The Philosopher's Pupil

PRELUDE

ii Our Town

I am the narrator: a discreet and self-effacing narrator. This book is not about me. I knew, though not in most cases at all well, a number of the dramatis personae and I lived (and live) in the town where the events hereinafter recounted took place. For purposes of convenience, for instance so that my ‘characters’ may be able (very occasionally) to refer to me or address me, I shall call myself ‘N’. But as far as this drama is concerned I am a shadow, Nemo, not the masked presence or secret voice of one of the main characters. I am an observer, a student of human nature, a moralist, a man; and will allow myself here and there the discreet luxury of moralizing.

It will be necessary to talk a good deal about our town, and as I would prefer, for obvious reasons, not to use its real name, I shall call it after my own, ‘N’s Town’, or, let us say, ‘Ennistone’. Ennistone is situated in the south of England, not exceedingly far from London. A fairly frequent train service increasingly takes ‘commuters’ daily to their work in the metropolis and brings them home at evening to a green countryside. However, most of our people still work in and around Ennistone, and old-fashioned Ennistonians would certainly resent the idea of being considered a ‘dormitory town’. The place has a strong identity and, one may say, a strong social conscience. New housing estates have recently diluted our old community life, but strenuous efforts are made by ‘responsible citizens’ (it is characteristic of our town to have many of these) to draw the newcomers into our many ‘worthwhile activities’. There are church groups, women’s groups, drama groups, debates, evening classes, a Historical Society, a Fine Art Society, a Writers’ Circle. There is a lively museum and a Botanical Garden. There is plenty of musical activity, including an operatic society, a silver band and the ‘Ennistone Orchestra’. We were (and to some extent still are) thus well able to amuse ourselves. I should also mention here a passion for playing bridge, though this is not now so common among the young people and the newcomers.

This account may suggest that Ennistone is a rather self-satisfied little place, and perhaps this is true. It was as if we pulled back our skirts from the sins and vices of London, which from here was seen as an exotic and dangerous playground. At one time even television was frowned upon, and some of the ‘responsible citizens’ made a point of banning these corrupt machines from their homes. We have a strong and long-standing puritan and non-conformist tradition, one result of which is that there are even now very few public houses in Ennistone. An ‘Austrian Wine Bar’ recently opened in the High Street occasioned a long controversy in the Ennistone Gazette (our worthy local paper edited at the time of this tale by Gavin Oare, an ambitious youth with his eye on Fleet Street). Ennistone was, in a rural way, a manufacturing town (I am speaking of the nineteenth century) and the fine Tweed Mill ‘as big as a palace’ still remains as an abandoned remnant of commercial glory. Several old Quaker families (the McCaffreys are one of these) founded the fortunes of Ennistone at that time, and still (together with some Methodists) control various less prosperous commercial projects which now provide our main sources of employment. Many Ennistonians, I should add, work on the land, but big landowners have not figured in our recent history.

Ennistone is situated upon an attractive river (which I shall call ‘the Enn’). The Romans were here (there is a Roman bridge over the Enn) and some interesting remains attest earlier inhabitants. There are some megaliths upon the common which are known as ‘the Ennistone Ring’ although there are only nine of them and one a mere stump. Professor Thom visited our stones and made some calculations but could make nothing of them (we were rather proud of that). Of the medieval village little survives except St Olaf’s Church, situated in the poorer part of the town. There are some good eighteenth-century buildings, including the Quaker Meeting House, the Crescent, and the Hall, and an eighteenth-century bridge (alas much altered) still called the New Bridge. Although so ancient, we cannot alas claim to have produced any very famous sons. History knows of a bishop who got into trouble in the seventeenth century for being a Cambridge Platonist. And there was a poor non-conforming fellow in the eighteenth century who, after becoming a famous preacher, suddenly declared that he was Christ and occasioned some sort of little revolt. His name was Elias Ossmor, and the Osmore family of today claim descent from him. On these and other matters see Ennistone, Its History and Antiquities (published 1901) by Oscar Bowcock, forebear of our Percy Bowcock. Oscar’s younger brother James was the founder of our one big shop, Burdett and Bowcock, usually known as Bowcocks. I think the book is out of print, but a copy survives in the public library. There used to be two copies but one was stolen. At the time of this story I can mention only two Ennistonians who are at all well known outside our gates; the psychiatrist Ivor (now Sir Ivor) Sefton, and the philosopher (about whom more will be heard in these pages) John Robert Rozanov.

