The two ultimate challenges to our path-finding abilities inside the castle and out are in the story ‘The Crime Wave at Blandings’ (Lord Emsworth and Others) and in the novel Pigs Have Wings. In ‘The Crime Wave ‘from what windows, at what ranges, with what type of airgun were those shots fired at Rupert Baxter those several times? And where exactly was Baxter (a) when picking up that cigarette end and (b) when astride his motor-bike? And where was Beach the butler when Constance Keeble missed a sitter in his direction? Where was the shrubbery in which Jane was crying her eyes out when she saw Lord Emsworth take his shot from the Library window? Where was the seat on which Baxter was sitting when he heard the confession to the crime? Some of your shrubberies and terraces, and the seat itself, must be imagined, we think, behind walls that cut off the view — for instance, the shrubbery in which Jane was crying must have been behind that ruined curtain wall of the old keep, just west of the solitary West Tower (17R).
And, next test: from Pigs Have Wings plot on the map, ours or your own, the hitherings and thitherings in the thefts and counter-thefts of pigs between their own sties, alien sties, Sunnybrae and shrubberies. That’s a real twister.
On our own map, the cottage (29N) in what is probably called the East Wood is where McAllister, the head gardener, lives and where Aggie Donaldson was staying when she ensnared the heart of lucky young Freddie. You can bet that in his little patch of home garden McAllister grows prize hollyhocks and roses at Lord Emsworth in the way those two Norfolk squires, Lord Bromborough and Sir Preston Potter, Bart., grew moustaches at each other in the Mulliner story ‘Buried Treasure’. It was in those water-meadows (15Y) that Lord Emsworth spotted Freddie and Aggie canoodling. It was in the park under those trees (23, 24U) that, in Service with a Smile, the Church lads pitched their tents and George, Lord Emsworth’s grandson, photographed grandpa cutting the little perishers’ guy ropes at dawn. It was thereabouts, too, that the tenants came for the Bank Holiday binge (‘Lord Emsworth and the Girl-Friend’ in Blandings Castle). The tea-tent, in which Lord Emsworth’s top hat was sent flying by a crusty roll and his stiff collar wilted, was pitched there, too, to achieve furnace heat under the blazing afternoon sun.
It was to that bathing hut, which Galahad calls ‘bath house’ (19U), that the Rev. ‘Beefy’ Bingham dragged the unconscious ninth earl out of the lake. Under the alias of ‘Popjoy’ (the usual reason — to be near the girl he loved, who had been brought to the castle to keep her away from him) he had surprised his host while bathing. Lord Emsworth had gone for an early morning swim to cool his throbbing ankle, twisted in a fall caused by this clumsy ‘Popjoy’ man. ‘Popjoy’ had recommended an embrocation for the ankle, and it proved to be a liniment for horses, not humans. Result: a night of agony and a dawn trip to the lake. So cooling and therapeutic to the ankle were its waters that Lord Emsworth in mid-lake started singing for happiness. ‘Popjoy’ heard him, thought he was drowning and calling for help, and plunged in to his rescue. To prevent Lord Emsworth struggling, ‘Beefy’/’Popjoy’ knocked him out with a blow to the jaw as prescribed in all life-saving manuals, and dragged him to shore. (‘Company for Gertrude’ in Blandings Castle). The Rev. R. Bingham’s vicarage must be just behind the church at Much Matchingham (27G) and his wife Gertrude is within easy call of her cousin Jane Abercrombie (‘The Crime Wave at Blandings in Lord Emsworth and Others) in the factor’s house (25M) . And if old Belford is still rector of Market Blandings (22B) then, when his son and daughter-in-law Angela (‘Pig-Hoo-o-o-o-ey!’ in Blandings Castle) are staying with him, that makes three Threepwood nieces, cousins and ex-prisoners of the castle, now neighbours.
If you can’t quite see the hammock for which Galahad and his sister Florence compete in this novel, it’s hidden between the two cedars (25R) . It’s a long earshot to the stables and garages whence, in A Pelican at Blandings, Galahad could hear the harmonica-playing of Voules the chauffeur. But perhaps Voules was a noisy executant and probably he had the breeze behind him. You can see the pond in the kitchen garden (23N) which apparently Galahad as a boy couldn’t. He fell into it and, according to one of his sisters, the pity of it was that he was ever pulled out by that gardener. Beyond (24K), is the Empress’s new sty, within squeal of the cottage of her caretaker and caterer (26L). And you will notice that, in the paddock where she is housed, there are two other fatties, white this time. It has long saddened us that Wodehouse, beyond mentioning piggeries once (in the plural), never specified that the Empress had any companionship of her own kind. Our sentimental artist has added a couple and thus trebled the pig-man’s work for him.
