a gallimaufry

Broomsticks over Flaxborough, by Colin Watson

I was reading one of Calmgrove’s reliably excellent posts, this one on Walpurgisnacht, when FictionFan quoted in the comments the opening line of Broomsticks over Flaxborough, by Colin Watson:

Naked as on the day she was born, save for a double-looped string of amber beads and a pair of harlequin-framed spectacles, Mrs Flora Pentatuke, of 33 Partney Avenue, Flaxborough, leaped nimbly over the embers of the fire.

How could I resist? Moreover, a novel that combined witchcraft with detection? It is still (expensively) in print with Faber Finds, but second-hand copies are available and naturally I paid extra for one with a pretty cover because I am a Fool.

Shortly after Mrs Flora Pentatuke skips over the fire on Walpurgisnacht, at ‘the quarterly “Revel” of the Flaxborough, Chalmsbury and Brocklestone Folklore Society’, the car of one of its members is found abandoned in a wood. Where is Edna Hillyard? And then the parish church is desecrated. While the manufacturers of Lucillite washing-powder direct a marketing campaign at Flaxborough, the police wrestle with the possibility that the town has been gripped by Satanism. Is this merely an outlet for the bored occupants of suburbia? Or is something more sinister going on (perhaps even a covert Russian plan to subvert the Christian world)? Soon a corpse has turned up, dead animals are being nailed to people’s doors and Miss Lucilla Teatime of the Edith Cavell Psychical Research Foundation has been called in...

‘You cannot put handcuffs on Satan, my friend.’

Watson has a great comic touch (yes yes, a tad sexist but this is 1972) and a sharp eye for the telling detail, while the mystery of Edna Hillyard’s disappearance is enjoyable too. As well as Miss Teatime and Mrs Pentatuke, we meet Inspector Purbright, so laid back he is practically horizontal; his chief constable, Chubb, who cannot believe that members of the Conservative Club could be anything other than pillars of virtue; bloodthirsty Sister Gooding, baker of dread biscuits and owner of the vicious black dog ‘Meffie’; pedantic Warlock Parkin; Mrs Gloss OBE, chatelaine of Aleister Lodge; and Mrs Framlington, the whimsical vegetarian Coven chairman who worries about the effects of black magic on the carpet.

The world Watson creates is an ersatz world, a fallen world, stuffed with cheap imitations and petty strifes. People hide their televisions in ‘Jacobean’ sideboards. They eat KreemiKrunch Kookies, ‘a country-style combination of dehydrated milk solids, soya rusk, sodium monostearate and saccharin’, and wear ‘dinky nylon nightie[s]’. The advertising campaign is of course fake and manipulative. The coven is a painful modern approximation of Satanism, compelled to make do with black polythene, novelty mugs and home-made ‘pumpkin champagne laced with rum’ for their orgies. Good manners disguise hostility:

Pook brought out this piece of reasoning with the air of having forced some wily miscreant into a corner.
Mrs Gloss made no comment. She poured more coffee for Miss Parkin, refilled her own cup, and moved the remaining biscuits to the side of the table farthest from Detective-Constable Pook.

The novel seems redolent to me of those 1970s sitcoms, presided over by Penelope Keith. I see that there is a whole series of Flaxborough Chronicles, concerning the exploits of Inspector Purbright, and now I am wholeheartedly looking forward to reading them all.

(The photograph of Colin Watson is from the Curtis Brown website.)

The Sword in the Stone, by T.H. White

I’ve had a copy of The Once and Future King hanging around for several years now, and every time I see it I think, ‘I really want to read that!’ and then I don’t. And I feel a little guilty because when I finally picked it up it wasn’t really to read it in its own right, as it were. As I may have mentioned, the third and last Sylvia Townsend Warner reading week is coming up. Since STW was accomplished at so many forms of literature, I’ve always tried to include a variety in my reading for this; she wrote a biography of T.H. White which I thought would be nice to write about for this year.

Alas, second-hand copies including delivery to Belgium are now so expensive that I have changed my mind. The very least I could do to make it up to T.H. seemed to write a post about this, his most famous book in his Arthurian quartet.

The Sword in the Stone is about the boyhood of King Arthur; specifically, his education. The boy Wart has been fostered by Sir Ector and brought up alongside Sir Ector’s biological son, Kay, in the Castle of the Forest Sauvage. Lost in the forest one day, Wart stumbles across Merlin’s cottage and Merlin decides to become his tutor. Naturally the lessons Merlin teaches are not the tedious grammar ones to which Wart has been accustomed up until now. He is transformed into different animals and birds and in one of my favourite episodes he and Kay meet Robin Hood and rescue Friar Tuck and the Dog Boy from Morgan le Fay’s fortress, CastleChariot. Finally, on a trip to a jousting tournament in London, Wart draws out a sword from an anvil because Kay needs it. This sword is the magic one which proves he must be the next king of England.

(John Lawrence, illustration for the Folio Society edition of The Once and Future King, 2013)

I will quote the description of Morgan Le Fay’s castle here because I love it so much:

It was a castle made entirely out of food, except that on the highest tower of all, a carrion crow was sitting, with an arrow in its beak. [...] It rose from its lake of milk in a mystic light of its own – in a greasy, buttery glow. It was the fairy aspect of Castle Chariot, which the Oldest Ones [...] had thought would be tempting to the children [Wart and Kay]. It was to tempt them to eat. [...] They plodded over the filthy drawbridge – a butter one, with cow hairs still in it – sinking to their ankles. [..] In the end they came to the inner chamber, where Morgan le Fay herself lay stretched upon her bed of glorious lard.

People sometimes talk about ‘comfort books’, and this is a comfort book. A ‘bed of glorious lard’! It is a comforting book to read, because it is amusing, it is about childhood, it is grounded in a wonderful natural world and it allows wish-fulfilment. Like Narnia, the world of the Castle of the Forest Sauvage is a place we long to visit. It is a self-consciously ‘hyperreal’ version of the Middle Ages, with proper snowy winters and old oak trees and feasts and jousting, all the Middle Ages one could wish for. Society is ordered and dangers are successfully overcome. And it is funny. However, it was also a comforting book for White to write. According to Kevin Crossley Holland, in the foreword to my edition, White had a miserable childhood and for the rest of his life used education as a means of comforting himself. So in this novel Wart learns what it is like to live in an ant society and a goose society; when to fear a pike; what falcons discuss at night. And we learn how to shoot a bow and joust a knight on horseback and hunt a wild boar – but like Wart, we have fun while we learn.

White writes in a dry, amusing tone and there are great comic moments in this novel. He also has a lot of fun with the concept of historical fiction, throwing anachronisms around gleefully to underline the fantastical nature of the book. Look, he seems to be telling us, it’s just a story, let’s enjoy ourselves! And we do.

(Photograph of T.H. White, found here)