The Norfolk Mystery (The County Guides) (4 page)

‘No, sir.'

‘Birds?'

‘No, sir.'

‘Aversions or allergies to any kind of animals?'

‘Not that I know of, sir.'

‘And you are not in current employ?'

‘No, sir.'

‘Good. So you'd be able to start immediately?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Very well.'

My curiosity had certainly been piqued by my interviewer's description of his enterprise, but after several rounds of questioning I was still keen to know more about the details. I made one more bid for clarity. ‘Can I ask, sir, exactly what the project is to be?'

‘The project?' He sounded surprised, as though the nature of his work was widely known. ‘A series of books, Sefton, called
The County Guides
. A complete series of guides to the counties of England.'

‘All of them, sir?'

‘Indeed.'

‘How many counties are there?'

‘Schoolmaster, aren't we, Sefton?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Well, then? Let me ask you the question: how many counties are there?'

‘Forty? thirty-nine?'

‘Thirty-nine. Exactly.'

‘So, thirty-nine books?'

‘We may also include the bailiwicks of Guernsey and Jersey, Sefton. In which case there shall be forty-one.'

‘An … ambitious project then, sir.' It struck me, in fact, not so much as ambitious as the very definition of folly.

‘In a life, Mr Sefton, of finite duration I can't imagine why anyone would wish to embark on any other kind of project. Can you?'

‘No, sir.'

‘I intend the
County Guides
as nothing less than the new Domesday Book. I shall be going out into England with my assistant to find all the good things and to put them down.'

‘Only the good, sir?'

‘The books are intended as a celebration, yes, Sefton.'

‘Works of … selective amnesia, then, sir?'

My interviewer frowned deeply at this untoward remark. ‘Among those I would call the “not-so-intelligentsia”, Sefton, I know there to be an inclination to talk down our great nation. Are you one such down-talker?'

‘I like to think I'm a realist, sir.'

‘As am I, Sefton, as am I. Which is why I am undertaking this project. You may wish to reflect, sir, that you are of a generation that may live to see the year 2000, from which distant perspective you will be viewing a nation doubtless very different from that which you see around you now. It is my desire merely to set down a record of this place before its roots are cut and its sap drained, and the ancient oaks are felled once and for all. I do not wish England – our England – to be unknown by future generations. Do you understand, Sefton?'

‘I think so, sir.'

‘Good.' He shifted in his seat and he glanced around the room, as though someone were among us. ‘Because I believe I can feel the chilly hand of fate coming upon us, Sefton.
The County Guides
I hope shall be clarion calls: they may be memorials.' He paused momentarily for reflection upon this profundity.

‘And how long do you imagine this great enterprise will take, sir?'

‘I intend to have completed the series by the end of the decade, Sefton.'

‘By 1940?'

‘1939 I think you'll find marks the end of the decade, Sefton. 1940 forms a part of the next, surely?'

‘Yes, of course.'

‘So, 1939's our deadline.'

‘A book on every county? By 1939?'

‘On every county, yes, Sefton. And by 1939. A celebration of England and the Englishman. From the wheelwrights of Devon to the potters of the north, from the shoe-makers of Northampton to the chair-makers of High Wycombe, the books will be—'

‘The chair-makers of High Wycombe?'

‘Renowned for its chair-making, Sefton. Do you know nothing of the English counties? Anyway, as I was explaining. I envisage this not merely as my
magnum opus
, but as a
magnum bonum
.
De omnibus rebus, et quibusdam aliis
—'

‘But that's … dozens of books a year, sir.'

‘Precisely. Which is why I need an assistant, Sefton.'

‘I see, sir.' The sheer scale of the task seemed ludicrous, lunatic. Which is, I think, what appealed: my own life had already reached the brink.

‘I was ably assisted for a number of years, Sefton, by my daughter and by my late wife. But my daughter is … maturing. And so I find myself … seeking to employ another. Anyway,' he announced, as the final grains of sand gathered to announce the passing of fifteen minutes, ‘
tempus fugit
.'

‘
Irreparable tempus
,' I said.

He glanced at me approvingly. ‘The hour is coming, Sefton, when no man may work.'

‘Indeed, sir.'

And at this he rose from his seat and walked towards the door. I followed. ‘I do hope that you don't imagine that because of our surroundings today' – he gestured into the gloom around him – ‘that we shall be going in for ritzy social gatherings, Sefton.'

‘No, sir. Not at all.'

‘Or chatterbangs. No swirl of the cocktail eddies here.'

‘I understand, sir.'

‘Good. Well. That'll be all, I think, Sefton. I'll send a telegram.' He went to shake my hand.

‘Actually, sir. I have one more question, if I may.'

‘Yes?'

There was one question that remained unanswered, and which I was keen to have resolved before leaving the room.

‘Might I ask your name, sir?'

‘My name? My apologies. I thought you knew, Sefton. My name is Morley. Swanton Morley.'

S
WANTON
M
ORLEY
.

Anyone who grew up in England after the Great War will naturally be familiar with the name, a name synonymous with popular learning – the learning, that is, of the kind scorned by my bloodless professors at Cambridge, and adored by the throbbing masses. Swanton Morley was, depending on which newspaper you read, a poor man's Huxley, a poor man's Bertrand Russell, or a poor man's Trevelyan. According to the title of his popular column in the
Daily Herald
he was, simply, ‘The People's Professor'.

