The First Murder

Epilogue

Surrey, July 1944

He limped into the Senior Common Room and tossed a file of dog-eared lecture notes onto the stained table near the door. This held a kettle simmering on a gas ring, a collection of odd cups and saucers, a battered tin tea-caddy, a large brown china tea pot and a tin of National Dried Milk donated by the assistant librarian, who had small children.

‘Harry’s had another of his brain-storms,’ the newcomer announced glumly, as he poured himself a cup of over-stewed Brooke Bond and stirred it vigorously to break up the lumps of milk powder. ‘He’s decided the college needs a diversion from the Second Front, so we have to put on a medieval play to entertain visitors at the Open Day next month!’

The only other occupant of the SCR groaned.

‘Why the hell can’t Harry stick to The Importance of Being Earnest or Jack and the Beanstalk, like any normal person?’

‘Harry’ was the covert nickname for Dr Hieronymus Drabble, the Reader and Head of the History Department at Waverley College, beloved by none of his small staff. The first man sank into a sagging armchair of worn Rexine and sipped his tea as he stared around the room. The grand title of Senior Common Room, which conjured up visions of a sedate chamber in a venerable Oxford college, seemed misplaced for this seedy place more suited to an inner-city secondary school. But Peter Partridge was not looking at the familiar décor and furnishings, but was casting a critical eye at the windows. In charge of Air-Raid Precautions at the college, he stared at the wide strips of sticky tape that crisscrossed the panes of glass to minimise the possibility of blast injuries and then at the heavy curtains of black cloth that had to blank out the slightest glimmer of light after dark. Obsessive about his responsibilities, he satisfied himself that a broken hook on one rail had been replaced by the college caretaker.

‘What’s brought this on all of a sudden?’ demanded Loftus Maltravers, Senior Lecturer in the History Department. ‘Harry’s not angling for a professorship again, is he?’

‘Only God knows how his mind works!’ growled Partridge. ‘But you might be right. No doubt some of the members of Council will turn up for it. Anyway, he’s called a meeting for three o’clock to discuss it. Every one has to be there, it’s a three-line whip.’

Peter was a big man in his late twenties, with red hair parted in the centre and Brylcreemed down flat on either side. A lecturer with a special interest in the plays of Molière, he had heavy features and an aggressive manner, which made him unpopular with his colleagues, who tried hard to make allowances for his club foot and the consequent three-inch-thick sole on his left boot. Like most of the college staff, either on health grounds or from being overage, he was exempt from military service.

Loftus, who suffered from bouts of severe asthma, was a thin, morose fellow nearing fifty, with black hair and a Clark Gable moustache. He was an expert in the history of stage scenery and pantomime throughout the ages. The two men always seemed ready to snipe at each other, contradicting and arguing over trivialities.

‘So what play do we have to do?’ he demanded. ‘Not another bit of the Townley Cycle, surely? We were stuck with that two years ago. I’m not building another bloody Noah’s Ark for it.’

Partridge sighed and shook his head. ‘No need to get yourself in a lather, Loftus! Harry said he’d found something very interesting in an old journal. He seemed quite excited about it, said we ought to follow it up and maybe get up a paper for one of the Yank publications.’

‘Nice to see that plagiarism is still alive and well,’ observed Loftus, with his habitual cynicism.

They broke off their conversation as the distant ululations of air-raid sirens began broadcasting their warning to a wide area of northern Surrey and South London. The college was a few miles south of Croydon, having been evacuated in 1940 from the main university campus in Lambeth to this shabby Victorian mansion in the supposedly safer Green Belt.

‘Bit early for them, isn’t it?’ asked Loftus, uneasily. With part of the northern coast of France already liberated following D-Day the previous month, the Luftwaffe air raids had almost ceased, but the unmanned V-1 missiles were still coming from launching ramps in the Pas de Calais.

The wailing sound faded and nothing further disturbed the peace of the morning, though until the steady tone of the All Clear sounded forty minutes later, both men had half an ear listening for the throbbing drone of the pulse-jet engine that signalled the approach of a ‘doodlebug’, to use the derisory but fearful term for Hitler’s no-longer secret weapon.

