Josephine Tey

by Jennifer Morag Henderson

  As the correspondence with Lena shows, Gordon Daviot was back in regular contact with her theatre friends, including Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies. In 1950, Josephine Tey published another mystery novel, To Love and Be Wise, which owes rather a lot, not only to her knowledge of theatre and her actress friendships, but also to the Essex villages where people like Gwen, Dodie Smith, Binkie Beaumont and John Gielgud had made their homes. It was country that Josephine Tey had got to know well, and she drew a sly, rather mocking, but ultimately affectionate portrait of this rural retreat from London in To Love and Be Wise, showing an artistic community causing waves in the country.

  The name of the village where Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies was based at Tagley Cottage – currently alone, as Marda was still in South Africa – was Stambourne.7 Dodie Smith’s house was in nearby Finchingfield (theatre manager Binkie Beaumont was still living there as Dodie and her husband Alec continued their extended exile in America), and John Gielgud and other theatrical personages lived close by. Gwen and John owed their homes to their financial success in Gordon Daviot’s Richard of Bordeaux, and the whole area had come to symbolize for them a retreat from London, where they went when they were ‘resting’ between jobs, but still wished to be in contact with the theatre community. Carfuls of their friends had been going out there since the 1930s.

  This southern English county of Essex is very different from the Highlands. The flat, fertile fields, bounded by high hedges, far away from the sea, create a type of landscape that is not found in Scotland. Old thatched village cottages, with thick roofs and white walls and small windows, are still preserved – although they are often now owned by the richer Londoner, because of their position within commuting distance of the city. A village or small town in the Highlands would be nothing like this vision of England. A Highland small community would have houses built to withstand the weather, oriented towards the sea. Farming and fields would be on a far smaller scale, and with less productivity there is more of a feeling of wrestling a living from the land. For a Highlander, the feeling of difference and contrast is huge. Thatched cottages and rurality would not have been so alien to Beth, but the physical contrast of a larger, flatter inland landscape, would still have been there. The policeman Rodgers says as much in To Love and Be Wise, contrasting the inland village with his own upbringing by the sea.

  Beth was at once drawn to the way of life Gwen and her friends lived, and slightly sceptical of it. As a native of the Highlands, and coming from a fairly small town herself, she was used to small town life, and able to see the village both as the villagers did, and as her theatre friends could. Small communities often attract people who have removed themselves from the city to ‘find themselves’ in the country, incomers who appropriate local customs but are never quite totally accepted as they never quite want to become truly local. There are a few scathing remarks in To Love and Be Wise: ‘A once beautiful English village’, Liz says, ‘that is now occupied territory’.8 The matter-of-fact, country born Sergeant Williams sums it all up, saying countryside always looks more appealing to those who weren’t brought up there, and who don’t have to do any actual work in it. Beth enjoyed and understood the country, but was clear that towns were really what appealed to her. She wrote to Gwen, ‘I know in my heart that three-minutes-from-a-station-and-two-minutes-from-a-cinema is my idea of comfort and convenience, and that I would rather spend my days in the country and come back to the comfort and lights of town at night’.9

  Josephine Tey’s portrait of ‘Salcott St Mary’ – and its inhabitants – is thus not entirely flattering. To Love and Be Wise sees the proper return of Alan Grant, who had only had a walk-on part in The Franchise Affair, and it also sees the return of Alan’s friend, the actress Marta Hallard. Marta is given some unflattering personality traits. She’s certainly not described in an idealized way, and the other ‘theatre’ personalities mentioned are equally flawed. In the case of Marta, however negatively she is described, Grant obviously still thinks a lot of her. However, her slight phoniness and tendency to take her acting into her everyday life is alluded to in the same scene, and Grant sums her up by thinking,

  In general knowledge Marta was as deficient as a not very bright child of eleven; her attention automatically slid off anything that was alien to her own immediate interests, and the result was an almost infantine ignorance. He had seen the same thing in hospital nurses and overworked GPs. But put a script in her hands, and from a secret and native store of knowledge she drew the wherewithal to build her characterisation of the author’s creation.10

  It’s a pretty damning assessment of an actress – but, on the other hand, it’s recognizable and has a definite air of truth. Perhaps, given the even-handedness and Grant’s appreciation of Marta’s talent, and obvious affection for her, Beth’s actress friends would have been rather flattered by the portrayal after all. They were certainly a group of friends who encouraged bracing criticism in the pursuit of high art.

