'. (p.130) This controlled, colloquial sounding narration indicates the unnamed youth (or young Hughes, as we might infer) dislikes the older man that he might become. Before reading about Hughes's letter, I had felt this was possibly her father, ambiguously abusive - 'She flies to the wall, as if she had been struck.' He is arguably protective of her, in that he unambiguously attacks the rival suitor, the Trilby-wearing stranger - possibly warding off her death, as he sees it?

The girl herself, the object of the story, is scarcely characterised; is more of an elemental force, who has compelled these suitors to her door. Young Hughes has walked five miles, in inapt dancing shoes, to get there; the love seems to be courtly, and can only remain so in the context of this story: 'Is she exclusively my secret? I scarcely know her. I have watched her at a distance, outstanding among three hundred others.' (p.126) Whilst never having spoken to her, she has clearly enraptured him, and is only seen through his perception in this narrative - when emerging from the older man's 'managerial' car, she is described in terms of her 'great fleece of hair'. Appropriately classical imagery used to evoke her distance from the scrupulously observed natural setting.

Here is a fascinating sound recording of Hughes, reading from Crow, his 1970 collection of poems:



Such tactile, northern vowels; just listen to how he pronounces 'fact' and 'black' - the predominant colour applied to the setting in The Suitor.

The setting brings out Hughes's clear-sighted, blunt lyricism; every part of the suitors' strange game is described as embedded within a harsh, cold, grimly romantic landscape - the same to be recognised in his poems. It cannot help but evoke Hughes's Yorkshire and the Calder Valley in particular in its archetypally northern gloom: 'A wind chopping and cutting and swirling in from all directions throws up the boughts of the elms as I pass under the rectory wall, and swipes my lapels against my cheeks, and clogs my hair with the drizzle.' There is, you guessed it, heavier rain, later, which in the true northern manner does not bother the narrator*, or alter at all the progress of the suitors' game. Such grasp of the north, and the simplicity of the situation, brings to mind the work of Jake Thackray, with his mythically prosaic Yorkshire tales.

Then there is the house - 'a truly commonplace house, semi-detached, pebble-dashed' - which takes on a forboding aspect as the tale unfolds. And then, the people; young Hughes at one with bleak nature, almost a northern stone wall himself: 'I hug my garments to me, reshuffling my warmth. Behind me the shrubbery shudders and flinches dismally. I am a black column of patience.' (p.128) As the suitors circle the house, after the tall man has left, all of the lights in the house are out; the imagination cannot comprehend what has passed and what may pass: 'Has she gone into a dark house? Is she sitting in the dark?' (p.133)

And, the resolution? Bloody great in its lack of resolution - ending in a bizarrely existential state of stasis. The young suitor has transmogrified into a figure almost resembling Alan Bates as Charles Crossley in Skolimowski's film - from a Robert Graves short-story - The Shout (1978), and the stranger is playing notes on a flute, notes that vie with and overcome the winds.

A vivid scene of hopelessness which burns itself into your mind; here's the whole of the last paragraph:

'And now in a kind of inane ecstasy, I writhe up my features again, stretching my mouth wide, making my eyes bulge, like a man laughing at tremendous volume or uttering a battle-cry, but in absolute and prolonged silence, while the flute notes dot and carry about the black garden and climb the wall and tap at the dark window and come circling back to the bowed attentive figure here, not three feet from me.' (p.134)

10/10

45. L.P. Hartley - 'A Change of Ownership' (1948)

'Laid back, I'll give you laid back'
(Hot Chip, 'Over and Over', The Warning, 2006)

'What fun for him, after these constricted years, to come home to a big house of his own, where he has three or four sitting-rooms to choose from, each of which he may occupy by himself!'

(L.P. Hartley, The Complete Short Stories, Hamish Hamilton, 1973, p.167)

It can never be 'his' front door.

'It was locked all right; but who had locked if?' (p.169)

A real oddity this one, of English gothic vintage. This side of Hartley was discernible in the Belladonna episode of The Go Between, with all its shattering symbolism of innocence and experience, but this is a fully fledged dalliance with the Weird. Making sense of 'A Change of Ownership' is harder than most; it is in many ways a refreshingly recalcitrant read - the sort of short-story where you do have to go back at several points to grasp the underlying narrative of the main character.

Hartley establishes the rather splintered, paranoid personality of 'Mr' Ernest carefully; first, he is seen partly through the eyes of a companion, Hubert - an old friend who gives him a lift back home after they have been to the theatre. Ernest's home is 'semi-rural', a large suburban house overlooking a field on one side. (p.163) His friend's conversation illustrates Ernest's isolation, living alone in this big house (his servants are apparently away), where previously he has lived in shared accommodation: when Ernest says that he is alone 'in a sense', Hubert understandably queries, 'Queer devil you are, Ernest; you must either be alone or not alone. Do I scent a romance?' (p.164)

Hardly so, as once his friend has departed, Ernest slips into thinking about himself in the third-person, a trend that marks the rest of the narrative. He imagines himself in a strange array of guises and roles while attempting to get to grips with being locked out of his house - which has been done by mysterious means. Internal dialogues convey an authentic sense of madness, and Hartley displays an unerring command of using the present-tense to embroil the reader. The status of the narrative voice is deliberately unclear - at times, as in the epigraph above, it seems as if it is mocking Ernest.

His learning to live alone, 'like other people', is shown to involve a splintering of - or at least, an uncertainty within - his personality. Stithies Court, the house, is a forbidding place and becomes literally inaccessible to him, its presumptive owner. The word presumptive being operative there. Stithies - evocatively, choicely, named - is something of an impregnable, infernal fortress: 'it looked like a large black hat-box, crowned at one corner by a smaller hat-box that was, in fact, a tower', the only certainty and constant in this unreliable narrative. (p.164)

LPH delves into the uncanny, and this can be said to fit in very nicely in the English Weird continuum, linking M.R. James and Christopher Priest; I, Haruspex is indeed the short-story covered so far which this most resembles. It is revealed that the figure in the house, keeping down the window with his fingers when Ernest tries to get in that way, initially has a Sapphire and Steel anticipating blankness - its face 'a featureless oval, dimly phosphorescent'. (p.173) This 'simulacrum', it is eventually made clear, is no less than Ernest himself: 'This time the face did not alter. It was Ernest's own face, a hateful face, and the face of a murderer.'

It is, overall, a continually discomfitting, confounding tale, written in an unusual, intriguing style; another fine advertisement for home ownership! Hartley, often facilely bracketed as English Heritage, is indeed, far from that; this is anti-heritage in almost all senses, being concerned with deeper things. As with his great 1953 novel, tradition and hierarchies are destructive; in this case, the old English house itself takes on particular malignance:

'In an old house like this, of course, the floor-boards do contract and expand; they have seen a great deal; they have something to say, and they want to get it off their chests.' (p.168)

8/10

44. E.M. Forster - 'Ansell' (1903)

'We were feeding on the past, and I knew that we could not live by that alone.'
(E.M. Forster, The Life to Come and Other Stories, Penguin, 1975, p.29)

Subtle links with the Bates story, with literature the focus instead of music; the unnamed 'I' in the Forster being analogous to Bates's gifted, yet unhappy, main protagonist, Clara.

Forster has a succinct, emphatic way of expressing the difference between having a traditional, presumably Oxbridge, education, and not. He explores this in the relationship between the verbally articulate 'I' and the manual worker and title character, Ansell. They were relatively on the level when introduced at age 14, Ansell proving a playmate, albeit one distracting 'I' from what his parents see as his serious destination: 'The sound of our whoops and shrieks as we jumped with abandon on one another's hats penetrated even into the smoking-room, where my father was arguing with my cousin as to the respective merits of Eton and Winchester as a school for me.' (p.28)

A future mapped out, and bound to lead away towards the sort of conveyor belt identified by one of the three posh-schooled boys in Granada's Seven Up series (the one who broke out of it by going to Durham, and then became a BBC producer, pointedly not taking part in the series beyond age 21).