Loftus carried on reading some essays he had set during term time to the few undergraduates that had either escaped the call-up or had been invalided from the Forces. In the armchair, Peter Partridge scanned the four thin pages of the morning newspaper. As a drama historian, he found the news that Stalin had once more attacked Finland and invaded the Baltic States of less immediate interest than reports of the London premiere of Laurence Olivier’s film of Shakespeare’s Henry V.

The door opened again and a very thin elderly woman came in, hugging a briefcase under her arm. She had a severe face devoid of make-up and wore old-fashioned pince-nez on a cord pinned to her mannish grey costume. Dr Agatha Wood-Turner, Senior Lecturer in Religious Art, was inevitably known by the nickname of ‘Lathe’, from both her surname and her body shape.

Scorning the motley collection of crockery on the table, she sat on an upright chair and delved into her case to retrieve a tartan Thermos flask. Unscrewing the Bakelite cover, she poured some murky brown fluid into it and then produced a small bottle of milk, two sugar cubes and a paper bag containing three digestive biscuits. Only when she had organised her ‘elevenses’ did she acknowledge the presence of the two men.

‘I hear that Doctor Drabble is intending to put on a play for Open Day,’ she said, as if she was reading the one o’clock news on the BBC Home Service.

Maltravers nodded. ‘We’re on parade at three o’clock. A hundred lines for any absentees,’ he added sarcastically, but the prim and proper woman ignored his attempt at levity.

The door opened again and a very different sort of female entered. Christina Ullswater was the archetypal fluffy blonde – petite, blue-eyed and shapely. She wore a fussy pink floral dress with ruffles at the neck, a white cardigan thrown artfully over her shoulders and unsuitably high-heeled shoes. At twenty-six, she was a postgraduate working on her doctoral thesis, and in spite of looking like an escapee from a Chelsea tennis club, was in fact a very clever young woman, already making her mark in the rarified world of early medieval poetry.

It was a matter of covert speculation in the college as to why she was not a Waaf or Wren, and opinions varied from having a daddy who was ‘something in the War Office’, to having being the mistress of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The most popular theory at the moment was that her first war job had been filling shells at a munitions factory, but that she had been asked to leave after a fortnight, due to fears for the safety of the establishment!

Christina gave a big smile to the others and dropped into another mismatched armchair. Though technically not on the teaching staff, the exigencies of war allowed her to use the SCR, as out of term time the students’ meagre facilities were closed down.

‘Hear the sirens earlier on?’ she asked brightly. ‘Less often now than last month, thank heaven. Why they bother with sirens, I can’t imagine. When the motor stops, we’ve got only half a minute left, so what’s the point?’

Listening to doodlebug engines was now a serious pastime. If the noise continued when directly overhead, you were safe, but if it cut out before it reached you, you could well expect half a ton of high explosive to be dropped at your feet.

Agatha Wood-Turner preferred not to dwell on instruments of violent death, unless they were medieval tortures portrayed in stained-glass windows.

‘I suppose you’ll be cast as the Virgin, and I’ll get Noah’s wife, as usual,’ she said bitterly.

The blonde batted her long eyelashes at the speaker in a parody of puzzlement.

‘What on earth do you mean, Agatha?’

‘Haven’t you heard yet on the college grapevine? Our lord and master wants to put on a Miracle Play for the Open Day.’

Christina shrugged philosophically. ‘Oh well, it beats having to listen to Harry making more speeches about how studying art history furthers the war effort!’

She groped in her own document case and pulled out a shapely bottle of orange Tizer and a glass. Filling it and raising it to the others, she proposed a toast.

‘Here’s to Adam and Eve, then. On with the motley, the paint and the powder!’

‘I thought we needed something essentially British in these dangerous times,’ said Hieronymus Drabble, doing his best to sound Churchillian. ‘Something from our glorious past, like a medieval play from the Old Testament.’

‘That would be essentially Hebrew, not British,’ muttered Partridge, but Drabble ignored him. He was a fat man with a bald head and a double chin, having a passing resemblance to the Prime Minister, which he cultivated. Approaching sixty, he saw his coveted professorship slipping beyond his grasp, and this soured his whole nature.

