Things That Go Bump in the Night

My English Traits - Chapter 1

The condition of England, on which many pamphlets are now in the course of publication, and many thoughts unpublished are going on in every reflective head, is justly regarded as one of the most ominous, and withal one of the strangest, ever seen in this world.

Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, 1843

“I don’t see why we shouldn’t try to spread our common language even more widely throughout the globe… the power to control language offers far better prizes than taking away people’s provinces or lands or grinding them down in exploitation. The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”

Winston Churchill, at Harvard University, 1943

“For thousands of years Britain has ruled in a wonderful way.”

The verbatim utterance of a member of the Question Time audience in Torquay last night, spoken by a bespectacled woman with a pink face in justification of her assertion that, “…we’ll only get true democracy when we get out of the EU.”

10th February 2017

Ever heard of Henry Thomas Buckle? I wouldn’t have either if I hadn’t come across a passing reference to him in The Way of All Flesh. And I wouldn’t have been reading Samuel Butler if I hadn’t spent the last six months attempting to plug the gaping holes in my knowledge of Victorian thought and literature. And I wouldn’t have been attempting to plug the gaping holes in my knowledge of Victorian thought and literature if I hadn’t woken up one morning to discover that I didn’t understand the English.¹

I thought I understood the English because I thought of myself as English. I thought of myself as English because my mother was quintessentially English, and her mother and father were properly English, and my father’s great grandfather was an English cutler who fought under Lt Gen Sir David Baird in the Battle of Blaauwberg that wrested the Cape Colony from the Batavian Republic 1806, and my father fought in Field Marshall “Monty” Montgomery’s Eighth Army in North Africa and Italy for Harry, England and St George, which is about as English as it gets even if you discount the possibly apocryphal family legend that our matrilineal bloodline could be traced back directly to Sir Francis Drake, the most English Englishman in English history.

My mother was a Smith, surely the most salt-of-the-earth-English of all English surnames. Her Christian names, as we rather optimistically used to call them, were the blushingly English and meekly Anglican Rosemary, the ancestrally appropriate Phillippa, and Leyland, my own middle name and that of all my siblings, which was a bobbing curtsy to the Smiths’ blue-blooded benefactor, the Natal sugarcane baron Lt John Leyland Feilden, son of Sir William Feilden (13 March 1772 – 21 May 1850) 1st Baronet, an English cotton manufacturer and Conservative politician of whom Wikipedia records – perhaps wistfully, perhaps sardonically, it’s hard to tell - only that, “He did nothing to distinguish himself in the House of Commons in his fourteen years as a M.P.” 

As children we were occasionally reminded that Fenniscowles Road in Umbilo, Durban, honoured the location of the eponymous homestead Lt Feilden carved out of the Natal coast’s virgin scrub and bush in the 1840s, named in turn after the Feilden family’s estate in the County Palatine of Lancaster. We weren’t to know until a generation later when we discovered the diary of John Feilden’s wife, the wonderfully observant Eliza Whigham Feilden, née Kennedy, published in 1887 by S. Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington after her return to England as My African Home: Or, Bush Life in Natal when a Young Colony, that the provenance of my mother’s branch of the Natal Smiths wasn’t quite as illustrious as the lineage from which our Leyland monikers were borrowed. Smith was Feilden’s factotum, the hired handyman responsible for provisioning Fenniscowles’ kitchen and keeping the persistent encroachment of Natal’s indigenous flora and fauna at bay, the fauna in particular, which in Eliza’s imagination is a teeming bestiary of creatures ranging from the inexplicable songololo through an uncountable variety of stripeless tigers to the unfathomable Zulu who must surely have smuggled themselves onto the ark when Noah wasn’t looking. All the more deflating is the way she refers to the brood of ragamuffins who were their factotum’s children, among them the future father of my maternal grandfather, as, “the poor Smiths.” But still.

