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Settling the Bill

Ernst Kestner has smoked 846,756 cigarettes. A butcher from Lübeck in his sixties, he is driving to France, doing the sums in his head. He has been a 40-a-day man since the middle of the Second World War. What happened to him in France in the war? Why, now that he suspects he has terminal lung cancer, is he going back?

The Pork Butcher was David Hughes’s ninth novel. At 124 pages, it has the crisp piquancy of a short story. But its length is deceptive. For Kestner, the German soldier bicycling to meet his French lover, ‘the journey usually took about an hour but never seemed more than a few months or less than a day’. For the reader, too, time stops and accelerates: Hughes’s control of pace is masterful. The butcher’s tale is revealed, line by awful line, with the impassiveness of Greek tragedy, the seeming ease of a parable, the plot twists of a thriller. But there is no tidy moral conclusion. This is a brilliant, horrible book. Hughes was taut, spare, incorrigibly elegant as a writer; he was also explicitly sensual. His descriptions of eating are downright carnal. The butcher likes his hams.

David Hughes was driving through France on a family holiday when, spurred by his wife Elizabeth, they made a diversion to Oradour-sur-Glane. ‘I had never seen the vision épouvante as the French call it,’ he wrote in The Times on The Pork Butcher’s publication day, 23 April 1984, but ‘I recalled the essentials everyone knows. Of a summer Saturday in 1944 when an SS unit descended without provocation on the little town in Limousine just as people were finishing lunch.’ (Lunch, for Hughes, had sacramental qualities.) ‘Up to now the war had not touched them. Now, in an hour, it wiped them out.’

More than 600 people were killed, almost the town’s whole population. The men were herded into barns and sheds and machine-gunned. The women and children were locked inside the church and burned. Oradour, now in

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Ernst Kestner has smoked 846,756 cigarettes. A butcher from Lübeck in his sixties, he is driving to France, doing the sums in his head. He has been a 40-a-day man since the middle of the Second World War. What happened to him in France in the war? Why, now that he suspects he has terminal lung cancer, is he going back?