He returns to the Hall where Ansell works when now are both 18 and have taken drastically divergent paths in life, and then again at 23, where the main action takes place; Ansell is now a type who anticipates Ted Burgess in L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between (1953), presumably many in D.H. Lawrence and even Tom Seaton in When the Boat Comes In. A man defined by work, practical and taciturn, who often comes into contact with the 'higher orders' by virtue of his work.

The narrator identifies the distinctions; physically he himself is inept, out of shape in comparison: 'But I had forgotten how to rest, and preferred reading to outdoor amusements.' (p.28) But he consoles himself with his presumption of higher intelligence, which are represented not by himself but by his books: 'After six years of a student's life I was perfectly inured to attacks on my implements.' Forster undermines this by the way in which it is revealed that he does not contain the requisite knowledge to complete his dissertation in his noggin, but has to rely overly on his notes and annotations (admittedly something I can sympathise with to some extent!). Also, in a key passage, his greater learning is revealed to be more of an insecurity; his reflex is simply to speak to cover any awkward silence, even making quotations that are not strictly relevant to deflect the idea that he might be wrong in any way.

Forster speaks volumes about what university means, socially: 'But to educated people silence matters: it is a token of stupidity and lack of invention. I racked my brains for some remark that would serve to keep my self-respect, but could find none.' (p.29) This expresses how people are judged socially, and have to adapt to survive, within the sophisticated world of academia. The academy develops the ability to fill gaps in conversation, but not necessarily to communicate meaning; talk may be superfluous, redolent of an untrustworthy verbosity. Forster is clearly ambivalent about this, being of this world himself, not necessarily trusting it and grasping for something more. 'unless I speak I cannot go on thinking' - amply expressing the way thoughts come through a constant articulation in the intellectually self-confident.

The picture at the top of this entry is one of my own, taken from the room at Jesus College I stayed in during the first of my two return visits to Cambridge last year - one in a professional capacity, the other to receive the absurdly difficult to explain (or justify!) Cantab MA. These visits, within the space of three months, brought back the Oxbridge experience in all its ambivalence; there was the space and context to 'get on', as Jack Ford would have it, almost too much to handle. It is a truth that Oxbridge gets better results due to fundamental factors such as the student : lecturer ratio, as well as that expectations, from parents, society and background are greater than they are for someone going to Sunderland or Northumbria University, say. It is a foreign country, compared with up north; a confident, increasingly secular and well-read middle-class enclave, in which the average record shop customer in Fopp was buying distinctly non-mainstream music and cinema. Of course, there's a great potential for smugness there, that you may not get in the more mixed areas of bigger cities like London or Newcastle. Yet, revisiting Galloway and Porters, for example, Clowns cafe, conversing with old faces at the MA reunion, it seemed, once again, an attractive world, if not quite mine, all the way. Part of me will always be there, part will always be at the old Roker Park (with perhaps the modern analogue of the Raich Carter Centre, Sunderland and the 5-a-side team I play in); part to Newcastle, though obviously never to its football. Owen Hatherley captures the city's contradictions well in these pieces:
http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=3143599
http://nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com/2009/06/tyneside-addenda.html

It is set up better than most to be a European city (YES, indeed, regarding the metro system, and its fine architectrual mix), but is held back by too many living up to the Viz-documented Biggmarket lairiness and unpleasantness. This has definitely been corroborated by several friends who live there, who tend to agree with me that Ouseburn, east of the city centre, is where to go. Civilised, and yet far from smug; as beautiful in its distinct way, as Cambridge, so long as they don't spoil it with over-development - the seemingly eternal, and depressing, fantasy of yuppie flats and their implied end of history. The Cumberland Arms forever. http://www.thecumberlandarms.co.uk/

(Anyway - barely related digression over!)

The two young men's past escapades - making birdlime from a Boy's Own Paper recipe - cannot sustain an easy conversation in the present. An inter-dependence only comes apart through the jeopardy they are thrown into - and indeed, 'Them Books' quizzically referred to by Ansell, end up saving his life. The cart carrying both of them and the narrator's books pertaining to his dissertation becomes overturned and the weight of the box of books saves them - going into the river before they do.

In this situation they literally save lives, but they ruin, or at least drastically alter, the narrator's assumed passage in life: he is looking to become an academic and requires successful completion of his prized dissertation to achieve that end. With Ansell's and others' help, he recovers several books, including the 'cover of an Artistotle', but his in-progress dissertation and annotated notes are lost forever - effectively ending his career before it had even truly begun. (p.34)

Intriguingly, Forster's The Longest Journey (1907) - made much of by Michael Bracewell in his England is Mine exploration of English cultural trends - also contains a character named Ansell. It will definitely be the next Forster I read; I regret to say that I have read no further than A Passage to India (1924) - and that was as a requirement as part of my BA course. 'Ansell' is a well crafted tale, especially impressive considering EMF's youth at the time; he is indeed remarkably adept at conveying what it is like to be 23 and 'educated'.

'Well, there's other things but books', Ansell reflects.

'If I met with one sign of sympathy I should break down'.

9/10

43. H.E. Bates - 'A Christmas Song' (1950)

'A little snub worked wonders with these stupid girls, though, really, she had to admit that Joan's devotion was less revolting than the so-called normal attitude that Tim Prosser and the others professed so loudly, a normality that apparently classed human beings with pigs.'

'It was the most wonderful Christmas Eve, just like a fairy story.'

(Angus Wilson, Such Darling Dodos, Penguin, 1960, p.113/118-9)

'Instead there was almost always rain and long columns of working-class mackintoshes floating down a street that was like a dreary black canal. Instead of singing Mozart to the snow she spent long hours selling jazz sheet-music to factory workers and earned her reward, at last, by being bored at the Williamsons' party.'
(H.E. Bates, Love in a Wych Elm and other stories, Capuchin Classics, 2009, p.135)

Well, there will be something of a theme for this new week's short-stories; they will all be from English writers, arranged alphabetically by surname. Fittingly, there is link with the last one I read; the Muriel Spark, because there is a Christmas theme.

H.E. Bates seems to have been off the radar for a long time in blighty; I cannot remember exactly when the successful TV version of The Darling Buds of May was on, and his books are scarcely in print, it seems, and like Angus Wilson's, do not seem to be accorded the merit of new editions by Penguin. There was, I suppose, the mention in Withnail and I (dir. Bruce Robinson, 1987), and a Peter Tinniswood-involving Uncle Silas TV-adaptation but his work seems to have slipped from public memory in the last 15-20 years or so. Many other major English writers born in the 1890-1914 era seem to have slipped from view somewhat: L.P. Hartley and Anthony Powell (barring Simon Barnes's regular allusions in The Times) do not have the profile of Waugh or Wodehouse, say.

But in 2009 we have a Capuchin Classics collection of his short stories, spanning the whole of his career; the back refers to Graham Greene's comparison of Bates with Chekhov, considering him the best short story writer of his generation. It is also perhaps his provincialism - refusal to court acceptance in London, or move there - that counts against him for some. And his being perceived as an avuncular ruralist.

