We are subject to shadows

Harry Hotspur with his wife, Elizabeth Mortimer















We are subject to shadows. It has always been so.

Henry IV deposed a king. A fairly useless king who’s sole claim to fame was to introduce the handkerchief to England. Before then real men had wiped their noses on mailed sleeves. Henry IV was made of sterner stuff, but he had set a precedent. Richard II may have been a lying arrogant twerp but he was king, anointed by God and son-in-law to the King of France. To make things worse, their grandfather, Edward III, had been unusually fecund, taking a second wife in his dotage. In consequence a large tranche of the English aristocracy had some claim to the throne. Henry IV had kicked and shattered Pandora’s Box, and when Owain Glyndwr sparked a Welsh rebellion against English rule, pride and ambition threatened to tear the island apart.

In 1402 Sir Edmund Mortimer was captured by Glyndwr but Henry IV refused to ransom him. Why should he when, as yet another descendent of Edward III, Mortimer could also stake a claim to the English throne?

Understandably niggled, Mortimer negotiated an alliance with the Welsh and married Owain Glyndwr’s daughter. He acted quickly and called in favours - in particular from his powerful brother-in-law Henry Percy (Hotspur) who ruled most of Northern England as Earl of Northumberland.

Owain Glyndwr acted almost as quickly. Envoys were sent to the King of France, who, like Brussels today, saw nothing but advantage in a weak and divided Britain. An agreement was arrived at.

Under the Tripartite Indenture, Glyndwr would rule an enlarged Wales, one that would extend as far as the rivers Severn and Mersey including most of Cheshire, Shropshire and Herefordshire. Mortimer would take all of southern and western England and Percy would take the North. French forces landed in Wales and the Isle of Wight. They devastated the coast of Devon and with Scottish privateers raided the English and Welsh coastline wherever vulnerable.

In history much is determined by accident and holding one’s nerve. At the battle of Shrewsbury Hotspur raised his visor in order to breathe and was immediately killed by an arrow to the mouth.

Henry IV was said to have wept, though I don’t see why. However when rumours later circulated that Hotspur still lived, Henry had him exhumed, his body salted and quartered and circulated around the kingdom. Just to hammer home the point, Hotspur’s rotting head was stuck on a pole in York.

England remained undivided, and with the death of Mortimer and the demise of Owain Glyndwr and Wales absorbed.

The story is a case of what might have been and testimony to the power of ambition and deals made in darkness. I imagine the average peasant, craftsman or merchant had little idea of the issues, of what had been agreed and why – much like today. Only today bankers, politicians and bureaucrats are unlikely to be salted and quartered should they get things wrong.

















Ambitious warlords put their neck on the line but behind the heraldry a peasant whose crops were seized or destroyed would have little idea why. It is much the same today though the warlords have been replaced by global financial powers, bureaucrats and politicians.

If it ain’t broke don’t fix it: A golden rule and a test of the probity of those who think otherwise. Whose interests are served by the break up of the UK, a small, already over-governed island?

The only real beneficiaries of devolution are politicians seeking more troughs. And behind them a Commission in Brussels that would like to see Britain the political equivalent to Lichtenstein or Italy before unification. But devolution didn’t carry the process far enough.

What other reason was there in John Prescott’s attempt to create another layer of government in the form of Regional Assemblies. The 2004 attempt mercifully failed when a referendum that was allowed saw a 78% majority against the idea. But don’t believe the impetus has gone.

With Wales seeking more power for itself, and in Scotland a smug grinning toad waiting his chance, you have to question the wisdom of those siren whispers calling for an English Assembly. Who gains from diluting power into the hands of even more politicians? And is democracy enhanced if we’re allowed to choose the design of a new postage stamp, the winners of Big Brother, or the X Factor, whilst more power is taken up by a European Commission that no one elects?

We are subject to shadows.

Merry Christmas, and thank you

It was Maria Zannini who cajoled me into writing a blog. I thought she was mad. What to write about, and why? But she has good instincts and all these years later I'm still scribbling. And grateful. It's helped, maybe, in developing a 'voice', and, as important, created the discipline of routine. Then there're the friends I've made, along with old students who have suddenly discovered the alternative Mike Keyton

Only now the juices are drying as Christmas overwhelms in all its joy and various commitments. Not forgetting drink. So it's goodbye from me until the New Year, when the burbling will begin afresh.