Morley's story is, of course, well known: a shilling life will give you all the facts. (I rely here, for my own background information, on Burchfield's popular
The People's Professor
, and R.F. Bolton's
Mind's Work: The Life of Swanton Morley
.) Born in poverty in rural Norfolk, and having left school at fourteen, Morley began his career in local newspapers as a copy-holder. Coming of age at the turn of the century, he had ‘stepped boldly forward', according to Bolton, ‘to become one of the heroes of England's emancipated classes'. By the time he was twenty-five years old he was the editor of the
Westminster Gazette
. ‘Unyielding in his mental habits', in Burchfield's phrase, Morley had grown up the only child of elderly, Methodist parents. He was a man of strict principles, known for his temperance campaigns, his fulminations against free trade, and his passionate denunciations of the evils of tobacco. He was also an amateur entomologist, a beekeeper, a keen cyclist, a gentleman farmer, a member of the Linnean Society and the Royal Society, the founder of the Society for the Prevention of Litter – and the chairman of so many committees and charitable organisations that Bolton provides an appendix in order to list them and all his other extraordinarily various and energetic outpourings of the self.

On the day of my interview, however, I knew absolutely none of this.

Like most of the British public, I knew not of Morley the man, but of Morley's books. Everyone knew the books. Morley produced books like most men produce their pocket handkerchiefs, his rate of production being such that one might almost have suspected him of being under the influence of some drug or narcotic, if it weren't for his reputation as a man of exemplary habits and discipline. Morley had published, on average, since the early 1900s, half a dozen books a year. And I had read not one of them.

I had
heard
of his books: everyone had heard of his books, just as everyone has heard of Oxo cubes, or Bird's Custard Powder. I had certainly seen his books for sale at railway stations, and at W.H. Smith's. I can even vividly recall a bookcase on the top landing of my parents' home – beneath the sloping roof and the stained-glass window – containing a set of Morley's leather-bound
Children's Cyclopaedia
,
which I may perhaps, as a young child, have thumbed through. But they left no lasting impression. Swanton Morley was not an author who produced what I, as a young child, would have regarded as ‘literature' – he was no Edgar Rice Burroughs, no Jack London, no Guy Boothby or Talbot Baines Reed, no Conan Doyle – and by the time I had reached my adolescence I had already begun to fancy myself a highbrow, and so Morley's sticky-sweet concoctions of facts and tales of moral uplift would have been terribly infra dig. Finally, Dr Leavis at Cambridge had effectively purged any lingering taste I may have had for the middle- and the lowbrow. Morley and I, one might say, were characters out of sympathy, of different kinds, and destined never to meet.

But I was also, at that moment in time, out of work, out of luck and out of options.

On leaving the Reform Club after my interview, I therefore found myself walking up Haymarket, and then along Shaftesbury Avenue and onto the Charing Cross Road. I thought I might visit Foyle's Bookshop, in order to catch up with a lifetime's reading on Mr Swanton Morley.

Crowds thronged outside Foyle's, the usual overcoated men rifling through the sale books, the publishers' announcements filling the vast windows, one of which was given over to the current ‘Book of the Week', a volume optimistically titled
Future Possibilities
. Two dismal young boys in blue berets prodded a shuffling monkey in a red cap to keep moving in circles on the pavement to the sick-making tune of their hurdy-gurdies. The customary beggar stood outside the main door, scraping on a violin, a piece of card hung around his neck. ‘Four Years' Active Service, No Pension, Unable to Work'. Pity and loathing made me give him a penny.

To enter into a bookseller's is of course to feel an instant elevation in one's mental station – or it should be. My father had once held an account with Ellis of 29 Bond Street, a bookseller that raised the tone not merely of those entering the shop, but even of those merely passing it by, and I had visited small bookshops in Barcelona, and others in the Palais Royale in Paris, whose elegance seemed to rub off on the browser, like fine print from the daily papers. But Foyle's is not, and never has been, a place of elegance and enlightenment: it is a shop, merely, a very large shop, but most definitely a shop, a place of sales, a department store for books, with its vast stock and signs jumbled everywhere, shelf rising inexplicably above shelf, book upon book, complex corridor upon complex corridor. I squeezed into the main lobby past a young lady in an apron dusting the top row of a long shelf displaying Sir Isaac Pitman's apparently endless Industrial Administration Series, and asked the first shopwalker I could find, a young man, where I might discover the works of Swanton Morley. He turned from casually rearranging an inevitable shelf of those dreadful, faddish books – including
How Not to be Fat
,
Why Not Grow Young?
and
Eating Without Fear
– and escorted me daintily to a long wooden counter, bearing vivid colour posters advertising a new edition of
Kettner's Book of the Table
, where a young lady – who might easily have been a barmaid were it not for the fact of her wearing spectacles – seemed more than prepared to assist.

‘Swanton Morley? One moment, please,' she said efficiently, turning to reach behind her for a large red volume whose embossed spine announced it as
The Reference Catalogue for Current Literature
1936
. ‘I'll just check in Whitaker's.' She opened up the book, began rifling through the pages. ‘Would you like me to note down the titles for you, sir?'

‘No thank you.' I thought I should be able to remember a few titles.

‘Very well,' she said, her finger sliding slowly down the page and finally coming to rest. ‘Here we are now.
Morley's Animal Husbandry
. That would be in Animal Lore, sir, second floor.'

‘Good.' I made a mental note of Animal Lore, second floor.

‘
Morley's Art for All
. Aesthetics, sir, second floor.'

I nodded. She continued.

‘
Morley's Astronomy for Amateurs
. Astronomy, third floor …
Morley's Carpentering
. Carpentering, second floor.
Morley's Children's Songs and Games
, ground floor … Cookery, first floor … Education, fourth floor …'

‘Wait, wait, wait,' I said. ‘Third floor, second floor, first floor, ground floor.'