The Strange Guests, part 2

(The story so far: Betty Worthing, a chambermaid, has got to know a mysterious foreign couple, who call themselves Ilych and Nadezhda, staying at her hotel. Now another foreigner has tried to persuade her to intercept and hand over the couple’s letters. Betty is unsure what to do)

One morning Betty came down to the foyer of the hotel and found the place deserted, apart from one guest sitting in an armchair in a far corner reading a newspaper. Behind the deserted reception desk was the board with the letters waiting to be collected, including one with a foreign stamp. She stepped behind the desk and examined it. Yes: it must be for the couple in room 212! This was her chance!  Quickly she took the letter from the board and slipped it into the pocket of her apron. She was still undecided what to do next: whether to deliver the letter to room 212 or to pass it on to the stranger who had offered her money for such letters; but all that could come later!

    There were footsteps behind her. The guest had dropped his newspaper and risen from his chair, and was now looking at her intently. He was a shortish man, bearded, wearing a tweed suit.

   “I see you’ve picked up the letter for our Russian friends”, he said. He had a strong Scottish accent, and his voice was firm but not threatening.

   “Yes, sir”, Betty replied, since it was pointless to deny it. “I was just going to take it up to them, sir”, she added impulsively. She sensed that she was falling into a situation beyond her control. What on earth should she do now? Suddenly coming to a decision, she told the gentleman how she had been asked to intercept and pass on letters. “But I wasn’t going to do it, sir! And I was afraid if I didn’t take the letter, he might come and take it himself, now there’s no-one about”.

   “Are you with us, then?” he asked.

   “Oh yes, sir!” replied Betty emphatically. Now she was really committing herself; getting in deeper and deeper!

    “Good. I’ll go up there with you then. It’ll save me the trouble of waiting for one of them to come down”. He returned to his chair to pick up his coat and a large bag.

   

He let her lead the way up the stairs. At the end of the corridor he stopped. “Now, lassie, you go and knock on their door and tell them the Scotsman’s come with the pamphlets. I’ll bide here to make sure the coast’s clear”.

    Despite her fears, Betty could not help feeling a tremor of excitement as she knocked on the door. She really was in an adventure now! As usual, the door opened just a crack at first, but then Nadezhda recognised her.

    “If you please, miss: I’ve a letter for you”, Betty said, “and the Scotsman says he’s brought the pamphlets”.

    Nadezhda opened the door, and Betty signalled to her waiting companion to come in. He glanced down the stairs to check they were not being followed before walking to the room. He greeted Nadezhda and Ilych, and then produced a large pile of pamphlets from his bag. Betty noticed that they were printed in strange foreign letters. Ilych thumbed through one of them eagerly, purring to himself with pleasure as he did so.

    “Very good, very good!” he said at last, “I shall arrange for these to be sent into Russia. But tell me: why did you bring the chambermaid up with you? Is she to be trusted?”

   The Scotsman briefly recounted what Betty had told him. The two foreign guests were silent for a while, then Ilych asked her to describe the stranger who had asked her to pass on the letters. “But I wouldn’t do it, sir!” said Betty, “I didn’t like him!”

   Nadeszda still looked distrustful, but Ilych chuckled, pinched Betty on the cheek and called her “a true proletarian heroine”. Betty had no idea what this meant, but gathered that it was intended as a compliment.

    Ilych then sighed. “So they have found us!” he said. “So we must be moving on again; Nadezhda and me. I think we must leave England. Now, child, you may tell your police spy we have gone, and you do not know where. Because, of course, you do not know! Do not tell him this until next week: give us time to get away. We shall take these pamphlets, but I shall give you one. You cannot read Russian, but one day you may learn. I shall write my name on it in your alphabet, so that you will remember me”.

    He picked up his pen and on the first page of the pamphlet wrote very carefully: Vladimir Ilych Lenin. 

My Father Remembers His Childhood

When I was two years old, my family moved to Hartlepool, where my father worked as a marine engineer and shipping inspector. I was the youngest of seven children, so apart from Ruth, who was five years older than me, my brothers and sisters had left home by the time I was growing up, and I only saw them occasionally.