The name Torr, on the other hand, even if it couldn’t claim the remotest association with the landed gentry who sent their sons to Parliament to catch up on the sleep they missed while bonking the chambermaids at Trinity, Magdalen, or St John’s, has its roots deeply and firmly in the soil that produced Gawain, Beowulf, and Chaucer. The Old English torr, possibly from Proto-Celtic, is “a high rock, lofty hill or tower”, the etymological daddy of those stony outcrops known as a tors, as in Glastonbury Tor. Not that my father would have known or cared. Names were names. Even cows and dogs learned to respond to them. Not sheep, mind you. His father had told him only that the name was as old as the hills.

I suspect my mother had reservations. It was one of her favourite phrases. She had reservations about a number of things. In this case, I’m sad to have to confess, they would almost certainly have concerned – how to put this nicely? – let’s say, the social rank of, perhaps even the racial and national provenance of, the name she had given up her indisputably English maiden name to assume. So she was pleasantly if not entirely reassured to learn from the loquacious landlord of a pub they stopped at in Devon while on their first trip to England in 1972, who turned out himself to be a Torr, that (he had it on excellent authority) when King Harold II was shot in the eye with an arrow at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the English soldier who shut the startled other eye out of respect for the dead monarch was, he said with a brawny arm around my father’s shoulders, “One of us.”

A free round was served in celebration at the King’s Arms that night. The landlord’s portly wife emerged from the kitchen to see what the fuss was about. “This is my other half - Janet,” the landlord proudly announced to his foreign guests. Legend has it that a bucket of cold water had to be administered to my father’s head to stop him from laughing himself to a coronary as he writhed on the beer-sodden floor slapping his thighs and wheezing between gasps of air, “Janet Torr, Janet Torr...!”

I see my mother looking into the middle distance. 

We lived on a farm in the rolling green foothills of the Drakensberg in a province of South Africa now known as Kwa-Zulu Natal. But as far as my mother was concerned we lived in a pleasant Tory shire in the late 19th century in a manor house not dissimilar to Downton Abbey. My siblings and I grew up on Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson, Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling and Rider Haggard. She read us Winnie the Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, Peter Rabbit, Just William, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and the expurgated Tom Brown’s Schooldays. She considered Jane Austen unsuitable for young minds and thought Thomas Hardy was a dangerously mad modern radical.

For the answers to such questions that arose from time to time concerning the facts of life, politics, and the world beyond Mooi River, we were directed to consult the omniscient wisdom of Arthur Mee whose 1923 edition of The Children’s Encyclopaedia in ten volumes was among her most cherished possessions. A Baptist from Stapleford and a supporter of the temperance movement, Arthur Mee is said to have had no special affinity for children but wrote his encyclopaedia rather in the hope of raising a generation of patriotic and moral English citizens, of which happy cohort I naturally aspired one day to be a member. His philosophical musings on subjects such as “Where Colour Comes From” and “The Wonderful Ant” may have been less than scientific, but he was excellent on practical matters, such as how to keep a hedgehog as a pet, how to clean a slimy sponge, and how to make a lasso, though, sadly, far less explicit about the facts of life, politics, and the world beyond Mooi River. In these rare cases where Arthur Mee could not provide satisfaction, we were referred upwards to the four daunting volumes of Winston Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, the very ornament of our instruction and enlightenment.

My father was a farmer because he’d grown up on a farm in the Eastern Cape, and farming was the only thing he knew apart from Morse code. And he was an excellent shot and an accomplished tent-pegger. He liked horses and they liked him. After the war he married my mother and bought New Dell, the farm where we grew up. He started out with precious little in the way of livestock and capital, and by the time he died he had less of both. He told us that he had never been bored, not for a day, nor an hour, nor a minute, nor a second of his life. No one could be bored if they walked around the farm every day and looked at everything. Just looked. I believe he was the happiest man who ever trod the earth.

My mother was a teacher who specialised in early childhood education, specifically the years between three and five, which some countries call kindergarten, others call nursery school, and the English call ‘Reception’. It didn’t sound Orwellian at the time. We thought it was rather charming. So passionate was she about the importance of early learning that she devoted a full year of home-schooling to all six of us children, each in turn upon reaching the age of five, as a kind of inoculation against the educational horrors she justifiably feared would lie ahead.