  Marta’s name is, of course, recognizably similar to Marda Vanne’s, and there is the usual number of in-jokes with real names and real places throughout To Love and Be Wise. My favourite is the book publishers Ross and Cromarty (the name of an area north of Inverness), and there is also Lee Searle’s address in London (9 Holly Pavement, Hampstead) which almost matches one of Gwen and Marda’s real London addresses (8 Holly Place, Hampstead).11 Marta Hallard dresses dramatically in black and white, in the manner of Dodie Smith, and various comments about upgrading country houses to suit artistes seem rather similar to comments Dodie made in her autobiographies about the real Essex and its artistic inhabitants.12 There are also rather more mentions of Scotland than a non-Scot would be likely to put into a book about the south of England. Lee Searle paints Scottish scenes, including Suilven, as her alibi, while Grant acknowledges a Scottish grandfather from Strathspey. With a background knowledge of Beth’s life – the real village, the friendships with actresses, the interest in art – something is added to the book, but equally it can be enjoyed without any of this knowledge.

  To Love and Be Wise begins by introducing us to an artistic community of writers and theatre people, before bringing in a newcomer to this world, photographer Leslie Searle. Alan Grant encounters Searle by chance through his friendship with actress Marta Hallard. He feels there is something odd about him from their first meeting, but is shocked to be called in to investigate his mysterious disappearance. To Love and Be Wise is a crime novel where you get to focus entirely on the process and go through all the emotions associated with disappearance, murder and discovery, without the horror of violently killing off characters. It is extremely interested in character and place and, as the conclusion of the book shows, how to be grown-up about love and passion. But at the same time as exploring character and motivation in this way, it is a good read: the pacing is perfect and the reader wants to know what happens next. In The Man in the Queue Tey showed from her first chapter cliff-hanger ending that she knew how to keep her readers wanting more. There is a similar chapter one cliff-hanger here, but this is a more sophisticated book than The Man in the Queue. In terms of technical writing, any of the awkwardness of phrasing that was evident in Beth’s early short stories is completely gone; she is now playing with words confidently. To Love and Be Wise does make reference to earlier Inspector Grant adventures like The Man in the Queue, when Grant’s superior talks about Jerry Lamont, but there are none of the authorial asides that we had in Grant’s first book. Tey is happy here to let her characters talk for her: she is now a confident enough writer to let the story flow through them.

  The plot in To Love and Be Wise hinges on what Grant calls ‘transvestism’. In this way, Tey is able to discuss something which was integral to the theatre world she knew. To Love and Be Wise would have been a very different book if, in 1950, Beth had written openly about gay people. Around this time, Dodie Smith showed her American publisher a draft of a novel featuring openly gay characters and was told it had to be revised for publication beca
use it would be considered obscene, while authors such as Dodie’s friend Christopher Isherwood who wrote about gay characters were writing a different kind of literature.13 It would have been almost impossible for a ‘mystery’ novel to include an openly gay character and still be marketed as popular Josephine Tey novels were. Since Marda’s declaration of ‘love’ Beth had been painfully aware of the homosexuality amongst her London friends, and To Love and Be Wise deals with her feelings about this in a measured way. Other hints of knowledge appear in earlier books – Brat and Alec Loding’s first meeting and talk about ‘propositioning’, for example – but there was no way that Beth could write about it openly in 1950.