‘Are you talking about another bit of the York or Chester Cycle?’ demanded Agatha, referring to a couple of the well-known collections of religious plays from the Middle Ages. ‘We’ve done a few of those over the years, even going back before the war,’ she pointed out, to emphasise her seniority in years of service.

Drabble shook his head, his jowls flapping above his spotted bow tie.

‘No, no! I came across something new quite recently.’

He reached across his paper-strewn desk and picked up a few pages of foolscap, pinned together in one corner. ‘I was in Oxford the other day, as an external examiner for a dissertation, and took the opportunity to call into the Bodleian to look up a few references.’

He looked at the fifth member of his captive audience, who were all seated on hard chairs around the other side of his desk. This was Blanche Fitzwilliam, the assistant librarian, a short, dumpy lady with a pleasant manner.

‘As you know only too well, our own library is woefully short of many historical journals,’ he said heavily.

Blanche was a war widow, having lost her RAF husband in the Battle of Britain, and was not going to be brow-beaten by the likes of Harry Drabble

‘And it will remain woefully short until the war is over!’ she said spiritedly. ‘We lost half our stock when that incendiary bomb came through the roof three years ago.’

The Reader raised a hand in surrender. ‘Of course, dear lady! I’m not blaming anyone, apart from Adolf Hitler – just stating a fact. Anyway, I found one of the papers I was looking for in an 1894 volume of the Quarterly Journal of Historical Research, but serendipitously noticed another title on the Contents Page that was of even more interest!’

He waited for an excited reaction, but there was a sullen silence.

‘It was a translation and a commentary by Austin Dudley Price of something he found in the London Library archives the previous year. An Early Middle English script – the twelfth-century original and a Jacobean translation of The Play of Adam.’

This time, Loftus Maltravers showed some reaction, albeit negative.

‘The Play of Adam? Never heard of it. Not in any of the well-known Cycles, is it?’

Christina chipped in, ‘Couldn’t be, it’s too early. Where did it come from originally?’

‘Oseney Abbey, according to Dudley Price,’ said Drabble. ‘It’s got the usual subjects in it – the Creation, the Fall of Lucifer, Cain and Abel, the Flood.’

They all pondered this for a moment.

‘How much of it do you propose doing? Some of these went on for hours, even days,’ objected Agatha WoodTurner.

‘About an hour would suffice, I think,’ replied Harry. ‘Just to show people that even five years of war can’t abolish academic scholarship.’

‘And to impress the Dean of the Faculty with his genius!’ murmured Peter Partridge under his breath.

The pages that Drabble had copied out from the journal in Oxford were passed around and after a quick scan, no one could think of any valid objection, if the boss was really set on this idea. The Open Day was an annual event as inescapable as Christmas, and something had to fill in the time to divert the few dozen people who felt obliged to attend. A discussion developed and, with it, mild enthusiasm for the project.

‘It looks as if three of these short sections would fill the hour,’ suggested Agatha. “The Creation”, “The Fall of Lucifer” and “Cain and Abel” seem most suitable.’

‘Great!’ said Loftus with relief. ‘That means I don’t have to make another damned Ark.’

Hieronymus leaned back in his chair, put his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets and nodded his agreement. ‘I’ll get this typed up and make half a dozen stencilled copies for you all. We can get some of the post-graduate students to help with scenery and take a few of the parts.’

‘Where are we going to do it?’ asked Maltravers. ‘Not on the back of a cart again, I hope.’

The last attempt at medieval authenticity several years earlier had been a disaster due to a sudden thunderstorm soaking the outdoor audience, making them run for cover just as Noah had announced the start of the Deluge.

There was a discussion about the best venue and eventually all agreed that the Large Lecture Theatre would be most suitable. Though as with the SCR, the title suggested serried ranks of polished benches climbing a curved auditorium, it was actually a First World War military hut that had been erected in 1917 when Waverley House had been commandeered on a previous occasion. A rectangular wooden structure similar to a small parish hall, it stood in the yard at the back of the main college building, whose red brick formed a U-shaped embrace around the hut. It had a raised platform at one end, ten rows of chairs and very little else.

‘Who’s going to organise the casting?’ asked Blanche Fitzwilliam.

