Bedtime Stories

I can’t remember if my parents read to me at bedtime. If they did, it left not a trace behind. They did, however, pack me off at the age of 13 to a traditional boarding-school where bedtime reading to the new boys’ dormitory was an established ritual undertaken by the duty prefect. By the time I arrived this enlightened custom had degener­ated from the originating housemaster’s lofty ideals. Some of the prefects appeared, even to us, as barely literate. One would read two or three pages of whichever book came to hand. The following night his successor would repeat the process with a random extract from a different book. It was barely a system and did not lend itself to continuity. Some read fluently and with feeling. Some read to us in foreign languages, living and dead. It didn’t matter. We adored it. It was a ritual and we were much aggrieved if it was denied. Perhaps that housemaster was wiser than I give him credit for. Perhaps even the prefects benefited.

Forty years ago I sat, for the first time, at the housemaster’s desk in a traditional senior boarding-school myself. The wheel had come full circle. Loftily idealistic, I resolved to offer my fledglings a sophis­tication on my own experience, with the result that I was kept housebound every evening for the length of my tenure. (I imagine that, once this pattern was established, it was the cue for the rest of the house to decamp to their various hidey-holes and smoke them­selves sick.) Books that read well aloud benefit from a strong, page-turning plot and a handful of well-differentiated characters. My first choice was John le Carré’s A Murder of Quality (1962) in which George Smiley plays the detective following a murder at a posh traditional boarding-school called Carne. It is the only Smiley book which has nothing to do with espionage, but Smiley is as Smiley, methodically, does:

It had been one of Smiley’s cardinal principles in research, whether among the incunabula of an obscure poet or the laboriously gathered fragments of intelligence, not to proceed beyond the evidence . . . Accordingly he did not speculate with the remarkable discovery he had made but turned his mind to the most obscure problem of all: motive for murder.

My Smiley leaned heavily on the underplayed Alec Guinness ver­sion, while the catalogue of grotesques who make up the Senior Common Room of Carne offered ample scope for more extravagant characterization – the florid, hectoring Housemaster, for one, or the socially obsessed Shane Hecht for whom people exist ‘to be found wanting in the minute tests of social behaviour, to be ridiculed, cut off, and destroyed’, and who taunts Smiley, between the lines, over his wretched marriage. Add a hint of witchcraft in a vagrant mad­woman who has witnessed the crime – ‘Janey see’d him! Flying on the wind he was!’ – then keep the clues coming and we all enjoyed a classic, pacy whodunnit, set close enough to home to have some listeners looking nervously over their shoulders. Next came Geoffrey Household’s Watcher in the Shadows (1960) which is darker in tone, begins with a convoluted mystery and accel­erates to an enthralling midnight duel. Ten years after the war Charles Dennim, a retiring zoologist, suspects he is the intended victim when a letter-bomb kills the postman. His past in Intelligence, working undercover in the administration of a Nazi concentration camp, is revealed, but the identity of his assailant remains tantalizingly con­cealed. Cat-and-mouse manoeuvres, a blind game of chess, and a metaphorical goat tethered out in the open to lure the tiger take the plot deep into the English countryside as the hunter and the hunted are drawn psychologically and sympathetically towards each other. Near-misses and distant sightings engender a mutual respect which is finally and memorably resolved. Household deserves his reputa­tion. Watcher is among his best. The start of the second half of the Winter Term can be a low point. What more enjoyable palliative than Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), though I did wonder whether the Rudolph/Flavia love affair might lead to whispered accusations of ‘soppiness’. How could I have doubted my audience? They homed in immediately on the conflicts of honour, duty and self-interest which – for all its derring-do, swordfights, midnight swims and narrow squeaks – provide the moral impetus that drives the plot. Invited by Hope to imagine our­selves transported to the throne of Ruritania, threatened with peril of discovery by a Black Michael hidebound by his own treachery, it is yet the spell of Flavia that pervades the book. Rudolph’s final revelation and parting carry emotional heft:

‘Rudolph – Flavia – always.’ That message, and the wearing of the rings, are all that now bind me to the Queen of Ruritania. For nobler as I hold her for the act, she has followed where her duty to her country and her house led her . . .

Reading aloud, I found Flavia a challenge, but Black Michael, Rupert, Fritz and Colonel Sapt come gift-wrapped. Each chapter takes thirteen minutes to read and ends with a cliff-hanger. Perfection. King Solomon’s Mines (1885) is a quest story with tremendous scope, though somewhat dated for today’s tastes. But Rider Haggard’s narrator, the lantern-jawed ex-big game hunter Allan Quatermain is even-handed in his allowance of virtue as the only accolade:

‘Am I a gentleman? . . . I’ve known natives who are, and so you will say, Harry my boy, before you’ve done with this tale, and I’ve known mean white men with lots of money and fresh out from home too, who are not.’

In an early exchange with Sir Henry Curtis, the organizer of the expedition to find his lost brother on which they embark, the native porter Umbopa philosophizes on the transience of life:

‘It is the glow-worm that shines in the night-time and is black in the morning; it is the white breath of the oxen in winter; it is the little shadow that runs across the green and loses itself at sunset.’ ‘You are a strange man,’ said Sir Henry when he had ceased. Umbopa laughed. ‘It seems to me we are much alike, Incubu. Perhaps I seek a brother over the mountains.’

And indeed he does. Once in Kukuana-land we are shown cruelty and self-sacrifice in full measure, interspersed with terrible dangers, unspeakable villainy, epic conflicts and a timely eclipse of the moon. It really is all here. And as the newly enriched adventurers, who have stumbled on the eponymous mines, return to ‘civilization’ they con­veniently pick up Sir Henry’s lost brother en route. King Solomon’s Mines is the progenitor of the ‘lost world’ genre. Who wants realism? A full-length Jeeves and Wooster lightens the mood and Right Ho, Jeeves (1934) provides the full range of Aunts, Drones, romantic mis­alliances and eccentrics. The cook, Anatole – ‘God’s gift to the gastric juices’ – can ‘take a few smooths with a rough’ and so can Bertie, whose pitch-perfect narration here takes us through this alarming encounter with an owl on a signpost:

So agitated had my mind become at this time that I thought it was Aunt Agatha, and only when reason and reflection told me how alien to her habits it would be to climb signposts and sit on them, could I pull myself together and overcome the weakness.

My only problem was keeping a straight face. The Summer Term, cricket matches, croquet, the onset of adoles­cence and (as little Leo wrote to his mother) ‘grate heat’ could lead only to L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953) with its bitter-sweet cocktail of innocence, hopeless love, manipulation, betrayal, disap­pointment, deceit and catastrophe set against the backdrop of the social and emotional minefield of Brandham Hall. Don’t go playing hopscotch there, Leo – you’ll get hurt! My reservation was to wonder whether we could carry off so rich and complex a work, but the younger Leo held their hands, and the older Leo mine, and on our various levels we got away with it. Interspersed with many short stories these were the six novels that sustained us. They have stood the test of time, at least in my time, but times change and, as we are told, ‘the past is a foreign country . . .’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 72 © Ewen Campbell 2021