Mr. Campion's Abdication

by Mike Ripley

  There were no instructions, other than the cursory ones they had received from Maxim Berlins, which had basically consisted of an address, a time and the need to identify themselves as ‘here for the fitting’. This they had done, but were unsure that the rather grizzled old man in a brown smock and flat cap smoking a half-inch of Woodbine who had shown them through the greengrocers’ stores to a staircase leading to the upstairs room had understood English. He had certainly made no attempt to speak it, but he grunted quite fluently.

  The Campions were not unduly perturbed as Monsieur Berlins had in the past dispatched them to auditions and costume fittings in deconsecrated churches, church halls, youth clubs, a bomb shelter, saloon bars during afternoon closing and, on one memorable occasion, a bingo hall while a tense, high-stakes game was still in progress.

  They posed side by side in front of the standing mirror.

  ‘Don’t we look a couple of swells, Miss Browning,’ said Rupert, using his wife’s maiden and stage name. He formed a D with his right arm, fist on hip, and Perdita slipped her left arm through it, though not before leaning across to straighten her husband’s tie.

  ‘I agree. We look the part – we just don’t know what the part is. We don’t even know who provided these clothes.’

  ‘Morris Angel, of course, costumier to the stars of stage and screen!’

  The Campions swung round to follow the voice that had taken them by surprise. Mounting the last few steps of the open staircase leading to the shop below with the stealth and precision of a cat was a woman perhaps ten years older than either Campion but the only one dressed in the latest fashion. Her long blonde hair was scraped back from her face and tied in a long ponytail which hung down over a black leather overcoat. The coat was unbuttoned and swept back almost like a cape by virtue of the woman clasping her hands behind her back.

  She stepped up the last stair and into the room, planted her feet apart and looked the Campions, who instinctively moved slightly closer together, up and down and then leaned to one side to view their reflection in the mirror. She wore knee-high boots with stiletto heels – how had she climbed the stairs so quietly in them? Perdita wondered – shiny black tights and pink velvet hot pants with bib and braces over a tight white cashmere sweater.

  Perdita jerked at Rupert’s arm and murmured, ‘Close your mouth, dear, you’re drooling.’ Then she smiled sweetly at their visitor.

  ‘Good morning, I’m Perdita Browning …’

  ‘No, you are not,’ said the woman with a lilt of an Italian accent. ‘You are Mrs Simpson and this handsome chap is His Majesty the King.’

  It had not taken Precious Aird very long to realize that the freezing gloom of a nineteenth-century Suffolk church – she had never been in a building colder on the inside than outside without the intervention of air conditioning – was not her ‘thing’. She had taken photographs of a dull stained-glass window, an unremarkable pulpit and a plain but moving commemorative memorial to the dozen or so villagers, seemingly drawn from only two families, who had fallen in ‘The Great War 1914–1918’ by which she assumed they meant the conflict of 1917–18, but perhaps she would ask Mr Campion about that.

  He was a curious old bird that Campion, unlike anyone she had ever met. Perhaps there was no American equivalent of a Campion – well, maybe there was something like him among the Boston Brahmins, but she had never met one of them.

  Having forsaken the church, she took shelter from the wind in the oak-framed porch from where she observed the two men who now seemed to be wandering aimlessly among the gravestones, deep in conversation. Campion’s friend was quite something too – a big man who could move powerfully fast; probably something of a hunk in his younger days. Certainly not what Precious had expected of an English ‘bobby’ but then she had not expected to be introduced to one. In fact, she had promised herself that she would not do what most American tourists did as soon as they deplaned, which was to rush up to the nearest uniformed policeman and ask, ‘Gee, is it true you don’t carry guns?’

  This friend of the old man’s, Luke something-or-other, looked as if he could handle himself without recourse to firearms. He was worth a photograph and she raised the camera hanging round her neck and surreptitiously snapped the two men deep in conversation across a gravestone.

  She would send that one to her mother to prove, despite her dire warnings about Teddy Boys and Mods and Rockers, that all the males in England were old enough to be her father or grandfather and hung around in churchyards.