The Pork Butcher was David Hughes’s ninth novel. At 124 pages, it has the crisp piquancy of a short story. But its length is deceptive. For Kestner, the German soldier bicycling to meet his French lover, ‘the journey usually took about an hour but never seemed more than a few months or less than a day’. For the reader, too, time stops and accelerates: Hughes’s control of pace is masterful. The butcher’s tale is revealed, line by awful line, with the impassiveness of Greek tragedy, the seeming ease of a parable, the plot twists of a thriller. But there is no tidy moral conclusion. This is a brilliant, horrible book. Hughes was taut, spare, incorrigibly elegant as a writer; he was also explicitly sensual. His descriptions of eating are downright carnal. The butcher likes his hams. David Hughes was driving through France on a family holiday when, spurred by his wife Elizabeth, they made a diversion to Oradour-sur-Glane. ‘I had never seen the vision épouvante as the French call it,’ he wrote in The Times on The Pork Butcher’s publication day, 23 April 1984, but ‘I recalled the essentials everyone knows. Of a summer Saturday in 1944 when an SS unit descended without provocation on the little town in Limousine just as people were finishing lunch.’ (Lunch, for Hughes, had sacramental qualities.) ‘Up to now the war had not touched them. Now, in an hour, it wiped them out.’ More than 600 people were killed, almost the town’s whole population. The men were herded into barns and sheds and machine-gunned. The women and children were locked inside the church and burned. Oradour, now in ruins, is preserved by the French state as a memorial of war. The doctor’s burned-out Peugeot still sits where it was parked on 10 June 1944. Hughes was fascinated by his reaction to this site of apparently senseless massacre. Did converting it into a ‘sight’ make sense of the massacre, even, somehow, of war itself? If so, maybe the people of Oradour did not die in vain? Hughes was 9 years old when Germany invaded Poland. His family was evacuated from London to Chichester; he lived in Alton for most of the war, serving after it in the Royal Air Force, at RAF Warrington (some way from a war zone). Having four decades later made this ‘ghoulish detour’, he became inspirited, he said, by the experience. ‘The eloquent wreckage made me live the reality of war as if it were a memory of my own . . . My own life at risk.’ The Pork Butcher dramatizes the memory of Oradour, in the story of Ernst Kestner and his illicit lover at ‘Lascaud-sur-Marn’. The illicit lover whom, after cycling to save her, he then shoots. Why do ordinary people commit war crimes? Can there ever be redemption? Forty years and all those cigarettes on, is Kestner’s confession atonement enough? He was a soldier, under ‘split-second’ orders, he says. He didn’t know what he was going to do until just before he did it. And then,
It becomes a game. Once you start, you can’t take it seriously, but you do. Cold blood becomes hot. You suspend yourself. It’s like being in love. Nothing else, for the moment, matters.
These are big themes. David Hughes has, I think, been underestimated as a writer. His punctiliousness as a stylist counted against him: he was dismissed as a miniaturist. And his marvellous contrariness puzzled people. In person he was disarming, on the page he is deliberately unpredictable: he doesn’t take the obvious moral, or narrative, route. Kestner is a splendidly dull man, despite his enthusiasm for charcuterie. Before he became a butcher, he was going to be a dentist. His sense of horror at his past is less general (he defers still to the Führer) than personal: he loved Jeanne (‘Jannie’) as he has loved no one else in his life, and he treated his wife ‘like a dog’. All these years he has ‘carried unspoken the responsibility for a war that had murdered his beloved’. Now, finally, it is time to shed the burden – to ‘bequeath’ his story to his daughter, Tina, whom he takes with him to Lascaud, there to admit his part in the massacre to the town’s civic authorities. Tina, who has married a Frenchman to spite her father, is a perverse, intuitive creature whose wrangles with him are disquietingly intimate. Their exchanges recall Hughes’s own conversation – his quickness, his love of wordplay, his gentle teases. She is torn between respect on the one hand for her father’s ‘ridiculously honourable idiocy’ and contempt on the other for ‘the lateness of its arrival’. The functionaries of Lascaud put every obstruction in her father’s way, questioning the ‘taste’ of his confessing at all. ‘Why has he come here?’ asks the mayor’s secretary. ‘I believe it is a matter of conscience,’ says Tina. ‘It’s far too late,’ says the secretary. ‘The office is shutting within fifteen minutes.’ The mayor himself is a sinuous politician who recognizes that, but for the massacre of most of his family, he wouldn’t have reached the position he is in today. Out of tragedy emerges grim comedy. And then the plot twists again . . . Hughes was ‘elated’ by his visit to Oradour: ‘My own life at risk.’ Risk is a motif of The Pork Butcher. Both the mayor and the butcher are exhilarated by risk. For them it is an ‘artificial stimulant’. Jannie ‘taught’ Kestner ‘the taste for risk, the insensate nature of life without it’ and, when she dies, his first feeling is relief – ‘I didn’t have to risk myself any more.’ When he confronts his own death, the cancer within him, he is oddly thrilled: he has ‘a unique, almost warm sense of being the first person in history to be threatened by imminent death’. Again, when the mayor confronts the death of his family,
I simply felt, with everything wiped out behind me, like the first man on earth . . . I had to start from scratch . . . And my entire political life has been, and still is, founded, not on the rebuilding of a place that had rotted away, but on the making with my own hands of a method for humans to live, with just enough risk to stimulate them but not enough to kill one another.