Like Angus Wilson, he stands as a significant post-WW2 writer born before WW1 and who does not fit easily into today's packaging of the past, which prefers to believe that there was nothing before rock 'n' roll and the Angry Young Men. Or, nothing between WW2 and Elvis. You get a sense in this story, as in early Wilson, of the curious place that Britain was, after the war but before Macmillanite consumerism had won the day. They are sensitive writers, dissecting the pulse of a nation that was changing, moving towards socialism but not quite. 'A Christmas Song' may be compared with Wilson's story from the same year: 'Christmas Day in the Workhouse', a wartime tale set in a Bureau. In that, the young, highly proficient and refined Thea repulsed by a perceived new vulgarity, which she sees as manifested in architecture and people, as captured in Wilson's sly prose:

'Despite the freezing wind that blew across the dismal meadows, where each month saw less trees and more concrete buildings, the atmosphere in the canteen with its radiators and fluorescent lighting was stiflinf. The white coats of the waitresses were splashed with scraps of food and gravy stains; around their thickly lipsticked mouths, their cheeks and chins shone greasy and sweaty. The young technician who sat opposite to Thea spat fragments of potato as he talked to his girl friend. She pushed aside her plate and decided to leave before the roof of her mouth was completely caked in suet. What a prelude to a Mozart concert! she thought. Nothing in her education had ever allowed her to bridge the gap between the material and the cultural.' (SDD, pp.113-4)

There is something of the unease Losey and Pinter captured in their 1963 film, The Servant (itself an adaptation of a 1948 novel), with Bates emphasising the dissolution of an out-of-touch upper crust in society - though in the fictional Evensford the rug is yet to be definitively pulled from under their feet.

The quietly anguished Clara - or "Good Old Clara!" as she is to the absurd Freddy Williamson - is the central character, who is delicately sketched in comparison to the broadness of her sister, the more social Essie, and the Williamsons: 'The Williamsons were in leather; they were very successful and had a large early Edwardian house with bay-windows and corner cupolas and bathroom windows of stained glass overlooking the river.' (p.136)

Clara dreams hopelessly of Christmas snow which might transform the drab Evensford into a more romantic, or Alpine, European town; the epigraph to this post indicates how she sees herself as distinct from both the unsophisticated, increasingly prominent working-class and the rich, represented by the ghastly Williamsons. She is a decidedly pre-pop culture sort of heroine, not assertive in accepting or rejecting the overtures of Freddy, but just not responding to them. The contrast is provided by the 'shy ardent' young man who cannot recall any of the song he wants to buy from the shop. She takes to him with all of his sensitivity and embarrassment - he clearly gets the emotion of the song he is seeking, in contrast to how the Williamsons raucously respond to her habitual Christmas Eve performances.



The song turns out to be, as she had suspected, a piece by Schubert - 'Standchen' (1828) in particular - and this impresses her, presumably in contrast to the endless jazz dance band songs she has to help people buy. There is a wistful gentility in the untapped, unspoken romance that cannot but remind one of Brief Encounter (dir. David Lean, 1945), a sort of Englishness that has in many senses been crushed by left, right and most of all, by consumerism.

One should not easily pigeonhole Bates, at least on this evidence, as a purveyor of cosy, middle-class consensus; there is a restlessness about conventional class-based society that you find everywhere from the finest work of Innes and Stanshall ('Postcard', 'Sport (The Odd Boy)', 'My Pink Half of the Drainpipe') to Bennett and Potter. Those who are cultured and sensitive are not necessarily going to fit in anywhere, seems to be the message. The function of the Schubert is almost entirely what the Al Bowlly songs are within Dennis Potter's work - incantations that transport the protagonists beyond the humdrum and everyday, or emphasise the melancholy contrast between the ideal and the reality. Wilson's Christmas story actually includes a part where 'Paper Doll' (used also in The Singing Detective, IIRC) is playing, chides Thea and her dreams of escaping from her isolation: 'I'd rather have a paper doll to call my own' the crooner sang, 'than a fickle-minded real life doll.' (SDD, p.125)

Counterpointing the poignant encounters between Clara and the shy ardent young gent are her forced encounters with Freddy Williamson. She is entrapped by this grotesque's persistent advances, which she can only seem to avert by agreeing to attend the yearly ritual that is the Williamson Christmas family party. Her reveries are bound to be broken by this actively reprehensible chap - often referred to as like a dog. His fatuous demand for kisses and attention - 'Come on, let's have one for Christmas' - cannot ultimately be rejected. (p.140) Freddy is rather like one of Angus Wilson's grotesque types, vividly painted in his malignance: 'He smacked at her lips with his heavy, dog-like mouth, pressing her body backwards.' (p.141) He also uses phrases like 'Whizzo'...

Christmas is bound to be appropriated by the Freddys; her cultivated, European dreams are ever at bay. There are clear analogues in 'A Christmas Day at the Workhorse'; Major Tim Prosser for Freddy, Stephanie for the ardent shy young man in terms of oblique romantic longing: 'A few minutes later Stephanie had slipped away, and Thea stood by a window, gazing out on to the wet shiny asphalt paths as though her dreams were reflected in their mirrored surface.' (SDD, p.122)

Underlining the resolution is a quintessentially English sense of doors being shut, of opportunities sadly slipping away: 'She felt the frost crackling under her feet. She grasped at something that was floating away. Leise flehen meine Lieder - Oh! my loved one - how did it go?' The inability to precisely remember the words mirrors her inability to escape the world of the Williamsons and find romance.

8/10

30. William S. Gilbert - 'Angela: An Inverted Love Story' (1890)

'When I first occupied my room, about six years ago, my attention was
directed to the reflection of a little girl of thirteen or so (as nearly
as I could judge), who passed every day on a balcony just above the
upward range of my limited field of view.'

(Victorian Short Stories: Stories of Courtship, http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/15381)

This one engages me much more than the Trollope, perhaps because it is so of its time in a more radical sense. Gilbert, of course, admits to desire and the whole state of mind that that entails. Vestiges of propriety may be maintained but like in Wilde, there is a sense of conventional assumptions being overturned and confounded. It was published in September 1890 in the Century Magazine, as a new cultural era was taking root.

As with the Trollope, this presents a rather curious picture of 'Victorian Romance' - but this time with the emphasis on love in signs and interpretations of what love is. It takes a while for the 'poor paralysed fellow' who is the main focus and narrator of the story, to be revealed as definitively English - but it certainly makes sense that he is: 'she threw up her hands in a pretty affectation of despair, which I tried to imitate but in an English and unsuccessful fashion.'

There is a rather poetic conceit, suitably visual coming from this man of the theatre (noted for burlesques, melodramas and operas, of course): that the would-be suitor only sees his paramour in reflection in the canal water; a mirror image which one cannot rely on. Gilbert shows that his narrator's interpretation of her basic friendliness as love is down to his loneliness and wishful thinking - it could almost make an early Pulp song, this scenario!

It is all chaste in explicit terms; as this girl becomes mature, possibly sixteen or seventeen he ardour becomes manifest - though one is entirely unsure how she regards him. This brief vignette is so determinedly fixed from one vantage point that it resembles an unlikely precursor to Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954), one of the greatest of films. Flowers seem to be a token of love, but are they? 'Tis a rather profound question raised by this story; our narrator interprets them as he will:

'But I soon took heart of grace, for as soon as he was out of sight, the little maid
threw two flowers growing on the same stem--an allegory of which I could make nothing, until it broke upon me that she meant to convey to me that he and she were brother and sister, and that I had no cause to be sad.'

It is rather 1890s in its revealing of the feelings and complexities beyond mere virtue and evil; in its small way, 'Angela: An Inverted Love Story' contributes to the Wilde-Shaw-Pinero destabilising of melodramatic conventions. What makes it all the more interesting is how Gilbert may be adding greater depth to the previous, rather roseate view of romance in some of his Operas (whilst slyly referencing The Gondoliers, which opened at the Savoy in the previous December); he is clearly coming to terms with stories like 'A Sphinx Without a Secret'. As in that story, male desire is satirised and the female character is unknowable, impossible to pin down in the standard ways their narrators demand.

