Lewis Grassic Gibbon's 'Cloud Howe' 1933

 

Jarrolds' 'Jackdaw Library' paperback edition - 1937

Of course,  I am reading the author's famous Scots Quair in quite the wrong order. Last Summer, I read the final book in the trilogy, Grey Granite (see my Blog of 23 June 2023) and had mixed feelings about it. I recall that I was slightly unsettled by the unfamiliar (was it 'poetic'?) syntax used, as well as the strange - to me - Scottish words that kept popping up. 'Grey granite' was a term applied to Ewan Tavendale, the son of the main character of all three books, Chris Guthrie/Tavendale/Colquohoun, The focus swerved towards him rather than his mother and I had no sympathy with his humourless, left-wing activism. Now I have read the second novel in the trilogy, Cloud Howe, I can see his character germinating from his very early teens.

The story focuses on Chris Colquohoun's 'middle years'. She has left the farming background of the fictional estate of Kinraddie in The Mearns and after a brief widowhood - her husband Ewan Tavendale Snr. died in the Great War - has married the Revd. Robert Colquohoun. They have moved, with young Ewan, to the small borough of Segget, which stood under the Mounth, on the southern side. Above lies the ruins of Kaimes, that was builded when Segget was no more than a place where the folk of old time had raised up a camp with earthen walls and with freestone dykes, and had died and had left their camp to wither under the spread of the grass and the whinns. It is an eerie place, often covered in mist or smothered in rain, with a history, part fiction part fact. Chris' second husband is not an easy man to live with: sometimes a black, queer mood came on Robert, he would lock himself up long hours in his room, hate God and Chris and himself and all men, know his Faith a fantastic dream; and see the fleshless grin of the skull and the eyeless sockets at the back of life.

The author's often powerful prose is suffused with poetry, with deeply-felt descriptions of the countryside and its seasons and, most compellingly, with a variety of three-dimensional characters. Every so often, I felt a breath of George Douglas Brown's The House with the Green Shutters (1901) and John Galt's The Provost (1822) - the former for its coruscating attack on Kailyard 'life', the latter for his mischievous humour. The Colquohouns have taken over from an old minister, who had died of drink, fair sozzled he was, folk said, at the end; and his last words were, so the story went, 'And what might the feare's prices be today?'...Ah well, he was a dead and a two-three came to try for his pulpit, more likely his stipend...Unfortunately for Segget, the Revd. Colquohoun was to preach meaty and strong and preached with some fire... Not surprisingly, his popularity waned quickly.

Half of the Segget folk worked at the mills - the spinners, as the rest of Segget called them; the others kept shops or were joiners or smiths, folk who worked on the railway, the land, the roads and the gardens of Segget House. There was wee Peter Peat, the tailor, who was the biggest Tory in the town, the head of the Segget Conservative branch, and an awful patriot, keen for blood...ready to kill you and eat you forbye, and running his tape up and down your bit stomach as though he were gutting you and enjoying it. Will Melvin kept the only hotel, the Segget Arms, he'd a face like a cat, broad at the eyes, and he'd spit like a cat whenever he spoke; he aye wore a dickey and a high, stiff collar and a leather waistcoat, and leggings and breeks...he had married late in life, an Aberdeen woman, right thin and right north, she kept a quick eye on the bar and the till. Rob Moultrie had once been the saddler of Segget...and as coarse an old brute as you'd meet...though a seventy years old and nearing his grave....he couldn't abide the sight of the gentry, or the smell of the creatures either, he said, and that was why he was Radical still. Old Leslie was maybe a fair good smith: he was sure the biggest old claik in Segget. He'd blether from the moment you entered his smiddy. One of the best defined characters was his son, Sim Leslie, the policeman. Folk called him Feet, he'd feet so big he could hardly coup...his feet had fair a sure grip on Scotland. There was also MacDougall Brown, the postmaster, who preached every Sabbath in the open air at the town's Square - he wasn't Old Kirk and he wasn't of the Frees, he wasn't even an Episcopalian, but Salvation Army, or as near as damn it. There he'd be, with his flat, bald head, and beside him his mistress, a meikle great sumph, she came from the south and she mouthed her words broad as an elephant's behind...