The mayor delivers this manifesto, his blueprint for the new Europe, to the butcher over dinner. There is plenty to eat in a David Hughes book. Dinner is at the Salon Courtine, a restaurant established before the First World War where waiters’ feet tap along long corridors of parquet. The two eat fillets of sole ‘poached in a sauce devised by old Courtine himself in the great days’, then wild duck, and local goat’s cheese washed down with a bottle and a half of St Pourçain, coffee and very old Armagnac. Elsewhere, the butcher slavers over a buttery croissant, eats carré d’agneau in Paris, sits long in a country town over steak frites and strawberry pudding, lunches with lorry-drivers (tomato salad, terrine, escalopes), picnics on bread and ‘perfect’ ham, ‘fingers . . . slick with drips of melted fat’. He estimates his adult consumption of beer as 28,000 litres, wine (not his drink) at a mere 700 bottles, red meat at 19,000 kilograms, not to mention ‘shoals’ of herring and entire potato crops. It is as though he is settling his bill at the Last Judgement. How do you define moral collapse? The mayor echoes Hughes at Oradour: ‘You could no longer eat a civilized lunch and expect not to be shot and burnt.’ The most poignant image of the townsfolk of Lascaud as they are flushed out to their deaths is that of the gourmet from the hotel, standing crossly with his napkin still tucked into his collar: ‘he hadn’t been allowed to finish his lunch’. It was over lunch that Hughes first made friends with Gerald Durrell, the subject of his affectionate 1997 memoir, Himself and Other Animals. It was 1956. Hughes was working for the publisher Rupert Hart-Davis, and the author of My Family and Other Animals, just out, took the team to Bertorelli’s. (They ate pasta and veal.) Later, when Hughes and his first wife, Mai Zetterling, lived in France, they lunched often with Gerry’s brother Lawrence Durrell. In Hughes’s Durrell memoir every board groans. With Gerald Durrell, ‘meals counted’:
I quickly saw that lunch and/or dinner, daily excuses to celebrate being alive, essential punctuation in the busy sentence of a Durrell day, must be for preference long and never less than merry. The menu hardly mattered, provided it was the best of its kind. Fish grilled over driftwood on a Camargue beach, sausages and fried eggs in the bright flat above his zoo in Jersey, the juiciest game in high spots of European gastronomy, all sorts of salads under cherry-red parasols in France, lobsters on a quay at Cherbourg, ramparts of prawns, oysters by the dozen, heaps of buttered bread, an infinite variety of cheeses, fruit – all such meals over the years had been accompanied by staccato bursts of belly laughter which suggested, contrary to reason, that the world was a matter for rejoicing . . .
It was over lunch, too, that, late in his life, I made friends with David Hughes. First over family lunches, in London with Elizabeth and his children at their friendly house in Kennington, or at their house on the edge of Romney Marsh, or on the Isle of Wight in summer, watching the local sailing boats, the ‘Seaview Mermaids’, tacking and jibing; and then one-to-one, most happily of all, at restaurants, the more French and old-fashioned the better. He was the best lunch companion one could wish for – a dedicated enjoyer of the table; funny, flattering, direct and wide-ranging, self-deprecating but also capable of proper asperity. And he was generous – pressing copies of his books, tenderly inscribed, into one’s hand on parting. The first that I read was one of these post-lunch presents, A Genoese Fancy (1979), which begins with Uncle Norman snipping sausages in his corner shop in Wimbledon. (I see now that it has strong elements of autobiography, what with its tales of National Service at ‘RAF Blickton’.) It was only much later that I read The Pork Butcher; and since his death I have read every book he wrote. Hughes died in 2005, and lunch wasn’t neglected in his obituaries. He was depicted in some as a genial literary type of the old school but a bit of a dabbler. This isn’t accurate. While he was certainly affable and, of course, enjoyed lunch, he was also profoundly serious. He, like his characters, was stimulated by risk – by going off the publishers’ piste. As early as his second book, a monograph on J. B. Priestley published in 1958, he insists on the duty of authors to present themselves to their readers ‘clearly and honestly and in the round’. His ninth, The Rosewater Revolution (1971), a brave, subversive book that he described as ‘a private search for the revolution within’, was initially subtitled ‘Aspects of Myself ’. Interleaved with footnotes and with a blurb like a concrete poem, it flummoxed the critics. After The Pork Butcher he published only one ‘conventional’ novel, But for Bunter (1985): all the books of his last twenty years were ‘aspects of myself ’ – most conspicuously and ambitiously The Little Book (1996), a striking work, completely sui generis, elegiac, inventive, uplifting, written after he had had an operation for cancer. He classified it as fiction, but all the characters are based on, and named in some form after, himself, and the book deploys the same blokeish autobiographical style as do his last books, The Lent Jewels (2002) and The Hack’s Tale (2004). The Hack’s Tale, a peripatetic diatribe on the modern media, mostly dismayed the critics it did not flummox, but The Lent Jewels found warm admirers. It purports to be about a nineteenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury, Archibald Campbell Tait, who, when Dean of Carlisle, lost five of his six daughters to scarlet fever. But it is also an investigation by Hughes of his childhood in Alton and the errant behaviour of the church organist. Most potently, it is an examination of religious faith, to which, Hughes concludes, he cannot pretend; but, honest to the end, ‘I had asked my questions of life in so firm a way as to finish up not minding if I had no answers to them.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 22 © James Fergusson 2009


About the contributor

James Fergusson was the founding obituaries editor of The Independent, 1986–2007. Last year he published Ahasuerus the Bookseller, a biography-bybook-catalogue of his first employer, Robin Waterfield.

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