This was no more than a battered old suitcase, held together with a frayed leather belt, crammed with the last remnants of his schooldays: reports, exercise books, certificates, holiday snaps, letters from his parents and the like. I was all for pitching in immediately, reading the contents at random in the hope of making some chance discovery. But no. They had to be sorted out carefully, then, and only then, fed to me. One at a time, in the correct order.
First to emerge was a small leaflet, Notes on St Matthias by the Rev. Stephen Archer. A brief paragraph had been marked for special attention:
Nearby a studded doorway, dating from Norman times, leads down to the crypt (not open to the public) containing the tombs of the Amberstone family. The nave is dominated by the rich rococo memorial to Sir Ignatius Amberstone (1789 – 1880), disparaged by Posner but adored by Betjeman. Of particular note is the depiction of the church band, one of his life-long interests, including several instruments which have subsequently passed into obscurity. Sir Ignatius’ ear trumpet, originally held in the right hand, has now been removed to Winchester County Museum.
‘Bassoon, trombone, ophicleide, serpent, hauyboy, comopean,’ Peter was reciting in sing-song fashion. ‘Drilled into us down at the village school, the instruments, I mean. Each one handed down from generation to generation. The Squire’s pride and joy – in the early days, that is, before the deafness set in.’
‘Hence the ear-trumpet?’
‘The genuine article, still there in my day. Until the church was broken into and it got carted off. For safety’s sake, so they said, though no one’s seen it from that day to this. Lucky for us, Jimmy was on hand to fill in the gaps.’
‘I might have known. Go on!’
‘It was sitting in the Squirarchal pew all those years alongside the bull-horn that did for his hearing. He must have left the trumpet at home on the day they appointed a new rector, Tobias Jones, a dyed-in-the-wool socialist. First the Squire knew about it was when he wanted a pathway from Amberstone Hall down to the church, with a special doorway in the east transept where the band led the hymn-singing. Tobias wouldn’t hear of it. Told Ignatius straight: this was God’s House, with one entrance only for rich and poor alike. As for the band, nothing but an organ would do for the worship of the Almighty. And Tobias knew exactly where it should be placed.’
‘Let me guess.’ I made a great show of massaging my scalp, furrowing my eyebrows. ‘Would that have been the East Transept?’
‘Heaven help us.’ Peter brought the forefinger of each hand together in the form of a cross. ‘The girl’s a witch!’ Playing along as we often did in private.
‘Neither Ignatius nor Tobias would give way,’ he continued, ‘and the stalemate continued for years. Then, quite suddenly, the rector died. To Ignatius’ relief, till the will was read, specifying precisely where and how he was to be buried. Nothing elaborate, just a single granite block – must have weighed a ton – let into the wall alongside the pulpit where he’d preached so often. Which just happened to be…’
‘… the East Transept…’
‘… And, humble as he was, Tobias required no more than his name and a single Scriptural text. Worn down completely by the time Jimmy took us there on one of his ‘travels’. John X 1.’
Peter was looking expectantly across at me. ‘Thought that would have been one of the first things they drummed into your head back at the convent.’
He reached down my copy of the Bible, found the right place:
He who does not enter the fold by the door but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber.
‘Convenient,’ I said, ‘the inscription worn away.’
‘O ye of little faith! Well, here’s something I can vouch for personally.’ Peter produced the next piece of archival evidence, one of the brass-rubbings he’d made as a child, traced in shiny black crayons on a large sheet of what I believe is called sugar paper:
*
The Hon. Vernon Amberstone
Eldest son of Sir Desmond and Lady Alice Amberstone
Killed in action, France, January 1941
*
Some Corner of a Foreign Field that is
For Ever England
The outcome of another of Jimmy’s ‘travels’, apparently, referred to by the Rev. Archer on the second page of his leaflet:
The commemorative tablet to Hon. Vernon Amberstone in the south transept was the cause of some controversy, the father, Sir Desmond Amberstone, having commissioned the design from his protégé, a local artist, known for his antipathy to the church. He it was who – against the wishes of the rector, Rev. Theobald Draper – chose the lines from Brooke’s poem, rather than a Biblical quotation. There were those who felt that the ultra-modern lettering, believed to have been created by the artist himself, was out of keeping in such a setting. The family, however, approved, Dame Alice being particularly taken with the text, and the work went ahead.