I have not yet mentioned the feature for which Ennistone is most famous. Ennistone is a spa. (The town was called Ennistone Spa in the nineteenth century, but the name is no longer in use.) There is a copious hot spring with alleged medical properties, which of course attracted the Romans and their predecessors to the site. Shadowy historical evidence suggests that the worship of a preRoman goddess (perhaps Freya) was associated with the spring; a rudimentary stone image in the Museum is supposed to represent this deity. A beautiful Roman inscription, also in the Museum, more solidly suggests a cult of Venus. The Romans honoured the spring with a handsome bathing establishment, of which unfortunately only foundations and a piece of wall remain. The idea that the waters had an aphrodisiac effect was periodically popular. Shakespeare’s sonnet 153 is said to refer to Ennistone, wherein the Bard’s lively fancy pictures the spring deriving from a prank of one of Diana’s nymphs who cooled the fiery penis of sleeping Cupid in a cool spring which thence became hot, and whose waters were said to cure the ‘sad distempers’ and ‘strange maladies’ which attend imprudent love. A seventeenth-century medical pamphlet makes an ambiguous reference to the Ennistone waters (see Bowcock’s book, the index under ‘venereal disease’). Our ancestors in their folly pulled down most of the fine architecture with which (as we see from prints) the spring was surrounded in the eighteenth century, including a Bath House of transcendent beauty. A minor eighteenth-century poet called Gideon Parke wrote a masque called The Triumph of Aphrodite which was to take place in the Bath House, and included a scene where the goddess emerges from the steam of the hot spring itself. This work survives and was performed in the nineteen-thirties with music written by the Rector of St Olaf’s. (There was some disagreeable fuss about it at the time.) Of the eighteenth-century buildings only the Pump Room remains, now no longer connected with the waters, used for assemblies and concerts and known as the ‘Ennistone Hall’. The spring has been the victim of a kind of periodical puritanism, and Ennistonians had, and to some extent still have, oddly mixed feelings about their chief municipal glory. Before the first war a Methodist minister even managed to have the establishment closed for a short period on an allegation, never proved, that it had become a secret centre of heathen worship. A vague feeling persists to this day that the spring is in some way a source of a kind of unholy restlessness which attacks the town at intervals like an epidemic.

Let me try to describe the spa buildings as they are now. The main edifice is Victorian, a long tall lamentable block of glazed yellow brick with a lot of ‘Gothic’ ornament upon it. At the time of the erection of this pile the establishment was christened ‘the Bath Institute’ and is still referred to as ‘the Institute’, though many people more familiarly call it ‘the Baths’. The Institute building contains, as I shall explain, together with the ‘machine room’ of the spa, a refreshment area, changing-rooms, offices, and two indoor pools. Next to the Institute, and divided from it by a garden about which I shall also speak shortly, is the Ennistone Hall (1760), beautifully proportioned and built of the local stone, a powdery golden-yellow, full of fossils and unfortunately rather soft. Ladies representing the virtues, reduced to four for convenience, who adorn the corners of the roof, have weathered to shapeless pillars. A pediment at one end contains a reclining god, said to represent the river Enn, who has been similarly reduced. Beyond the Hall is the park, or Botanic Garden, containing many rare and interesting plants and trees. There is a lake, and a Victorian ‘temple’ which houses our small but well-arranged Museum with its treasured collection of Roman antiquities. In the same building there is a modest art gallery containing nineteenth-century romantic paintings and some prettyish work by Ned Larkin, an Ennistonian follower of Paul Nash. The open space which separates the Hall from the Institute, and forms part of the premises of the latter, is known as Diana’s Garden. This garden contains an excavated area showing foundations of Roman walls and some water pipes. (A mosaic found here is in the Museum.) Also to be seen is the only ‘natural’ manifestation of the great spring which is visible to the public, a steamy stone basin (perhaps the site of the exploit mentioned in sonnet 153) where scalding water spits up at intervals to a height of three or four feet. The basin is not ornate, it is even rudimentary and of uncertain age, suggestive of the country shrine of some little local god. It is traditionally called ‘Lud’s Rill’ but is more popularly known as the ‘Little Teaser’.