With no sign of embarrassment, Hieronymus produced a sheet of paper. ‘I took the liberty of drawing up the dramatis personae. I thought Mr Partridge, being in the prime of life, could play Adam, and also portray Cain, alongside Doctor Maltravers as Abel.’

‘So who will be Eve?’ demanded Agatha, clipping on her pince-nez to glare at Drabble.

‘Perhaps Miss Ullswater would oblige,’ said Drabble in his most oily voice. ‘It would be more consistent with the age of Adam.’

‘And who’s going to be God?’ wondered Peter aloud, silently adding, As if I didn’t know!

‘I think that part would best suit me,’ said Hieronymus brazenly. After some more wrangling, they agreed that Agatha Wood-Turner, Christina and Blanche would make suitable angels.

Hieronymus made some notes on a pad as they went on with their plans.

‘Dr Maltravers, would you dragoon a few senior students to fill the other roles? We need the Devil, the Serpent and few extras to stand around and look either sinister or beatific.’

Loftus also grudgingly agreed to knock together some simple scenery, pointing out that the materials were almost impossible to obtain in these hard times. The meeting broke up after half an hour and the members drifted away. Peter Partridge and Maltravers went back to the Common Room to put the kettle on, and by the time they had brewed another pot and started an argument about Christopher Marlowe’s death, Christina had arrived.

As they sat drinking their rationed tea, she handed them each a chocolate biscuit, with ‘US Army’ printed on the wrapper. The blonde offered no explanation, but the treat was accepted graciously. But she did have something to say about the meeting they had just left.

‘I’m sure I’ve read something about this play somewhere, not all that long ago.’

‘Harry said it was in the Q. J. Hist,’ said Peter. ‘We all read that; perhaps what you saw was in there?’

She shook her golden curls. ‘I’ve never looked at any issues from half a century ago. He said it was in the 1890s. No, I’ve read a much shorter piece somewhere else. I think it was a commentary on medieval writings that had some stigma attached. I’m sure there was a reference to The Play of Adam. The name stuck in my memory.’

Loftus shrugged. ‘As Blanche said, half our library was destroyed, so it would be a devil of a job to follow that up.’

Christina agreed. ‘It doesn’t matter, anyway, but I was just curious. Next time I go up to town, I’ll call in at the London Library to have a root around.’

‘Take your tin hat and gas mask, then,’ advised Peter. ‘Though these days, it’s probably more dangerous down here than in the City!’

The following week, the attractive Miss Ullswater took the train up to Waterloo. Looking through the carriage windows at the hundreds of bombed-out buildings on the way through South London, she could only be thankful that the History, Language and Theology Departments had been evacuated early in the war to Waverley, even if the old Victorian mansion was gloomy and inconvenient.

After her business at the surviving part of the mother college in Lambeth was done, she went across to St James’s Square in the heart of the West End, to what was left of the venerable London Library, for which she had a personal subscription at four guineas a year. Founded as an independent institution in 1841, it had been bombed earlier that year and much of the most precious material had been evacuated to safety deep in the countryside. However, many of the periodicals from recent years were still there and as her speciality was quite circumscribed, she knew which journals she would have been combing for her thesis in the past eighteen months. Going down into the dank subterranean chambers that held the stacks of past issues, too deep for even the air-raid sirens to penetrate, she scanned the shelves for her familiar old favourites.

Thankfully, these half-dozen regular academic publications had annual index lists, which indicated the titles and authors of each new paper published during that year. In her document case she had her own draft thesis with all the references she had culled from the journals and now she systematically revisited each one in the indices. Though the article she sought was nothing to do with her own particular field of expertise, she recalled that it had immediately followed one of them, and that it had caught her eye and she had read it out of curiosity.

It took her forty-five minutes to find it again, but her methodical mind was used to such literary dredging exercises and with a quiet whoop of triumph, she moved along the stacks to find the correct book, the 1936 volume of the Transactions of the British Society for Medieval Studies. Taking it to a nearby table, Christina sat down and read the article again. Then she took a pad from her case and started making some notes.

‘Now then, Hieronymus,’ she murmured to herself, ‘let’s see if I can put the wind up you with this message from the past!’

