Ampersand Papers

Copyright & Information

 

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The Ampersand Papers

 

First published in 1978
Copyright: Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1978-2011

 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

 

The right of Michael Innes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

 

This edition published in 2011 by House of Stratus, an imprint of
Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,
Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.
 
Typeset by House of Stratus.

 

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

 

	EAN		ISBN		Edition
	1842328719		9781842328712		Print
	0755117867		9780755117864		Pdf
	0755119541		9780755119547		Kindle
	0755120744		9780755120741		Epub

 

This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author's imagination.

 

Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

 

www.houseofstratus.com

 

Michael Innes is the pseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who was born in Edinburgh in 1906. His father was Director of Education and as was fitting the young Stewart attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel, Oxford where he obtained a first class degree in English.

After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, he embarked on an edition of
Florio's
translation of
Montaigne's Essays
and also took up a post teaching English at Leeds University.

By 1935 he was married, Professor of English at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and had completed his first detective novel,
Death at the President's Lodging
. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on his character Inspector Appleby. A second novel, Hamlet Revenge, soon followed and overall he managed over fifty under the Innes banner during his career.

After returning to the UK in 1946 he took up a post with Queen's University, Belfast before finally settling as Tutor in English at Christ Church, Oxford. His writing continued and he published a series of novels under his own name, along with short stories and some major academic contributions, including a major section on modern writers for the
Oxford History of English Literature
.

Whilst not wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he managed to fit in to his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.

His wife Margaret, whom he had met and married whilst at Leeds in 1932, had practised medicine in Australia and later in Oxford, died in 1979. They had five children, one of whom (Angus) is also a writer. Stewart himself died in November 1994 in a nursing home in Surrey.

Who knows what may be buried in his back garden? Only the man who has cultivated the whole area to a considerable depth. If his spade strikes on something out-of-the-way – the golden helmet, perhaps, of some Roman general, or an Anglo-Saxon
scramasax
exquisitely inlaid with copper, silver, niello and bronze – it is likely to be what the law describes as treasure trove. No owner can conceivably be discovered for it, but this by no means makes it the property of the finder. The finder, indeed, must hasten into the presence of the Coroner (popularly supposed to deal only in corpses) and produce his discovery. The Coroner will then sit on it. He will hold an inquest on the object, that is to say, and pronounce upon whether it be treasure trove or no. To hold on to one’s find and say nothing is an indictable offence. Or it is so in England. In Scotland natural cupidity and possessiveness is more mildly regarded, although at the same time more portentously dealt with, since those charged with weighing the matter include the Procurator-fiscal and the Queen’s and Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer. In both countries there is, of course, a spot of dead letter about all this. The affair ends up – it may be crudely put – by everybody getting his whack.

Precious things have often been buried or entombed in a big way, with results more or less strikingly apparent on the earth’s surface. One thinks of the pyramids. Or of that oddly shaped hummock near Woodbridge in Suffolk which proved to follow the lines of a buried ship: a clinker-built ship very like another ship found at Nydam in South Jutland. One had to go back to the year 481, it turned out, before anything like the splendour of the Sutton Hoo treasure had been buried anywhere in Europe.

Lesser treasures have been found in odder places. Particularly ‘literary’ treasures. In 1930, for example, at Malahide Castle near Dublin, somebody unearthed in a cupboard a box supposed to contain croquet equipment: it proved to harbour, among other things, the manuscript of James Boswell’s
Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides
with Samuel Johnson, LLD
. To one section of the learned world this discovery was quite as exciting as Sutton Hoo had been to another.

These historical or antiquarian remarks are perhaps a shade on the portentous side as a prelude to some account of the Ampersand affair. But there is a link at least with the recovery of the Boswell Papers in that a certain element of obscurantism – even philistinism – in the landed classes is common to both. So is a castle. Lord Ampersand lived in one. He lived in it in increasing discomfort, since he was increasingly hard up.