No matter how he felt about the church, nor what I thought about the man, Jimmy had excelled himself. Gaunt capitals, elongated vowels, trailing word-endings – capturing a mother’s anguish for a lost son to perfection.
‘Not Dame Alice’s choice.’ Peter was re-examining the script. ‘The Rev. Archer, whoever he was, got that part wrong. Given her way it would have been the tag-line from some movie.’
‘For a memorial plaque? You must be joking.’
Peter shook his head. ‘The old girl was crazy about the flicks as we called them. She’d have them delivered to the Hall in enormous tin cans, silent ones mostly. Used to invite us there sometimes at Christmas, to watch Charlie Chaplin or a Laurel and Hardy, with iced buns and ginger beer served during the interval. Quite civilised after Saturday mornings rushing up and down the aisle at the Odeon, standing on our seats screaming at Flash Gordon, hissing at the Ming the Merciless. Anyway she got it into her head that nothing but a quote from her favourite film would do for Vernon’s memorial. The Squire, never the most sensitive of souls, hit the roof; nor would the rector, usually a meek-and-mild character, hear of it. Eventually it took a visit from the Bishop before she changed her mind and Jimmy stepped in with those For Ever England lines.’
‘Makes a change from Browning.’
‘And the very last poem you’d have expected from him. A great one for the apt quotation – something the both of you have in common – but nothing past the Victorian Age. Had us children guessing just what it was the old lady had in mind. Ollie Hardy’s “Another fine mess you’ve got me into” was our best bet, or Bugs Bunny’s “What’s up, doc?’
‘Mae West’s “Come up and see me some time”?’ I suggested, still not quite certain how seriously to take him.
Peter was looking at me admiringly. ‘You, Helen, are wasted in the library,’ was all he said.
‘She died not a few months later, as much from grief as old-age.’ He was searching for another document among the archive. ‘But if it’s the calligraphy rather than punch-lines you’re interested in, here’s something rather more informative. Or thinks that it is!’ He found what he wanted and passed it across.
The Encyclopaedic History of British Art was a compendious volume, its contents arranged in four columns across a hundred or so yellowing pages. Illustrated here and there with the occasional blurred photograph or sepia print and published in weekly episodes within The Daily Guardian, 1962, it provided all the reader might wish to know about the great and the good: Abell, William (1446-70) to Zucchi, Antonio (1728-95). Dog-eared through continual use in A-level revision, but falling open under ‘S’:
Saintley, James (c. 1940s): little factual evidence – not even his real name – is available concerning this multi-talented artist, craftsman and poet, active in the Hampshire village of Bereden in the immediate post-war period. The sobriquet by which he is known derives partly in response to his hermitic mode of existen
ce, partly an ironic comment on his critical attitude to all things religious.
Saintley attempted to marry content to form in a number of ways, encompassing various kinds of painting, pottery, sculpture, wood carving, and was a calligraphist of the first order. Here, he produced his own pigments, going back for inspiration to the illuminated manuscripts of mediaeval Europe and working wherever possible with materials that were immediately to hand. He also drew heavily on local history and folklore, his interpretation of which owed more to the imagination than accuracy. This, together with his eccentricity, a delight in the surprise approach, of shock tactics, often detracted from Saintley’s real merits.
Stylistic influences are William Morris and Eric Gill, although Gillray and Hogarth might also be cited, but most obviously William Blake. Here, the combination of technique and content, freedom of expression, mysticism, disdain for current art forms and anti-clerical attitude are too close to be coincidental. Little of Saintley’s work is extant, and what there is in private hands. Some interest remains concerning both the contents and the fate of his final work, Mappa Mundi, said to epitomise all he found distasteful regarding both religion and authority.
GL
Peter was unimpressed. ‘I’d forgotten how little there was.’ He shrugged dismissively. ‘And how inaccurate. Not surprising the writer can’t bring himself to give his full name. Probably one of Murgo’s pseudonyms!’
