A Man on a Journey

‘In the great days that are gone I was walking the Journey upon its easy smiling roads and came one morning of windy spring to the side of a wood.’ That first sentence of the first story in A. E. Coppard’s first collection, Adam and Eve and Pinch Me (1921), has always drawn me on.

Coppard himself was a restless spirit and the characters in his stories are always on their way somewhere. I first came across his work in my teens, when I was a lover of ghostly tales and a particular fan of the Fontana series of Great Ghost Stories, edited by Robert Aickman. In one of Aickman’s anthologies was a story by Coppard called ‘Gone Away’ – not a conventional ghost story but a strange, unsettling tale about three companions travelling through France: they see various odd sights, including inexplicable road signs (‘A thousand miles to here’ says one), and then one by one, with no reason given, they vanish. The story stuck firmly in my mind, as did the name of the author. Many years later, I came upon a classic orange Penguin edition of Adam and Eve and Pinch Me. I scanned the contents, hoping to find ‘Gone Away’. It wasn’t there, but the titles of the stories the volume did contain were enticing: ‘Dusky Ruth’, ‘Weep not My Wanton’, ‘The Angel and the Sweep’, ‘The Trumpeters’ and ‘Arabesque: A Mouse’, to name a few. They sounded like lines or images from poems. The blurb on the back was intriguing, too, and suggested a sense of humour. It told me that Coppard was born in 1878, son of a tailor and a housemaid, who went to work for a Jewish tailor in Whitechapel at the time of the Jack-the-Ripper murders. He subsequently became a clerk, lived in Brighton and Oxford, and ‘adopted professional sprinting as a hobby’, but his chief current recreation was ‘resting’. I bought the book, and it did not disappoint. I discovered that Coppard was not, primarily, a writer of ghost stories but of a kind of odd, whimsical, wayward, fantastical fiction in which the supernatural seems entirely natural when it appears. ‘Marching to Zion’, which describes the journey of three somewhat other-worldly travellers, Michael, Mary and Monk, has a dreamlike quality, full of random encounters, summary justice, a love affair and what seems to be the apotheosis of one of the travellers at the end. But some stories, though still told in his characteristically lyrical style, are in the realist mode. ‘Dusky Ruth’ for example, which also begins with a man on a journey, is a tale of an encounter with an inn keeper’s daughter. We never learn her name, but the traveller calls her Ruth. Alone together in the parlour, they spontaneously kiss. At mid night, he makes his way to her room. She is naked in the darkness, weeping. He comforts her and dries her tears, though we don’t know why she has been crying, and they lie together for an hour, ‘as innocent as children’, before Ruth sleeps and the traveller returns to his room. The next morning at breakfast she greets him ‘with curious gaze but merrily enough’: the inn is crowded with guests and they have no opportunity to speak. At length he takes his hat and his stick and goes on his way: ‘Her shining glances followed him to the door, and from the window as far as they could view him.’ There’s nothing supernatural here; and yet the story feels magical. The title story, ‘Adam and Eve and Pinch Me’, disconcerts by beginning in the middle of a sentence: ‘and in the whole of his days, vividly at the end of the afternoon – he repeated it again and again to himself – the kind country spaces had never absorbed quite so rich a glamour of light, so miraculous a bloom of clarity’. Jaffa Codling (Coppard’s characters tend to have bizarre names) is out in his gar den, enjoying the sunshine, the grass and the trees. Yet when he steps through the French window into his house, something inexplicable occurs. A housemaid brushes past, without seeming to see him. He goes upstairs and hears his wife talking to a man, but he can’t open the bedroom door. He can’t open any doors. No one can see him, no one can hear him. He drifts back to the garden, where his three children are talking to the gardener. They are oblivious to his presence – except for the youngest, Gabriel, who does seem vaguely to perceive him for a fleeting moment . . . One’s first thought is that Jaffa Codling must have died: this is his ghost. But no. Coppard is never so predictable. The resolution is both stranger and more satisfying. The final story, ‘Arabesque: A Mouse’, is another in realist mode – but with Coppard, ‘realist’ still means pretty peculiar. It’s a freezing winter night and a middle-aged man is sitting by the fire in a top floor room; he’s been reading Russian novels ‘until he thought he was mad’. In the stillness, a mouse scurries to the hearth and warms itself. Its appearance sparks off a chain of memories: of his childhood, his mother, his first love, his thwarted ideals. The story is structured like a poem, and its seemingly disparate elements – the mouse, a painting by the Japanese artist Utamaro, the man’s mother, his girlfriend, breasts, hearts, hands, deaths – seem to speak to one another. Coppard was indeed a poet as well as a short-story writer – his best-known poetry collection is Hips and Haws (1922) – and many of his stories, though not without a strong narrative element, could be seen as prose-poems in which he blends humour and pathos, irony and sincerity, fantasy and realism, and the demotic and the high flown. He enjoys using unexpected words – furuncle, quoin, bombazine, rann, ruckle, integument, sidereal, arbutus, squinancy. Yet he never seems to be straining for effect. He is sui generis. Coppard’s life was as idiosyncratic as his literary work. He was a self-taught intellectual – he had no schooling beyond the age of 9 and throughout his teenage years took on a series of menial jobs to sup port his mother and two sisters. As well as his sprinting – at which he was talented enough to win prize money – he excelled at cricket and billiards. In 1905 he married Lily Richardson, but they had no children. They moved very frequently: Coppard is recorded as living at no fewer than eighteen addresses – chiefly in Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Gloucestershire. On 1 April 1919 he rented a cottage in the Oxfordshire countryside, where he lived frugally and alone, and where he wrote the twelve stories that would become Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, published by the Golden Cockerel Press. Later, he embarked on a series of affairs and left Lily altogether; one of these liaisons, with Winifred de Kok, produced a daughter, Julia; later Coppard and Winifred married. (Lily Richardson went on to become a writer herself; her novel The Orange Court was published in 1929. She died in 1932, with, apparently, Coppard at her bedside.) Coppard served in the Home Guard during the Second World War, and his autobiography, It’s Me, O Lord, was published in 1957, the year he died. Coppard’s reputation once stood high. He was prominent enough to merit an entry in Who’s Who, and his work was praised by L. P. Hartley, Ford Madox Ford and Rebecca West. Yet now he is almost forgotten. What a pity that is. I still have my copy of Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, but I have to read it with care, for the pages are beginning to fall out. I must scour more second-hand bookshops for his other collections of stories, with their strange, haunting, poetic titles: Pink Furniture, Fishmonger’s Fiddle, The Field of Mustard, Nixey’s Harlequin, Silver Circus and You Never Know, Do You?

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 87 © Brandon Robshaw 2025