  No wonder they were interested in archaeology.

  ‘It was thirty-five years ago,’ said Campion. ‘There wasn’t any “Heronhoe Horde” or treasure then and there isn’t now.’

  ‘So where did the stories come from?’ asked Luke.

  ‘Where they always come from, the four-ale bars and the snugs of all the pubs within a fifty-mile radius after too many pints of Bullard’s Mild.’

  ‘So what were you doing sniffing around?’

  Campion pulled off his gloves and thrust them into his coat pockets, then produced a large white handkerchief from his trousers, carefully removed his spectacles and began to polish them. Luke knew Campion’s habits of old and recognized this one as a ploy to gain time in order to give a considered answer.

  ‘I would hardly call an amateur academic interest in what could have been an important archaeological find “sniffing around”. Ship burials don’t come round like buses, you know. There had been one found up at Snape back in the last century – 1862, I think – which yielded a ring and a glass beaker; no doubt the local soaks in Snape and Aldeburgh called that a treasure trove back then but it was still an event of national interest. Not as much, I admit, as the Sutton Hoo find just before the war, and if I’m being truthful the Heronhoe excavation was a bit of a damp squib when it came to antiquities and a dead loss if you were a treasure hunter.’

  ‘But you still made the effort to come down here, didn’t you?’

  ‘Couldn’t resist, not with it being on the doorstep of Pontisbright, so to speak, which was always Lugg’s favourite place on earth, so there was no trouble getting him into the car like an enthusiastic Labrador, and I was on nodding terms with the Mad Major, as we used to call him.’

  ‘And he would be …?’

  ‘Actually not a major at all, more a captain really but he did love riding horses, quite dangerously as I remember, and betting on them equally badly, so the nickname seemed to fit. Better known as Captain Gerald Wemyss-Grendle, the owner of Heronhoe Hall at the time and last of the line of Wemyss and Grendle, the chap who sold the place to Lord Breeze and who is probably living in Switzerland on the proceeds.’

  ‘Frinton,’ said Luke. ‘I checked. There were just enough proceeds to pay off his bookies.’

  ‘Ah,’ sighed Campion. ‘That doesn’t surprise me, but Gerry was our host that week – the week I suppose you’re interested in.’

  ‘Which week would that be?’ asked the policeman rather than the friend.

  Mr Campion faced Luke, expressionless. ‘The week in 1935 when the boat burial at Heronhoe got a visit from HRH you-know-who and his retinue, which is what I suspect this third degree is all about.’

  ‘Third degree? We’re nowhere near one-and-a-half degrees yet. Were you and Lugg in the prince’s retinue?’

  ‘Not really; we were a sort of advance guard, checking the place out, doing a bit of reconnaissance. The Mad Major, as his name implies, wasn’t the most reliable of chaps and I was there to vet the other visitors. Lugg was there to chuck out any journalists or photographers.’

  ‘Of course,’ Luke said, nodding to himself, ‘the great unwashed public knew nothing of the king and Mrs Simpson, did they?’

  ‘David wasn’t king at that point and the British public were pretty much in the dark, though in other countries their relationship was well known.’

  ‘And your job was to keep it that way?’

  ‘As I said, I was merely the reconnaissance party, Charlie the
advance guard. There’s always one for a private royal visit, whatever the occasion. I knew the area and I happened to know Gerald Wemyss-Grendle and when it was time to hide the gin bottle. Being the loyal and trustworthy sort of chap I am, I was volunteered.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Campion firmly. ‘Lugg and I arrived a day or two in advance, had a talk with the archaeologists on the site, checked the surrounding bushes for booby traps and liaised with the local constabulary who seemed to have everything well in hand. The prince and his valets and bodyguards turned up and we had a decent dinner at the hall. Next morning, bright and early, Lugg and I were on our way back to London.’

  ‘Done your job, had you?’

