UTTERSUPERBLUNK!
PICTURE SIXTEEN: THE KING DECORATES SWEENY GOG THE DEMON BARBER OF SECRET STREET IN FRONT OF THE CHANGING OF THE PALACE AND BUCKINGHAM GUARD.
KING: We’ve run out of medals for you, Sweeny Gog, but we haven’t run out of instalments! I’ll have to invent a new one by next week. The Georgia Garter and Bar!
SWEENY GOG: Thanks, your majesty. (THINKS) What a spiffing new attachment to my demoniac electric barber’s chair!
AND SO . . .
DON’T MISS THE NEXT NUMBER OF SWEENY GOG VERSUS COUNT MAGNUS! SEE THE GASPING GARROTE OF THE GEORGIA GARTER ON PETAL VON PIPPIN, THE NUBILE ARYAN MAIDEN WEARING WHAT NATURE DISTENDED! PALPITATE WITH FEAR AS SWEENY GOG SEEKS YET AGAIN TO SAVE DEAR OLD ENGLAND FROM THE WICKED WILES OF ADOLPH’S APPARITIONS! TREMBLE WITH TERROR AS COUNT MAGNUS FLIES IN AGAIN WITH THE V-I’s ON HIS CADAVEROUS COFFIN! YOU CAN’T AFFORD TO MISS OUR NEXT SURE-DUPER, WHIZZ-FIRE, SUPER-BANG ISSUE!
A shadow falls across the comic in Gog’s hand and he lets the sheets of paper blow away in the wind as he blinks up at the shape of a Military Policeman standing between him and the sun. First the unconscious one in Edinburgh at the start of the journey, then the American one in the bar at Exeter, now a third M.P. They seem to be after Gog as remorselessly as Maire.
“Sleeping?” the M.P. asks.
“I was reading,” Gog says.
“What?”
As Gog looks round for the comic pages that blew away in the gust of wind, he finds them vanished out of sight, so that their lurid pictures remain only in his memory.
“It’s blown away,” Gog says.
“Your book?”
“My comic.”
“A grown man reading a comic?” the M.P. says. “Rather childish.”
“You’ve no right to question me,” Gog says.
“You’re sitting on army property,” the M.P. says. “Where’s your I.D. card?”
Gog rises and stands at the level of the tall M.P. whose face remains shadowed by the peak of his cap. “I.D.? What’s that?”
“Identity card. It’s wartime regulations. You have to carry one, as you know.”
“I haven’t got much of an identity these days,” Gog says. “Not much more than you could write down in a card. Or a horror comic.”
“Could I see your I.D. card?” the M.P. insists.
“No,” Gog answers. “You’ve no authority.”
“While you as civilian personnel are on Army property . . .”
Gog takes two steps onto the tarmac of the roadway and smiles at the Military Policeman.
“This is the public highway,” he says. “You can’t make me now.”
“Don’t be difficult,” the M.P. says. “When were you demobbed? You could be A.W.O.L. Where’s your discharge papers?”
Gog looks at the high prison walls in front of him that no longer seem a comic strip but a vicious circle closed about all life within them. And he turns away and begins to walk back up the road.
“Better come quietly with me,” the M.P. says at Gog’s back, grasping him by the arm. But Gog shakes off the other’s grip and finds himself taking the evading action once taught him by the class war of Old England.
“Take your paws off me, my man,” Gog says in his most clipped and gentlemanly tone. “If you don’t, you’ll be in trouble. My wife’s the local Justice of the Peace.” Who knows if Maire is not a J.P. in one of her many guises?
The assurance in the M.P.’s behaviour and voice cracks a little. “I’m sorry, sir,” he begins. Then he rallies. “But it’s my duty. If you wouldn’t mind coming along to be identified by the civilian police.”
“I would mind.”
“Not having seen you before, sir, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind staying five minutes in the police mess while I go round to the station . . .”
“If you arrest me, my dear fellow,” Gog says with the light menace of those sure of their place in the county, “you’ll have to charge me. What is the charge?”
“Acting suspiciously in the vicinity of His Majesty’s Detention Barracks . . .”
“Reading a comic is acting suspiciously?”
“There wasn’t a comic, sir. And what would a gentleman like you . . .”
“I can do as I please,” Gog says curtly. “According to you, I was asleep. Is that a crime?”