  Dodie Smith, in her novels, tried to deal with issues surrounding homosexuality, but her then-liberal attitude now comes across as dated. Josephine Tey does something that seems far more modern, in showing that homosexuality is incidental to the characters’ morality; it is not the crime. Grant knows something is ‘off’ about Leslie, and feels uncomfortable around him from the first time he meets him at the publishers’ party, but Grant’s moral judgement is reserved for Leslie’s later crimes, and is tempered with a feeling that Leslie has been rather clever. The character of Serge Ratoff, the fading Russian dancer who is obsessed with playwright Toby Tullis, approaches the idea of a same-sex relationship, but here, too, Josephine Tey has other, overriding concerns: Serge is the only one of the incomers who is fully accepted by the village, partly because he enjoys being part of village life, chatting in the post office and drinking in the bar, but also because he is seen by the villagers as having a ‘childish quality [… they treated him with] the same tolerance that they used to their own “innocents”’.14 Another reason why Serge is able to move between the two groups, the artists and the villagers, is that, as a foreigner, Serge is out of the class system which is accepted throughout the book. Leslie Searle, the other outsider, outrages the playwright Toby Tullis by leaving him in the pub to talk to his ‘friend’ Bill Maddox, the garage owner. Toby is upset because Searle is not acknowledging his fame and status, and is instead spending time with a villager. Class is far more important in Josephine Tey’s depiction of English country life than sexuality and that, ultimately, is how she saw it. It wasn’t their sexuality which set her London friends apart from her life in Inverness, and not even their theatrical backgrounds, it was their class and upbringing. When Beth was with Gwen and Lena, she was a playwright. But in Inverness, Beth was still a fruiterer’s daughter.

  Beth’s Inverness life, and her relationship history, is referenced in To Love and Be Wise in one other way: the book contains a clue to Beth’s relationship with Hugh McIntosh, when Grant quotes some lines of poetry which he attributes to ‘an army friend of mine’. ‘That’s good that is,’ says his colleague. ‘Your army friend knew what he was talking about.’15 The lines are carefully attributed in an acknowledgement at the start of the book. If it wasn’t for these ten small lines of poetry quoted by Josephine Tey, Hugh McIntosh’s work and short life would be completely forgotten.

  In Inverness, Colin MacKintosh was now so frail he needed someone to lean on when he walked.16 He still visited his late wife Josephine’s grave every Sunday afternoon, but he now had to go by taxi. Over the years, Beth had come to dislike these ritual visits, and retained a hatred of putting fresh flowers on graves. There were many meaningful graves in Tomnahurich for her, but she was always the type of person to look forward, rather than dwell on the dead. Sometimes, she waited for Colin in the taxi outside the cemetery, reading the Sunday papers, though, if Colin was ever unable to go, she would take the flowers to Josephine’s grave for him. Colin’s fruiterer shop and landlord business were still a going concern, but he had to rely more and more not only on his daughter to help him, but also on his long-serving shop assistant, Annie Macpherson.17 Although Colin was still comfortably well off, with constant money from rents and investments and no real need to worry about finances, his fruiterer business had never quite regained the standing it had before the war.18 In common with most Scottish women of her class, it is likely that Beth not only knew her father’s exact financial situation, but also that she managed the household accounts, if not all the business accounts as well. Colin, however, probably didn’t know the extent of Beth’s fortune. Father and daughter liked to spend their money on practical things – furniture, clothes, or expensive jewellery – but neither was ostentatious.19 Beth always preferred, for example, a plain, smartly cut suit of expensive material to following the latest fashion. They bought good furnishings for their house, but Beth’s greatest expenditure was probably her holidays and trips to London and to see friends. Beth never wrote solely for money – her aim was not to provide a living for herself and Colin, but to write literature she enjoyed and which helped her to cope with the restrictions of her life in Inverness.

  While the fruiterer business could be left, to a certain extent, to shop assistant Annie, Colin’s landlord interests really needed more attention, and neither of the MacKintoshes seemed to be putting in the time here. The value of the shop buildings, stores and flats on Castle Street had gone up over time, but only because of a general rise in prices. In reality, they were very run down.20 Colin had always maintained his flats to a higher standard than many others in the street, but the problem was the basic structure of the old buildings: they were falling down. By 1949, five of the rooms that Colin rented out were condemned and could no longer be used – he had only four tenants left, as opposed to the nine he had in 1918.21 No new tenants and rents could be found until a serious amount of work was done. The tenants in the remaining flats had remained fairly stable, with the Diack family still occupying the flat they had been in since about 1918. Colin was lenient with demands for rent now that Mrs Diack was a widow, and she was a few months behind.22 In 1950, local cinema owner and film-maker Jimmy Nairn made a short feature called Homes for a Highland Town, where he illustrated the changes in housing in Inverness by contrasting the new family sized, three-bedroom council houses with gardens being built in wide, planned streets in Dalneigh, with the crumbling old tenements of Castle Street.23 In the short silent movie, which was shown alongside newsreels before the main feature in cinemas across Scotland, it’s not possible to identify Colin’s flats or shop, but small children stare out of narrow alleyways in the old town in Inverness as the camera pans slowly up the crumbling brickwork and faded, peeling window frames. This illustration of how Invernessians were encouraged to view the old flats of landlords like Colin, may explain once more why Beth felt antagonistic towards Inverness. As a keen cinemagoer, she would not have found it pleasant, however uninterested she was in the landlord business, to have seen her father’s flats, which he had worked so hard to buy, held up as an example of the opposite of progress and modernity.

