Josephine Tey

by Jennifer Morag Henderson

  Some of Hugh’s early work was also published in the magazine of a group called the Panton Arts Club; an English group supporting literature and the arts. This group then advertised a competition, for the best unpublished collection of poems by a new author, and it was to this competition that Hugh sent his small book. Like Gordon Daviot, Hugh was to find his first success through a competition, as his collection won the first prize of publication, but Hugh never knew that he had won the Panton Arts Competition, as the result was announced a week after his death. The publication of his winning entry was overseen by his family. A biographical note at the start of Hugh’s only book was provided by ‘R. M.’ – his other sister, Robina McIntosh – and a foreword, lamenting the passing of a new talent, was provided by Ernest Rhys, the well-known English writer and editor who founded the Everyman’s Library series of affordable classic books, and who had been a judge in the competition. Rhys rated the poems very highly, saying that, of all the competition entries, ‘this one, brief, psychic, born out of the war, had a different quality from the others: it touched reality’.27 He goes on to praise the ‘characteristic mixture of grimness and prettiness in some of the succeeding lyrics’ and concludes, ‘for me, hardened critic that I am, they have a convincing individuality, a perfect sincerity, and a curious power of bringing to life the actual sensation of these terrible war-days as confronted by a soldier who at heart was a true poet’.

  A Soldier Looks at Beauty is a charming collection, now virtually impossible to find second-hand. It is a short book, containing only 31 poems. In traditional verse-forms, the poet focuses mainly on moments of beauty in nature. Although A Soldier Looks at Beauty is hard to come by, two of Hugh P. F. McIntosh’s poems were anthologized in a popular collection called Holyrood: a Garland of Modern Scots Poems, showing that his work was admired by contemporary readers – and, as the anthology included authors such as MacDiarmid, that Hugh’s work could have been seen in the context of the Scottish Literary Renaissance, unlike Beth’s. One of the poems included was a tale of a soldier on guard duty, while the other describes the Highlands with aching homesickness. Ironically, although Hugh’s poetry is forgotten, his father Hugh Senior’s dry religious writing is still in print: Is Christ Infallible and the Bible True? is a Christian classic.

  If Hugh had not been terminally ill from their first meeting, he and Beth could have developed their friendship along more romantic lines – but what use were ‘what ifs’ to Beth? If Hugh hadn’t been ill, he would never have come to Inverness, and they would never have met. For Beth, as the years went on, Hugh’s death, even more than that of her First World War officer, came to symbolize the lost opportunities that war had made in her life. This intelligent, unusual man, with a shared interest in writing and a similar outlook on life, had been a good match for her. There is an awareness of Hugh, a memory of his writing and of the man himself, scattered throughout Beth’s work. Not only did she talk about the quality of his poems and their reception, but she also engaged with Hugh’s strong feelings about Scotland. If he had lived, Hugh had stood more chance than Beth of acceptance to the Scottish literary establishment, as shown by his poems’ inclusion in the anthology Holyrood. Beth’s writing, even when she was very successful, was never viewed as particularly ‘Scottish’ in content, and she was not part of the Scottish literary scene. Hugh, in contrast, embraced a more romantic image of Scotland in some of his poetry. Beth did not idealize Hugh, and her challenges to Hugh’s romantic images of Scotland throughout her work, and her realistic and not always complimentary descriptions of poets, point to a level of maturity in this relationship that is not necessarily there in her feelings about her First World War soldier. Beth was aware of Hugh’s flaws and their differences; this was not a perfect first romance, but a friendship that could have had a real future.

  One of Hugh’s poems, ‘A Flooded Field’, is prominently featured and quoted in the Josephine Tey mystery novel To Love and be Wise (published in the 1950s), and it is primarily from here that I was able to begin tracing back Hugh’s story. However, there is another thread running through Beth’s writing which refers to Hugh: her use of the name ‘Patrick’.