Hartlepool is still well-known throughout the north-east as “the town where they hung the monkey” (see note at end). We rented a big semi-detached house on the main Stockton road, with the trams running outside the front door. I remember it as always being very dirty. We could sit in the garden and watch the smuts from the Seaton steelworks falling around us. Sometimes the night sky would glow as the slag was tipped. Ruth and I discovered that if we rubbed our hands on the trees and then wiped them on our faces, we became completely black; which did not please Mother. One night an enormous dump of tens of thousands of wooden pit-props near the railway caught fire. The flames were so bright that you could read a book by their light, and the intense heat buckled the rail track.
We didn’t often go to the seaside, although there was a good beach quite close. The sea was always cold, and I don’t remember ever bathing in it with any degree of pleasure. Further up the coast, at Black Hall Rocks, you could find coal dust washed up on the beach from an undersea seam, and the unemployed men would come to rake it up and take it home in sacks. We preferred to have picnics up on the moors at Hobhole, where I could go fishing from the footbridge. Once, when I was about 8 or 9, I proudly told Mother that I had caught two cod and five kippers
.
Father was only able to take us on longer outings on Bank Holidays. For three or four summers we stayed in a farmhouse in Kildale, up in the Cleveland hills. This was a very traditional little settlement, with a pub, a church, a local squire, and even a village idiot. The farm was run by a family called Tait: a husband and wife with a son and daughter in their 20s. This was a period of severe depression in farming, and the Taits must have been very poor. They had no motor-vehicle, and just one horse to provide all the pulling-power. It was a dairy farm, and they had their own creamery, which I remember as being the only clean part of the farm. We once bought local cheese (though I think it was from another farmer) which weighed 14 pounds! The farm had no gas or electricity, water came from a spring into a trough, and the only lavatory was a hole in the ground in an outbuilding. We enjoyed our time at the farm, though I suspect Mother would have preferred something more sophisticated.

When I was about ten, Father bought me a second-hand bicycle for £3.10/-. He took me on cycling tours, stopping for bed and breakfast overnight; up Teesdale or Weardale; to Richmond or Barnard Castle. Later I went for rides with a school friend: once we did a day’s run to Whitby and back, which must have been about 80 miles.

When I was 13 I went away to boarding school, where I became a close friend of Francis Crick, who later won the Nobel prize for his work in the discovery of DNA. Then, three years later, Father retired and moved to Bexhill in Sussex, and we never returned to the north-east.

Footnote:
Hartlepool is known throughout the north-east as “the town where they hung the monkey”. The story goes that during the Napoleonic Wars a French ship was wrecked off the coast, and the only survivor to be washed ashore alive was the captain’s pet monkey, which had been dressed in a little military uniform. The people of Hartlepool had never set eyes on a Frenchman, and they assumed the monkey must be a French soldier, so they hanged it! Hartlepool still takes a perverse pleasure in the story of their stupidity: to this day, the mascot of the town’s football team is called “H’Angus the Monkey”

(My father died recently, at the age of 93)

Michael Davenport

-  Hello. I’m very pleased to meet you. As I explained on the phone, I’m collecting material for a biography of Michael Davenport, and I was told you used to work for him.

- Yes, I was his valet.

-  Well, I’d be most grateful if you could fill me in with some personal details of what he was like. I might say, your identity will be treated with the strictest confidence if that’s what you’d prefer. Let me get you a drink anyway ……………… Now, what was he like to work for?

-  He was a complete bastard

-  Really? That’s most interesting. That’s not the way most people would have perceived him at all. They do say, no man was ever a hero to his valet. Tell me more! In what ways didn’t you get on with him?

-  He had no consideration for us at all. He treated us like dirt: never once thanked us for what we did. And we had to do absolutely everything for him, you know. He was like a little kid. It wasn’t just fetching and carrying. When he went to a formal dinner, I had to tie his bow tie for him, cos he couldn’t do it himself, and he refused to wear a made-up one cos it looked cheap. I didn’t mind that too much, but I did mind having to put his shoes on for him.

-  Are you saying he couldn’t do up his own shoelaces?

-  Well, he probably could, though I never saw him do it. I think he just liked to have someone grovelling in front of him, doing them up. Gave him a sense of power: made him feel like an emperor or something. That’s the trouble with these new-money types, you see: no old-style traditional gent would ever act like that. And I really used to hate him for it; because I’ve got a bad back, and it really gave me gyp, kneeling down to tie up his shoes. And he didn’t care. I used to hate him for it.