Merry Christmas and thank you, Maria, and Merry Christmas to everyone misguided and/or generous enough to follow me:

Jason Hanrahan, Henry Lara, LD Masters, Sam Waters, R, Mac Wheeler, Stephen Tremps, Angela Brown, Jackie Burris, DRC, Adam M Smith, Joy Ann Ball, Misha Gericke, Laura Riley, Malin Larsson, Sue Gagg, Mark Ward, Nikki, Claudia, Vero, Susie Q, Shirley Wells, L J, Carlos, Renee, Seattle Friend, Gwen, Regan - or is that Sue - Diane, Terri, Kerri, Angela Brown, Brian Wilkinson, Marguerite Butler, Andy Bruce

Plonkers

Wonderful picture from the New York Times. But oh for an Heironymus Bosch to do it full justice.

Black pudding in Aberdeen

Black pudding is a visual feast. It glistens and crumbles on the fork. A single mouthful justifies the millions of years that have led to perfectly formed mouths and taste buds.

The one served at the Ardoe house hotel sat on the plate between the bacon, sausage and fried egg. It looked inoffensive. I savoured the moment before cutting into it and raising it to my lips.

It was like chewing pulped cardboard with the faintest aftertaste of manure. Must be some mistake. Nothing can go wrong with black pudding: a savoury mix of barley, pig fat and blood. I left it for a bit and attacked the egg; went back to the black pudding. Dry. Definitely something wrong. Manufactured slurry. A normal person would have left it. The world is full of black puddings.

I tried again, caught by obsession, a history of childhood rationing and just plain stupidity, until the damn thing was gone.

What was I doing at Ardoe House glooming over black pudding?
















We had gone to Aberdeen for our son’s graduation and arrived at Jury’s Inn hotel just after midnight. This was after a ten hour journey by train which involved a 90 minute wait for our final connection on a freezing Edinburgh station. Arctic winds screamed through flesh and bone and precipitated hallucinations. How else could I explain the vision of a man with a Desperate Dan chin, clad only in red T shirt and knee length shorts? He stood arms folded, oblivious to the polar weather. His legs bulged in a Macdonald tartan of varicose veins, the only hint of discomfort. And then he vanished.

Eventually we stumbled into the foyer of the Jury Inn, seeking a warm bed and looking forward to breakfast. Unlike the Holy Family, we had booked our rooms weeks ago and confirmed it earlier that morning, warning them that we would be late. ‘No problem’ we were assured.

Only there was. The young male receptionist told us we didn’t have a room. His tone of voice suggested mild displeasure, as though we were somehow to blame for him being in this embarrassing situation. The mild displeasure turned to puzzlement when we didn’t turn cartwheels of joy on finding out that they had found another room for us in a hotel, which involved a ten mile taxi-ride.

Voices were raised, and then a young Irishman emerged and did brilliantly what the young receptionist should have done in the first place. He once again explained they were victims to a double-booking made by a central computer and that as a result the hotel was full and then, instead of just making the best of a bad situation, he exceeded anything we’d anticipated: The alternative hotel was superb (apart from the black-pudding, but I absolve him from blame for that) Our night there was at a discounted rate and our second night at the Jury’s Inn, for which there was a room available would be complimentary – breakfast included.
































The following day a free taxi took us back to the original hotel. We were treated like VIP’s and I realised for the first time what the very rich take for granted.

The lesson is that most cock-ups can be resolved through charm – being Irish helps – and daring to be generous. I feel now like some kind of unpaid ambassador for the Jury Inn chain. Ardoe House too, though my stomach is preparing a Minority Report on the Black pudding.

Closing Doors

My motto has always been to open doors; kick them if they’re stiff. But what if there are no doors? My son achieved A* at GCSE A level in subjects such as maths and physics, Latin and Greek etc. He has an Oxford degree and an MSc in Library and Information Studies. And like a million others is now on ‘Jobseekers Allowance.’ The point is not that my son is particularly hard done by but that the phenomenon is so widespread.

