Mr Campion's Visit

by Mike Ripley

  ‘Can you prove it?’ asked the librarian, clearly a woman dedicated to her job.

  ‘Would I admit to such a thing if it were untrue?’ charmed Campion and then, realizing that the big guns might have to be produced, added: ‘A telephone call to the vice chancellor or, even better, the Bishop of St Edmondsbury could confirm my appointment.’

  At the mention of those names – or perhaps just one of them – the dragon at the gate relented and allowed Campion to enter her den, even pointing him to the lifts and a large information panel which showed, as in the best department stores, what was available on each floor.

  Ignoring the first and second floors which concentrated on the sciences and languages and linguistics, he headed for the third floor where he thought he would feel more at home among literature, history and philosophy. Specifically he was looking for a minor enclave in the history section, and one which he felt sure would not be overcrowded with students on the first day of term, if ever.

  To call ‘Local History and Donated Archives’ an independent section would be flattering to say the least, as it comprised no more than four shelves of material – books and box files – and Mr Campion had it all to himself.

  After amusing himself for a good half-hour reading a sheaf of yellowing press cuttings held together by a rusty bulldog clip on ‘The Shocking Events at Black Dudley: Murder, Gangsters and Rescue by the Monewdon Hunt’, he found what he thought he might be looking for in a box file containing parish magazines, programmes from amateur dramatic productions and flyers for Christmas fayres.

  Some kind soul with an eye on posterity had deposited a dozen four-page pamphlets priced optimistically at sixpence per copy, with a brief description and history of St Jurmin and his chapel. They dated, Campion guessed, from the 1950s, and told him little that he had not gleaned from Roger Downes and Gerry Meade when he had spotted the chapel while on his official tour of the pyramid residences.

  Jurmin, or alternatively Jermin or Hiurmine, was the son of Anna or Onna, a seventh-century king of the East Angles, part of the Wuffinga royal family. He had been, as far as Campion could tell, a ‘good king’, and his son Jurmin had been a saintly and holy chap, both of them receiving honourable mentions in the chronicles of the Venerable Bede, who Campion remembered with a giggle was better known to schoolboys now as the Venomous Bede.

  Sadly, the Wuffinga father-and-son team were less well thought of by the aggressive Penda, ruler of the Midlands kingdom of Mercia, who had an eye on East Anglian territory and who duly invaded around the year AD 653. It had been far worse than the invasion of Stoke or West Bromwich fans to a football match at Ipswich, and had culminated in the battle of Bulcamp Hill just outside Blythburgh. Both Anna and his son Jurmin were killed, the battle marking the end of the kingdom of the East Angles and the dominance of the Mercia, but at least St Jurmin had a small church named after him and a feast day, 24 February.

  There had been much debate (among whom? Campion wondered) as to whether St Jurmin’s was one of the seventh-century churches generally known as the ‘Kentish group’ – churches built on Roman sites and usually out of reused Roman material. While the structure contained dressed stone, bricks and roof tiles that almost certainly came from a Roman coastal fort or watchtower, no Roman structure had been positively identified nearby; if there had been one, it was probably under the sea thanks to coastal erosion.

  The pamphlet had little further useful information to add, though the bottom half of the fourth page comprised an advertisement for The Plough public house in White Dudley, a ‘welcoming local’ which offered ales, stouts and cordials from the brewers Steward & Patterson.

  And there was one final line of detail, advising the potential tourist that the key to St Jurmin’s chapel could always be found at 8 High Street, White Dudley, in the care of Mrs Daisey May Meade.

  As dusk fell and lights came twinkling on all over the campus, Campion found the view from the top floor of the library almost hypnotic. The childlike geometric shapes of the buildings had become indistinct as the eye was drawn to the patterns of orange lights blurring their outlines. Only Black Dudley itself, with every possible light burning, stood out as an unmistakeable point of reference. Beyond the house, between shore and sea, the chapel of St Jurmin, which had intrigued Campion, had disappeared completely into the gloom, but then his eye was caught by the movement of lights in the main university car park.