The next meeting of ‘The Play of Adam Steering Committee’, as the pompous Dr Drabble insisted on calling it, was held a few days before the performance. They quickly went over the relatively straightforward arrangements, as everyone claimed that they were already word-perfect in their short parts. The costumes were simple, mostly cloak-like drapes made from odd lengths of fabric, Peter Partridge’s stock of blackout curtain material being prominent. Loftus’s scenery was primitive in the extreme, but he claimed this was quite authentic: a few cardboard trees straight out of the Bayeux Tapestry, as well as a plywood mountain and part of a castle left over from a pantomime put on for local children the previous year. After they had hammered out the few glitches with only a mild degree of the bickering traditionally associated with all academic committees, Harry Drabble shuffled his papers together as a signal that he had had enough.

‘I think I can safely say that I have guided us all to a satisfactory conclusion on all matters that will ensure our venture is a success,’ he said, in his best Winstonian impression.

‘All he needs now is a bloody cigar,’ muttered Peter to Blanche, who was sitting next to him before the magisterial desk. As Harry began to rise in his seat, Christina Ullswater put up a finger and smiled sweetly at him.

‘Excuse me, Dr Drabble, but before we break up, I think there is one matter that should be brought to your attention.’

Hieronymus sank back into his chair and stared suspiciously at her.

‘And what might that be, Miss Ullswater?’ he grunted.

‘Did you know that The Play of Adam is alleged by some to be cursed?’

‘Nonsense! Where on earth did you get that idea?’ rumbled Harry.

‘From the Transactions of the BSMS. It discusses, amongst other plays, this one you found in the Bodleian.’

The other four members, whom Christina had briefed beforehand, sat back to enjoy Drabble’s discomfiture.

‘There was nothing about this in the article I showed you,’ he said dismissively.

‘No, but that was only based on a copy of the seventeenth-century translation.’ Christina handed across a short transcript she had typed up from her study of the article in the London Library. ‘The original parchment still exists and that has a postscript by the author that warns of the perils of performing the play.’

Drabble put his half-glasses back on his nose and scanned the brief extract, before handing it back.

‘Very interesting, Miss Ullswater. You are to be complimented on digging up such an obscure gloss on the Oseney play,’ he said patronisingly. ‘In fact, I might mention it to the audience in my introduction before the actual performance, just to lighten the proceedings.’

‘Do we know what sort of ill fortune followed exhibitions of this drama?’ asked Agatha Wood-Turner, being deliberately provocative.

When Christina admitted that there was no information on this point, Harry Drabble snorted his derision. ‘Interesting, of course – but a lot of nonsense! Like the old chestnut about it being unlucky to mention Macbeth, and having to call it “The Scottish Play” instead.’

‘I never understood the origin of that,’ ventured Blanche Fitzwilliam. ‘But I know several actors who are very serious about sticking to the tradition.’

‘No mystery about it,’ advised Loftus. ‘When a lousy play nose-dived at first night or was pulled after a short run, it was common for the theatre management to rustle up a quick Macbeth to fill in, as every actor worth his salt knew it off by heart, so to mention the play when something else was running was held to be a bad omen.’

Peter Partridge immediately contradicted Loftus with a rival Macbeth theory and their difference of opinion was soon in danger of becoming quite acrimonious, until Drabble loudly declared the meeting over and cleared them from his room.

As Christina Ullswater and Dr Wood-Turner walked together to the bus stop opposite the college gates, the younger woman sought to delve into Agatha’s long-standing knowledge of their colleagues.

‘Why do Peter and Loftus always seem to be at each other’s throats?’ she asked, turning her innocent blue eyes on the older woman. ‘They never seem to be easy in each other’s company. Sometimes it gets a little embarrassing to be with them, when they are busy putting each other down.’

They reached the bus stop, alongside which was a red postbox, its top painted dull green, which Christina knew would allegedly change colour if poison gas was around. Ignoring the reminder that they were permanently in a war zone, Agatha’s sharp face turned to look quizzically at the blonde.

‘I think you’re rather taken by young Peter, my girl! Yes, there is some friction between them, but it’s not that serious. All I can tell you is that Peter feels resentful that he was beholden to Loftus Maltravers over a matter some years in the past. I can’t say more, as it would be betraying a trust.’