At the other end of the Institute and joining it at right angles is a long concrete structure, now a little strained and battered, built in the nineteen-twenties in the Bauhaus style and at that time considered a model of modern architecture. Between the end of this building (called the ‘Ennistone Rooms’) and the end of the garden runs a wall made of yellow glazed bricks, similar to those of the Institute building, and decorated here and there with mauve and blue tiles made up into pictures of dolphins and such. The large rectangle enclosed by these four sides contains the Outdoor Bath, an expanse of natural warm water (26° to 28° Centigrade at all seasons) over which in winter there hangs a thick pall of steam. The Outdoor Bath is said to be the largest swimming-pool in Europe, but this may be an exaggeration. It certainly meets Olympic standards and is frequented, especially in the colder months, by athletes in training. A large clock with a second hand at one end records the speed of the swimmers. Between the brick wall and the pool at the Diana’s Garden end runs a row of sizeable round concrete wells filled with water at a series of temperatures running from 36° to 45° Centigrade. Into each of these wells, which are tiled at the bottom, a stairway descends, and there is a seat round the edge upon which bathers can sit and soak, with their heads a little above the water level. Each well can in this way contain some ten to fifteen people. These hedonistic places of meditation are known as the ‘stewpots’ or just ‘the stews’.

This completes my account of the outside of the Institute. I now move inside. Through a doorway like that of a Renaissance palace, above which in Roman mosaic style is inscribed the Institute motto, Natando Virtus, one gains access to the first public area, the Promenade. This is a large rather shabby place, painted a melancholy green, dotted with tables and chairs where simple refreshments may be obtained, such as tea, lemonade, bars of chocolate, sandwiches, and of course (free of charge) the famous water. The healing stream flows from the brass mouth of a marble lion, but the filled glasses stand upon the counter. No alcohol is served in the Institute. This rule is maintained in spite of periodic protests by younger citizens. It is held that a bar would radically alter the atmosphere of the place, and no doubt this is true. At the end of the Promenade opposite the main door there is access to the changing-rooms. There is also a long observation window looking on to the Outdoor Bath. (Those who want to watch but not to swim pay a reduced entrance fee.) On the right of the Promenade arc situated the Indoor Bath and its facilities and beyond it the Infants’ Pool and the Institute offices. The Indoor Bath replaces (but unfortunately does not copy) its eighteenth-century predecessor. The latter, built of local stone, felicitously (as we see in pictures) imitated the classical through a natural affinity. Our Bath is built of marble, and its architect, who also thought he was imitating the classical, has produced something resembling an indifferent Victorian picture of a bath in a harem. (Some such idea seems to have haunted a local painter commissioned to paint some frescoes of classical scenes, but whose designs were turned down by the Committee.) However, the place, with its double row of columns and marble steps descending into warm clear water has a certain charm, though spoilt by unsightly masses of potted plants. The Indoor Bath used to be hired out for private parties, but after a gathering which was reported in the national newspapers this custom was discontinued.

On the left of the Promenade a door leads to a large and curious octagonal room known as ‘the Baptistry’. This room enshrines the entrance, complete with pseudo-classical pillars and pediment, to the great ‘machinery’ or ‘engine room’ to use the traditional terms, of the installation. These machines, now modernized of course, were the pride of a well-known nineteenth-century engineer, and the huge subterranean area which they occupy used to be on show to the public. Now, however, for a variety of reasons (thought by some who canvass the matter regularly in the Gazette to be sinister) this area is closed off and the way into the Baptistry is marked PRIVATE. The Baptistry is used as a store-room, and the great hot bronze doors, studded with pseudo-nails, which guard the access to (as we say and imagine) the hot spring itself, are locked against all except ‘authorized personnel’. Even to glimpse these doors, through which steam eternally seeps, is a rare treat for citizens managing to peer in from the Promenade. A door on the far side of the Baptistry leads to the Ennistone Rooms, but the public entrance to the Rooms is of course on the street, and not through the Institute.

