Gone to Earth

There’s a classic type of resourceful, unassuming hero that they just don’t make any more (think Richard Hannay), and the narrator of Geoffrey Household’s novel Rogue Male, a ‘bored and wealthy Englishman’, is far too well bred ever to give his ‘widely known’ name away. The first fifty pages of this sharp little thriller – which I have a particular personal reason for enjoying, as will become apparent – form a self-contained adventure set in the summer of 1938, in which the aforementioned Englishman, after a fortnight’s sport in Poland, finds himself at a loose end in the Bavarian Alps and in possession of a Bond Street rifle complete with telescopic sight.

Just for amusement he decides to stalk the biggest game of all in the form of the country’s upstart leader at his mountain retreat. No names, no pack drill, as they said in the Army when I was a lad, but the anonymous dictator in the hero’s sights is obviously the same one to whom Henry Williamson, in what must have been the worst career move in twentieth-century literary life, had recently dedicated one of his novels – ‘The Great Man beyond the Rhine’. Caught, tortured, thrown over a cliff and left for dead, our hero escapes and secretly – or so he thinks – makes his way back to England, only to find himself being skilfully and relentlessly trailed in London. To add to his problems, he also finds himself on the run from the police, having dealt over-zealously with a would-be assassin in Aldwych station. So he decides to make for Dorset as an unlikely part of the world in which to be hunted down, and to hide out near the quaint old-fashioned town of Beaminster. Now begins the main body of the story, a game of cat-and-mouse between the public-school superman literally gone to earth in a hole in the Dorset hills and the intellectual Nazi assassin bent on his destruction. Our man’s ingenuity, pluck and initiative in acquiring everything he’s going to need for what he predicts will be a long time hiding in deep cover are much to be admired, though his cavalier, devil-may-care, throwaway humour in times of trouble now and again becomes a real pain in the neck. Much of it is delivered in what Patrick Hamilton used to call ‘Wardour Street English’, after all those costume dramas that the British film industry once churned out, liberally sprinkled with clunky metaphors such as ‘a pint of the foaming’ for a perfectly ordinary glass of beer. He soon finds what he wants – ‘as quiet a hillside as any in England’ – surrounds himself defensively with impenetrable brambles in a long neglected sandstone cutting, and in a few days manages to burrow a coffin-shaped hideout in the earth and soft stone for use in the unlikely case of discovery, camouflaging its entrance to his exacting satisfaction. Curious dogs are kept at a distance thanks to a wildcat befriended by our hero and named Asmodeus; and he also excavates a tiny chamber within the cave to serve as a kitchen, a place to cook fresh meat such as rabbits or pigeon killed with his catapult. (My mother-in-law, incidentally, who has worked as a biographer for the past forty years, has made herself a similar nest in a tiny bedroom, which she finds highly efficient, with reference books, radio, telephone, face creams and tea-maker all within arm’s reach of her counterpane, quite like an astronaut on a space station in fact.) About twenty-five years ago my wife and I went to live in Beaminster, when she took a sabbatical from publishing, trained as a saddler and opened a workshop. And I have myself seen, on my more adventurous walks in the hills around the little town, extraordinary crevasses like the one that inspired Geoffrey Household, when a distant hedge on the Downs reveals itself to be a row of treetops growing in a chasm as much as twenty feet deep. These strange features are the remains of ancient tracks in use over 2,000 years ago. At this point in the story you might think the author, no less than his protagonist, has got himself into rather a tight spot, but not a bit of it. Author and fugitive alike are men of infinite resource and, when our hero next embarks on a shopping trip into the village, his innocent outing escalates into a merry moonlight chase around the hills of Dorset, as thrilling and exultantly written as anything in adventure fiction. In the course of it, he overhears talk of a ‘furr’ner’ looking for him too, and soon deduces that his most dangerous enemy is now on the trail as well. Nemesis attempts a strike that very night, and the endgame begins in a narrative stripped down to its barest essentials and with its hero now a virtual prisoner underground:

Space I have none. The inner chamber is a tumbled morass of wet earth which I am compelled to use as a latrine. I am confined to my original excavation, the size of three large dog-kennels, where I lie on or inside my sleeping-bag. I cannot extend it. The noise would be audible in the lane.

Once his bolt-hole has been discovered, his pursuer becomes his captor, masquerading as an English gentleman, Major Quive-Smith, and cunningly staying at a nearby farm ‘to put in a bit of shooting’. He mounts guard night and day over the hapless prisoner with the help of an assistant, and taunts the wretched creature underground until his nerves are stretched to breaking-point and his resolve is in danger of melting away. It takes a petty act of gratuitous cruelty on the part of his antagonist to rekindle the spark of defiance in our hero, who is now determined to kill him at any cost. The end, which soon comes, is sharp and shocking, a satisfying and rounded finish to a vintage adventure which remains just as smart and fast paced as when it was first published seventy years ago. The word ‘unputdownable’ might have been coined for Rogue Male. As for Beaminster, it was still a genuine rustic community in the days when we knew it, before the 4x4s and superannuated addicts of Country Living drove away the locals. On darts nights they used to serve real smoked badger sandwiches to the lads of the village at the Horse and Groom, though the pub we used, in the main square, had a better class of customer when it had any at all. Its corpulent, Brylcreemed landlord became our close friend. Clicking his dentures and leaning his fat arms on the counter like the old comedian Norman Evans in one of his ‘Over the Garden Wall’ monologues, when the mood took him he would tell the most bloodcurdling stories about his years in the Military Police in Palestine at the end of the war, where he’d been an occasional hangman. These tales are still for me the stuff of nightmares, though to give the dear old chap his due, if you ever had the rotten luck to find yourself standing on a trapdoor with your hands tied behind your back and a cotton bag over your head, you’d have felt a jolly sight better if you knew the future landlord of the Golden Hind was going to pull the lever, I should think. I can picture him now, pulling pints of best bitter with an abstracted gaze, as if the very act reminded him of some remembered lever far away and long ago.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 22 © Clive Unger-Hamilton 2009