With that, Christina had to be satisfied, as the single-decker bus came towards them, looking oddly blind with its headlights blanked off by slitted metal masks, which at night reduced their illumination to a point where the poor driver would have been better off leaning out of his cab with a white stick!

As the two women climbed aboard, the kindly young academic decided that she would somehow find a way of trying to heal the breach between the two men. But perhaps Fate already had the same idea.

The morning of the Open Day started bright and sunny, and remained so as the dozen visitors from the parent establishment in Lambeth arrived on the 11.37 train. Much to Dr Drabble’s contentment, this year these included the vice principal, the dean of the Arts Faculty and the bursar, all influential people when it came to bucking for a Chair. As Waverley College also housed the Theology and the Language Departments, History had to share the glory of displaying the talents available in deepest Surrey. By noon, spectator numbers were swollen to about thirty by families, non-teaching staff, some curious local residents and a few waif-like students who had projects to complete or examinations to resit during the summer.

The academic staff went through the ritual of parading the visitors through each department to show them the mediocre facilities worsened by the privations of wartime. Unlike Faculties of Engineering, Science or Medicine, there was little of visual interest to show visitors and it was with relief that they adjourned at one thirty to the lecture theatre, where some meagre refreshments were laid out on two trestle tables.

After five years of rationing, the days of buffet lunches on Open Day were a distant memory, but the staff had scraped together enough from their weekly allowances to provide the makings of a few fat- and sugar-free sponge cakes, sandwiches of home-made jam, tomato or tuna, and a fruit salad culled from the produce of their own gardens. Agatha Wood-Turner had contributed wafer-thin margarine sandwiches containing either cucumber or reconstituted egg powder, and Blanche had made patties of mashed potato and corned beef. Christina’s bowl of chocolate biscuits, the American Army wrappers diplomatically removed, was emptied in a flash. All these victuals were washed down with either tea, instant coffee or ‘pop’, while the visitors and staff gossiped, recalled better days in the past and looked forward to better ones in the future.

Some looked curiously at the large black structure occupying much of the dais at the front of the hall. Loftus Maltravers had simulated the medieval stage which had been built either in a town square or outside a priory gate – or on the back of a hay wagon. He had erected what resembled a room-sized four-poster and surrounded it with long curtains, again borrowed after some wrangling from Peter Partridge’s blackout stores. At half-past two, Dr Hieronymus Drabble mounted the two steps to the platform and stood importantly centre stage, in front of the Black Box. After coughing himself hoarse to call the audience to order, he began a tedious monologue of welcome, then extolled the virtues and academic excellence of Waverley College, emphasising the pre-eminent position that the History Department occupied. Before the muttering objections of the other departmental staff became too obvious, he shifted to the high spot of the day’s entertainment, as he called it.

‘You may wonder why we have not provided you with chairs, Vice Principal, ladies and gentlemen, but we always strive for authenticity. Imagine yourselves back when this Play of Adam was first performed in the twelfth century. Then you, as the audience, would have stood in the street, perhaps in front of a crude ox cart or a makeshift stage such as this.’

He swept a hand dramatically at Peter’s black out material behind him, then launched into a reasonable account of mystery and miracle plays and the part that the religious establishment and then the guilds played in the evolution of the theatre.

‘One of my gifted postgraduates, who you will see onstage in a moment, discovered an interesting legend, in that the author of this play, the prior of Oseney Priory in Oxford, added a written warning on the original script that performing this play could lead to some unspecified disaster. So perhaps we should have done it two years ago, when some of you will recall having a soaking when we suffered a cloudburst in the middle of an outdoor performance of part of the York Cycle – appropriately when Noah announced the start of the Deluge!’

He waited for a titter of amusement, but there was only stony silence. Having rounded off his speech with some further platitudes, he bowed himself offstage to put on his robe as narrator, the other members of the cast having already assembled inside the box, through a door at back of the platform.