‘That’s hardly fair. For all you’ve told me Jimmy could be a figment of the imagination. Or some elaborate hoax.’
‘And most of it rubbish. “Saintley”? I’d never heard him called that in my life – not till the experts took notice. “Limited success”? It was popularity that put paid to the Shakesphere series. He sold the copyright for a pittance then hated the publicity that followed. “Produced his own pigments”? Made a pig’s ear out of them more like. As for “Mappa Mundi” – most likely something “GL” dreamt up to fill out the article.’
‘Slag him off as much as you like,’ I said, ‘at least the man’s prepared to share his ideas. The part about Blake especially – “too close for coincidence”. Anyone can see that – if Fiddlers Three’s anything to go by.’
‘Never in a hundred years.’ Peter laughed but, catching my expression, changed his tone. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to be flippant. Sure, Jimmy recognised Blake’s talent – once it was drawn to his attention. Loved what he was trying to do and the way he was doing it. Detested the poetry, though. Just as he hated the man’s piety. Same applies to Hogarth, Gilray and the rest. He respected their work right enough, once it had been pointed out to him, but I honestly don’t think he paid them much attention once he began the doodling.’
‘Doodling?’
‘That’s what he called it. To begin with. And, for all the Squire’s support, it might well have gone no further. Jimmy would never have been sure enough of himself, given no thought to putting brush to canvas. Might well have remained content just telling us stories, writing those dreadful poems. And it’s a dead certainty he’d never have appeared on that television programme. But for the Quintock factor.’
Chapter Four
Tea Bomb Epiphany
‘It was long before either of us were born that Enid Quintock arrived in the village. A student-teacher in those days, straight from a northern manse having lost her fiancé in the early years of the war. 1914, 1915 it must have been.’
Helen had rooted through her own archive, what there was of it, and produced some photographs together with a few of her old school reports – putting my own to shame – and we were comparing notes.
‘Hard to imagine,’ I said. ‘No more than eighteen, plunged suddenly from a city having all the amenities into a backwoods like ours. Caged, day after day in a one-room remnant of Victorian times with a dragon of a headmistress. Just the two of them, continuously at it, coaching pupils of all ages in the three Rs, with Enid taking the flak for everything that went wrong.’
A stern task-master that first boss, she used to tell us, but workmanlike and efficient. Unlike her successor who simply couldn’t cope. Before long the woman had drifted into a different dimension, or ‘took off with the fairies’ as the villagers put it. At which point Enid had come into her own. It had taken twenty or more years for her to become accepted within the village, but now she was appointed headmistress and set about dragging the establishment from the nineteenth into the twentieth century.
One of her first acts had been to institute a collection of footwear of all shapes and sizes to replace boots sodden during particularly long walks to school and, right from the beginning, the punctiliousness of her register failed to note the absence of certain pupils at strawberry-picking or harvest time. Before long the fume-belching ‘tortoise’ stove was ousted from the central hall, she’d bullied the authorities into replacing the outside toilets with main drainage, taken personal oversight of regular medical inspections (red cards signalling the presence of nits, green ones the ‘all clear’) and, as Bereden increased in size, saw to it that separate classrooms were erected and new teachers appointed. Which was how matters stood in the mid-forties when I became one of her pupils.
Jimmy’s arrival in the village preceded my own by a few years only and it was not for some time that I got to know him, apart from reputation that is. Miss Quintock was aware of all such encounters, but as far as I knew they’d never met. Little, however, slipped our teacher’s attention so that his assistance with our homework came as no surprise. ‘Consultation’ he liked to call it and, to be fair, he never actually supplied answers to the problems we’d been set, merely pointed us in the right direction through a series of questions and manipulating the responses we gave.
‘An excuse for making it up as you go along if you ask me.’ Helen could not restrain herself. ‘We had one of those once; not bothering to do her own homework, let alone set anything for us to get our teeth into. Far easier to get us to look it up or write ‘project work’ in her lesson plans and leave it at that.’