“There’s no harm in sleeping,” the M.P. says. “But if you do it in the wrong place or the wrong bed, there can be trouble.”
The M.P. takes courage from his insinuation and walks in front of Gog to bar his way. The light shines on his face and for the first time Gog can see his small head, set like a pumpkin on a pole, incongruous with saffron cheeks above his height.
“If you arrest me,” Gog says, “I’ll sue you in the civil courts. That mightn’t affect you much. But I’ll also see your commanding officer, my man. He’s Colonel . . . ?”
The M.P. is too wily to be caught by such a simple trick. “He’s Colonel who?” he replies. “You answer.”
“My wife will know him,” Gog says. “She likes army cops. Then you’ll bounce, my man. A head will surely roll, and I think it will be yours.”
The M.P. is no longer sure of himself. He stares at Gog with large, baby-blue eyes, then takes a half-step to one side.
“Who are you, sir?” he asks. “It would make my job easier . . .”
“I?” Gog says. “I’m an eccentric local squire. Can’t you tell by my accent?”
“Your clothes, sir, don’t seem quite . . . and you haven’t shaved . . .”
“I said I was eccentric,” Gog says. “I’ve taken a vow not to change or shave till the end of the war in Japan.”
He feels the long stubble on his cheeks and chin and strokes the forgotten bristles as if he was indeed fingering his beard of wisdom, which has taught him how to use the rotten caste system of England to extricate himself from the still more rotten intrusions of wartime.
“I’d still feel happier, sir,” the M.P. insists softly, “if you’d come with me . . .”
“And I’d feel happier finishing my stroll on my own,” Gog says. “Will you let me pass?”
He takes a step forwards and is relieved that the M.P. steps aside. He does not feel like fighting yet again the strong arm of the law, since his shoulder is still badly bruised from the truncheon of the Military Policeman of Exeter.
“I’ll let you go on your way,” the M.P. says. “I’ll take you at your word.”
“The word of a gentleman,” Gog says firmly, “has to be taken, doesn’t it? And gentlemen can be eccentric, can’t they? It’s the polite way of saying they’re lunatic. And it means they don’t have to be locked up for their follies like ordinary people. Good-day, my man.”
He strides away up the road with the soft voice of the M.P. speeding him on his way. “All the same, sir, I would advise you not to hang around the Detention Barracks again. Or we might make a mistake, even though you’re a local gentleman, and put you inside.”
Gog increases his pace to something approaching a trot, thankful to make so easy an escape. If he had not retained something of the arrogance of the gentleman so that he could play the part with ease, what then? He glances back to see the Military Policeman running towards a jeep, obviously hell-bent on sending the civilian police after him. So, once he is round the bend and onto the main road, Gog begins a lumbering clop away from Shepton Mallet past a redbrick hog factory with green windowsills, the inbuilt career of the pig from grass into blood, with a railway right by to bring home the bacon.
Go right by the tracks down a side-street towards the south. Walk until the sign of the hanged man outside the pub at Can-nard’s Grave. Look up at the corpse of the innkeeper turned sheepstealer, as he hangs from the black gibbet above his open grave, with ten of his white woolly victims making a frieze of pallbearers above and below. And run, run out of town from the gruesome pub sign, run Gog without identity, run from the policemen just as Gog Turpin once ran from the law in York.
At the ou
tskirts of Shepton Mallet, veering south-east into the Mendip hills, Gog reaches the last refuge of the old ways, a thatched cottage with a thatcher on its roof. The thatcher whistles The Foggy Foggy Dew as he packs in osiers under a wire hairnet pegged over the eaves and shears away unnecessary ends. He has curly black hair and a crimson nose, and he warbles as merrily as the sparrows that try to make more holes in the thatch for their nests the moment he has filled in all the old holes. “Hey, thatcher,” Gog calls up, “the cops want to put me back in the army. Tell them I went the other way.” The thatcher grins. “Right you are,” he shouts. “Good luck on the road.” And he continues to plait and clip and trill on his perch, as ready to misguide inquirers as any swallow’s flight misguides diviners seeking signs of rain.