  Castle Street was no longer a prospering area. Shops nearby had not changed much in the last few years, with a cycle shop and a confectioner next to Colin’s fruit business, but several shopkeepers were living in the little flats above their shops now, rather than being able to afford big houses in Crown.24 There is a description of a sad little street in Brat Farrar that sounds suspiciously like Castle Street: ‘the row of cheap shops on the opposite side of the road; some of them not much better than shacks. Dingy cafés, a cobblers, a bicycle “depot”, a seller of wreaths and crosses, a rival seller of flowers, a greengrocer’s, and anonymous businesses with windows painted half-way up and odd bills tacked in the window’.25 As Colin became more ill, the worries over the shop and the tenants became Beth’s. She was plainly not interested, and preferred to spend her time with her writing and on holidays, but Colin’s illness now deteriorated to the point where she had to take action. She typed a letter to Moire in early September 1950, saying that she had had to call in the doctor.26 Colin was taken in for treatment at a private nursing home at Rossal, 31 Island Bank Road; a large half-timbered house a little way up from the River Ness. Beth’s letter is quite positive – Colin, she writes ‘asks you to ex
cuse him from writing because “he doesn’t feel like it” – the sober truth being that he is so deep in a work by Ian Hay that he can hardly put it down to eat’. Ian Hay wrote popular novels and Colin, like Beth, was still an avid reader. Beth ends her letter by saying that she ‘is having an unbroken night’s sleep for the first time for eight months. Smasheen.’ Despite the cheerful tone and the last word (an in-joke for anyone familiar with the Invernessian accent), it’s clear that Beth has been finding the task of looking after Colin difficult.27

  Beth wrote again to Moire shortly after, to say that Colin had undergone a successful operation which had left him much more comfortable, though she was still concerned about him – ‘Up to yesterday his normal dictator complex was in full swing, which was a good sign if very hard to bear. Today however he is lethargic and sweet, which is a much less healthy sign.’28 Colin had definitely rallied, but the ups and downs continued. It was a difficult time for Beth, alone in Inverness with sole responsibility for her father.

  Colin died in the nursing home, at quarter to seven in the evening on the 25th September 1950, less than a month after he had first been admitted.29 He was eighty-seven years old. On his death certificate, the cause of death was recorded as hypertrophy of prostate and pulmonary hypostasis. As on every official document, his occupation of ‘Fruiterer’ is carefully noted, but so also is the fact that he was the ‘Widower of Josephine Horne’. Colin had come a long way from the isolated croft at Shieldaig, and through his own hard work had established himself creditably in business and established his family in a substantial house. He had paid for his daughters’ education, and seen two of them happily married, while his eldest daughter had dedicated much of her adult life to caring for him. Colin has sometimes been portrayed as an autocratic, domineering father who forced Beth to stay at home. While he was undoubtedly strict, his upbringing shows why this was: he cared very deeply for his family and wanted the best for them. He was always a fair man, a hard worker who did his best, and who did not always get a just reward for that work. He had missed his wife very much in the decades since her death, and he was finally buried next to her in Tomnahurich cemetery.30 ‘If one had prayed for his life to end in one special way,’ Beth wrote to her school friend and Anstey room-mate Marjorie, ‘one would have prayed for it exactly as it happened’. Despite Beth’s flurry of letters to Moire, it had actually only been three weeks since Colin took a turn for the worse, and he had not suffered too much pain. ‘Moire’, Beth continued, describing Colin at the end, ‘said how extraordinarily good-looking he had become and that was true’.31