These were just some of the characters the Colquohouns had to deal with. And then there were the spinners. The worst of the lot were the Cronins, fair tribe of the wretches. The worst of the breed was young Jack Cronin  - he worked as a porter down at the station...him and his socialism and the coarse way he had of making jokes on the Virgin Birth; and the sneering at Jonah in the belly of the whale; and saying that the best way to deal with a Tory was to kick him in the dowp and you'd brain him there; so, when the upheavals that led up to the General Strike descended on Segget, he was at the forefront of any disruption. The other side of the coin was represented by Stephen Mowatt, resident at the big house and owner of the Segget mills. He'd a face that minded Chris of a frog's, with horn-rimmed spectacles astride a broad nose, and eyes that twinkled. His English accent made him say Oh, thenks! and I say! and How Jahly! He will be the butt of the author's political slant for the rest of the novel - castigated for his role in ensuring the General Strike failed and forever playing the capitalist swine. When Jack Cronin decides to call it a day and move to Glasgow to join the middle classes, he, too, is caustically appraised.  

The author's humour, rarely downright malicious, and then only aimed at the gentry, saved the novel for me. The story of the dead pig in a wife's bed and the drunk husband only realising the fact when a lantern is brought and then saying: Well, then, I'm damned. Man, but it fair looked her image to me, was well told. I have yet to read Sunset Song, the first of the trilogy, regarded as a classic and voted Scotland's favourite book in a 2005 poll supported by the Scottish Book Trust. That will have to wait until I can track down the Jarrolds' 'Jackdaw' Library paperback edition. I realise that if I was a Scot and a socialist, I would be even more whole-hearted in my praise of the two I have read. But I am neither.

John Macadam's 'The Reluctant Erk' c.1942

 

Jarrolds' Jackdaw Library paperback edition - c.1942

When the Second World War broke out in September 1939, Jarrolds had already started the first of their new series of paperbacks, under the title Jarrolds' 'Jackdaw' Crime series. These continued until 1940, with No. 16,  Moray Dalton's The Stretton Darknesse Mystery being the last published. However, most publishers continued to bring out paperbacks for the Armed Forces, on very cheap, fragile paper. Penguin had their Forces Book Club, which issued a series of 120 paperbacks between October 1942 and September 1943. I have a lovely copy of John Meade's Falkner's The Nebuly Coat, published in July 1943. The ten sent out that month included E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and Evelyn Waugh's Put Our More Flags. Strangely, although Penguin was the first to bring out such paperbacks, its Forces Book Club was a miserable failure and, when it ended in September 1943, the publisher was left with significant quantities of unsold stock.

Jarrolds, too, brought out a few paperbacks in their 'Jackdaw' Library. Few survive for obvious reasons, but my copy of The Reluctant Erk is as new. On the back cover, it reads: This edition is produced for the SERVICES CENTRAL BOOK DEPOT Artillery House, Handell Street, London, W.C.I for circulation to the FIGHTING FORCES OF THE ALLIED NATIONS. On the bottom it states, HIS BOOK MUST NOT BE RE-SOLD. There were only around half a dozen other titles published in the series, as far as I can gather, one being Ethel Mannin's Women Also Dream. I have not been able to track any of them down.

What of John Macadam's (autobiographical?) reminiscences of his time as an R.A.F. Erk? I had never heard of the word, so I turned to the Imperial War Museum's excellent website. An Erk was the R.A.F's equivalent of the Army's 'Tommy'. All airmen below NCO status were Erks, and the title embraced men of all trades and occupations. Wikipedia states the term is short for aircraftman, an old R.A.F. nickname originating in the Great War, which started out as airk. So, there we are. The author has sensibly supplied a Glossary at the back of this slim paperback (just 126 pages long), which may not have been necessary to the servicemen reading his book in the War, but is very helpful to the modern - ignorant - reader. Apparently, Charlie and George were names given by Corporals to every Erk; whilst Blue was the other ranks' uniform. Thus, working-blue and best-blue.