The Digitts – for that was the family name – had been for many generations perfectly ordinary and unobtrusive English folk. They had owned, that is to say, fairly large estates in the West Country (and numerous mines and quarries as well); they ventured with some regularity into the Army and the Church; occasionally one would take a fancy for politics, and occupy one or another of the parliamentary seats within the family’s control. Ministerial office tended to elude these, surely the most public-spirited, Digitts. One, however, had become Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies in a rather short-lived administration towards the close of the nineteenth century. There was a tradition that another had declined the distinction of being appointed Postmaster-General by Mr Lloyd-George, but nobody had ever found means of either verifying or confuting this claim.

The Digitts, however, produced (like the Coleridges, and numerous other respectable families) an occasional black sheep. Some had even dabbled in poetry – Dick Digitt, for instance, who in the mid-eighteenth century had drawn through rhyme’s vexation a good deal of well-bred minor impropriety in the manner of Matthew Prior. And from time to time other Digitts, although not themselves creative, had been inclined to take up with literary, and even positively artistic, people. Nobody much minded; the morals of these eccentrics had no doubt been impaired by keeping such company; but it wasn’t like gaming in a big way, or wrecklessly debauching young women in good society, with all the awkwardness between family and family, interest and interest, which can result from that sort of thing. But this minor strain in the Digitts, although it did frequently bob up, is very little documented, or indeed so much as mentioned by way of digression in such biographies and obituary notices as better-conducted Digitts attained to every now and then. It might almost be said that the Digitts in general, although aware of these occasional aberrations in their midst, had never totted them up; if they had, they would have discovered that they had seldom been without at least one such odd bod for more than a generation at a time.

And then somebody produced a little book about them. Or not quite as bad as that. The book was called
Some By-ways of English Literature
, and just one of the by-ways was them. ‘A Step towards Parnassus’ – that was the title of the relevant essay – was about a succession of Digitts who had briefly skirmished with the Muses, mostly in Youth. It was all rather twaddling, and it wasn’t well-informed, and sometimes it was flatly inaccurate. The few serious journals that noticed
Some By-ways
condemned it as amateurish and belletristic: a hang-over from an age before scholarship had begun, so to speak, to give English literature the works.

Nevertheless this harshly assessed volume (the labour of a clergyman’s widow, fond of books) alerted more competent persons – university professors and the like – to something they ought to have spotted and got on to long before. At one period and another, straying Digitts had hobnobbed, if only casually, with half a dozen major English writers or artists, and with countless minor ones as well. Lord Ampersand began to receive letters from members of the investigating class – most of them with American addresses – the general tenor of which was that his family had lately been discovered to merit regard. So would he kindly answer this question and that – and could he undertake to be at home in his ancestral seat or stately residence throughout the month of August, during which the writer would be vacationing in England. The writer’s university, partly as a result of the writer’s tireless efforts that way, was seriously considering the establishing of an archive in which the cultural life and affiliations of the Digitts would figure with proper prominence. And a visit to Treskinnick Castle might further this proposal quite notably.

Lord Ampersand was totally without experience of this sort of thing; he was conscious only of monstrous and unaccountable impertinence on the part of these grossly presuming persons; it was to be a quite astonishingly long time before the crucial penny dropped. He invariably replied that the multiplicity of his engagements precluded his entering into correspondence with the writer, and that he never spent the month of August other than in Scotland. (There was another family castle in Scotland, but even more than Treskinnick it was a mere rat-hole of a place, surrounded by moors as denuded of grouse as of Great Auks and Dodos.) Occasionally there were more awkward because more circumspect approaches from indigenous learned persons: fellows of Oxford (or at least Cambridge) colleges who opened fire with letters of introduction from men Lord Ampersand knew quite well. To these impeccably accredited pests Lord Ampersand caused Lady Ampersand to reply, saying something about her grave anxieties over her husband’s health, and their hope that something might be contrived by way of meeting in a twelve-month’s time.