8/10

26. William Makepeace Thackeray - 'The Devil's Wager' (1836)

'it appeared that the holy father could not manage the desired prayer.'
(Peter Haining, ed., Gothic Stories of Horror and Romance 1765-1840, Penguin, 1973, p.492)

This is the first of two stories drawn from a Peter Haining curated anthology of 'Gothic Stories of Horror and Romance'. Unsurprisingly, given its moniker, this tale tends towards emphasising the horror side of things.

Thackeray opens with a Gothic flourish which surely even in 1836 had an element of the parodic - presumably deliberate. It is a florid, archetypal setting of the scene that deserves quoting in full:

'It was the hour of the night when there be none stirring save churchyard ghosts - when all doors are closed except the gates of graves, and all eyes shut but the eyes of wicked men.
When there is no sound on the earth except the ticking of the grasshopper, or the croaking of obscene frogs in the pool.
And no light except that of the blinking stars, and the wicked and devilish wills-o'-the-wisp, as they gambol among the marshes and lead good men astray.
When there is nothing moving in heaven except the owl, as he flappeth along lazily; or the magician, as he rideth on his infernal broomstick, whistling through the air like the arrows of a Yorkshire archer.
It was at this hour (namely, at twelve o'clock of the night,) that two things went winging through the black clouds, and holding converse with each other.'
(pp.485-6)

He then breaks with this studiously ominous prose style; there is an almost debunking bathos in his reversion to a duologue remisicent of one of Poe's more philosophical asides: reminding me of 'Mesmeric Revelation' (1844), for example. This dialogue is established between a demon-messenger, Mercurius, and the soul of Sir Rollo, a dead knight in purgatory, whom the demon is supervising, indeed keeping him in line through winding his tail around his neck. The two establish a wager that would enable Rollo to ascend to heaven - if only he can get a living person to save an ave (prayer) for him, given three opportunities. First he tries his niece, who is startled by the visitation 'and of course fainted' (p.486) and when revived refuses to save the ave because the knight goes on to insult her current suitor, Edward. In a move which sums up the freewheeling style of this tale, Thackeray spells the niece Matilda's name in at least three different ways.

Next the pair intrude upon a friar, Father Peter, and his drunken company, who are predictably most amused by the spectacle: 'a person with hoofs, horns and a tail rather distubred the hilarity of the company.' (p.491) As is clear in my epigraph, this inebriated friar is unable to utter a prayer, and indeed is manipulated by Mercurius - who edits the hymnbook - into singing a satirical, anti-Church song:

'My pulpit is an ale-house bench,
Whereon I sit so jolly
A smiling rosy country wench
My saint and patron holy.'
(p.492)

A decided dose of satirical humour is evident throughout this tale, bringing this horror tale perhaps surprisingly into the orbit of WMT's novel, Vanity Fair (1847-8). The third visit is to Rollo's brother, a prior who had entered into a pact with the devil 'never to say a prayer.' The dead knight is by this point unable to contemplate winning the wager, faced with a gloating Mercurius, cutting 'a hundred jokes at the expense of his poor associate.' (p.493)

He enters the room of his brother, a 'wicked and maligant sorcerer', with no hope; as amusingly put by WMT: 'he entered his brother's room more for the five minutes' respite than from any hope of success.' (p.494) Yet, Rollo manages to develop a more wily strategy, taking Father Ignatius into his full confidence and then tricking him into saying the ave, and thus leading to his brother taking his place in hell. Thackeray's vivid tableau at the end includes a memorable description of the miserable Ignatius being dragged downwards by Mercurius towards hell: by his long beard.

This story was enjoyable, much like one of the tales inserted by Dickens within hihumours contemporaneous saga, The Pickwick Papers (1836-7). Thackeray tells a basically moral tale, but invests it with enough diabolic incident and satiric good humour to make it a worthwhile read.

7/10

24. J.G. Ballard - 'Track 12' (1958)

J.G. Ballard (1930-2009)

Hearing of the great writer's death means a change to the schedule, for a day - and Ballard will form the first exception to the 'one story per writer' rule of this site. He will be allocated a second one relatively soon; this I just want to write about briefly, on the spur of the moment as it were.

This story is archetypally Ballard; as Martin Amis said today on Channel 4 News, the style is unmistakable, it could not be anybody else's. Of course, Ballardian has now become an adjective and has had a tremendously productive influence upon music and culture, as detailed at this exceptional site: http://www.ballardian.com/index.php. Crucially, his aim is (the present-tense must be affirmed) to write of the here and now in a way few others have done. He embraces and inhabits the new forms of technology and existence that have marked the post-war world; all the better in order to satirise their effect on humanity in his mischievious yet serene way.

A New Kind of Man, indeed. Here, two contrasting gentlemen are placed in what is obliquely revealed - almost as an afterthought - to be a love triangle; and a bizarre one at that. Their very names sound like East Anglian places - Maxted and Sheringham - and the latter's eccentric obsession is archetypally English but displaced, taken somewhere else entirely. Sheringham is a 'rim, unattractive man, with his pedantry'; he almost appears like a Martin Bryce (of Ever Decreasing Circles) figure, still in Surrey but on different plane - part of a truly modern, radiophonically charged Britain. Skolimowki's The Shout (1978), adapted from Robert Graves's short story, also comes to mind, with its added element of John Hurt as an avant-garde sound engineer, tinkering at the edges - fighting a seemingly losing battle of sounds with sinister force-of-nature, Alan Bates.

Here, Sheringham seems a crank and remains so, but his recordings, truly a labour of love, take on a greater, macabre significance. Suffice it to say that we are talking Delia Derbyshire, Kevin Shields or Basil Kirchin type command of sound - though the use he puts it to is hardly similar. This story, in the way it inhabits technology is light years ahead of the television of its time - Billy Bunter had still got a few years left to run when this was published! Whilst there is a kinship of sorts with Kneale's Quatermass I would imagine that is more in the radiophonic sense rather than any thematic similarity (although it must be said that Kneale's excellent The Stone Tape, BBC2 Christmas Ghost Story, 1972, is a kind of MR James / Ballard meeting). This story was featured in this Resonance FM show, available for MP3 download here and featuring an excellent looking soundtrack: http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2008/09/a-bite-of-stars-a-slug-of-time-and-thou-episode-10/

'Track 12', with its title evoking a forlornly unrecognised CD playing in iTunes, is another superbly twisted, confounding tale from a master whose stature can only grow. Along with Poe, Wilde and Angus Wilson, he has inspired my interest in the short story as a form and I will be surprised - and very pleasantly at that - if anyone's shorts are as consistently great as his are. The Ballardian is embedded in our dreams and nightmares - long may it linger and pollinate.

9/10

22. Richard Hughes - 'A Night at a Cottage' (1926)

'There were none of the rags and tins and broken food about that you find in a place where many beggars are used to stay.'

(The Dragon's Head: Classic English Short Stories, Oxford University Press, 1988)

To begin the fourth week is from a collection of short stories bought at Tynemouth Book Fair, held in the evocative Victorian train station (still very much in use as part of the Tyne & Wear metro line). The fair was superb, and really required a whole day's perusal, with relief for lunch in the middle. I had to be back to play some football, so only really got around 50-60% of the main Book Fair in around two and a half hours; there were stalls from all around the North-East, and as far away as Selby and Huddersfield. The other half of the station was being used for the less specialist weekly market. A full day will be spent in the next one of these in late June, and indeed at a 'working class' book fair to be held in Sunderland at the Museum Vaults pub in mid-June (around the 25th anniversary of Orgreave), which has being extensively flyered.

All of this week's stories will be drawn from collections of shorts purchased today. The first is from the author Richard Hughes, most famous perhaps for A High Wind in Jamaica (1929), a novel in the RL Stevenson tradition of riproaring adventure and apparently an intrinsic sense of the terrain between child and adulthood. The volume is an Oxford University Press collection of Classic English Short Stories, originally published in 1939 as English Short Stories of Today - it also includes stories by Galsworthy, Somerset Maugham, M.R. James, H.G. Wells, Dorothy L. Sayers and the Scottish socialist Naomi Mitchison.