I turn now to the Ennistone Rooms, the modern (well, not so modern) extension of the Institute. The Rooms, as I explained, are a nineteen-twenties building meeting the Institute at right angles. The ‘nose’ or narrow end of the building, with an austere but handsome public entrance, is on the same street as the Institute, the walls being coterminous. The Rooms stretch back skirting the Outdoor Bath, from which they are separated by a garden and a high beech hedge. (The windows on the Bath side are double-glazed.) Of course a therapeutic use of the waters dates back a long way, perhaps as far as any human occupation of the site. Certainly a ‘cure’ existed at Ennistone in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the eighteenth-century buildings included a wing devoted to private baths and treatment. In the nineteenth century these facilities were housed inside the Institute Building, but were considerably curtailed after the construction of the Indoor Bath. After the first war, when ‘health crazes’ were much in the news, the Town Council decided to invest in a new building and make a greater profit out of science.

The Rooms comprise consulting rooms, offices, massage parlours, mud baths, a gymnasium, a common room, but mainly the enterprise takes its name from the set of luxurious bedrooms with private baths attached. These large bed-sitting rooms, modelled on similar installations in continental spas, were designed for wealthy invalids. They were adorned in an art déco style which contrived to be, at the same time, severe, exotic and insipid. The colour schemes were predominantly black and white, trimmed with beige, orange and light green. There were a lot of triangular mirrors with zigzag edges, and curly tubular steel chairs which swayed alarmingly when sat on. The beds were also made of tubular steel, moving on casters to stand against carved light oak headboards attached to the wall.

Beyond the louvred double doors the bathrooms were walled with iridescent coloured glass depicting thin ecstatic ladies on hilltops, leaping fawns, enormous cocktails, aeroplanes, airships and so on, together with pieces of furniture made of fur, and various alcoves protected by moorish lattices. The baths themselves (black), sunk into the floor and shaped like boats with blunt ends, were large and deep enough for a swimmer to take two or three strokes. Only the big goldeny Edwardian brass taps were reminiscent of a more traditional taste. These were put in by mistake, much to the annoyance of the Swedish architect, but never changed, since by then the cost of the building had exceeded the wildest estimates. (Most of the fittings came from Sweden; there were rows about that too.) I have used the past tense in this description since the Rooms have changed a good deal since the days of their glory. The famous orange and white ‘sunrise’ crockery has been mostly broken and not replaced, as have the zigzag mirrors and iridescent glass. The tubular snakes have sagged under their burdens and been succeeded by sturdy ugly chairs. The glittering black Swedish tiles are gone from the baths and decent white British tiles reign in their stead, though the shape of the baths and the Edwardian taps remain. The Institute suffered considerably from blast during the war, when it was used as an Air Raid Precautions centre. (The Outdoor Bath remained in use throughout the conflict and was very popular with the Army Camp upon the Common.) In general the decor of the Rooms has suffered, in a way which ought to have been better foreseen by the architect, from perpetual steam, since the hot water streams continuously from the great brass taps, maintaining a lowish water level in the baths (which may be raised by putting in the plug). The temperature is kept at 42° Centigrade. (Once the water supply suddenly became scalding hot by mistake and drowned an elderly gentleman who was unable to get out in time, but we do not speak of that.) The deafening noise of the water, together with the thick steamy moist air, gives the Ennistone Rooms a strange atmosphere. More than one woman has admitted to me that she feels a sexual thrill on entering.