There were deer in the park in the two earliest Blandings books. But we think that the problems of fencing, ha-has, winter feeding and (whisper it) poaching decided Lord Emsworth to let the herd (Japanese and Sika) run down, and to give the remainder to a not-too-neighbourly landowner he met at one of those Loyal Sons of Shropshire dinners. It was quite a business rounding the deer up and carting them. Shropshire has wild deer these days the way East Anglia has coypus, and direct descendants of escapees from the Blandings herds are sometimes seen in the West and East Woods and in the copse north of the stables (1 4N) . Nobody molests them, though McAllister would like to. He curses them when they get into his gardens, and the foresters don’t like the way they eat the bark off young trees.
In Heavy Weather, at the end of Chapter 6, we read: ‘Sir Gregory Parsloe hurried from the room, baying on the scent like one of his own hounds’. Can this mean anything but that Sir Gregory is the local Master of Foxhounds? Whether or no, Lord Emsworth has the living of Much Matchingham in his gift (end of ‘Company for Gertrude’ in Blandings Castle). Is it conceivable that Matchingham Hall is on the Blandings estate and that the hated Sir Gregory, M.F.H., is one of Lord Emsworth’s tenants, but claiming the right to hunt his landlord’s land? There is mercifully little about blood sports in the Blandings books, though we know Gally kept his gun at the castle (Summer Lightning), Lord Emsworth has a pistol with ammunition (Something Fresh) and Colonel Wedge comes to the castle with his service revolver ready for use (Full Moon) . Add to these young George and his airgun, and it still doesn’t make a bloodthirsty household.
You can see horses in that paddock (7U) . I doubt if they are hunters. There is better evidence for them than for the supernumerary pigs. Hugo Carmody rode, in his secretarial days at the castle (Summer Lightning). You see cows in a far field (16, 17K). Those provide milk for the castle and would sometimes, when their grazing is changed, use the cow-byre (10V) where, on the afternoon of the Bank Holiday binge, Lord Emsworth found his little slum-child girl friend. And you can see (5P) the house in Blandings Parva, with the garden at the front, where that girl had quelled the aggressive dog, and brother Ern had bitten Constance in the leg. Just where the girl was when she copped McAllister with a stone is not utterly clear.
Where are the boundaries of Blandings set? Of what noble species are those huge ducks on the Blandings Parva pond (1 Q)? Under which of the gravestones in Blandings Parva churchyard (2N) are Lord Emsworth’s parents, and his late wife for that matter, buried? We assume that it is to Blandings Parva that they went to church (the only such occasion specified) in Something Fresh, though then they had staying in the house party one bishop and several of the minor clergy. Who is living at Sunnybrae cottage (6G) now? Galahad put one of his Pelican Club friends into it, but the man got scared of the country noises and went back to London. Into which window of the castle does Jeff climb in this book, to meet the startled Claude Duff? Where is the little dell near the small spinney in which Baxter’s parked caravan invited pig-stealers plus pig (Summer Lightning)? Who has left that gate open (18L)? And are those (2G) boys from Shrews-bury sculling for home?
These are good questions. Where we have tried to answer others, we claim no originality of interpretations. What we do claim is that we have done a good deal of homework. Whether we have got the answers which would have pleased Teacher, we can never know, since he is no longer at his des
k.
THE TRAINS
BETWEEN PADDINGTON
AND MARKET BLANDINGS
FROM my earliest readings in Wodehouse I had had a suspicious eye on the trains that connected Paddington and Market Blandings. I thought the author was inventing train-times as the mood took him, hardly looking back to earlier chapters of a book, let alone to earlier books. I doubted whether any of his train-times would square with the Bradshaws or ABCs of the publication dates of the books in which they occurred.
Not that I would hold it against him if that’s the way he was doing it. But I wanted to see, and particularly to see if train-times provided any evidence of where in Shropshire Blandings Castle might be. There are, or there were in the days of the 1953 Encyclopaedia Britannica (Sarsaparilla to Sorcery), 1,346.6 square miles of Shropshire. Perhaps the railway evidence in the books might help us to put the mythical Blandings on a real map.