'A Night at a Cottage' is almost a textbook example of how to craft a ghost story; very brief, chosen as I am struggling to get back on track with reading and writing about my 'one a day'. There is not a great deal of depth or ceremony about this story; Hughes simply gets on with delivering macabre chills in as few words as possible. The impression is of the narrator having to get the story out of him, placed under some constraints - as perhaps indicated in the way it ends. The extended clauses of the opening sentence establish exactly the sort of Gothic ground being trodden upon: 'On the evening that I am considering I passed by some ten or twenty cosy barns and sheds without finding one to my liking: for Worcestershire lanes are devious and muddy, and it was nearly dark when I found an empty cottage set back from the road in a little bedraggled garden.' (p.38) There has been heavy rain earlier in the day. It is also established that the narrator has recently left Worcester jail, now surfaced possibly as a fugitive - and certainly not wanting to return. (p.39) The ambiguity quite as to the 'various reasons' why our unnamed narrator does not want to return there, is typical of a story that revels in what it omits.

Unsurprisingly, I tend to intepret this Worcestershire as the mythologised Worcs. of Elgar and Rudkin; deepest England, if not entirely as associated with weird fiction as other counties might be. It seems apt to wonder whether the devious lanes include a sign for Pinvin at any stage. In its central motif of the drenched intruder, the story does attain a diabolic power akin to an M.R. James miniature, or a less ceremonious Dennis Wheatley (who I will concede I have never read). The fellow fugitive, the stranger who relates the story of the cottage owner's drowning of himself, turns out to be rather more than he might seem... He is also given a colloquial mode of speech - 'Gho-asts' 'fo-aks' 'hisself' 'childer' 'Drownded' (p.40) - that may have been fairly common in conemporary horror, if one is to go by the satirical horror classic, The Old Dark House (dir. James Whale, 1932), itself adapated from J.B. Priestley's novel Benighted (1927).

I enjoyed the brevity of this; Hughes conjures a limited but potent ghost story that does not waste a word. This is not really one to shake you to the core, but it delivers an agreeable measure of eerieness.

7/10

21. John Christopher - 'The New Wine' (1954)

"There will be no wives for you in the world of 2129."

(Edmund Crispin, ed., Best SF: Science Fiction Stories, Faber, 1955)

This story is the last of a week's offerings drawn from my parents' bookcase; written by John Christopher, aka. Samuel Youd, this was selected as his work sounds interesting - disaster fiction, dystopias, ruined earths. He is perhaps most known for his Tripods trilogy, which was dramatised for television by the BBC in 1984-5. It was from a battered old Faber edition of Science Fiction stories that caught my eye on the bookcase - includes others like Wyndham and Bradbury, both of whom I will get around to eventually in this survey.

One is presented with a portentous scenario, which develops along a fairly predictable course - in line with the sort of themes Christopher is reputed to use on his Wikipedia page. In itself, this is not a terrible story, but its disaster is handled with a much more melodramatic flourish than you would find in the work of that measured, intoxicating surrealist JG Ballard. It is more along the lines of Wells, but given a fairly generic treatment. Things start out as recognisably bland, with a couple about to part; a male and a female scientist musing over their respective inventions; Harl with his tube which entails time travel and Ellen with her telepathic concerns - "Your own Project X?" (p.169). The setting is perhaps apposite in its cardboard, standard nature: 'They were walking up through the trees towards a misty sunset' and the parting is handled with a predictably clipped sentimentality. (p.168)

Admittedly, Christopher goes onto convey a fairly intriguing mysterious scenario of a deserted future earth. The equation is squared, as the vanquishing of humanity has been caused by the meddling of Drewitt and Ellen with the very form of humanity "What we are going to do is to change the human race in one sweep." (p.170) This is a standard genre science-fiction trope of scientific boundaries being pushed too far too quickly, and leading to disaster. There is a nice bit of melodrama in how JC resolves the scenario, but it hardly compels like the best classic theatrical melodrama or cinematic horror.

I am making this sound rather threadbare, but there is some low-key purchase to be found in descriptions of a ravaged, deserted Detroit: 'As they went into the city, there were fewer trees, and grass grew only in patches. For quite large stretches the works of man still held an almost undisputed sway. But the houses were shuttered and empty. They advanced to the city centre, and then turned and back-tracked towards the ship.' (p.177)

The whole is competent, efficient, but not particularly inspiring or challenging; I suppose the comparisons with the force of Priest, Poe or Lovecraft's or the inimitable Ballard are bound to count against this modest, if not wholly unengaging effort.

6/10

20. Stan Barstow - 'A Lovely View of the Gasworks' (1961)

'no messing about with building societies. That's a stroke of luck.'

(Stan Barstow, The Desperadoes, Corgi Books, 1974, p.45)

Chosen as being brief, in contrast to the 71 pages or so that the previous two have comprised. Chosen also as Barstow was another author influential to my dad - particularly the novel, A Kind of Loving (1960), filmed with the redoubtable Alan Bates a few years later.

This is set in the same West Riding town as featured in that novel; presumably either Ossett, where Barstow has spent most of his life, or the larger Wakefield, which is nearby. This is consciously written in what is already an established northern stream of literature by 1961; Billy Liar, Braine, Sillitoe, Storey and Delaney, as well as this author's initial works. Barstow captures a world which consumerism doesn't really seem to intrude, although contemporary mores and laws certainly do.

It is fascinating to read of the couple here being offered the chance to buy a house for £600 outright or pay £150 and take on the burden of a £500 mortgage. UK house prices have risen from an average of £11,288 in 1975 to £156,828 at the end of 2008 (which had fallen 14.7% from the near 184k of a year before!). I would be interested to see whether mean household income has risen x 13 times in the last thirty-three years...

The absurdity of our present-day nation's 'dream' is made clear when one looks at the properties advertised in my area (SR2). The north-east is the poorest region in terms of household income (definitely less than £20000 per household) and yet property prices are exhorbitant; how the market works of course. The media onus on ownership has a lot to answer for, but also people for going along with it and growing excessively attached to sometimes exceedingly small spots of land and temporal bricks and mortar. And the least said about Newcastle city-centre 'studio apartments' (one bedroom boxes) advertised for £140,000 (probably being sold for more than double that a year or two ago)... this whole world is as divorced from reality as Noel Edmonds:

http://www.pattinson.co.uk/public/content/buy/Estate-Agents/property-for-sale-by-Postcode-page1.htm?minprice=0&maxprice=5000000&minbedrooms=1&includeUO=False&PropertyType=Any&postcodes=SR2
http://www.pattinson.co.uk/public/content/buy/Estate-Agents/property-for-sale-by-Postcode-page1.htm?minprice=0&maxprice=5000000&minbedrooms=1&includeUO=False&PropertyType=Any&postcodes=NE2
Barstow's prose can be judged as successful in capturing 'a recognisable society', as the back cover claims; the expectations of this couple - an older man having an affair with a young woman possibly even still a teenager, it is implited - are grounded in bathos. The man's age only becomes clear when he is described thus: 'this thin balding figure in the ill-fitting sports coat and creased flannel trousers'. (p.43) There are no illusions; the house is 'no palace', simply a functional base for 'living in sin'.

The moral dimension is ambiguous; Barstow is of course careful not to impose any definite judgement on the characters. It is made clear that the woman who they arrange the mortgage with - in effect, a landlady - will find out at some point. Her adherence to the conservative social views still dominant in a Britain still eight years away from the passing of the Divorce Act, is unclear: 'wondering what change there would be in the woman's brisk friendliness were she to tell her that he had left his wife and they wanted somewhere to live in sin.' (p.44)

'A Lovely View of the Gasworks' sets up a rather tortuous situation for its protagonists, with the unnamed man's wife also seen as likely to intrude. They are full of doubt, yet also a desperate form attachment, the girl displaying a possessiveness one could only form at such a formative age. Things are left tantalisingly up in the air at the end: 'Yes, all our troubles'll be over then' deployed and then echoed with notable irony.