The Institute occupies a central place in the social life of Ennistone. Its role has been compared to that of the agora in Athens. It is the main rendezvous of the citizenry where people idle, gossip, relax, show off, hunt for partners, make assignations, make business deals, make plots. Marriages are made, and broken, beside these steamy pools. It is like what going to church used to be, only it happens every day. This aspect of our lives is of course described by responsible citizens in high-minded terms. Swimming is the very best kind of exercise for old and young, and is undoubtedly also good for the soul. This lofty conception of the spiritual utility of swimming battles continuously with the (also recurrent) notion of many citizens that the Baths is a temple of hedonism. The old this dansants (with three-piece orchestra) upon the Promenade have long ceased to be. But the danger always remains that innocent and healthy disciplines may degenerate into pure pleasure.

Be that as it may, the people of our town make the fullest possible use of this natural bounty. Everybody swims. Babies learn at the age of six weeks in the Infants’ Pool, where mothers with amazed joy watch the tiny creatures taking boldly to the water, striking out with puny arms, and floating fearlessly with noses just above the surface. The aged swim, unashamed of their bodies, pot-bellied men and ancient wrinkled women in bikinis. Decency is maintained, however. Recent suggestions about nude bathing (a sign of the times) have been quickly extinguished. We swim every day seven days a week. Many of us swim before going to work, or, if the lunch-hour allows, at midday, a popular time. Then there are evening swimmers, many of whom have also been morning swimmers. Persons of leisure or housewives, mothers with children, come at less crowded hours and sit about and talk. We swim all the year round. The Outdoor Bath, floodlit after dusk, has a quite special charm in winter when we run from the changing-rooms, crossing a patch of frost or snow, to plunge into the warm water which is covered by so thick a cloud of steam that visibility may be reduced to a few feet and we swim about in strange insulated bubbles. Most swimmers favour the Outdoor Bath as being suited to the serious swimming which is a matter of pride in our town. The Indoor Bath is usually frequented by certain kinds of women, I do not mean prostitutes, but shy or withdrawn people who shun the more boisterous atmosphere outside; and the place has lately developed, especially at weekends, a curious clientele of its own.

I must say something more about the Ennistone Rooms. Unfortunately for the town, the cult of the Rooms by rich invalids from elsewhere did not last for long, and Ennistone’s hopes of becoming an internationally famous spa were soon dashed. A medical report published in The Lancet, and reprinted in the national press, to the effect that the Ennistone water, though less, had no curative properties whatever, was probably unconnected with the change of fashion which returned Ennistone Spa to comparative obscurity. (It is also doubtless untrue that the then Director of the Institute tried to have the report hushed up.) Various postmortems bemoaned various mistakes, such as not enough advertising, or the wrong kind, bad food, unattractive masseuses, and so on. One trouble with the project was that its original creators never made up their minds whether they were designing a hospital or a hotel, and it was later argued that the Rooms performed neither function. This would perhaps not have mattered had the waters been more widely credited with magical properties. In any case, and for whatever reason, the troop of highly paid doctors and nurses and physiotherapists who had run the Rooms in its early days departed, leaving the town with a much-diminished asset with which, of course, something had to be done. What was done was to let out the Rooms at a more modest cost for short periods, even by the day, to locals and tourists simply as hotel rooms where those who enjoyed such things could soak and sleep, and soak and sleep again. No further ‘treatment’ was offered but twice a week a doctor was in attendance to discuss medical problems for a fee. (Even about this there were arguments, everything about the Institute provokes arguments.) Sufferers from arthritis, undeterred by the medical report (or more likely not having heard of it), came in small but regular numbers. Some were encouraged to come by local Ennistonian practitioners. No restaurant facilities were offered, but food could be ordered from the snack bar on the Promenade. Some pilgrims continued to travel to the great Ennistonian spring, but the main custom of the Rooms increasingly came, rather to the surprise and dismay of the Committee, from ordinary Ennistonians who thought it fun or even chic to hire a room for a day or two and enjoy the handsome private bath and the luxury of relaxing in a place which still bore some resemblance to an exotic hotel. The cost was not great. Students came with their books. Writers came. Slimmers came. Convalescents came. Some doctors (including Ivor Sefton) recommended this ‘cure’ to people recovering from nervous breakdowns. I should add that married couples (and a fortiori any other kind) are not allowed to reside together. The Rooms are all single rooms and are kept under such supervision as to preclude any improper occurrences. Alcohol is also banned, though the ban is difficult to enforce. The popularity of the Rooms has (perhaps this is to be expected) occasioned criticism from the anti-hedonist lobby, who claim that excessive enjoyment of the waters must be demoralizing and that hot baths and beds give people ideas. It is even alleged that people make a habit of leaving their offices early at four-thirty, bathing and resting until six and then proceeding to the pub. I have met some of these offenders myself.