-  (Then why didn’t you leave him and get another job? No, I won’t ask that now: don’t stop the flow; let him carry on talking)

-  But I got my own back in the end, you see. He was off for this big event, flying out, and

he says, George, get me my special black shoes, and make sure they’re properly polished.

Now: his special shoes. Did you know some of his shoes were specially built up, with quite high heels, to make him look taller? Not many people knew that. Shows how vain he was. So I went to the cupboard and got the special shoes with the big heels, but when I was giving them a shine, I noticed that one of the heels had worked loose and might come off at any moment. Now if I’d told him, he’d have gone mad, and raved at me for not mending it sooner, so instead I just covered up the break with some shoe-polish so you wouldn’t spot it. And then I had to kneel down in front of him to put them on, and my back was hurting really bad, so I couldn’t straighten up afterwards, but he didn’t care. And I thought, if that heel comes off , serve you right! I was really hoping it would, just when everyone was watching him. Because no-one could ever look dignified in public with the heel off one shoe and having to hobble around like they’d got a bad leg. He’d just look silly, and everyone would laugh at him.

-  And it turned out to be more than that, didn’t it? Because he appeared at the door of the plane, and waved, and all the camera flashbulbs popped, and then he started to walk down the steps, and suddenly, over he went, tumbled right down to the bottom, head first, landed on the tarmac and broke his neck. Nobody at the time had any idea how it happened: now we know. A man cut off in his prime. Perhaps even a turning-point in history. Who knows; maybe in 50 or 100 years, people could be asking, would everything have been different if Michael Davenport hadn’t died? How did you feel, knowing that?

 - Well, it was tough on all of us. My back was worse than ever. In the morning, I couldn’t move!

Old Age or Early Death?

My father lived to be 93. In past centuries it was extremely rare for anyone to reach such an age. George II, who died in 1760, was the first British monarch ever to pass the age of 70 (and only three have managed it since), which suggests that most ordinary people led even shorter lives.

Many famous people are seen so much as products of their time that it is difficult to imagine them living into a later era. For instance, if Mozart had lived as long as my father, he could have read the Communist Manifesto, and so could William Pitt the younger. And can we imagine William Shakespeare coming out of retirement at the age of 85 to comment on the execution of Charles I?

In some cases, it is an early death which paradoxically serves to immortalise someone's reputation. Nelson's legend climaxes with his death in the moment of victory at Trafalgar: his reputation would surely be different if he had survived the battle and lived as long as the Duke of Wellington. Max Beerbohm imagined Lord Byron living till the 1850s, and writing long letters to the "Times" about the repeal of the Corn Laws; Byron's image, like those of Keats and Shelley, is linked with early death, without which they might have ended up like Wordsworth or Coleridge. We could hardly envisage Oscar Wilde, aged 85, being evacuated back to England from Paris in 1940 ahead of the German invasion; and I fear Marcel Proust, aged 68, would have refused to leave, and would have perished in Teresinstadt concentration camp around 1943. The thought of Aubrey Beardsley (1873-98) as a war artist in either World War makes one shudder: equally, the mental stability of Van Gogh (1853-90) would not have been helped by witnessing the First World War, and Raphael (1483-1520) was spared the sack of Rome by the Imperial armies in 1527. One wonders what D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) would have made of Nazism, and Evelyn Waugh (1903-66) would surely have considered Mrs Thatcher and her supporters appallingly vulgar.

It is best for a romantic hero to die young, because:-

"Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man"
(A. E. Housman: "To an athlete dying young")

At the opposite extreme are those who achieved their finest successes late in life, or kept working well into old age: Gladstone and Churchill, Milton and Goethe and Tolkien, Titian and Michelangelo. The greatest of such people appear not as anachronisms left over from an earlier age, but as products less of a single period, but of all time.

The Strange Guests; part one

Betty knocked tentatively on the door of room number 212. Voices from within told her that the occupants were still there, but it was now late in the morning and unless she was able to make their bed very soon she wouldn’t have time to get ready for her lunchtime duties. She hadn’t yet met the couple in 212, but Elsie, who normally did this room, said they were foreigners and “a bit funny”.

