The Summer Isles (17 page)

My old school is the one place where I could be certain of recognition; which is why I avoid it. Instead, I take the bus in search of Burntwood Charity. But there is no sign of the school where I started my career—or even of the road that led to it with fields on the far side, or of the pit wheels. The whole place consists of nothing but houses and a vast new comprehensive school.

I have also, by the more complex routes that travelling east-west in this country always involve, re-visited Louth. The taxi ride out from the town to the Eveleighs’ old house seems far longer than I ever remembered the walk being, and even here the sun is out, baking the Lincolnshire Wolds, evaporating what little remains of my memories. But the house is still there at the end of its long drive, although with the bluish look of a colour photograph left out too long in the sun.

“Might as well have a good look now we’ve come this far,” says the taxi driver as he pulls through the gate. He parks on the new gravel amid a scatter of other cars, and a brisk grey-haired woman comes charging out from the doorway.

“So
good
that you could come,” she says, opening the taxi door, shaking my hand. “I’m the Assistant Day Matron, Mrs. Larvin. Well—let’s not beat about the bush, shall we…?”

As I’m ushered inside and I notice that, yes, the inner hall does still smell faintly of galoshes and dog, I see that the house is now P
RIMROSES
N
URSING
H
OME
F
OR
T
HE
E
LDERLY
.

“How long,” I ask, “has this been a nursing home?”

“I suppose,” says Mrs. Larvin, who clearly imagines I’m a prospective resident, “since the mid-twenties.”

“And before that, it was a private house?”

“As far as I know. Of course, it’s been completely re-furbished. Over here, we have our new self-operate lift. Some of our guests take a while to get used to it, but of course there’s nothing to be frightened of. You just press this button…”

Mrs. Larvin closes the brass trellis and we rise up with an electric buzzing, then she leads me along garishly-wallpapered corridors. The house is essentially the same, even if the clocks are no longer ticking, but it’s still an effort to keep my bearings. Old people draped in tartan rugs sit around in high-backed chairs in rooms where the walls have been knocked through into large communal areas. Many of these creatures wouldn’t look out of place in an Oxford fellows’ room, but the air here smells more like a school; faintly of stationery cupboards, faintly of cabbage, faintly of urine. The small second floor bedroom at the back of the house, which I express a special wish to see, is already allocated.

“Still,” Mrs. Larvin says, leaning on the same old heavy brass door handle with the dent in the middle. “I’m sure Mr. Edmunds will be pleased to see you.” She’s even mastered the trick that I did those years ago when I used to sleep here of giving the door a slight pull before pushing it open.

“
Here
we are!” She trills. “See—a visitor for you!”

Mr. Edmunds lies in his bed. The sunlight is indecently bright. He has the nose and cheekbones of an Egyptian mummy, and he’s clearly senile, incoherent, incontinent. Amazingly, amid the clutter of his life—pictures of relatives, several fine models of ships in glass cases, uneaten grapes and chocolates on his bedside table—the tall wardrobe that once contained Francis’s coats and shirts still stands in exactly the same place against the wall. I’d be tempted to open and take a look inside it if Mrs. Larvin wasn’t at my shoulder. It would be no surprise to find Francis’s old jackets and school clothes still swaying and jangling on their metal hangers, that single lonely shoe.

“I suppose there are worse things than living too long…” I say to Mrs. Larvin as we breathe the fresher air outside Mr. Edmunds’s room again.

Mrs. Larvin gives me a look, then dabs her handkerchief to her brow. “We never give up. As long as you have life, as we say here at Primroses, there’s always something you can do with it. Now, if I could just show you our kitchens, of which we’re especially proud…”

Glancing out of a window at the wide lawns at the back of the house as she leads me along these disinfected ways, I notice that they’re still having problems with the moles. I finally make my departure just before tea is served, leaving promises that I’ll have a good think about coming here, and a false name and address.

Back in Louth, still probing at the past like a tongue burrowing a sore tooth, I visit the Town Library and spend a couple of hours in useless research. Just as in Oxford, just as in Lichfield, the census data and the voting lists and the rating and the parish records and pretty much every kind of document covering the period between the end of the War and the start of the thirties has been destroyed. Here, in fact, the scythes here have cut even deeper. Even the
records
of the records had gone, along with the spaces they were supposed to occupy. It’s as if a whole decade has vanished entirely.