  Unmistakably, cars were on the move, engines being revved and headlights illuminated, which meant that the police had allowed movement out of the grounds and, in turn, that suggested they had either made an arrest or had abandoned any idea of containing overnight the staff and students who lived off-campus.

  Mr Campion suspected the latter and considered that, as teatime was now a memory, he should be contemplating the possibility of dinner, or at least a drink before dinner; perhaps at a ‘welcoming local’ within easy driving distance.

  There were police cars still in the car park, but no on-duty policemen to challenge him as he manoeuvred the Jaguar out of its parking bay and, at the end of the campus slip road, turned left towards White Dudley, some three miles away according to the signposts.

  From what the Jaguar’s headlights – irresponsibly turned on full beam – could uncover, the village was a single-street affair straddled by short terraces of houses, cottages and bungalows, and Campion even thought he spotted a couple of pre-fab structures dating from the post-war housing crisis. There was a shadowy outline of a church, but the only building showing un-curtained lights and offering any sort of welcome was the pub The Plough, which actually had a real iron plough as an inn sign, dangling precariously from a scaffold in the small parking area at its frontage. Campion noted that of the few cars outside the pub, none had been parked directly under the suspended ironmongery and, valuing the Jaguar’s bodywork and unwilling to file an improbable insurance claim, he followed the strategy of the locals.

  He had thought little about White Dudley, other than making assumptions about its name based on his knowledge of East Anglia, where it had been common practice to give adjoining or divided villages the designation ‘White’ if it represented a community which had survived the Black Death and ‘Black’ if the inhabitants had not been so lucky. He had no justification for this theory other than a vague memory of once being told that the Black Dudley house had been built on the foundations of a long-abandoned fourteenth-century monastery, which would fit his speculative timeline, and it was perfectly possible that a medieval monastic community might decide to settle out on this part of the Suffolk coast where, thanks to St Jurmin, there was evidence of a spiritual track record.

  Campion read the legal declaration above the door, which informed him that a Mr H. Hopewell was licensed to sell all the necessary liquors one might reasonably expect to find, before opening it to be greeted by music of anything but a spiritual bent. It was coming from a brash American jukebox, which seemed to take up one wall of a brightly lit saloon bar where each table had, as a centrepiece, a large green plastic ashtray, around which beer mats had been dealt out as if by a careless poker player.

  The bar had perhaps a dozen customers and was clearly the result of two or perhaps three small rooms being ‘knocked into’ one. The one-bar pub was, Campion knew, something of a controversial modern development among traditionalists, although in truth it harked back quite accurately to the years before coach (and then rail) travel, which introduced the class system to the democratic British pub, demanding a division between saloon and public bars.

  The Plough had, it seemed, adopted modernity in almost every aspect. The lighting came from harsh neon strips, the bar counter was made of shiny fake wood and armed with a variety of garish plastic boxes holding small dispensing taps for the keg beers. There was not a horse brass or a smooth mahogany beer pump handle in sight; only the music coming from the jukebox showed any sense of history in that it seemed to come exclusively from the 1950s and the era of skiffle, trad jazz and primi
tive – very primitive – rock and roll.

  Although by no means a dedicated follower of musical fashions, even Mr Campion appreciated that the musical repertoire on offer was unlikely to attract any business from a young student population to whom the musical stylings of Lonnie Donegan, Chris Barber or even Bill Haley were ancient history.

  But yet there were younger customers, who Campion presumed were students, a group of four seated around one table as far away from the jukebox as it was possible to get. The telltale signs were that they were all sipping from half-pint glasses while the rest of the clientele, almost exclusively middle-aged males, were quaffing full pints of Norwich Mild. It was not the only thing which distinguished the two castes of customer. While the male clientele stood within reach of the bar and talked, or at least nodded, among themselves, or shared a newspaper or played darts, the students were also distinguished by the fact that they sat in silence, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes with copies of the same, unopened, paperback book in front of them on the table.