  Hugh Patrick Fraser was given his first name after his father, and his second middle name after his mother’s maiden name: Patrick is his own. Beth MacKintosh gives the name ‘Patrick’ or ‘Pat’ to a character in one of her early short stories, published in the Glasgow Herald – and then uses the same name, same character and same incident, in her last book, The Singing Sands. Pat, in this early short story, sits on a fence making a flute – exactly the same image as Hugh used in his short story ‘Innocence’.

  This same character Pat also gets a mention in The Daughter of Time. Although Beth reused some ideas (the play Dickon, for example, is a forerunner to The Daughter of Time) the striking similarity between the early short story and the incident in her last, best book, stands out. The Singing Sands is too sophisticated to be an early unpublished work – Beth’s development as a writer is clear when comparing this to The Man in the Queue – so it is safe to say that the character of Patrick is one she went back to: a character based on someone she knew. In The Singing Sands, Patrick is the son of Laura, the woman Grant once thought of marrying. Patrick is also the name of a major character (albeit one we never meet) in Brat Farrar. Finally, in Claverhouse, there is the following line: ‘Perhaps if he had been a “character”, they would say: “Patrick. He was the one who flung his bonnet at the Commissioner” .’28 The ‘he’ in this sentence is Claverhouse, and there are no Patricks anywhere near this sentence – it’s just a ‘random’ name – but its repeated use throughout Gordon Daviot’s work suggests it’s something other than random. Perhaps Hugh Patrick Fraser did once fling his bonnet at the Commissioner. He must have had a strong personality, to survive the trenches and decide to sign up again, and then, when he was too ill to continue, to decide instead to emulate his heroes, the First World War poets. A soldier who had seen active service in many different fields, a gifted poet, and the son of a charismatic and successful preacher, I imagine that Hugh was indeed a ‘character’ – if he and Beth had had a romance, it could have been a stormy one, with so much talent and ambition thrown into the mix.

  Hugh Patrick Fraser was buried in Tomnahurich cemetery, where his headstone reads ‘In Loving Memory of Hugh P. F. McIntosh, MC, only son of the late Rev Hugh McIntosh, MA. Born at Brockley, London, died at Inverness [...] aged 33. “May God be thanked who has matched us with His hour”’. The last quotation is not a religious one, but is from Rupert Brooke, the First World War poet, from a 1914 poem written when the war and soldiering still seemed glorious. Hugh’s work would have slipped into obscurity if it wasn’t for Josephine Tey, but it seems that Hugh’s family never knew Beth. Hugh and Beth’s relationship was officially one of friendship, and Beth was left with no claim over him when he was dead. Almost no one knew of their shared interest in writing, and Hugh’s life story, and his part in Beth’s life, has never before been written about. It was almost as if their friendship ceased to exist after his death. If Beth had been Hugh Patrick Fraser’s fiancée or wife, she would have been able to mourn him in a different way, but, as a friend, she was almost forgotten. Their relationship did not have a chance to develop, because of Hugh’s illness. Beth was well aware that her choices had effectively been limited by the war, and she retained a bitterness about this. For Beth, a new reality of her life was brought home to her by Hugh’s death: as one of the post-war generation where women now outnumbered men, living in a small town where she already knew most people, having already lost two relationships as a direct or indirect result of the First World War, and now thirty-one years old, Beth was probably never going to marry and have children.

  Chapter Seven

  Short Stories and First Two Novels

  The earliest Gordon Daviot story I have found is ‘Pat’, published in the Glasgow Herald on 2nd April 1927. It features the young boy, the Pat of the title, who remin
ds me of Hugh Patrick Fraser McIntosh, recalling the same imagery that was in Hugh’s story, ‘Innocence’. ‘Pat’, this first published creation of Daviot’s, goes on to reappear in another Glasgow Herald short story, and then, again, over twenty years later, in the Josephine Tey novels The Daughter of Time and Beth’s final published work The Singing Sands. The striking thing about Daviot’s early short stories is their confidence. Her style develops over time, but she focused on many of the same themes throughout her life, looking at them with increasing maturity and writing expertise.