With an hour still left to kill before the next Peterborough train, I end up wandering around St James’s Church. I can’t remember ever seeing this gloriously light and tall spire before when it wasn’t truncated by clouds and rain. The graveyard here filled up centuries ago, and there’s little room left now to commemorate the descendants of the ancient vergers and worthies who rest here, although there’s a corner by the outer wall—grubby, seems to me, with wilting flowers and a sense of deaths so recent that they have yet to be cloaked by history—where a few recent additions have squeezed in. Scanning the names and dates, I discover one that reads:

IN MEMORY

OF

HERBERT & ELIZABETH EVELEIGH

1868—1922

1873—1919

The stone is plain polished granite, thick and deeply chiselled. It feels cold even in this heat. And it just sits there. No flowers. No sign that anyone has ever come to pay their respects. I lean against it as the warm air swarms around me and the sky presses down.

Mrs. Eveleigh must have died the year after I last saw her, probably in the flu epidemic that ended up killing more people in a single winter than we humans could manage in four years of industrialised slaughter. And Mr. Eveleigh only lasted for another couple of years after that—I doubt if managing a bank in the early twenties, which meant closing companies, calling in the bailiff, would have given him much reason to carry on…

When the train from Louth to Peterborough finally arrives, it has to be re-routed because this summer heat has buckled the main line rails. So instead I travel slowly and single-track through the late afternoon, and end up beached on the platform of a rural station with the faint promise of an eventual Oxford-bound train. There, talking to the lonely station master, a round-faced man whose body bulges gently from the gaps between the buttons and joins of his uniform like rising dough, we surprise each other by giving off signs that we are available.

The station is empty; the rails stretch down through Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire amid nodding scoops of cow parsley and wild fennel. The pigeons are cooing. The air seems joined to the sky. We stand up from our bench and move off towards the tin heat of his office. He checks timetables before closing its shutters, then pulls some bell-and-wire mechanism—
ping, ping
—to send a message down the line. For once, there is no fear and no hurry. He helps me remove my clothing, and then removes his own. We stand naked as babies, anticipatorily erect whilst the seaside faces smile down at us from the walls. S
KEGNESS
I
S
S
O
B
RACING
. B
ARMOUTH
F
OR
M
OUNTAIN
S
AND AND
S
EA
. The moment is so perfect that it almost seems a shame to go on.

The promised train does eventually come, and the stationmaster and I make our farewells; bashful strangers once again. I gaze out of the carriage as the train rattles on and his seed slowly seeps out of me, almost crying. By Oxford and the weary walk back from the station, my mind is finally made up. For once in my life, I will do something.

If my new project is not to be like so many other things, I decide as I build a small fire in the grate of my rooms and begin to feed it with the pages of my book, I must be persistent and precise. I must be cold. I must be heartless.

Glowing fragments of paper dance up the chimney. Everything, after all, ends this way—the only question is how, and when. Napoleon, Peter The Great, Bismarck… The pages curl. The ink shows briefly pale, then fades to dry smoke and crackling heat. Already gone; mere history. All that’s left to change is now. And the future.

I feed in more of the paper, huge sheaves of it now that are already brown with age, crisp as leaves long ready for a bonfire. I rummage through my drawers for a tin of lighter fuel and squirt it, causing a great leap of flame. Soon, there’s barely anything left of my book to burn, and my life feels simpler already.

To Blackwells, then, and to the Bodleian, where much of the space made by those emptied shelves has been taken up by the plump spines of Modernist Literature. I pluck out armloads with titles like
The Great Years, Man or Myth? A Hero’s Life
and
The World Vision.
Some of the names on the front plates are familiar, as are some of the books. I could kick myself now for my silly acts of rebellion in refusing to keep the many complimentary or review copies that came my way. After all, I will need to gather as much information as I can, if I am to kill John Arthur.

Over the years, I have been visited by a fair number of authors, journalists and crackpots. My name often appears in their acknowledgements;
Geoffrey Brook, for his invaluable help
(a stilted pub lunch and a promise to “get back soon for a proper chat”). Yet, by confirming that I briefly taught John Arthur at Burntwood Charity, then refusing to make up any more stories beyond those that have already appeared in the
Daily Sketch
, I am the subject more of evasion than enlightenment within the actual pages. Not that it isn’t accepted that John Arthur wandered somewhat in his early years, but his accent remains distinctly South Yorkshire. Too great an emphasis on anywhere else would simply confuse his adoring public. Of course, John Arthur himself remains mute on the subject. When asked, he would no doubt profess amazement that anyone would even care about his background. That is why his people love him.