  At the bar Campion ordered a bottle of Worthington White Shield and, relieved to see that the landlord appeared to know how to pour it properly, summoned up the courage to ask if any food was available.

  ‘You be from the university then?’ the landlord demanded in an inquisitive, not unfriendly, Suffolk sort of way.

  ‘I am indeed visiting that splendid institution,’ Campion replied truthfully, and his answer acted like a password to provisions if not gastronomy.

  ‘Then I suppose Gladys can rustle you up some vittles. Pie and chips be good enough for you?’

  Campion rapidly assumed that Gladys was Mrs Hopewell and that to demand a more expansive menu might not be diplomatic. ‘That sounds most suitable,’ he said with a smile. ‘What sort of pie?’

  ‘Meat.’

  ‘Perfect. I’ll be sitting over there.’

  The landlord nodded to signify that some form of contract had been entered into, and disappeared through a curtain into the private quarters of the pub. From the sounds which emerged as a door was opened and a television could be heard, it seemed that Mrs Hopewell was being dragged away from Coronation Street for kitchen duty. Campion hoped it wasn’t her favourite programme.

  He took a sip from his beer and thought briefly about dear old Lugg, who had once decanted twenty perfectly clear glasses of White Shield in a row, leaving the yeasty sediment in the bottom of the bottles. It had earned him the award of a tie from the White Shield Pourers’ Club, which had a vaguely military design and, to Lugg’s delight and sometimes advantage, was often mistaken for the regimental tie of 42 Commando of the Royal Marines.

  ‘Do you mind if I join you?’ he addressed the student enclave.

  His request was met with sullen silence from three of the company, all male, but the fourth, a girl with long, straggling hair in need of a wash, blew smoke from a roll-up in his general direction, picked a shred of tobacco from her lower lip and said: ‘They say it’s a free country.’

  ‘They do indeed,’ said Campion, grinning and reaching for a spare chair from the neighbouring table, ‘but they rarely mean it. Hope I’m not intruding. I’m at the university too, in a sort of way.’

  ‘What makes you think we’re students?’ one of the boys reacted sharply.

  Campion could have said many things, all of which would have been expected from a man of his age, but instead he pointed to the paperback books labelled Penguin Classics on the table.

  ‘Don Quixote is not the usual early evening reading material for a Suffolk country pub, fascinating book though it is. Did you know that it is supposed to have been translated into more languages than any other book apart from the Bible? Another interesting fact: most of its first editions were exported to Spanish colonies in South America, but the bulk were lost in a shipwreck and only seventy copies made it to Lima in Peru.’

  ‘So you’ve read it?’ the girl asked.

  She was, like the boys, not long out of her teens, twenty-one at the most, and like theirs her fashion sense extended only as far as a uniform of jeans and an anorak or parka bought from the Army & Navy Stores. Campion had already spotted that two of the boys wore long hooded jackets with the West German flag embossed on the shoulder.

  ‘A long time ago,’ said Campion jovially. ‘Wonderful book, a great inspiration to dreamers like me. I even had my own Sancho Panza, of a sort.’

  Campion was confident that Lugg would have taken that as a compliment.

  ‘That’d be your butler, would it? Or your batman?’ snapped the boy who had snapped before. He was, Campion thought, a callow youth trying desperately to look older than his years by growing a ragged brown beard to match his shoulder-length hair, which made a poor job of camouflaging a bad case of vibrant acne.

  ‘Don’t be rude, Kevin,’ said the girl, draining her glass of clear liquid. ‘This nice gentleman was just about to offer to buy a poor student a drink.’

  She had turned away from Campion as she spoke, and he suspected that she was giving her companions a conspiratorial wink.

  ‘In the absence of any nice gentlemen, I suppose that honour falls to me,’ said Campion, playing along. ‘Though I insist on introductions as one should never buy a round for strangers. That’s something I learned from Don Quixote. My name is Albert.’

  The girl offered up her empty glass. ‘I’m Angie and these three are Joe, Brian and chopsy Kevin. They’re drinking beer so they can relate to the working classes. Mine’s a gin and tonic. Have you really read Cervantes?’