7/10

18. Osbert Sitwell - 'Low Tide' (1924)

'The Boer War was dreadful, but apart from the revelation of human brutality and degradation offered by the obstinate desire to fight on behalf of their country shown by those brutal, bearded farmers, there had never been really much reason for worry. After all, we were an island, and brute force had never won yet ! And we had the Navy, and our generals too. Of course it was true that there were "cranks" at large in London, "Fabians" who wished to overturn the whole system of civilized society. But one did not hear much of them now at Newborough.'

(Osbert Sitwell, Alive-Alive Oh! and other stories, Pan Books, 1947, p.168)

'Oh I do like to be beside the seaside,

I do like to be beside the sea,

I do like to stroll along the prom, prom, prom

Where the brass bands play

Tiddly-on-pom-pom!'

(Music hall song, 1907, by John A. Glover-Kind (1880-1918)
http://www.victorianweb.org/vn/seaside.html

'Low Tide' is described by the author as almost a nouvelle, with the intention of depicting 'a decaying civilisation', and how people and their rituals contribute to this decline. (p.6) It is by his own admission his favourite of the five stories collected in the Pan Book that was on my parents' shelves; a composite drawn from two earlier collections, Triple Fugue and Dumb Animal. It holds particular interest for being a relatively rare piece of fiction set in North Yorkshire; in Scarborough, a seaside resort I have visited a few times, a rather more sedate variant upon its twin on the other coast, Blackpool, with atmospheric castle ruins spread along a cliff-face and Anne Bronte's grave nearby. Sitwell wrote a novel, Before the Bombardment (1926), also set in a thinly-disguised Scarborough, which I will certainly have to read. In his melancholy vision here, the seaside is no comfort even for those who do like to be beside it, as they are caught out of time; this evokes Alan Bennett's superb Sunset Across the Bay (1975), Morrissey's 'Every Day is Like Sunday' (1988) or any number of cataloguers of English maladies.

Sitwell's style is florid and grounded; the prose is pointed in a dexterous, elegant manner. There is an amazing accumulation of detail, with motifs recurring and tallying as the piece develops throughout its well-formed 47 pages. For example, there are telling little asides from the narrator, presumably Sitwell himself here, regarding the North Sea: 'Beyond the garden, as far as the eye could see, rolled what in our childhood we were taught to regard as the "German Ocean"'. (p.149) Born in 1892, Sitwell would have picked this up in the years when the Germanic heritage was emphasised in our royal family. Also, the Boer War is introduced early, to be returned to later, and the seemingly innocuous aside concerning how Panama hats came to be fashionable and retailing at £100 for 'a good one' turns out to be rather important in terms of who their patron was...

Sympathies are evoked, and yet there is nothing ultimately to be mourned in the passing of an age that the author clearly sees to be a dead-end. Victorianism was more clearly over by 1924, when Sitwell wrote this, and British Imperialism was ebbing if not yet dead. The depiction of Scarborough, where OS had spent a lot of his life, is barbed; 'Newborough' is a place of limited horizons, with the populace shown as terse and uncharitable towards the perceived 'odd' sisters, the Misses Fanny and Frederica Cantrell-Cooksey. Whilst initially Sitwell encourages one to feel some empathy with the sisters - nearing sixty and yet dressing in the most extravagant fashion, with feathers 'raped from the osprey', in a typically evocative phrase (p.159) - their 'essential goodness and kindness within' is indeed not clear-cut. (p.146) They are a living embodiment of Victoriana; whilst others still profess the same values, they do not actively live them out in all their contradictions. Both the sisters and the town are implicated in a process of irrefutable decay, edifices, surfaces and certainties splintering as the new century takes root.

The Cantrell-Cookseys were brought up by a curate father, were devoted to him until his death and then with the inheritance bought a lavish red-brick house on the cliff's edge, overlooking the sea. Despite the provincial perception of them as outre, as potentially 'drugged', the irony is that they tend to share the same values as the Newborough townfolk; they are not a breed apart - they are avid churchgoers and share Mrs Sibmarsh's horror of oddity. They have rejected the noise and They are just as insistent on keeping up appearances and all manner of absurd etiquette, only that they have made no accomodation at all with a changing world; they are true believers in a world of doubters: theirs is a 'roseate view of life inherent in those gifted with the Romantic Temperament. In fact they still believed in the Age of Miracles.' (p.145)

The rouge-pot and other cosmetics mark them out as merely extreme exponents of the Victorian veneer; the sisters almost stand as representatives of what the townspeople have turned their back on. They are Victorian exemplars in their love of Wagner and Gilbert and Sullivan (whom even their curate father liked, in the case of The Gondoliers), and represent the showy colour of that age with the 'extreme vividness of their exterior'. (p.146) This is the immediate description of how they appear:

'Mild and timed in bearing, they yet boasted a singular bravery of apparel [...] They were bedizened and a-jingle with little crinkling ornaments, ruby-bars, gold-bangles, slave-bracelets, small watches set with half-pearls hanging from enamelled-brooches shaped like true-lover's knots; they were decked out with little pieces of lace, numerous ribbons and a thousand other joyous trifles.' (p.142)

A fair amount of sympathy is elicited as Sitwell's unnamed narrator describes how they are subtly shunned by the town, yet remain untouchable in their own world, with servants and the never to be realised expectations of entertaining guests. Sitwell builds a thoroughly convincing portrait of the loneliness of these 'Real Aunt Sallies!' as a local old biddy refers to them; a loneliness kept at bay merely through convention and ritual.

They are fundamentally out of their time, for vanity's sake refusing to wear glasses despite poor eyesight and therefore appearing all the more out of the ordinary: 'Resultantly, they looked like a pair of music-hall sisters, some popular variety turn of the late seventies, left over from that age but defiant of time - looked as though they had been made up for their entertainment by the green, value-changing gaslight of mid-Victorian times, and after a Rip Van Winkle slumber, had woken to find themselves here [...] in the hard new dawn of a new, rather sinister, century.' (p.143)

'Not by one syllable would either admit that the world had changed.' (p.174)

The story has almost a two-act structure; with the first setting up the background of the sisters and the town, and the second delivering their comeuppance, which becomes redolent of an entire society, too: 'Their eccentricity had turned [...] into the final agonizing pretence that all was as it should be.' (p.182) All of the seeds for their downfall are sewn in the opening act.

The first misfire, which exacerbated the frosty relationship with the townsfolk, was the vanity and absurdity of the sisters giving their ages as 26 and 28 in the census returns - a sign of their distance from reality, a flightiness disdained by the locals: 'By 7.30 the next night every dining-room in the town was discussing this lamentably absurd lapse from verity.' (p.158) Then, most fatally, is their liking for gambling, manifested in Miss Frederica's market speculations, investing in 'South African Mines and other speculative concerns', indeed investing their whole fortune in these, having utter faith in the words and deeds of one Cecil Rhodes - a maverick British imperialist. Sitwell highlights the inability of Miss Frederica to think for herself as a citizen, or of her sister to raise any questions about the wisdom of this gamble; the main factor is that Rhodes' roseate view accords with theirs and that the newspapers are advising them to do so - to 'Think Imperially'. (p.169)

The inevitable failure of the media-promoted 'golden future' in free-market imperialism (which Sitwell could clearly see coming in the 1920s too, and virtually all in Britain were blind too in the last ten years) leads to their decline, a fall in financial and social standing that they attempt to allievate by keeping up appearances, though without servants and with limited funds, their get-up takes on an increasingly faded, grotesque aspect. The whole final passage, detailing the decline, is subtly harrowing and remorseless; carrying a chill appropriate to the north-eastern coastal locale. There is, tellingly, an increased emphasis on the difficulties the sisters face, in a cheap bording-house, living a pauper's existence in all but the garish external face they (increasingly infrequently) show the world. The winter hits hard; both in terms of the actual cold and the metaphysical chill of the out-of-season seaside resort.