The tower on the top of Glastonbury Tor, which Maire called the tomb of Saint Gog, mocks the fleeing Gog as he takes the ancient lead route towards the old ridgeways across the high chalk downs ahead. Gog can almost see the small dark men with their ponies carrying baskets full of ore, as they trudge along the way over Maes Down towards the rivers that can float the metal down to the sea and onto Gaul. Yet to them, the far Tor swelling like a green breast from the flatlands must have been a marker on their way rather than an echo of Maire’s derisive voice reminding her husband that the price of his wanderings is the willingness of society to feed and clothe him on his solitary way. From hilltop after hilltop, the tomb remains as distinct as the sight of a rifle pointing due west down the vale from Gog’s position.
Gog walks slowly all the afternoon under the alternating dark and bright patches of day. The separate clouds that spot the blue sky are lopped off underneath by some dark blade of wind that leaves their topsides white as washed lambswool and shears their bases greasy-dark and even as a stretched fleece. His strolling progress gives Gog time to look at the little things by the wayside, the flowers that pullulate at the foot of the hedgerows. There is hogweed or fool’s parsley tall as Gog’s shoulder and powdered with white on its skeletal rayed stalks; there are the violet shaved tongues of meadow cranesbill, the green spiky froth of ragless mayweed, cuckoo-spit hanging in gobs from thistles; there is bittersweet with its fool’s petals round its pointed cap, poison warning in the yellow peak darting from the nightshade’s purple hood; there are ox-eyed daisies with yolks big as hens’ eggs between beaten white splashes, and the red filaments of sorrel that taste acrid in the mouth. One by one, Gog picks the hedgeflowers, while their names and properties spring unbidden to his mind, as if mere sight and feel of each conjures up old botany lessons and wildflower rambles in the distant past. Yes, once there had been another quest, the never-ending search after British flora, so boy Gog could paint in the white spaces between the outlines of each specimen in the holy writ of Bentham and Hooker. Gog is happy to find little details creep back into his skull as well as the immense obsessions of his past. “Eggs and Bacon,” he finds himself murmuring as he cups the bright yellow flowers of birdsfoot trefoil, and the homely name on his tongue makes him smile at the hope of recovering an ordinary way of thought and the interest in small things that is so much of the love of life.
Another tower set among woods on a rise ahead greets Gog as he pants up to the crest of Seat Hill. He pauses to consult his map and finds that the new marker is called Alfred’s Tower. Its appearance seems almost too apposite. For, as Gog turns towards the West, he realizes that the crest of Seat Hill will finally cut him off from the sight of the tower that crowns Glastonbury and Arthur’s Isle of Avalon. Yet, as Gog looks back, the miracle that sent him from Glastonbury seems repeated in his last view of the holy place. The clouds have interwoven to spread their dirty cloth over the whole sky, turning the meadows into drab olive and the stubble into dirty mustard. Yet over the Tor, the sun is sending down a few dark spokes of light through the rents in the cumulus. Rungs of rays connecting earth and heaven climb from the distant tomb of Saint Gog to the base of the clouds, like that Jacob’s Ladder held by the stone angels flying in squadron over the entrance of the Jacobean Church which Gog has just passed in the village of Batscombe.
The far Tor is too distant for Gog to see whether men are climbing the ladder of light to God above. Only faith would name this effect of afternoon sun through cloud a miracle, and Gog wishes to have no faith despite a miracle. Yet there it is. And something stirs in Gog’s soul, a reverence for nature and for whatever stages its seasons and its tricks. Gog chokes on a gulp of awe and closes his eyes to clear his throat. Behind his lids, he sees his son’s face or his own kneeling at a red altarcloth. Saliva flows back into his mouth as sweet as communion wine.
He opens his eyes again to find the dark spokes of light moved on from Glastonbury Tor into the flatlands. He feels a grimness drag down the muscles on the corner of his mouth. He begins to curse at the priests, who taught him long ago and who can still make him see their Catholic visions, however far he journeys from them down his own road. “Christ!” he shouts, “Christ, Christ, Christ! Can’t you leave a man alone!” And there is no answer from the indifferent grey of the sky, only the nagging voice of Maire inside his ear, “You will think yourself a saint en route, naturally.”
XXIV
“Roughing it,” Merry says. “We’re just roughing it.”