The New York Times tells the story of: Willie Osterweil who graduated magna cum laude from Cornell and found himself sweeping Brooklyn movie theatres for just over seven dollars an hour. Rebecca Chapman who has a master of arts in English and comparative literature from Columbia University, and the previous summer was unable even to find a non-paying job.

As galling was the lack of courtesy shown by prospective employers who couldn’t be bothered to email or otherwise inform her she hadn’t succeeded this time. My son has had similar experiences from institutions that no doubt have a shiny little logo to advertise that they are ‘Investors in People’.

But what I love about New York is its energy, along with its ability to turn problems into solutions…of a sort.

They, along with other ‘over-educated’ and unemployed graduates, meet in a pokey, book-shelved apartment on the Upper East Side. They meet under the banner of ‘The New Inquiry’ edited by Rachel Rosenfelt, and with such a diverse and multi- talented, but unemployed group, the discussion is by turns frivolous and deep. The magazine has no end of contributions – though I must confess little enthusiasm for ‘Kanye West’s effect on the proletarian meta-narrative of hip-hop’.

The novelist Jonathan Letham refers to them as ‘…the precursor of this kind of synthesis of extra-institutional intellectualism, native to the Internet, native to the city dweller.’ Sounds grand. I would call it old fashioned savvy and ‘get up and go’.

Ambitious members of ‘city’s literary underclass’ ignored by the publishing establishment have gone out on a limb, emulating the literary salons of the 1920’s.
The New Inquiry is now planning to print a quarterly edition along with an iPad version for two dollars a month – and doors are starting to open. People are taking notice.

They may have not so much found but created a door that will lead to great success. Equally it may turn out to be a short-lived dead end. But, importantly, it is keeping the spirit alive.

“This is my fantasy: a room full of books, people talking about books — it smells like books,” says Ms. Chapman, the journal’s literary editor, though she also points out that at twenty five and with a good degree from Cornell, a master’s from Columbia, its galling to be unemployed and living at home with your parents.

Similarly, Tim Barker enjoys discussing ‘…ideas at an extremely high level, without worrying about status or material support of traditional institutions: publishing houses or universities.’ But he too points out that his ambition had been to be a history professor – and those doors are closing fast – not just sticky, but bolted and barred.

To paraphrase Earl Grey on the eve of the Great War ‘The doors are closing all over Europe. Who knows when they will open again?’

Peter Cheyney

I have always argued that to get under the skin of a past culture you have to read its pulp and dreams. All the biographies, political histories and the scholarly works derived from them will tell you the view from above, the sanitised self-exculpatory icing on a dark and fruity cake.

Within the whitened sepulchre lived those who left few written accounts, and the letters and diaries that have been unearthed are subject to the same conscious or unconscious self-censorship.

No, it is in the books they read, and later, the films they saw, that reveal with blistering accuracy the fears, fantasies and unvarnished prejudices of an age.

Edgar Wallace and Sax Rohmer brilliantly conjure up the paranoid fears of a Britain caught between wars; a sense of skating on dangerously thin ice in a world full of shadows.

Peter Cheyney, too, caught the zeitgeist of an age, reaching his peak in his ‘Dark Series’ that shows what a nation with its back to the wall wanted to believe: that its secret agents, though brutal and flawed were the best in the world and keeping the shadows at bay.

Peter Cheyney wrote thirty five novels and over 150 short stories in the space of fifteen years between 1936 and 1951 when he died aged fifty-five. Some writers have little or no literary merit but ride a short-lived wave. Cheyney’s books would never be accused of literary worth but his wave was more substantial and lasted longer than most. His books portray a world that has long gone, along with the dreams and prejudices of those he wrote for.

It is a world of smoky bars and clubs, stylish apartments, country houses, and more mean and squalid streets. It was also an age of austerity, during the war and in the years immediately after.


Aspiring writers, check out this link and weep

Cheyney may have been subliminally influenced by the fact that his mother lived above the corset shop she owned, or perhaps by the fact that, in 1923, he briefly became involved in a dress making company. His brother, Stanley, stuck at it and earned some success in the field of haute couture, and this is reflected in every novel Cheyney wrote.