The commonly accepted truths about John Arthur’s upbringing are that he was born John Arthur of William and Mary Arthur on 21 October 1890 in a suitably pretty cottage (now open to the public) in Cornwall, not far from Tintagel. Mary Arthur died in childbirth, whilst William Arthur—a mysterious figure; the books try hard not make him seem shady—and his son ended up travelling up through Britain. William supported them both by working as a labourer and carpenter. His son didn’t regularly attend school; in fact, in the popular imagination, John Arthur never even lived in a house before the age of about twelve. He slept in barns, beneath hay ricks, under the stars. He sat on milestones gazing into the future.

Most curious of all to me as a historian is the welter of documentary proof that supports these quasi-truths. There are birth certificates, marriage certificates, wage slips, baby shawls and cribs, even actual chairs that William Arthur supposedly crafted. It all seems like a deliberate ploy, but more likely, a few forgeries, hopes and mistakes, and some quite genuine references, have all been stirred up by the Greater British consciousness to make one satisfying whole. In the more farfetched books, you even find pictures of John Arthur hand-prints in stones, John Arthur hawthorns that lean against the prevailing wind, miraculous John Arthur wells and John Arthur graveyards sporting naturally-formed Modernist crosses; phenomena which have shaken off their previous associations with some saint just as easily as they shook off the pagan gods who came before them.

A small link with Burntwood is generally made along the lines of:
William Arthur set about learning his new trade as a miner in a pit (now-disused) in Southern Staffordshire, where John also briefly attended school before heading north to the South Yorkshire village of Raughton.
The famous pit at Raughton has also closed—except to tourists. The miners’ sons and daughters now work happily behind the counters of fish and chip shops, gift shops, museums, pubs and guest houses. Here, for all I know, is where a boy called John Arthur really did spend his adolescence. Here is where his father William died in a pit accident in 1911. There is, after all, a tombstone in the pretty local churchyard with his name on it.

By Dickensian twists and turns, John Arthur was adopted by an aunt who also happened, for reasons which are never fully explained, to live in Raughton. Mrs. Framley is still with us. White-haired and soft-voiced, full of country wisdom, she remains just about the only proper link with the John Arthur’s childhood.

At the age of 15, John Arthur went down the pit. At 18, he was working the roads. At 20, he went to night school in Nottingham. At 23, war intervened. John Arthur, by his own admission, was intense and argumentative. He wouldn’t have stood a chance in a peacetime army, but in war, in the mud, with real shells and bullets flying, people would have respected him. Uninterested in promotion, he would have been exactly the kind of squaddie whom the officers looked upon to take the lead. He was wounded first in Flanders in 1915, and then again and more seriously at the Somme. Back at the Front by mid 1917, finally promoted corporal, he famously won the George Cross at Ypres, yet somehow survived that and the confusion of defeat to return to England with his life and limbs intact.

By the agreed figures, John Arthur would have been 27 by then. The country was tired and run down. There were no jobs for him and his like to return to. After the fall of Lloyd George in the autumn of 1918, Baldwin’s weak coalition was the first of several enfeebled minority Governments. But, after the heroism, career-hopping and misty-eyed wandering, it is in these early post-War years that we glimpse the first undoubtedly true picture of John Arthur. He stands thin and bare-chested in a boxing ring with his hands raised, a useful light-weight boxer. After the hazy images and fairy glade woodcuts, the face is unmistakably his as it stares out white-lit from grainy newsprint photos, surprised in victory, his ribs and belly sculpted, Christlike. Did he fight bare-knuckle as well? Did he do the fairs and bear-pits? Did he take backhanders for an easy fall? I think that, as a canny lad who was clearly in need of the money, the answer is probably yes. John Arthur was, by all accounts, a quick, ferocious fighter. Not that good technically (he started too late) but hard to beat, controlled and yet driven. His trade probably took him abroad—some travelling show—as I doubt if he had any ties. You can see him wandering amid the circus tents pitched in some field outside Paris, the scents and the stirrings of the caged lions and elephants…