When the front curtain of the box was hauled up by strings, the Creation was displayed and, with Hieronymus now downstage left in a voluminous cowled cloak, the drama penned eight hundred years earlier began, with Harry filling in the gaps between the actors’ dialogue with a sonorous Latin narration. It went without a hitch. Then Drabble could not resist giving a summary in English of his Latin commentary. The next pastiche was ‘The Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man’, with Christina tempting Peter Partridge with a large Cox’s Orange Pippin.

The format was as before and appeared to be well-received by the audience, other than the small son of the lecturer in Spanish, who in a strident voice, demanded to know when the Demon King was going to pop up through a hole in the floor. The final act was ‘Cain and Abel’, performed with enthusiasm by Peter and Loftus, who after their initial lukewarm acceptance of Harry’s dictat to put the play on, seemed to have vied with each other to inject life and drama into the ancient words. Each was essentially a frustrated actor, turned aside by circumstances into the academic study of the theatre, as an alternative career to treading the boards. With Loftus traditionally in a white robe as the good innocent brother, and the evil Peter swathed in one of his own blackout curtains, they pranced about the stage declaiming the Jacobean translation, while Hieronymus spewed out streams of Latin at one side.

The action began building up to the climax, Cain bitterly complaining about Abel’s better fortune and ability to offer higher quality sacrifices to God. The lethal weapon was already in his hand – for lack of an ass’s jawbone, one of the college archaeologists had loaned a Bronze Age shin-bone from his departmental collection – and Cain was beginning to brandish this threateningly as the acrimonious dialogue reached its peak.

Suddenly, Hieronymus became aware that the attention of the audience had been diverted, some looking about them, others whispering and several edging out towards the exit at the back. The actors on stage also felt that they were losing their grip on the spectators and their speeches faltered, as did Drabble’s haughty stream of Latin.

Above the words as penned hundreds of years before by the prior could now be heard the all-too-familiar ‘thrum-thrum’ of an approaching pulse-jet. Even more menacing was the fact that a moment later, the engine was heard to cut out.

The sudden silence in the hall was far more sinister than the previous droning from above, but was abruptly broken by Peter Partridge’s shouts from the stage. Now incongruously waving the three-thousand-year-old bone, he yelled for everyone to take cover. The cellars of the college were designated as air-raid shelters and the entrance was within a few yards of the lecture hut. Those on stage began to clamber down from the platform and join the orderly but hasty stream of people, now shepherded by Peter as ARP boss and by other members of the staff. Even Harry Drabble dropped his usual posturing to help the older members of the audience to hobble a little faster to the door.

‘How long do you reckon we’ve got, Peter?’ shouted Blanche, as she helped the aged wife of the bursar towards the exits.

‘Can’t tell. Sometimes it’s a couple of minutes, but it can be much less. But it may land a mile away, if we’re lucky.’

As if to mock his hopes, there was a tremendous explosion and a blast of air that blew out many of the windows, though Peter’s sticky tapes prevented a storm of flying glass. Thankfully, the flying bomb had struck three hundred yards in front of the college, so that the big U-shaped building sheltered the hut from the worst of the blast, though it suffered badly itself.

Then, amid screams of fear and terror, came another ear-splitting crash as one of the tall brick chimneys of the college teetered over and fell onto the roof of the lecture hall. It landed on the near end, squarely above the stage. The rafters gave way and the roof structure, plus half a ton of masonry, folded down on to the ‘black box’. By now almost everyone was at the other end near the doors, many already having gained the entrance to the shelter opposite.

Peter Partridge, like the captain of a sinking ship, was last to leave the hut, in his capacity as ARP supremo. He was shepherding out the last straggler and could not resist a last backward glance at the ruination of Loftus’s primitive medieval scenery, just visible in a cloud of cement and brick dust. But also just visible was a shod foot sticking out from under a pile of collapsed blackout curtains – and even more ominous was the flickering of flames at the side of the stage, where the mangled electricity distribution-board had short-circuited and ignited yet more curtains that had fallen onto it.

Though the centre of the roof was now groaning and ceiling plaster falling like snowflakes in anticipation of a further collapse, Peter turned and hurried back to the stage end as fast as his gammy leg would allow. He was alone, as the last of the geriatric visitors had left for the shelter.

‘Loftus!’ he yelled as he hauled his heavy surgical boot up the steps to the platform. He knew who it was, as Maltravers had worn a pair of Clark’s open-toed sandals on his bare feet, to imitate Abel’s antediluvian footwear.