When ever a character is introduced for the first time, for the second time and for every time after that, minute attention is paid to what they’re wearing. The action stops until we know almost down to their underwear how the character is dressed. Freud or a cynic might wonder whether Cheyney enjoyed dressing up dolls as a child, but I suspect the answer was more rational. Not only did it add to his word-count, it also pandered to the aspirations of a readership deprived of luxury. In an age before Dynasty and Dallas, big hair, and glossy lipstick, padded shoulders, his books did the trick. Murder and retail therapy.
















In ‘You Can Call It A Day, (1949) Johnny Vallon:
‘He wore a dark blue, double-breasted suit that had been cut by a good tailor, a cream shirt, a blue tie.’ (It continues) .....is observing Querida Gale:

‘She had what it takes in a very big way, Vallon decided. She was wearing a navy blue suit with a skirt fitting so well it looked as if it had been painted on her. Under her coat was a blouse that came out of France – a fine hand-made georgette in a faint lemon colour with hand sewn tucks. Her shoes were hand-made and the seams of her stockings were dead straight up the back of her calf.’ Most men would be hard pressed to recall in detail what their wife is wearing but this is a hard-boiled private eye who drinks whisky before breakfast, smokes for England and who, unbelievably, even recognises the name of her perfume.

The Fashion show continues:

'Mrs Gale was standing in front of the fireplace. She wore a superbly cut black velvet dinner gown with a square cut neck; a dog collar of pearls. There were two diamond clips at her neck. Vallon looked at her with approval from the top of her well coiffured head to her four inch-heeled sequin embroidered shoes.
Vallon helped himself to a whisky and soda'

The formula often ends with Vallon, or his equivalent in other books, dampening desire with a drink.

(Evangeline Roberta Trickett ) 'was sitting at the dressing table doing things to her mouth with a lipstick. She wore black lace underclothes, with a gold wrap, worked with black Chinese dragons, over them. She wore the sheerest silk stockings and black satin pumps spangled with gold stars. Miss Trickett was a ‘looker’ and knew it. Vallon poured out a drink…'

Sometimes the ritual has purpose, is insightful and acute.

'A girl came into the bar and sat on the high stool next to him. He looked at her casually. She was pretty and had a good figure. Her coat and skirt were well cut – even if the skirt was a trifle short. Her stockings were sheer and her patent pumps had been expensive. They had been. Now, he noticed there was a slight inclination on the part of the sole of the left shoe to part company with the upper. You could only notice this when she was sitting, as she sat now, with one foot tilted on the bar-rail at an angle.'

More often it reads like a fashion magazine inhabited by murderous models:

Kiernan stood in the doorway. He wore a short leather jacket with a dark fur collar. A tweed cap was pulled over one eye. A cigarette hung out of the corner of his mouth. He was smiling. (Dark Wanton 1948 1946)

'She stood motionless, one hand resting on the bottom of the balustrade, the other hanging by her side. She wore a long black velvet skirt with a white georgette blouse. The ruffles about her neck and the full sleeves at her wrists were caught with black velvet ribbons. One small crepe-de- Chine shod foot tapped impatiently on the floor. (Uneasy Terms 1946) As you can see, it would be quite easy to write a whole new novel from a fashion mash-up. Women could read his novels for fashion tips and, like the men who read them in bedsits or on the battle fields of France, indulge in mild eroticism.

There is so much more, but this is long enough. Too long. I’m sorry. Perhaps a posting some time on Cheyney and women.

Bottoms up

Oh for an apostrophe


















This set me on a search for other London street names associated with the lower half of the body

























































So many of our old street names were direct and to the point; they literally cut through the crap. London's Sherbourne Lane has been bowdlerised from the more accurate Shittenbourne Lane of medieval times. The lane ran alongside the River Bourne, which was an open toilet for much of London.

But if you truly want to savour old English in all its crude vitality, you can do no better than explore the origins of the very respectable sounding Grape Lane. This blog is aimed at those who appreciate the minor currents of history, rather than the prurient, never the less I have drawn the appropriate veil via the link. I suspect many historical novelists also have veils which they dare not twitch, but what really interests me is whether other languages past or present were so unashamedly explicit.

Let's end on a more uplifting note