Although, the brief reminiscences were not really my usual  'type' of reading, I must admit I quite enjoyed the author's account of the trials and tribulations of an Erk, which he accompanied with lashings of Service humour. From the very beginning, when twelve hundred erks on parade in the early morning stiffly conscious of their creased uniforms and the weight of the stuffed kit-bags and the biting packs; stomachs distended after the excited rush of breakfast...the bawling of drill corporals from the other drill grounds comes to them on the morning air. They tilt their ears to it, attentively, like animals scenting danger...to the last chapter, where the onetime Erk becomes a 'gentleman' and makes his way from the railway station to the Officers' School, the author keeps up one's interest. There is a marvellous range of 'characters' (I kept thinking of Sergeant Bilko - that dates me! - and It Ain't Half Hot, Mum). The Actor - a good-looking cove and dead West-end, even in his working blue. He had his missus starch his collars and send them on to him and he used to get one of the erbs (aircraftman) to shine his boots. As far as I could see, all the erb got out of it was an autographed photo; Shino - who spent his time polishing his buttons, morning, noon and night; Titch - the smallest, littlest bloke I ever did see inside a uniform, and he had the biggest eyes...big, brown things, like at Saint Bernard's, that seemed too heavy for his face, which was thin, bony and white. When he moved his eyes it looked like a big physical effort. They slewed round; Young Izzy, with a PLAN - to become the Camp barber, but got killed in a German air-raid.

Above all, there was the Sarnt (sergeant), who shouted in Capital Letters - YOU LEANING AGAINST THE WALL. GET OFF THAT WALL BEFORE I PUSH IT OVER ON YOU. ..You're going for your inoculations. NEVER MIND WHAT AGAINST...THERE'S NOTHING TO FEEL SCARED ABOUT..(Fond memories of Battery Sergeant Major Williams in It Ain't Half Hot Mum!). One chapter commenced: The argument was all about Sarnts. Funny thing, but when you get a bunch of erks together they're either talking about women or grub or sarnts, which about the only things they have any time to think about apart from their jobs.

One of the stories which I fondly recall is that entitled 'Madame'. The author, Titch, Bluey and the Actor are asked to visit 'an old dear' living in a big house all alone with a 'butler cove' waiting to meet and greet them. In conversation, they established she was once a famous opera singer. Apparently, she had suddenly ended her career (she had been the lead role in Carmen) on her husband's death in a mountaineering accident, and not sung a note since. The four Erks revisit and Bluey presents her with a present - a model of Carmen. The old lady leaves the room and they hear in the distance the sound of a piano being played and 'Carmen' being sung, like an angel...the butler cove's eyes are still popping out of his head and a big tear's streaking down his cheek. The lady returns to the room, saying "It came back only for a moment".

Matthew Richardson's 'The Scarlet Papers' 2023

 

Penguin paperback edition - 2023

This is the second novel my daughter gave me for my birthday in June and I saved it for holiday reading in Spain. To use an old-fashioned term, it is a bit of a blockbuster, running as it does to 575 pages, with a further five devoted to its source material. Even the author calls it a monumental project. However, I found it an 'easy read', in that the style was fluent with an excellent narrative drive to it. I am not surprised the author studied English at Durham University and Merton College, Oxford. The list of brief (extracted) comments on the covers of the paperback were uniformly (and inevitably) positive - Hugely impressive and compelling:  William Boyd; A breathtaking thriller. A classic in the making:  Peter James; A shot in the arm for thriller fans: The Times (in fact it was that paper's 'Thriller of the Year' in 2023) - but I totally concur.