Gog sits under the high pinnacle of Alfred’s Tower, taller than a tall story, longer than the long arm of coincidence which makes Gog fall upon his mother again. The brick triangle of the building climbs perpendicular between its three corner columns, crowned with skiey and absurd battlements. In the shadow of this Victorian delirium which outdoes in madness any rich man’s folly and builds a memorial to look like an ornamental chimney, Merry is sprawling on a chaise-longue that squats insanely on its four wooden beasts’ paws scratching at the grass. The couch has four gilt griffons’ heads which snarl from each corner of its up-curving ends, and its cover is of damson silk threaded with gold. Merry reclines in a limp lump, dressed in a gown of claret velvet. At the far end of the chaise-longue, a toad of a man sits, squat and low-lidded, his cheeks pocked with scars, his skin rough with tweed.
“Otto, this is my son, George,” Merry says. “He’s dropped in by chance to take pot-luck with us. He’s on safari across England. Gog, this is Otto. For a man with a kraut mother, he’s almost a Britisher. Or else he’d be in detention camp under 14B.”
“I am a Britisher,” Otto says in an exquisite Oxford accent, more English than the English. “How’s hunting, Gog? I can see you’re very sophisticated. You don’t even carry a gun. You like to give the game a sporting chance. And it’s more fun, I admit, to kill with one’s bare hands – if you can catch things.”
“I’m a bit slow,” Gog says. “So I’m starving.”
Otto claps his palms together. From behind the tower, two aged footmen appear, wearing dun liveries, threadbare and patched, but with silver buttons shining. Between them they carry a hamper. A third old footman follows behind, bearing a Chippendale table, while a creaking butler brings up the tail of the procession, solemn in tail-coat and white-wing collar, too frail to support the weight of a damask tablecloth. “I’m sorry the servants look like an old folks’ home,” Otto says. “But the army’s left us with only the ancient monuments, third class.”
The table is spread with the cloth and a feast is set out in front of Otto and Merry and Gog. There are the luxuries that are beyond price and out of the range of coupons. Partridge and grouse, hare and venison; quail’s eggs and asparagus, pâté de foie gras from a pre-war tin; burgundy from the year of the Armistice, hock from the vintage of the General Strike, port only as old as Guernica. Gog eats and drinks himself sick and silly, while his mother apologizes, “I’m so sorry. You shouldn’t have dropped in to see us on the one evening we decided to camp out and picnic.”
“Déjeuner sur l’herbe,” Otto yawns over his brandy, which dates from the Kaiser if not Napoleon. “Take all your clothes off, Merry my dear, and the illusion would be complete.”
“I would with pl
easure,” Merry says, “on such a clement evening. But really, a son can see too much of his own mother. At least, Gog thinks so. He hardly ever comes to see me.”
“I’m right here,” Gog says, “by some sort of accident. It’s like a dream. To be gorged when I thought I was starving. I’m sure I’ll wake in a moment and find only a mouthful of straw.”
“To return to the most serious of subjects,” Otto says, “your hunting. I can see you’re covered with burrs and dried grass. I presume you disguise yourself as a heap of manure, until a rabbit tries to dig a burrow in you. Then you strangle it. Very original.”
Gog finds the offensive banter of Otto revive in him the role of the gentleman so effective against the Military Policeman.
“No,” he replies, “I disguise myself as a ditch. And when a hunter comes by, I break his ankle.”
“Can a son of yours be against blood sports, Merry?” Otto says. “It’s like Nero turning Christian and feeding himself to the lions.”
“Gog’s against everything,” Merry says, patting her son fondly on the head. “Everything except his mother.”
“You eat grass then,” Otto says, “when you aren’t being polite and wolfing down our poor meaty fare?”
“I agree,” Gog says, “I’m not consistent. I’m not even consistent enough to be against everything. I like eating meat and I hate killing it. It’s a natural end-of-the-war reaction. I mean, murder may soon become a crime again, and mass murder be considered rather bad form.”
“The size of the bag,” Otto says, “shows the talent of the shot . . .”
“I should warn you, Gog,” Merry interrupts, “there’s hardly a country on earth that Otto hasn’t hunted in. He’s declared a sort of permanent world war against animals, and he’s winning it. Hippo in Rio, wildebeeste in Vancouver, penguin in Sierra Leone, I simply can’t count the corpses.”
“Your geography, my dear,” Otto says, “does credit to your sense of romance. It’s true, my friend, that I have pursued the rarest of beasts over the more lonely parts of the globe. Panda, oryx, white rhinoceros, I’ve shot them all. It has been most informative, as well as damn good fun. Do you know, the Himalayan bear, when potted, makes the noise of a weeping child? Unbearable – excuse the pun – if you didn’t know what the noise came from.”
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