       The door opened a fraction, and a pair of eyes peered out through the crack. When they recognized Betty’s chambermaid uniform and cleaning gear, the door was opened more fully and a youngish woman, plainly dressed and with her hair tied severely back, poked her head out and quickly glanced each way down the corridor to ascertain there was no-one else there, and then pulled Betty quickly inside and locked the door behind her.

       The air inside was thick with smoke. A great mass of papers littered the table by the window, with more on the floor. Seated at the table was a man in shirt-sleeves and waistcoat, with a pen in his hand. The woman spoke to him in a foreign language, and he then turned to face Betty.

   “If you please, sir; I’ve come to make the bed and tidy the room”, said Betty.

   “And what is your name, child?” His accent was so strong that Betty had difficulty understanding him.

   “Betty Worthing, if you please, sir”. She dropped him a little curtsey, because she sensed that, despite the fact that his clothes were rather shabby and that he and his wife were occupying one of the cheapest rooms in the hotel, he was nevertheless a gentleman.

   “Ah, Betty Worthing, yes”. (He pronounced it as “Vording”) “You may clean the room, child. But you must never touch my papers. Never, you understand?”

    “Yes, sir”. Betty proceeded with her work, conscious that the couple were closely watching her every movement. She was careful not to touch a single paper, however much she longed to stack them in a neat pile and dust all the cigarette ash from the table. She allowed herself no more than a single fleeting glance at one paper, which was not only in a foreign language, but written in strange letters which she could not read. At last she finished her work, curtsied to the couple and let herself out. They were indeed “a bit funny”!

Betty was assigned to room 212 for the next few weeks. She never found the room empty, at any time of the day. The strange couple always had their breakfast in the room, and never went down to the dining room together for other meals. Sometimes the man went out for a walk on his own, or the woman went shopping, and to post letters. They wrote a lot of letters, often to foreign countries. Sometimes they had visitors, mostly other foreigners, and then animated conversations continued throughout the night.

     As the man became more accustomed to Betty’s presence, he began to ask her questions; about how much she was paid and the hours she had to work; about her family and life in the town. Often he made notes about her answers. In time she found it easier to understand him, though he never learnt to pronounce her name properly. In an odd way, she liked him. His wife said little. Betty worked out from their conversations (which were never in English) that she was called “Nadezhda” and that she called her husband “Illyich”. That’s a very strange name, Betty thought.

Then one day the clerk at the hotel reception desk called Betty over. “There’s a man wants to speak to you”, he told her, indicating a respectably-dressed stranger seated near the entrance. “He says it’s important”.

    Betty didn’t usually like to be seen walking out with strange men, but she allowed him to take her to a café (where fortunately there wasn’t anyone who would recognize her) and they sat in a quiet corner. She remained on her guard, and hoped he wouldn’t suggest anything improper.

   “You are Betty Worthing, chambermaid at the hotel?” He asked, and she nodded. “And you clean room number 212, where live a man and a woman, yes? Tell me now, how does he look?”

   Betty considered. This man was clearly another foreigner; perhaps from the same country as the couple in 212, since he pronounced her name in the same way. What was going on, she wondered. But she saw no harm in answering his question.

   “He’s not very tall, and his forehead’s bald. He’s got a little beard. He’s got high cheekbones and his eyes are a bit slanted. I think his wife calls him Illych”.

   “Ah yes! It is him!” the man hissed, “And his woman, Nadezhda, she is very plain, yes? She is not his wife, you know. Immoral behaviour! Yes, a very bad couple! Most wicked!”

   Betty stiffened. Her brother was living with a girl who wasn’t his wife, and although she didn’t approve of such behaviour, she didn’t see why strangers had any right to make remarks about it.

    “Are they criminals?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you tell the police?”

   “Ach, your police; they are so stupid! Just because this man commits no crime under your law, they ignore him! But this man, he is more dangerous than any robber; far more dangerous! But you can help us. He has many papers in his room, yes? Then perhaps you can bring some to us: you will be rewarded. Or does he let you post letters for him? No? Then you can persuade him to, and bring them to us. And also the letters he receives, yes?”