  There is a gap of over ten months between ‘Pat’ and the next published short story I have found. In the interim, Beth had a number of short pieces published in the Saturday Review.1 Each of these short pieces was a competition entry. Some of the competitions were on general themes (for example, write a poem about July), but others were very prescriptive (for example, make a list of typical Hollywood sub-titles on set topics). Most of them were meant to be funny (‘We offer a First Prize of One Guinea... for the most forcible letter writer to ‘The Times’ either for or against a proposed tax on Beards’).2 Beth used these competitions as writing exercises: they gave her practise in writing to a deadline and allowed her to experiment with different forms – and they gave her feedback on her work, as each week the results were printed with extensive comments. Beth continued to enter these competitions until 1929, when her first book was published – though with decreasing frequency. She was a frequent winner, and a regular enough entrant that, when she didn’t send in writing, the Saturday Review took the time to say that “The competition was the poorer from the absence of any contributions by Gordon Daviot”, and later asked her to both set and judge the competition entries one week. It was a gratifying early sign for Beth that her writing could attract attention, and that her expertise was acknowledged by a community of fellow writers.3

  It’s possible that Beth wrote and published other, as yet undiscovered work, but there were also changes in her personal life that affected her writing. Hugh was in the final stages of his illness, and died four months after her short story ‘Pat’ was published. And Beth’s grandmother, the ninety-year old Jane Horne, died the day after ‘Pat’ was published, on 3rd April 1927.4 The death of her maternal grandmother, who had told her so many family stories, was the loss of another connection to Beth’s mother Josephine and her happy childhood. Even in an era where loss was widespread, Beth was unlucky enough to have several people die at meaningful periods in her life. Beth was always left behind to pick up the pieces as people died and left her increasingly alone. She poured her feelings into her writing, creating in some of her first short stories pictures of happy family life, with carefree children.

  ‘Pat’ had been well received, and Gordon Daviot went on to have four more short stories published in the Glasgow Herald between 1927 and 1929. Observational pieces featuring ‘characters’ and quirky situations, they were well-tailored to the readership of the paper’s ‘Weekend Page’. They also, surprisingly, given Daviot’s later novels and Anglophile attitude, have Scottish settings and feature a number of Scots words, such as scunnered, aye, haivers and bubblyjock. Generally, though, they are specifically ‘Highland’ stories, rather than ‘Scottish’ stories. Beth herself always made that distinction, recognizing the vast differences in language and culture between the north and south of the country. ‘When I came home to live,’ she wrote for a short biographical sketch, ‘I knew nothing of Scotland except the Highlands’.5 It’s an important distinction. Beth felt that ‘Scotland’ could mean many different things. Later, she did not fit easily into a ‘Scottish’ literary world that she felt did not include her own experiences, and she continued to feel a close connection to the south of England.

  In ‘Pat’s’ second appearance, in the short story ‘Haivers’ in February 1928, the character of Pat, like his later incarnation in The Singing Sands, speaks in a broad brogue, which is semi-put-on – reserving his best ‘English’ accent for when he is displeased. Pat is also described in his kilt as having ‘a grace worthy of his ancestors’. There is little yet of the cynicism of The Singing Sands – or even of The Man in the Queue, with its pejorative descriptions of Gaelic. It is starting to creep in, though, in ‘The Find’ (June 1928) which pours scorn on the celebration of couthy, idyllic rural settings.

  In terms of style, rather than subject, the stories are closer to Daviot’s literary novels, Kif and The Expensive Halo, than her more popular Josephine Tey mysteries. There are some nice turns of phrase: ‘Agnew’s rooms are full of bright primitive colour and wood ornaments and queer mats and a general lack of comfort and upholstery’ (‘The Find’) and pithy descriptions, as of the folk-song enthusiasts: ‘Two of the women had untidy hair and the hair of the third hadn’t enough life to get untidy; it just hung’ (‘The Find’), but occasionally Daviot’s style can seem particularly convoluted and rather old-fashioned because of this. ‘The surgeon [the child Pat] glanced indifferently at his parent as she came, and continued his torturous explorations, to the accompaniment of much heavy breathing’ (‘Pat’). Daviot doesn’t use a simple word when a fancier explanation can be used instead, and, without the driving force of the readable plots of her mysteries, this is one of the things that can make her short stories, and her literary novels, hard going.