  ‘Yes, I have, but a long, long time ago, way before any of you were born, so please don’t ask me to help you with your homework, at least not before I’ve got the drinks in.’

  Mr Campion went to the bar and placed his order with Mr Hopewell, who confided that his ‘dinner’ would be another five or perhaps ten minutes. Campion assured him there was no rush and that he would take it at a smaller table, not at the one he was buying drinks for.

  Campion returned to his students with a metal tray on which he balanced three pints of bitter and a double gin and tonic, Mr Hopewell even managing to find an ice cube and a slice of preserved lemon for the latter, indicating with a nod and a wink that the recipient would appreciate such luxury, which she did.

  ‘Wow! What a treat!’ said the girl called Angie. ‘A proper G and T. Thank you, Mr Albert. Now if you could write my seminar paper for me, you really would be my knight in shining armour.’

  ‘I’m not sure that would be allowed,’ said Campion, handing out the drinks, ‘even if such a thing were remotely possible, for I am a poor scholar when it comes to judging literature.’

  ‘Actually, Joe, Brian and I are studying linguistics. Kevin there is doing sociology, but his thing is really politics.’

  ‘Goodness,’ said Campion, ‘as if sociology wasn’t enough. Why the Cervantes?’

  ‘Textual analysis,’ said the boy next to Angie, who might have been Joe or possibly Brian, raising his glass in salute to its provider. ‘You didn’t get one for yourself.’

  ‘I’m driving,’ said Campion, ‘and I no longer have the capacity of youth. Plus, I need to keep a clear head if I am in the company of intellectuals who know what “textual analysis” means.’

  ‘We analyse texts by means of a computer programme,’ offered the boy, warming to his subject.

  ‘If you can ever get time on the bloody thing,’ interposed Kevin.

  ‘Well, we might this term,’ said the girl, ‘once our sanctions start to bite.’

  ‘Sanctions?’

  ‘We’re boycotting lectures and tutorials until we get more computer time,’ said the boy Campion had decided was Brian.

  ‘Isn’t that rather cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s educational face?’

  ‘It’s a protest,’ Angie explained, as if explaining thunderstorms to a nervous child. ‘Our next step will be direct action, but at the moment it’s a formal protest.’

  ‘May I ask against what?’

  ‘Aga
inst the mad scientist, of course!’ Kevin blurted, loudly enough to attract questioning stares from a group of locals propping up the bar. ‘The South American heart-throb,’ he added, lowering his voice and glaring at Angie, ‘who monopolizes the Computing Centre for his precious research for the CIA.’

  ‘Are you referring to the late Professor Perez-Catalan?’

  Campion spoke quietly, so that his words could not be heard beyond the table, but the effect on his audience was as if he had shouted down a megaphone. The four students stared at him in amazement, drinks paused between table and lips, and Angie’s mouth fell open to reveal a perfect set of white teeth. Only Kevin made a sound – a snort, but whether in surprise or derision, it was not clear.

  The girl reacted first. ‘Pascual is dead?’

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ said Campion. ‘Have you not been on campus today?’

  ‘Not much point if we’re boycotting lectures.’ The girl fluttered her eyelashes over the rim of her glass like a silent movie vamp. ‘Did we miss anything exciting?’

  ‘Alarums and excursions all round; everyone is in quite a state about it.’

  ‘He didn’t pop his clogs in flagrante, did he?’

  ‘Kevin! That’s a loathsome thing to say!’ Angie’s eyes now flashed in anger.

  ‘Woops! Hit a sore spot, have I?’ Kevin replied with a sly smirk. ‘Wouldn’t it be a hoot if he’d conked out during an orgy with first-year virgins in his love shack.’

  Mr Campion decided that the time had come to inject decency and decorum into this saloon bar Brains Trust. ‘The professor’s body was found late last night by the porters, near Black Dudley,’ said Campion with gravitas, only to be taken by surprise by the reaction of the girl sitting next to him.