   Betty found herself disliking the man more and more. She might only be a chambermaid, but she still had some professional pride; and the suggestion that she, an honest girl working in a respectable hotel, might steal a guest’s papers and letters ….. the very idea! And why should a foreigner say the British police were stupid: what an insult! On the other hand, she was tempted. It wasn’t so much the promise of a reward, though heaven knows she could do with more money. But she’d always had the dream that she might one day be the heroine of a great adventure mystery, and now it looked as if the dream might be coming true.

     “I’ll see what I can do, sir”, she said, cautiously.

(Continued in a later entry)  

Kingfisher

Suddenly my wife said, "Look!"
and I turned just in time to see
a flash of brilliant emerald
fly under the bridge
but not out the other side.

Many times we returned to that bridge.
We longed to see him again
maybe perched motionless on a twig
scanning the river below for his prey,
unsuspecting minnows and sticklebacks,
or diving, an iridescent meteor,
into the brown waters

But he never came back.
This king of fishers,
lethal killer in miniature regal pomp,
wasn't there for our benefit,
he existed only for himself:
was interested in us only insofar as
we interfered with his hunting.

The Labours of Hercules in Shropshire

Many thousands of years ago, around the time half of Britain was covered in ice, the River Severn flowed north, into the Dee estuary. But then, when the ice retreated, the god Zeus spoke to Hercules and said, “It is my desire that the Severn should now flow southwards. Take your club and beat out a new channel for the river”.

Hercules took his club and began his labour at the northern end of the new river-bed. But the god of the northern marshes, fearing that his wetlands would be drained, sent out his reed-girls to distract Hercules. And the reed-girls said, “Stop your work, Hercules, and come with us, and we will show you pleasures beyond imagining!” But Hercules answered, “Go away! Come back when I’ve finished!” and he continued with his work. But he was thinking so much about the beauty of the reed-girls that he beat out his channel shallower than he intended, so some of the wetlands survive to this day.

As Hercules worked further southwards, the river god, annoyed that he had not been consulted, sent river-nymphs to distract Hercules. The river-nymphs danced round Hercules and sang, “Stop your work, Hercules, and come with us, and we will show you pleasures beyond imagining!” But Hercules answered, “Go away! Come back when I’ve finished!” But he was so confused by the nymphs dancing in circles around him that he lost all sense of direction, and the course of the river-bed he was beating out, through where Shrewsbury now stands, instead of being a straight line, ran in great loops and meanders.

Hercules now reached a line of hills and began to beat a passage through them. But the god of the hills, foreseeing that men would come and cut down his trees to fire their furnaces, and blacken his rocks with their smoke, sent woodland dryads to distract Hercules. The dryads sang, “Leave your work, Hercules, and come with us, and we will show you pleasures beyond imagining!” But Hercules answered, “Go away! Comeback when I’ve finished!” But he was so eager to sample the pleasures that the dryads had promised that he stopped he work early, so that the Ironbridge Gorge was narrower than intended, and it remains a place of fierce and dangerous waters to this day.

At last Hercules finished his labours, and the Severn now flowed southwards in a new path. And Hercules went and sat down to rest in the Quarry gardens, and he called out, “Ho! Reed-girls and water-nymphs and tree-dryads! I’m finished at last! Where are the pleasures beyond imagining that you promised me?” But there was no answer, for they had all gone away. And Hercules in frustration smashed his club on the ground, causing a great pit which is now the Dingle gardens. But eventually he fell asleep, tired out by his labours.

The god of the River Severn saw him asleep and thought, “Now I’ll have my revenge! Reject the pleasures offered by my water-nymphs, did he? Not to mention the reed-girls and dryads too! I’ll place a curse on him so that he’ll never be able to enjoy such pleasures again!” And he cursed Hercules, but Hercules did not realize it till he awoke.

Men came and erected a statue of Hercules, which you can still see in the Quarry gardens. This angered the river-god, and he was angrier still when he realized that, thanks to the labours of Hercules, he now faced a very long and weary route to the sea. His anger continues to this day; and every few years he sends down a flood, which often fills the Quarry gardens and surrounds the statue of Hercules, but he has never managed to topple it. And if you go to the Quarry, you can still see Hercules, with his lion-skin and his mighty muscles and gigantic club – but if you look closely you will notice that, thanks to the river-god’s curse, he wears only an infeasibly tiny fig-leaf.