  ‘We were dismissed … surplus to requirements. David knew his way around Heronhoe; he’d stayed at the hall several times before. He and the Mad Major shared a love of point-to-pointing, it seems, and they wanted to get some riding in while he was there. Wemyss-Grendle used to have a well-stocked stable in those days.’

  ‘So did you see Mrs Simpson?’

  ‘No.’ Campion shook his head. ‘Not then and I only heard she’d been there later. I find it difficult to imagine her being a guest of the Mad Major at the hall.’

  ‘Wemyss-Grendle didn’t approve of divorcees?’

  ‘Gerry certainly didn’t approve of marriage but he had pretty liberal views about married women, if you get my drift, and I wouldn’t have thought he had any prejudices against divorcees. One got the impression that no woman was completely safe when under the same roof as the Mad Major.’

  ‘So nothing untoward happened back in ’thirty-five when the royal personage visited the Heronhoe boat excavation?’

  ‘Not that I’m aware of, old chum,’ said Campion, brightening. ‘No shenanigans, no lurid stories in the press and absolutely no treasure found, lost or stolen.’

  Luke planted his feet apart and, with a forefinger under the brim, pushed his hat to the back of his head.

  ‘Then, old chum, can I ask just what the hell you’re doing in Heronhoe now?’

  Campion’s face slipped into an expression which a stranger might have mistaken for genuine shock and outrage.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you, Charlie? I’m a film producer.’

  FOUR

  Boat Burial

  When Lord Breeze purchased Heronhoe Hall and Park from the impecunious Captain Wemyss-Grendle, he had little knowledge of the history of the house. He was aware, thanks to the land agent’s prospectus, that John Constable had been asked to paint the hall in 1816 but the then owners had baulked at the 100 guineas’ fee he had demanded and, as a consequence, the artist had taken his brushes and easels down the road into Essex and painted Wivenhoe House near Colchester for the Rebow family. Lord Breeze openly admitted that he knew little about art, but he recognized a failed investment opportunity when he saw one.

  Until he attempted to get planning permission for some – preferably all – of the associated parkland, Breeze was also totally ignorant of the boat burial which had been found by local antiquarians in 1934 at the very western edge of the estate where it bordered the village of Sweethearting.

  At the time of the discovery of ‘a Barrow of archaeological interest’, the then owner, Gerald Wemyss-Grendle, expressed an active disinterest in the find when it was reported to him by the vicars of both Heronhoe and Sweethearting, two well-meaning gentlemen who shared an interest in the topography and history of the east coast. On the day this clerical delegation had called at the hall to impart the news, it so happened that the captain had many other things to occupy his mind which was, by common consent, not one of the largest in Christendom. He had just added a new four-year-old to his small stable of horses and was keen to get into the saddle; there was a new housemaid to ‘break in’ to the routines of the hall and he was expecting a delivery of port and claret from his new wine merchant in Ipswich while simultaneously devising ways of avoiding the final demand which his previous wine merchant in Hadleigh was attempting to deliver. As a consequence, and with hardly any thought at all, he waved the reverend gentlemen away with a barked instruction that they could do what the blazes they liked as long as the smooth workings of the estate – raised eyebrows and knowing looks on the faces of the two vicars at that! – were not disrupted.

  Archaeology in the Thirties was still seen, despite the efforts of Mortimer Wheeler, as a pursuit followed by the gifted amateur with physical support from the labouring classes when it came to moving earth. The problem with the dig at Heronhoe was that it rapidly became a contest between the two vicars who, while friends and allies in theology and religious practices, rapidly became rivals once out in the field. First there was disagreement over whether their find was a tumulus or a barrow and, as the parish boundaries had never been exact, whether it should be called the Sweethearting Barrow/Tumulus or the Heronhoe Tumulus/Barrow. Then there was a long debate about the best way to dig into the Barrow. Under a cloud of well-mannered acrimony, the dig proceeded thanks to the muscle power of parishioners from both churches, with the vicar of Sweethearting claiming the moral high ground by supplying a tea urn and scones for the diggers courtesy of the Mothers’ Union. When the Barrow had been excavated from two sides (to keep the warring vicars apart) and it became clear that what had been buried there was a boat, further energy was expended on whether to call it the Sweethearting Boat or the Bright River Boat, on the assumption that it had got where it had by travelling along the nearby river.