No scholar, as far as I know, had collected all the railway references and laid them out for inspection. So, since this last chronicle of Blandings adds one last train to the time-table, I have brought them all together. It was not difficult, only laborious. But interpreting the references was beyond me. I could see no pattern, if any existed, in the times and speeds. I could see one obvious anomaly. In Leave it to Psmith, Psmith says it’s roughly a four-hour journey either way. But, elsewhere in the same book, the narrative says that the 1250 from Paddington arrived at Market Blandings ‘about 3 o’clock’ (1500). My guess is now that that ‘3’ was originally a misprint for ‘5’ and has persisted uncorrected through half a century of editions. Otherwise we have a train, not even called an express, doing the four-hour journey in 2 hours 10 minutes.
Besides, as recently as 1969, when Wodehouse was eighty-seven, he said to Peter Lewis of the Daily Mail, at the end of an interview at his Long Island home, ‘By the way, about how long does it take now from Paddington to Shropshire? About four hours? Good, I always made it about four hours.
To avoid the bother of a.m. and p.m., I have translated all train times to the Continental clock. And I have added the publication dates of the books from which I combed my references. It looked professional and it might provide clues. And I have included the ‘stops at —’ and ‘first stop —’ details as given in the texts. We get them only four times, always on trains from Paddington. And in three cases out of the four they have a purpose.
I can see no point in Freddie Threepwood adding ‘first stop Swindon’ in relating to Bill Lister that the girl of his (Bill’s) heart has been sent to Blandings on the 1242 (Full Moon) . But with the 1615 express, the addition of ‘first stop Swindon’ in Something Fresh is a plant. Ashe Marson and Joan Valentine are travelling to Blandings together, he to be valet to an American millionaire, she to be lady’s maid to the millionaire’s daughter. There is a little job of retrieving for the millionaire the priceless scarab that Lord Emsworth has forgetfully pocketed and then assumed to be a most generous gift. And the millionaire will pay handsomely for it to be returned for him. Since both Ashe and Joan are out for the reward, Joan wouldn’t mind if Ashe were eliminated from competing. So, between Paddington and ‘first stop Swindon’, she tells him grisly tales of the hardships and snubs that lesser servants have to suffer below stairs. Having frightened him, she says ‘Wouldn’t you now like to get off at Swindon and go home?’
And when, in ‘Pig Hoo-o-o-o-ey!’ in Blandings Castle, the 1400, ‘best train of the day’, stops at Swindon, it is with a jolt just sufficient to wake Lord Emsworth up and make him realize that he has already forgotten the master hog-call that might make his beloved Empress start eating again.
The third purposeful stop is the ‘first stop Oxford’ for the 1445 express in Uncle Fred in the Springtime. Lord Ickenham, king of impostors, is gaily travelling towards Blandings Castle in the guise of Sir Roderick Glossop, the loony-doctor. With him is Polly Pott, in the guise of his secretary. And his quaking nephew Pongo is with them in the guise of Sir Roderick’s nephew. So far, so snug in a first-class compartment. But then the Efficient Baxter is seen getting into the train at Paddington, and he starts by being suspicious of the whole party. But worse, much worse, is to come just as the train is pulling out. The real Sir Roderick himself gets on. This really is a facer for Uncle Fred. Lord Emsworth had told him that, pursuant to his sister’s commands (it was she who was worried about the Duke of Dunstable being potty), he had gone to London to make the acquaintance of the great alienist and persuade him to come to Blandings to vet the Duke. But, Lord Emsworth said, he had discovered that Sir Roderick was the grown-up version of the horrid little boy they had called ‘Pimples’ at school. Sir Roderick, thus addressed by Lord Emsworth today, had refused the invitation to Blandings. That then enabled Lord Ickenham to set up his three aliases and his triple storming of the castle: on Lord Emsworth’s behalf, and to help a couple of young couples find happiness. ‘Help is what I like to be of,’ says Lord Ickenham.
And here was Sir Roderick Glossop, in person, getting on to the train at Paddington, having changed his mind. Lord Ickenham needed that stop at Oxford badly. It gave him time to talk Sir Roderick into believing that the patient he had been so hurriedly sent for to inspect had turned the corner and needed no immediate attention: so Sir Roderick could go back to his busy practice, stepping off at Oxford and catching whoknowswhat train home to London.