  The plots, as well, are not entirely straightforward. Tortuous plotting was one of Daviot’s hallmarks, and what makes her mysteries (and plays) so effective. She manages to fit rather a lot of plot into a short space. For example, in ‘Pat’, which is just over 1200 words long, we hear about the cowman, Pat’s uncles, a dispute with Pat’s mother, a visit from one uncle, a trip to a different farm, a week in a new place, his cousin, a discussion of his uncle’s personality, an argument between Pat and his uncle, and the final denouement. That is rather a lot for a very short story, yet Daviot manages to make it flow and keep the reader’s interest. The only thing that does not quite work is perhaps the denouement itself: both in ‘Pat’ and in ‘The Exquis’ the ending doesn’t quite live up to the build-up, or perhaps the moral points they were trying to make are no longer so relevant in the twenty-first century. ‘A Three-Ha’Penny Stamp’ (November 1928) also suffers from this, with the distinction between the Wee Free and the United Free Church no longer being so meaningful, and the idea of raffles being sinful (even if Daviot is making the point that Carninnish is backward) is old-fashioned now. The ‘point’ of the story is lost to the modern reader.

  Characters and places are strongly drawn, from Carninnish (the setting which was re-used in The Man in the Queue) to the French café where the hall is bordered with ‘four minute tables where only a Frenchman would have thought of finding room for them’ (‘The Exquis’, January 1929). In this last, her final story for the Glasgow Herald, Daviot moves the setting away from Scotland for the first time.

  Gordon Daviot was carefully targeting her writing, however. As well as the short stories based in Scotland which she sent to the Glasgow Herald, she was also writing stories on quite different subjects, which she sent out to the English Review. In later life, Gordon Daviot was particularly proud of the English Review stories, mentioning them alongside her biggest success, Richard of Bordeaux, in her Who’s Who entry.

  The English Review ran from 1908 until 1937, and published many leading authors, particularly in its early days, including Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad and Katherine Mansfield. The magazine’s tone was resolutely highbrow, with political and cultural commentary in the editorial and letters pages. Major books were reviewed, and reviews and factual articles appear under the sort of pseudonyms that people find amusing if they have had a classical education. Advertisements were kept to a minimum. The first Gordon Daviot story to appear was ‘His Own Country’, in July 1928, almost a year after Hugh’s death. It doesn’t have a specifically Scottish setting, unlike the short stories in the Glasgow Herald, though the characters’ names do have a Scottish tinge (Willie Rawson or Meikle for example) –
and the place name of ‘Feriton’ is a clear nod to the Ferry district in Inverness. It is a remarkably bitter story, and the first real indication that Beth was not happy in Inverness. ‘His Own Country’ concerns the return of army man Willie Rawson to his home town. A huge success in the wider world, at home he is regarded as something of a joke, by townspeople who are too stupid to understand what he has achieved. It is easy to read into the story something of Gordon Daviot’s own attitude and frustration at returning home to the small town of Inverness after living and working successfully in England – and it is possible also to see her friendship with either – or both – Hugh McIntosh and her First World War officer reflected in the story.

  Both were successful soldiers, and Hugh, in particular, made a return to the family home, like Willie Rawson in this story. It is tempting to see Beth in the woman who defends Willie Rawson, puncturing Anderson of the Furniture Emporium’s speech by retorting, ‘“There isn’t anything Willie Rawson couldn’t do. He would beat you all at your own jobs, if he were interested enough.” Anderson thought it very bad taste on her part not to smile and agree, like everyone else. But she was queer, of course. Or perhaps she thought that she was going to get off with the so-called colonel.’ The attitude of the Feriton people is sharply drawn, and the depiction of the characters and the small town gossip are very true to life: the taxi-man complaining of an over-large tip; the woman who used to do the Rawsons’ washing not wanting to see them get above themselves. They all remember where Rawson came from, they all know that his father was just a dancing teacher, and they are not going to let him forget it. He may have won over strangers, but he’s not going to fool them. Gordon Daviot, daughter of Colin, was no stranger to this sort of jealous attitude.