When I used to think of 1959, that blissful year when, but for the importunate wails and mewls of my younger sister and brother, I was the sole focus of her loving attention, I would see just the two of us, my mother and me, sitting at the magnificent dining table of Victorian teak with my books and my jotter spread out before me, and I’d be annotating my pencil drawing of the Panama Canal, and she, with that beautiful profile outlined by the golden light of the summer afternoon, would be saying, “Anopheles, with a ph in the middle, not an f, silly!”

It was gentle enough, my introduction to epistemic injustice. Some people knew things that others didn’t and thought them silly for not knowing. I didn’t mind at the time. Little did I know. 

But now, thanks to yet another attempt to plug a yet another gaping hole in my knowledge of Victorian thought and literature, I see instead the picture of Education that H.G. Wells describes in The History of Mr Polly. Painted on the wall of a public building, “…in Manchester, Birmingham or Glasgow”, she is personified as, “…a glorious woman with a wise and fearless face stooping over her children and pointing them to far horizons…” Wells imagines her telling them of, “…the great prospect of life that opened before them, of the spectacle of the world, the splendours of sea and mountain they might travel and see, the joys of skill they might acquire, of effort and the pride of effort and the devotions and nobilities it was theirs to achieve...”

More personally, pertinently, and pointedly, “She was reminding them of their great heritage as English children, rulers of more than one-fifth of mankind of the obligation to do and be the best that such a pride of empire entails, of their essential nobility and knighthood and the restraints and the charities and the disciplined strength that is becoming in knights and rulers…”

In that imagined mural I recognise my mother’s wise and fearless face, and I see that I was one of those children, the boy with the wispy blonde hair and the faraway look in his pale blue eyes, and that I really did feel an obligation to do and be the best that a pride of Empire entails, and I longed and hoped to be a noble knight, preferably Sir Galahad, or Sir Percival at worst, if push came to shove, and I’d have their disciplined strength and their chivalrous restraint, but only when I’d finished being Christopher Robin. But always English; very specifically English.

I assume I knew that I didn’t live in England. But at the age of five geography is circumscribed by the distance you’re allowed to wander before someone yells at you to come back, that universally understood length of the radius of a circle that has a responsible adult or older sibling at its centre.

If I knew it, I’m certain I didn’t understand it. In the world of a child, culture always trumps geography, and family culture trumps national culture, and the values of the family — spoken and unspoken, explicit and tacit, for better or for worse — trump logic, judgement and common sense. For me they were what I assumed to be the old-fashioned values of the polite, decent, considerate, mild-mannered, well-meaning, fair-minded, good-natured, even-handed, softly-spoken, slightly eccentric English.

It was too good to last, of course. Sooner or later the circumference of my circle of blissful ignorance would widen until I was out of earshot of the responsible adult or older sibling calling me to come right back.

If I had the vaguest notion of the slightest possibility of the remotest chance of the haziest of shadows obtruding upon my perfect sphere of sweetness and light, I imagined it would appear in the form of one of the creatures depicted on a souvenir saucer from John O’Groats, which my mother kept on her dressing table as a repository for her earrings, brooches and cameos. 

A trinket of negligible intrinsic value and even less artistic merit, its eerily illustrated inscription made explicit the macabre mysteries and evil enchantments children instinctively know all nursery rhymes are actually about despite the sanitised sing-songs they come wrapped in. That it was the only prayer we knew that might break the sinister spells of all the others made it even more seductive to our innocent ears:

“From googlies and ghosties, and long-leggedy beasties, and things that go bump in the night, May the Good Lord deliver us.”

But it didn’t go bump in the night. It went bump on the bright autumn afternoon of the 31st of May 1961. I was seven years old.

1. I will circle back to Buckle in the end. I mention him here only because he lit the fuse that would explode into the intemperate rage of the latter essays of this collection of my uncollected thoughts.