Finally, if train times helped to give Market Blandings a position on the map of Shropshire, we might decide which way the Vale of Blandings went. We put the castle at the end. For how many miles does the Vale stretch? Is Market Blandings short of, or beyond Shrews-bury, its nearest reasonable-sized shopping town? Do you turn left or right for Shrewsbury when you come out of the castle drive on to the main road?
I decided to ask the help of a friend of mine who had been a Bradshaw expert at his (and my) preparatory school, long before he joined British Railways as a career. This was the evidence I supplied:
Trains from Paddington to Market Blandings
0830 express (Sunset at Blandings 1977). The train that arrives at 1610 (Service with a Smile 1961).
1118 (A Pelican at Blandings 1969).
1145 (Service with a Smile 1961).
1242 ‘first stop Swindon’ arrives ‘shortly before 1700 (Full Moon 1947).
1250 arrives about 1500—i.e. about 2 hours 10 minutes ? this a misprint (Leave it to Psmith 1923).
1400 ‘best train of the day’. Stops at Swindon (Blandings Castle 1935).
1423 (A Pelican at Blandings 1969).
1445 express. First stop Oxford (Uncle Fred in the Spring time 1939).
1515 (Blandings Castle 1935).
1615 express. Stops at Swindon (Something Fresh 1915). An express that arrives c. 2105. Restaurant car (Leave it to Psmith 1923 and Uncle Fred in the Spring time 1939).
1705 ‘there is nothing between the 1400 and this’ (Blandings Castle 1935).
Trains from Market Blandings to Paddington
0820 ‘arrives about noon’ (Uncle Fred in the Springtime 1939).
0825 (Uncle Fred in the Springtime 1939).
0850 arrives about midday (Leave it to Psmith 1923).
1035 (Service with a Smile 1961).
1050 (Something Fresh 1915).
1115 (Hot Water 1932).
1240 arrives shortly before 1700 (Full Moon 1947).
1400 (Blandings Castle 1935 and Uncle Fred in the Springtime 1939).
1445 (Heavy Weather 1933 and Uncle Fred in the Springtime 1939).
‘the afternoon train’ (Something Fresh 1915).
1445 Car at the Castle at 1400 sharp (Leave it to Psmith 1923).
1800 (Full Moon 1947).
Notes:
1. There are also branch-line trains mentioned. Bridge-ford (can this mean Bridgnorth?) to Market Blandings takes 30 minutes (Leave it to Psmith 1923). A train leaves Market Blandings towards Norfolk at 1240, and there’s one that returns from the Norfolk direction at about 1945 ‘in time to dress for dinner’ (Heavy Weather
1933).
2. Blandings Castle is in Shropshire. The Severn flows through its grounds. Shrewsbury is 45 minutes by car, not hurrying. Market Blandings is 2½/3 miles from the castle (that includes ¾ miles of the castle drive) . You can see the Wrekin from the battlements of the castle.
[P.S. I ought not to have assumed that the Severn flowed through the castle grounds. What it says in Leave it to Psmith (1923) is: ‘Away in the distance wooded hills ran down to where the Severn gleamed like an unsheathed sword: up from the river rolling park-land …’ Whose parkland? Probably Lord Emsworth’s, but, if so, perhaps the Severn marks his boundary there. My assumption gave some trouble.]
My expert friend passed on my evidences to a friend of his, Colonel Michael Cobb, who, besides knowing his Bradshaw, had the extra advantage of specializing in surveying during an army career in which he spent a number of years on the Ordnance Survey. Colonel Cobb produced a most learned report.
COLONEL COBB’S REPORT
From an initial glance at the problem it is clear that there are railway inconsistencies, such as Blandings Castle being on the Severn and in Shropshire, and yet one could get a train to its station from Paddington with a ‘first stop at Swindon’.
I realized that I must discard certain data. I have tried to find a place which fits the main topographical data and which lies within the limits of the largest number of the railway facts.
The topographical data are as follows: the castle is in Shropshire; the Severn runs through its grounds; it is 45 minutes by car to Shrewsbury, not hurrying; the Wrekin is visible from its battlements; it is 2½ miles or so from the castle to its station.
Blanding Castle Omnibus Page 342