The basis of most MA or PhD research, I might have said – it was an issue we’d crossed swords over on a number of occasions – but made no comment. Truth of the matter was that Jimmy’s interventions were not always that helpful. No doubt about his competence in art or composition, but his grasp of mathematics and science was sorely inadequate, whilst the slant he gave to subjects such as history and the Scriptures was invariably at odds with those supplied by our teachers. ‘Tell that woodland friend of yours that Jane Seymour was the third, not the fifth of Henry’s wives,’ Miss Quintock wrote in our exercise books, or ‘an extra two marks, compliments HoB (the Hermit of Bereden)’, if pleased with the result. To which Jimmy would respond with an appropriate yet respectful message for ‘her up at the school’. Nor was our teacher unaware of Jimmy’s prowess as a story-teller, constantly encouraging him to come and visit us for such purposes – invitations that he always refused.
The breakthrough came whilst visiting Jimmy one afternoon shortly after the beginning of the autumn term. His home, universally known as Third Class Cottage, stood on Squire Amberstone’s land, leased out to him – so it was said – for peppercorn rent, and was reached down a pathway leading into the forest. Or what we called ‘forest’; it was no more than woodland really. Nor was the name of Jimmy’s residence anything to do with the quality of the building or its state of repair. It was, in fact, two railway carriages placed side by side, most of the internal divisions removed, topped over with a corrugated iron roof that creaked noisily in any strong gust of wind. It stood some distance from the railway station and no one could remember just how or why the carriages had been brought there.
‘Wonder that any rolling stock survived along that line if half of Jimmy’s stories concerning disasters and derailments were to be believed.’ I reached across for something to write on, found one of the ‘student-centred’ dissertations I’d been marking, and sketched
out a ground plan on the back cover.
The interior consisted chiefly of a single room with a mahogany roll-top desk on which rested his ancient Smith-Corona typewriter, a matching bookcase placed to one side of it and a low divan-type bed at the other. On the wall above hung a single, neatly framed picture depicting what appeared to be seventeenth-century noblemen setting out for war. Between desk and bookcase stood a stripped pine table with drawers for cutlery, alongside which was a cupboard where Jimmy kept his provisions. There were two doors at the back of the room: one, painted yellow, which led into a small, very basic kitchen, with a primitive stove and porcelain sink; the other, coloured blue, behind which was an even more basic earth closet. The modern open coal fire, from which the interior received its warmth, was a more recent concession to comfort, as was a commodious radio, perpetually tuned to the Third Programme and a cuckoo clock that never succeeded in announcing the correct time. Windows were set into the walls on all sides, most of them later additions but two, dating from the early days of steam locomotion, announced this to be a Third Class carriage – hence the cottage’s name.
Here we – ‘Chunky’ Richards, Tim McPhail, Charlie Dowse, Andrew Boydell and myself – would retreat on an evening as summer drew to an end. Harsh white gaslight hissed continuously from gauze mantles set into the ceiling, a softer glow from oil lamps illuminating the darker recesses of the room. Logs we’d help drag in some five weeks earlier burnt in the fireplace as, huddled round it, we’d toast chunks of bread on sharpened sticks, sipping tea – sweet, dark and very hot – from chipped mugs. Rationing had not yet come to an end; commodities we now take for granted were in short supply, so each of us was expected to make some contribution to the feast. This might be bread, apples or margarine, but usually it consisted of a spoonful of sugar purloined from pantry or kitchen, mixed together with a small quantity of tea and if possible an equal amount of condensed milk, all screwed within a scrap of newspaper. Should any of us be unable to supply the required ingredients Jimmy would make up the deficit, adding the defaulter’s name to a ledger kept pinned on one of the walls – the first and most practical of our introductions to the world of accountancy. I don’t ever remember such debts being called in but, as I say, rumour had it that – whatever the reason – Sir Desmond made certain Jimmy did not go short. On arrival, these ‘tea bombs’ were tossed in a pan of boiling water, twenty minutes or so later the sodden mass of yesterday’s bylines and editorials being swept from the surface and deposited on Jimmy’s compost heap. What remained was a rich mahogany-coloured brew.
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