  That particular debate was firmly concluded by Captain Wemyss-Grendle on his first visit to the site, which he had totally forgotten about until he noticed two of his part-time gardeners carrying spades and hoes walking along the river’s edge while out riding one day. On being told he had a site of some interest on his lands, he immediately proclaimed it to be henceforth known as the Heronhoe Boat and, should any treasure or grave goods be found in there, they were naturally the property of the owners of Heronhoe Hall.

  Little of interest, and nothing of value, was found that summer, the dig starting late because of the unseasonal snowfalls in May – ‘hardly even a boat’ as one local wag observed to a local newspaper reporter. The acidic soil had consumed the timbers of a boat approximately twenty feet in length with a beam of six feet (the two vicars recorded wildly differing measurements in their reports), leaving only an outline in the sand and clay. If there had been a body in the boat when it was buried, it too had dissolved and the only artefacts the rival teams of diggers managed to harvest were a few rusted iron nails or rivets, some fragments of broken pottery, a bent and rusted knife blade and some fragments of briquetage suggesting that the boat or its owner had something to do with the salt trade, a perfectly logical assumption given the importance of that industry and the proximity of the saltmarsh estuary.

  A disgruntled Captain Wemyss-Grendle was heard to mutter that he could not understand why the Vikings had gone to the trouble of burying a boat with nothing valuable on board. His mood was not lightened by being told (by both vicars, agreeing on something at last) that it was not a Viking boat but undoubtedly a much earlier, possibly sixth-century vessel built and sailed by Angles in the process, historically speaking, of becoming the English.

  All-in-all, Gerald Wemyss-Grendle found the whole thing uninspiring and there was not even the opportunity to charge a penny admission to visitors, partly because there was nothing much to see but mainly because most of the population of Sweethearting and a sizeable proportion of that of Heronhoe had already been there to look and be disappointed for free. The owner of Heronhoe Hall was only grateful for the fact that the site was at the furthest reaches of his land and could not be seen from the hall. If it had any use, it might be as a snippet of small talk to impress his friends in London on a quiet evening in one of the few clubs where his credit was still welcome.

  Which is exactly what happened.

  ‘It turns out,’ said Oliver Grieg Bell, ‘that old Wemyss-Grendle moaning about “bloody arc
haeologists” and “meddlesome vicars” came to the attention of King Edward – or should I call him the Duke of Windsor?’

  ‘He was not yet king,’ said Mr Campion, ‘but the Prince of Wales, and known as David.’

  ‘Why wasn’t he called King David, then?’ asked Precious Aird innocently.

  ‘It’s the English tradition of regnal names, something you rebellious colonials long since gave up bothering about.’ Campion smiled. ‘Edward was one of the prince’s names and I think it was his mother who chose that one as his regnal moniker. His brother, who became George VI after the Abdication, was actually Albert Frederick Arthur George, but everyone knew him as Bertie. Well, perhaps not everybody. I’m sorry, Oliver, pray continue.’

  Their host continued to saw thick slices from a loaf of wholemeal bread the size of a draught excluder and pass them clockwise around the table as his wife Lavinia circulated in the opposite direction with a large china tureen balanced on her hip, from which she was ladling out chicken and potato soup the colour and consistency of wallpaper paste.

  ‘From my researches and the local folklore,’ said Oliver, ‘it seems that the prince was interested in the Sweethearting Boat even if Wemyss-Grendle wasn’t. Of course, back then it was called the Heronhoe Boat, but since Lavinia’s father sold off half the park, including the site, to the farmer at Windy Ridge, it’s no longer on Heronhoe Hall land, and anyway, it was always much closer to Sweethearting than Heronhoe.’

  ‘So the dig site is not actually on your land?’ asked Precious, tearing a slice of bread into more manageable chunks.