It is telling that the only remotely friendly rapport they have is with the vagrant types, who scour the gold sands for stuff washed ashore from the north sea during storms. Others, whom the sisters paid when they had the resources to do so, were quick to abandon them and join the mockers. Following bankruptcy and the repossession of their property, they are granted by relatives a small allowance, to distributed on a fortnightly basis in the form of a bursar - a position volunteered for by 'dear old' Miss Waddington, as an ostentatious show of doing 'good works'; the old lady actively dissaudes any of her circle to attend the absurd 'tea parties' she holds for them before handing them the allowance. In addition, some small-shop owners, whom the Cantrell-Cookseys had liked, start to go to the wall: 'Newborough was altering [...] things were not prospering with the smaller shops.' (p.178)

Overall, this is a compelling tale that lingers, haunting the mind; there is play on memory and the sense of even a fairly recent past being a foreign country - clearly this sort of writing leads productively to such chroniclers of English foibles as L.P. Hartley (whose work covered the East Anglian coast - The Shrimp and the Anemone, 1944, set in Hunstanton), Laurie Lee and Angus Wilson. The vividness of the character portraiture and period details is certainly in line with Wilson's excellent short-stories (of which I have read all - or at least all in Such Darling Dodos, The Wrong Set and A Bit Off the Map, if they be all; tell me if there are more!) of the 1940s and 50s. Sitwell's historical perspective is astute and, perhaps surprisingly for a writer so 'off the map' in current literary terms, very relevant - in terms of what he has to say on the subject of investments.

I will sign off for now by quoting the final passage, which describes the sometimes-drunken men's forlorn findings from stuff washed up on the sands from the northern sea, emphasising that the Victorian age is just as temporal as any other: 'They found that morning a William-and-Mary gold piece; a small chest covered with rusty iron nails and green with age, with nothing in it; a small box, hermetically sealed, of China tea; a straw ship in a glass bottle, and two George IV four-shilling pieces.' (p.184)

9/10

16. Joan Aiken - 'I Am Lonely' (1978)

'Of course, god never sleeps. For if he slept, what would happen to the solar system, and the growing plants, and the trees, and the tides, and the traffic? The whole universe would collapse.'

(Monica Dickens and Rosemary Sutcliff, eds., Is Anyone There? Penguin - 'A Peacock Book', 1978, p.66)

'I Am Lonely' presents an enormous contrast with 'La Plage'. There is one of the most pointed, individual narrative voices I have came across here; used expertly by Aiken to suggest a broader canvass of people with problems whom this voice could apply to.

Aiken captures the disturbing feeling of apartness from others, with the character logically extending this to think of themselves as a god, and that no other people or things have any life when they themselves are not watching over them. It is a bleak tale, which offers no easy ways out - crafted for a social purpose, as its placement within Dickens and Sutcliff's 'collection of stories and articles about someof the difficulties and uncertainties encountered by young people' attests. It is part of a book designed to commemorate 25 years of the Samaritans; founded by Chad Varah, a Lincoln-based Anglican, who represents the finer side of English Christianity, for example, campaigning for sex education and educating people about the dangers of cults such as Scientology. The Samaritans is a noble undertaking, as redolent of the post-WW2 idealism as anything; it is another mark of our times that fewer volunteers are now coming forward, and it has taken the likes of Phil Selway from Radiohead, himself a Samaritan, to promote the idea with younger people. The basic idea is well explained here:

'The Samaritans does not denounce suicide, but rather it provides entirely accepting and non-judging listening to callers. The organisation's vision is for a society where fewer people die by suicide because people are able to share feelings of emotional distress openly without fear of being judged. Samaritans believes that offering people the opportunity to be listened to in confidence, and accepted without prejudice, can alleviate despair and suicidal feelings.'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samaritans_(charity)

Dickens (author of the Follyfoot series amongst much else) and Aiken clearly embody this enlightened vision, children's writers of much distinction, who, from the 1960s supplanted the prevailing conservative ethos (whether One Nation Tory or even at times actively far right) in children's literature which had predominated. The book also contains pieces from Roald Dahl, Leon Garfield, Ursula Le Guin, Susan Hill, Jan Mark, Brian Patten, Alan Garner and Robert Westall; a role-call of the cultural point we were at in 1978. Aiken's 'Wolves' sequence of novels clearly must be read, it sounds fascinating with its Dickensian elements and the alt-history of a Britain that was never ruled over by the House of Hanover.

The front cover to the edition of Is Anyone There? from my parents' bookcase is more striking than the one above (found via Google Images); a red telephone box is in the foreground, flanked by houses and two archetypal 1950s/60s tower blocks - all in monochrome. This symbolic use of colour, red representing life and human contact, was of course used by Steven Spielberg in Schindler's List (1993), for Hollywood effect.

Aiken captures how the powerlessness leads inevitably into a misguided sense of powerfulness; an overwhelming burden and responsbility that the unnamed 'I' in the narrative assumes. That the character is unnamed entirely fits the Samaritan ethos, steering readers away from thinking of this as only a story. Of course, that 'only' is a misnomer; Aiken uses her considerable artistry to turn this individual's concerns from being a microcosm to a macrocosmic picture of how many such people think: 'It was a terrifying thought, that, in a way: I was responsible for so much, and there was no one to help me.' (p.64)

This unfortunate person's visions are revealed; quite how he has been dehumanised is plain in the disturbing metaphor of people as 'like heaps of empty clothes', collapsing when he is not presiding over them. (p.64) Also, when assuming the mantle of godhood, it only leads him to petty cruelties, even further alienating himself from others and further harming any residual self-esteem; the episode where he makes the boy carrying the cat trip over has a bleakness and sadness redolent of the older European fairy tales - Andersen and the Grimms, who will of course be covered in this exercise.

One might actually perceive a link with the Ramsey Campbell story I read a few days ago; the 'I' here, has, like Russell, experienced the end of what is implied to be a relationship - this time with a girl called Ailsa, who it transpires has died, being run over a week ago. Both stories show how destructive it can be when one is rejected or bereft; there is a void, nobody to turn to in a society perceived to be uncaring. As with Russell, memories predominate and chide - taking on even greater significance in the retrospective mind's eye; the idyllic picnic that the protagonist shared with Ailsa: 'it was such a beautiful evening and we wanted it not to end.' (p.62)

These doomed reflections on what has gone before are prompted by the second movement of Beethoven's First Symphony coming on the wireless in the hotel lounge where he is seeking refuge from people - manifested by his reading. The reading matter is not explained; in this particular case, it clearly makes no difference, provides no escape route from the demons and shadows. The setting, including the uncanny visitation of Beethoven's fugue, only prompts the narrator into forlorn reflections and then hardened actions.

This story has a terrible beauty about it; we might gain something as a people if it were a set-text in junior and comprehensive schools, and young people were able to talk about it. It allows us an insight into the thinking of somebody in an awful position; like Atticus Finch argued, there is nothing more important than for those in a civlised society than trying to get inside the shoes of those that are different.

9/10

14. Robert Westall - 'The Making of Me' (1989)

I Hear an Old World

'The world goes forward to drugs and violence and fruit-machine addiction. I go backwards, to where I am truly free.'

(Robert Westall, The Best of Robert Westall Volume One: Demons and Shadows, Macmillan, 1998, p.87)

To conclude Week #2 and the library-sale stories is a understatedly moving piece, about the relationship between a young boy and his grandfather, and how this influenced the man that resulted.