I have portrayed our citizens as rather sober and strait-laced folk, and this is indeed true of the majority. However, there is also manifest, and not only in the young people, a certain restless sensationalism, something almost superstitious, which seems bound to erupt at periodic intervals. A visiting evangelist made a deep impression some years ago by crying out ‘You have dethroned Christ and worship water instead.’ Some serious persons went about shaking their heads and speaking of ‘grave spiritual hazards’. This sort of unhealthy excitement or ‘moral unrest’, something vague, almost fanciful, came at fairly rare intervals, yet regularly enough for people to attempt to chart them. Perhaps there was nothing to these ‘phases’ except a periodic infectious need for people to say ‘We’re going into one of those things’, or ‘We’re going to have one of our funny times.’ It might be as if, morality being tiring, a holiday from it had at certain intervals to be decreed, at least ostensibly, by some covert social complicity. These ‘holidays’ took various forms, sometimes appearing simply (or initially) in the guise of some prevalent ‘craze’, which was then taken rightly or wrongly as a symptom of deep psychological or moral disorder. Some years before there had been a sudden passion for interpreting dreams, then for experiments in telepathy, seances, automatic writing, then perfectly rational people began to see ghosts (and so on). At such periods more was always to be heard of the old speculation about the waters having an aphrodisiac effect. (I recall a harmless little Roman Catholic shop called ‘Our Lady of the Grotto’, which had existed among us for some time, being suddenly made an object of interest, even persecution, by people who went round murmuring ‘What lady, of what grotto?’ It eventually changed its name to ‘The Pentecostal Bazaar’. This example suggests the quality, as well as the irrationality, of these seizures.)

At the time of this story some nonsense of this sort was again at large in the community, particularly among the younger people and among the idler older women who liked to have something weird or shocking to gossip about. A large number of letters (so large as to suggest a concocted campaign, though this was never proved) were received by the Ennistone Gazette suggesting that the Bath Institute should be thoroughly shaken up and hustled into the contemporary world. The suggestions were various but similar in tone: the Institute should be renamed (this prompted many facetious proposals), it should be open till midnight, alcohol should be served, there should be regular dancing on the Promenade. One letter signed by some ‘bright young things’, even suggested that a Casino should be established. (One of the signatories was young Gregory Osmore; this caused some distress to his parents.) These letters were not really very shocking, and a number of people, some of them Friends (Quakers), tried to ‘take over’ the ‘outbreak’ by saying that it was indeed not absurd to suggest that the Institute should become a big ‘money-spinner’ for the town and thus help to provide better housing for our poorer citizens. A left-wing group on the Town Council took the occasion to demand changes in the way the Institute was administered. This too was perfectly sensible. However, various less sensible folk chose to see these discussions as symptoms of some local upheaval, and seemed intent on spreading a sort of self-conscious excitement and anticipation of scandals. A group of the ‘bright young things’ before mentioned were discovered to be planning a production of Gideon Parke’s masque The Triumph of Aphrodite in a new and more daring version, which had been unearthed by a solemn scholar, a visitor to the town, who had been delving in the archives. The scholar (called Hector Gaines) was at first dismayed and later flattered at being taken up by our jeunesse dorée. He was rumoured to have found a lot of pornographic lines which had been deleted by a nineteenth-century editor.