Max Archer, Associate Professor of Intelligence History at the London School of Economics (BA MPhil Cantab, PhD Harvard), is sent an old-fashioned calling card, like a prop from a period drama, to go to a house in Holland Park. It is in the name of Scarlet King. She was a legendary, almost mythical name in the intelligence community. Once upon a time, she'd been the top Russian expert at MI6 and even lined up to be the first female Chief. There was no public photograph of her...she was that tantalizing thing for all intelligence historians: a real-life ghost. He is met at the door by a petite woman of indeterminate age - thirtyish, perhaps, though with an older, weathered air about her. Even though Max had been told to Dry-clean thoroughly, and he had glanced into shop windows, doubled back and turned suddenly into side streets, he had failed to spot the A4 watchers on the top floor of the stuccoed house opposite. The watchers uploaded photos of Max, cross-referenced his facial features against MI5's internal database, confirmed the target name with Thames House and vacated the property. Operation Tempest was officially in motion.

Max is ushered into a sitting room, where there was a large flat-screen, iPads and laptops strewn around, the detritus of the twenty-first century. Then a small, elderly figure sitting in the middle of it all. Scarlet King looked like an anomaly in a high-backed chair by the coffee table, a leftover from a previous century. Thus begins an enthralling tale, which cross references between 1946, 1964, 1992 and 2010. It is the story of treachery, blackmail, spying and other nefarious practices and involves both fictitious and real-life people. Scarlet 'interviews' Max - her voice was stronger than he predicted...she smiled now. It was a spymaster's smile. The smile charmed while exploiting It had a venomous sincerity, like a weapon, teasing out secrets. Fe were ever fully immune.

Scarlet soon reveals that she knows all of Max's 'secrets' - his childless marriage; his wife getting a divorce to marry her lover, whose baby she is carrying; his treadmill existence marking undergraduate essays while earning less than most of his former students; and the fact that he failed to become a spy himself still rankling. Scarlet hands him some scans of a diary or notebook - it is her Memoir, which breaks the Official Secrets Act. She wants Max to publish it: Welcome to the secret world. Do you roll the dice or do you walk away? Is this gold dust or chicken-feed? She also tells Max that she has been a double-agent, spying for her actual homeland. Her real name is Colonel Anastasia Chekova and she worked for the NKVD as a so-called illegal operating within the British Empire. As another character says later in the book, She makes the Cambridge Five look like schoolboys. The reader is only on page 24 of a 573 page novel, but the rest of the story, with its twists and turns, its time travel over 60 years, stems from this. Max manages to stay (just) a step ahead of the British spy service - thanks to the help of the petite woman of indeterminate age, who turns out to be a skilful Israeli agent. On the way, the story takes in the real life Kim Philby as well as Gordon Lonsdale (Konon Moldy); Sir Anthony Blunt (Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures); Anatoliy Golitsyn, Oleg Gordievsky, Sergei Skripal, Maurice Oldfield, and the U.S. traitor, Aldrich Ames.

One interesting fictitious figure is Scarlet's 'aunt', Maria Kazakova, a White Russian who sought refuge in England after the Revolution. She taught at Oxford for most of her life. More patriotic than the British. In fact, she is Scarlet's 'handler' and responsible for recruiting others to spy against the British. 

So, Miss Scarlet King of Baker Street and the Secret Intelligence Service was really Colonel Anastasia Chekova of Directorate S of the KGB. Or was she? There are two huge 'twists' at the very end of the novel, neither of which I saw coming, and I am not going to reveal them! Matthew Richardson holds the reader's attention throughout, through all the twists and turns. Max was tasked with discovering the 'truth'. But what was the truth?

George Goodchild's 'Return to Eden' 1929

 

Jarrolds' 'Jackdaw' Library paperback edition - 1937

After the rather depressing novels set between the Wars which I have read recently in the 'Jackdaw' Library series - Rupert Croft-Brooke's Night Out and Ethel Mannin's Crescendo - it has been a relief to turn to George Goodchild's story. Goodchild (1888-1969) appears to have been a fascinating character. He started his career in publishing, working in turn for Dent, Jarrolds and Allen & Unwin. He edited volumes of poetry and anthologies and wrote short stories and articles for magazines. He was also music critic for the Saturday Review and Outlook. He joined the Royal Garrison Artillery during the Great War and took part in the Battle of the Somme. He soon became a Lieutenant/ Acting Captain but was wounded, shell-shocked and gassed and repatriated to England. His editing of anthologies included England, My England, a War anthology (1914); The Blinded Soldiers' and Sailors' Gift Book (1915); Battle Poems and Patriotic Verse (1915); and Made in the Trenches (1916).