‘Loftus, are you all right?’ Even in such fraught circumstances, Peter realised what an inane question this was. The victim would hardly be lying in a burning disaster zone out of choice!

He limped across to the heap of curtains and debris, feeling the heat from the rapidly increasing fire a couple of yards away, which was avidly devouring more of the cardboard, plywood and fabric substance of the stage set. Pulling off some shattered rafters to reach the mound of black fabric, he found Loftus lying on his back, gasping and blue in the face, in the throes of a severe acute asthmatic attack.

‘Are you hurt, old chap?’ Peter asked urgently, kneeling and lifting the victim into a sitting position. Afraid that he had been struck by a falling beam, Peter rapidly scanned Loftus’s body, but saw nothing sinister, and between his wheezing paroxysms Loftus managed to shake his head.

‘We’d better get you out of here pronto, chum! There’s a bit of a fire starting upstage.’

His own leg defect made it difficult, but he managed to drag the other man to the edge of the platform and then stumbled down the steps himself to grab Loftus in a clumsy fireman’s lift and stagger halfway back down the hall, just in time to avoid the collapse of another section of roof. Running out of strength, he was forced to lay Loftus on the floor and bend panting over him until he got his own breath back.

By this time, several of the staff who had escaped to the air-raid shelter had noticed that Peter and Loftus were missing and had returned to look for them. Hieronymus Drabble pattered along behind them and soon was organising everyone, but by then Peter Partridge had delved into Loftus’s pockets and found his asthma inhaler. A few puffs began to improve his breathing and colour, but as soon as the Auxiliary Fire Service and Red Cross ambulance arrived, Peter insisted that he be shipped off to hospital for more effective treatment, along with a few others who had minor injuries, mostly from flying glass.

A few minutes later, Agatha Wood-Turner stood with Christina Ullswater, watching as Peter climbed into the back of the ambulance with his colleague. The two women were both shaken, but unhurt and unbowed by the afternoon’s events. The blonde postgraduate stared after the retreating ambulance as it left the college.

‘Well, looks as if the prior’s curse has struck again, after eight hundred years!’ she said uneasily. ‘Yet Cain and Abel seem to have made up their differences in a rather dramatic fashion.’

The wise old Agatha nodded. ‘Young lady, I think that possibly this may at last have lifted that stigma from The Play of Adam.’

Christina looked enquiringly at Agatha. ‘Why do you say that?’

‘You asked me not long ago why Peter and Loftus always seemed at odds with each other. Well, I happen to know why, because I was there. When Peter applied for the lecturer’s post here, Loftus, as a senior lecturer, was on the appointment committee and it was his vote that swung it. Paradoxically, Peter has always resented that, feeling that he should have been appointed solely on merit, not by a favour, and since then he’s always been difficult with the very man that got him the job.’

Christina looked puzzled as she used her handkerchief to dab away a smear of blood from a small glass cut on the older woman’s cheek. ‘I don’t understand why Loftus should have been shown him such partiality, Agatha.’

The expert on religious art smiled at her knowingly.

‘Because I happen to know that although Peter and Loftus had different fathers, they had the same mother! So they really are brothers – at least, half-brothers. Though Peter felt guilty about this bit of nepotism, being siblings, they were well cast as Cain and Abel. Now that at last a performance of The Play of Adam has had a happy result, maybe it always will!’

Historical note

The V-1 terror offensive against Britain began a week after D-Day in June 1944 and continued until October, when Allied troops overran the launching sites in France, though the last one to reach England was as late as March 1945. A total of over nine thousand of these jet-engined missiles were launched at South-East England, up to a hundred a day, though many never reached their targets. The 2,419 that exploded, killed over 6,000 people and injured over 17,000.

After the French sites were captured, the offensive was directed at Antwerp then in Allied hands, at which 2,448 V-1s were launched, with great loss of life.

Following the V-1 campaign, the Germans used the large V-2 rockets, which were far more destructive. Over 3,000 were launched, killing over 7,000 victims.

After the war, these were the basis of both US and Soviet intercontinental missiles and space programmes.