In February of the year of this tale (not long before George McCaffrey’s ‘accident’) an elderly man called William Eastcote, a most respected citizen and pillar of the Friends’ Meeting House, a non-drinking, bridge-playing intimate of Percy Bowcock, saw an unidentified flying object, a large luminous tilted saucer, hanging motionless over the Common, quite low down. No one else witnessed this phenomenon; but a week later several young people, including Greg Osmore and Andrew Blackett, returning from a concert at the Hall, saw something similar rather farther off, and there was one more dubious sighting after that. This was of course a popular topic (with all of us, I must confess) and there were plenty of theorists to link the saucer with the Ennistone Ring by various familiar sorts of wild speculation. Here indeed was a genuine portent, a veridical harbinger of the onset of a ‘funny time’. Another portent followed of which I was myself a witness. Lud’s Rill, the ‘Little Teaser’, the modest hot jet in Diana’s Garden, suddenly became more animated and began sending up great spurts of boiling water to a height of some twenty (when I saw it) or even thirty feet. Some people who were nearby when the jet suddenly first erupted were quite seriously scalded. The garden was then closed. The spring continued to perform for about three weeks and then stopped of its own accord. The garden remained closed for some time and was then reopened after the introduction below ground of some grand new ‘valve’ which, we are assured, would preclude any repetition of such exuberance. There was disappointment and general annoyance at what was felt to be an unjustified interference with a marvel of nature. Most of us would gladly have surrendered the garden to the whims of the scalding jet.

An account of all this nonsense is not irrelevant to our story, since it was in the first or anticipatory stage of this unhealthy mood that George McCaffrey’s ‘exploit’ occurred, and at another time it might have attracted less notice. The incident with the Roman glass, which had happened over a year earlier and which had led, though because of bureaucratic delays not at once, to his dismissal, had caused less of a stir at the time, partly of course because few people in Ennistone cared deeply about Roman glass, but also because the psychological climate was then less highly charged. As it was, it came later to be regarded as highly significant, and added a new dimension to George’s already considerable reputation or ‘myth’. Past happenings, including the Roman glass, were recalled and refurbished. Better read citizens instanced similar times in Ennistone’s history, as in the case of the man who thought he was Christ, when some violent action (in that case a murder quite unconnected with the poor fellow’s delusion) heralded a period of upheaval. It was interesting that almost everyone, at once and on no evidence, took it for granted that George had driven the car into the canal on purpose, though opinions differed about whether or not he had intended to kill his wife. Serious citizens and prudes who did not care for this kind of irresponsible speculation said that all this showed was how glamorous a thoroughly nasty man can seem to be. Others, however much they disapproved, saw George in a different light. It would be an exaggeration to say that almost every man in Ennistone envied George’s liberation from morals and almost every woman believed she could save him from himself, but it is an exaggeration worth recording. However, I anticipate. All I want to add here is that George’s ‘accident’ was, for whatever reason, taken by the serious-minded as an example of how pure disorder at one level can cause a fall of moral barriers at another.