During a writing career of over 60 years, Goodchild had four pseudonyms: Wallace Q. Reed, Jesse Templeton, Manda McGrath and Alan Dare. It was under the latter name that he published Return to Eden in 1929, but with the title Body and Soul. In fact, I think that title is even more apt, as the story involves a young artist, Paul Stafford, searching for peace and a philosophy of life after serving in the War - recently he had come out of a sea of trouble (not only the hideousness of the Western Front, but the loss of a sister and mother in quick succession) into a haven of rest, and he desired nothing better than to dream a little longer.

He travels through France to the Côte d'Azur and books a sunny room in a hotel in Mentone. Here he meets Colonel Roppe (also once of the Royal Garrison Artillery) whose chief hobby was to visit Barclay's Bank three or four times a day and gamble on the exchange rates. There was also a wife and a daughter, Virginia, but to expect any intelligent conversation from the Roppe family was asking too much. Stafford starts to paint again but also decides to visit the halls of dazzling light, Monte Carlo's casinos. Here he eventually meets a strange personage. It was the girl who on his first visit had staked against the eleventh red, and won....he judged she was about twenty-two, and of fairly good upbringing. They bond over saving an injured pigeon and she tells him that she has a small son, Michael, but her young husband had been killed in Flanders one day before the Armistice. Their bond deepens and when Stafford decides to rent a villa, Yvonne agrees to become his housekeeper. Inevitably, they fall in love, she body and soul, he certainly body but does not address his 'soul'. 

At the same time, a very wealthy Russian ex-patriot, who has fled the Revolution with enough jewels to live an ostentatious and wealthy lifestyle as a Russian Crœsus, desires to purchase one of Stafford's painting. Thus, the latter is drawn, unwillingly, into Serge Petroff's world, which includes his sultry cousin Lydia Kopki - a tall Russian girl with eyes like Chloe. She had that far-away look that is so characteristic of her type, a long but delicately moulded neck, and perfect arms. [Stafford] could have formed an opinion of almost all the rest of her anatomy, for there was little to conceal it. Serge buys a painting and Lydia poses nude for Stafford, much to Yvonne's disgust.

The South France idyll is shattered when Stafford decides, in his wanderlust way, that he wants to travel on to Switzerland, but not before, at last, Yvonne sleeps with him and is allowed to destroy the painting of Lydia. He spends the forthcoming summer avoiding the vast tribes of tourists round about the Jungfrau and the Matterhorn but, as winter approached, he decides to join the 'mob' in an hotel in Grindelwald. Here he meets Catherine Ryder, the daughter of the Dean of Portchester Cathedral.  Her beauty entrances him and they get on well enough for him to return to England, visit her parents (a great pen portrait of her father - dark and lean and aristocratic. As an orator he was magnificent, but as a preacher he was a failure) and marry Catherine. It soon proves a major error. The last hundred pages describe the unravelling of their marriage; a disastrous decision to go to the Riviera where they meet up with Yvonne (now married to Stafford's old friend McBride), Serge and Lydia; their mutual decision to separate; more, rather aimless, wandering by Stafford. McBride, alerted to Yvonne's previous attachment to Stafford by a vengeful Lydia, casts her adrift. Like a cork on a turbulent sea, Yvonne floated among the human flotsam of the Riviera. The storm had passed and left her bruised and battered at heart...like Stafford, she had taken the lone road, but with a heavier heart than he. 

I mustn't spoil the ending; suffice it to say that body and soul reunite. The last few chapters are written in an almost poetic style, with deeply felt feelings by Stafford and Yvonne (and the author?) Stafford finds not only his true love again but also his Soul. Reason! This reason which we rate so highly is but a limited thing. It cannot live in the blinding light of reality. Art! That, too, is not the uttermost. Its value lies in the joy it gives, not in itself. There is something beyond and above - something yet veiled, but willing to be revealed to him who finds the key. The Times Literary Supplement judged the novel a vivid though quietly recording pen. I feel the better for having read it and wish the fictitious Paul Stafford and Yvonne D'Indy a wonderful life together. It is an Eden they return to. They certainly deserved it!