It is notable that something as low-key and humble as this is placed within a 'Best of' volume of Westall shorts that promises 'Eleven haunting tales', 'astonishing tales from the dark side of the mind...'. It may not be representative, or else it is representative of how Westall haunts, as it were.

The chills here are in terms of human disengagement; the boy and his grandfather do not understand each other at all to begin with, and inflict moments of cruelty on each other - the grandfather strikes the boy and then the boy constructs a washing line of pots, pans and other such noisy implements to get his own back, as it were.

There is a sense in which this tit-for-tat results from a lack of understanding; our infantilised, tabloid culture (painting children as perfect dolls) would no doubt denounce the penitent grandfather as a child abuser, and not allow the chance for the reconciliation. Westall rather movingly paints a scenario where things manage to move beyond the Old Testament barbarism of the child's 'new world'*, into a more humanist resolution. At the very start the first-person narrator reflects upon a 'Sally Army' aunt, who clearly did not point the way forward, and then portrays his father as his main role-model at that stage: 'a great wizard' amid 'roaring furnaces and stamping carthorses, among great heaps of smoking slag and clouds of green gas, and who could start great steel dinosaurs of engines with one push of his small shoulder to an eight foot flywheel.' (p.81) A desire to emulate his father perhaps inadvertently leads to his tormenting of his grandfather, who suffered from shell-shock while serving in World War I (WW1), and continues to find even the banging of a kettle lid a source of great irritation.

Westall is, like Priest, somebody I have wanted to read for a while; his geographical proximity may be a factor, as may memories of The Machine Gunners being shown in junior school - more recently, watching the charming, doughty TV-adaptation of The Watch House (1988), and John Lennard stressing his qualities in his Of Modern Dragons (2007) e-book on critically neglected genre literature: http://www.humanities-ebooks.co.uk/Catalogue/Of_Modern_Dragons.html

Westall is surely one of the finest chroniclers of the industrial north-east, setting much of his fiction in the North Shields / Tynemouth area he knew so well. The effect of indutrialisation and mechanisation is both terrible and defining in a more positive sense, as is made clearer as it progresses. This story evokes the early WW2 era (it is surely based on Westall's own childhood , who was born in 1929) and like Christopher Priest, the focus is on looking back; the main protagonist is made by the past and his family just as is Owsley in that strange tale. The difference here is that the narrator's burgeoning interest in the past, awakened by his grandfather's revealing of the stories behind various household objects, is productive, and indeed leads to his career.

This piece is a profound meditation on the intense meaning seemingly innocuous or unusual artefacts may hold for people; providing a tangible link to the past - in this particular case, to the grandfather's cherished memories of life, perhaps especially before the outbreak of WW1: of his courtship, for example. Musings on the Mauretania rub alongside those on Kitchener, Kaiser Bill, Marie Lloyd and Lloyd George. The old man also possesses the lens of the film projector which showed the first movie ever to shown in North Shields - at the Temperance Hall, with Fatty Arbuckle as its star. (p.84)

There is no avoiding the sense of there being such bleakness to life in the north-east, yet such warmth and lack of ceremony once people understand one another. The joke of the Shields lads in the trenches shows a deep rootedness inherent in the days when families and working-class solidarity held firm:

'The boy stood on the burning deck,
His feet were full o' blisters.
His father stood in Guthrie's Bar
Wi' the beer running down his whiskers'
(p.86)

Now that the depth of this man's past has been made clear to the young lad, he can now sympathise with his grandfather's silences; they now share a bond and are part of the same community, a tradition of remembrance: 'Now we were both silent, and it was all right. For I knew who was in the silence now. The good chums, every one.' (p.86)

As somebody so often fascinated by artefacts from the past myself, this story speaks directly to me more than most read so far; the only concern is to avoid becoming buried in the past, and hostile to everything that is current, as my chosen epigraph might suggest: it must rather be made to live for the present and future.

Westall's values seem to be classic Old Labour, the politics of togetherness, though not in the sense of being uniform; this impression is reinforced by what he said about his 1983 novel, Futuretrack Five, which I have and would like to read: 'It was a violent, angry book; every ounce of anger I felt as a careers teacher about what the Tory government was doing to my children went into it; it was a picture of the twenty-first century, of a Tory government gone beserk.' (Robert Westall, Lindy McKinnel, ed., The Making of Me: A writer's childhood, Catnip, 2006, p.195) I need not comment on the attendant ironies presented by what is happened in the intervening twenty-six years. Today, no doubt, Westall's fiction is neglected partly because Old Labour values are unfashionable - seen as defunct by those in politics, not even recognised by most under thirty. However, in the light of our current predicament, neo-liberalism is not even delivering on capitalism's own restricting terms. My feeling is that the provincial Westall's values will persist way longer than those of New Labour Islingtonites.

* The clattering line of implements, used by the child to gain control over and torment the grandfather, seems a twisted variant upon the improvised, more benevolent dictatorship of Joe Meek: 'It was like entering into a new world.' (p.82)

9/10

13. Ramsey Campbell - 'Breaking Up' (2004)

'Since the day I lost you, girl

I just can't face the world

I can't help feeling kind of small'

(The Walker Brothers, 'I Need You', 1965*)

Ramsey Campbell: "I'd already written one macabre tale about a mobile phone [...] and then it occurred to me that there could be another. I suspect all this is my mental preparation for owning one of the things."

(Stephen Jones, ed., The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Vol.16, Robinson, 2005)

Excellent story again here, a textbook study in how to gradually evoke unease; Ramsey Campbell's horror story is a horror of the everyday - viewed in terms of naturally occurring extremes: the end of a relationship, mirrored by near Arctic weather. The setting is appropriately unspecific - it could be any town in Britain.

He also uses our everyday technology to provoke chills - the mobile phone is hardly presented as a comfort or aid in any conceivable sense. Home comforts turning into nightmares is a theme very much prevalent in 1970s cinematic horror, when the uncanny began to dominate genre cinema and one senses Campbell emerges from this tradition (although I do have a collection of his tales which begins in 1962).

The scenario and detail is all plausible, and it is only at the climax that things become a tad more inexplicable, but then this element is crucial to how Campbell haunts. As in other stories previously discussed, memory is important; here it is subtly implied as a Pinteresque battleground - one evening is seen in drastically different terms by main protagonist Kerry and her older ex-suitor, Russell:

'It had been the beginning of their end. Once he'd finished shouting above the disco uproar that he was her uncle, he'd set about dancing with a violence that seemed designed to complete with everyone else in the room. She could almost see the thin figure jigging and jerking as if he'd borrowed all the artificial vigour of the strobe light, his sleeves and trousers flapping like flags in a gale. When he'd panted to a standstill he had subsided into a chair and watched her dance, his eyes flickering with resignation that might have concealed a plea. Now she could have hoped he would ask anything other than "Didn't you?"' (pp.112-3)

In the end, the human mind and its entanglements can prove as horrific as anything, as this story goes on to outline in merciless, tellingly small details. We learn relatively little about Kerry or her exact thoughts, only that she did not reciprocate Russell's rather desperate yearning. I shall not 'spoil' how precisely it develops...

Again, this is another writer who would be perfect to write for a television show with fantasy or horror themes; for example, Dr Who if that show was not so reliant on hype, pyrotechnics and gimmicks - i.e. every episode having to have such Sontarans, Daleks or Dubai. 'Breaking Up' would, I feel, be really good to use in teaching; hard-hitting, gripping and difficult to dislodge from the mind.**

* Another life-affirmingly gloomy number from Take It Easy with the Walker Brothers, this one penned by Goffin and King.

** 'I, Haruspex', both in terms of length and content would be unsuitable for any classroom use, superb as it is!

9/10