As there are quite a large number of McCaffreys in the story that follows, I might, before concluding these introductory remarks, give a brief account of the family. The McCaffreys, as I have already mentioned, were originally commercially minded Quakers. (The name of course is Scottish, but no connection north of the border remains on record.) George’s great-great-grandfather, William McCaffrey, had inherited money and some sort of leather business from his father, who was said to be a saddler. William built up a flourishing leather trade and founded a glove and shoe manufactory which he passed on to his son Albert, and which Albert passed on, in a less flourishing condition, to his son Gerald who was George’s grandfather. George’s father, Alan McCaffrey, was not interested in the business and Gerald sold it in due course to the Newbolds, an Anglican family associated with St Paul’s Church, Victoria Park. (The glove factory still exists partly under their management.) In his later years Gerald McCaffrey left his wife and went to live with a Danish mistress in Copenhagen where he was said to have ‘gambled away the family fortune’. He seems in fact to have left Alan reasonably well off, though there were some who said darkly that Alan had inherited more than money from his father, meaning that he inherited a rather unsatisfactory temperament. (The word usually employed was ‘raffish’.) Alan became a doctor, reputed to be a good one, and served in a medical capacity in the Second World War. When still fairly young he married Alexandra Stillowen, whose family, also Ennistonians, were Methodists, formerly involved in trade (connected with the defunct Tweed Mill) but now professional people of various kinds. Alan was clever and handsome, and Alexandra was a high-spirited beauty, and the marriage gave general satisfaction, to which predictions that she would ‘rue the day’ also contributed. The old McCaffrey house in the Crescent had by now been sold to the Burdett family, and the happy pair moved into Alexandra’s father’s house, Belmont, which her father, a successful lawyer who had moved to London, had only intermittently occupied. In due course two sons were born, first George, then Brian. It also appeared in due course that the gloomy prophets were right. Alan was restless, said to be interested in other women, though without producing any very palpable scandal. Alexandra was said to be concealing her unhappiness. However, Belmont life went on, and the two boys continued to grow up into and indeed out of their teens before anything decisive occurred. Theories differ about exactly how and when the marriage finally broke down, and how this related in time to the advent of Fiona Gates. In fact, to do Alan and Fiona justice, it was fairly clear that Alan and Alexandra were already alienated from each other by the time Fiona appeared on the scene, and divorce proceedings had been talked of, perhaps instituted. Again, the Fiona Gates story is told in several different versions - of which I give the one which I credit most myself.

Fiona, the child of sensible ordinary parents living in East Anglia (her father worked in a bank), being then eighteen years old, at a pop festival jumped impulsively on to the back of a teenage boy’s motor cycle with the intention (which she fulfilled) of running away from home. She ran away with her handbag but without a coat. Her youthful ‘abductor’ took her on his bike as far as Ennistone where, after an argument, he abandoned her. The first person she then met was Alan McCaffrey. She spent the night with Alan (where is not recorded) and then and there (so the legend has it) conceived a child. This child, after causing its parents some initial dismay and indecision, forged resolutely ahead and was duly born and soon thereafter known as Tom McCaffrey. Alex divorced Alan (I shall start to call her ‘Alex’ now as this is how she is familiarly known) and Alan married Fiona with whom it appeared he was genuinely in love. ‘Feckless Fiona’, as she was called, must have been a person of charm. ‘A dotty girl’, people would say, and as they said so they would smile indulgently. And they said that she had ‘a happy temperament’. However, Fiona was not destined to be happy for long, since she died of leukaemia when Tom was three years old. It is not true that when she was dying Alex entered the room and took the child away. What is certain is that Tom went to Belmont to join his brothers, with Alan’s consent, soon after his mother’s death. Alan, very evidently afflicted, left Ennistone and went into practice in Hong Kong where he died three years later in a mysterious accident in a laboratory without ever seeing his youngest child again.

Tom was of course very much younger than George and Brian, who were by this time grown-up. It was said that Alex doted on her little stepson to the exclusion of her sons, causing the latter to conceive a deep hatred for the child. A variant story has it that although Alex adored Tom she never got over her original passionate attachment to her first-born, George, and that although George may have hated Tom, Brian developed a protective fatherly relationship to the newcomer. Meanwhile it should be recounted that George and Brian were busy getting themselves married. George married Stella Henriques, not an Ennistonian, daughter of an English diplomat of Sephardic Jewish extraction. Stella was said to be ‘academic’ and ‘awfully clever’, though she gave up her studies on marriage. Brian married Gabriel Bowcock, a cousin of Percy Bowcock who runs the big shop (the Bowcocks are also Quakers). Two other McCaffreys deserve mention: Adam McCaffrey, son of Brian and Gabriel, and Rufus McCaffrey, son, deceased, of George and Stella. Rufus died as a small child in some sort of mishap at his home. Those who take a tolerant view of George’s ‘temperament’ attribute it to continued shock as a result of this loss. Others, less tolerant, put a more sinister construction upon the child’s death. At the time of this story Alex is sixty-six, George is forty-four, Brian is forty-one, Tom is twenty, and Adam is eight.