G.P.R. James' 'Forest Days. A Romance of Old Times' - 1843

 

 Saunders and Otley first edition - 1843

Good old G.P.R.; he has done it again - given me a few hours of pleasure wallowing in the past. This time he has set a novel in the days of Henry III, just prior to, and after, the Battle of Evesham. Of course, one has to swallow hard occasionally when the author embarks on yet another purple passage (he was often mocked for this by contemporary critics). Here is his opening paragraph:

Merry England! - Oh, merry England! What a difference has there always been between thee and every other land! What a cheerfulness there seems to hang about thy very name! What yeoman-like hilarity is there in all the thoughts of the past! What a spirit of sylvan cheer and rustic hardihood in all the tales of thy old times! Certainly, the printer's compositor must be worrying about using up all his exclamation marks too soon.

However, we then plunge into the tale itself, commencing in a well-described country inn, surrounded by medieval rustics but each with individual characteristics. We meet flirtatious Kate Greenly serving a man in the garb of a countryman...his form had that peculiarity which is not usually considered a perfection, and is termed a hump...his legs were stout and well turned, his arms brawny and long, his chest singularly wide for a deformed person, and his grey eyes large, bright, and sparkling...his nose was decidedly the point of the epigram, standing out a sort of sharp apex to a shrewd, merry ferret-like face. There he sat, sopping his bread in the contents of his jug...Not for long. In comes the villain of the book, toying with Kate, the landlord's daughter. The peasant sums him up: if his heart be as black as his face...Well, it is. He is Richard de Ashby, kinsman to the Earl of Ashby. After a fracas, the 'peasant' departs, into the nearby greenwood. He will appear intermittently throughout the tale - sans hump -, as Robert of the Lees, aka the legendary Robin Hood. Both Kate, who leaves her local yeoman lover for Richard de Ashby and a time of absolute misery, and Robin are  going to be the downfall of de Ashby. The latter sustains his vileness throughout: he never prayed: the blessed influence even of an imperfect communion with Heaven never fell like the summer rain upon his heart, softening and refreshing. The idea of his dependence upon Providence, or his responsibility to God, would have been far too painful and cumbersome to be daily renewed and encouraged by prayer. He was one of the idolaters; and the god of his heart was himself.

James places a considerable part of his tale in the forest to the north of Nottingham: no forest contained more to interest or to excite than that of merry Sherwood - comprising within it self, as the reader knows, a vast extent of very varied country, sweeping round villages, and even cities, and containing, in its involutions, many a hamlet, the inhabitants of which derived their sustenance from the produce of the forest ground. Here Robin reigns supreme, even if it is in Henry III's reign and not the usual earlier period of King John. These scenes are contrasted with the gaiety, but also the treachery and deceit, of the Court. The author's portraits of the vacillating Henry III; the troubled, but awe-inspiring Simon de Montfort; the chivalric Prince Edward and his cherished wife Eleanor; the solid and, essentially, moral earls of Ashby and Monthermer, are well-drawn and life-like. If there is a heroine, it is Lucy de Ashby, who provides the necessary love story with the undoubted hero, Hugh de Monthermer, only nephew of the earl of Monthermer. and presumptive heir to his title and estates.

Other passages of note are the description of the Battle of Evesham and its aftermath; the scenes between Hugh and Prince Edward; and the denouement of the story at the projected to-the-death tournament between Alured de Ashby (Lucy's brother) and Hugh de Monthermer. James keeps control of his quite convoluted tale throughout, bringing in a gallery of minor supporters as well as the genuinely historical and fictitious main characters.   It is truly, as the subtitle proclaims, A Romance of Old Times.

Left in my James' 'locker' are Arabella Stuart 3 vols. (1844); Russell 3 vols. (1847); and The Cavalier (1859). I look forward to reading all three later in the autumn. And then?  I have my eyes on another dozen, all in three volumes, to purchase; that is, at an affordable price and only in first editions.