Donald Cottee's first blog

A search for Donald Cottee… - Don sets the scene by examining who he might be. He searches for himself without much success. He then introduces himself, comments on his lost education, discusses sheep and goats and goes back to school

            A search for Donald Cottee in this information-rich, perhaps wisdom-neutral age reveals a wealth of potential identity. Like everyone with broadband, I regularly Google my name and even minor variants to see if I still exist. Browsing results carefully ordered for relevance I imagine possible identities, alter egos that one day I might be tempted to adopt.

I could be a black belt in taekwondo, bi-locating between California and Indiana. This version of Don Cottee is an active type, both younger and fitter than me. Alternatively, I might be the co-author of an Australian educational resource, no doubt enlightening for those who experience it, if, that is, experience has time to crystallise in an attention span trained by search engine response times. In another persona, I might even be involved in agriculture. But, despite pursuing a personal enlightenment in recent years, farming was not a discipline I explored. For Donald Cottee, perhaps, the life of a beef eater or indeed Beefeater might have appealed, but a beef farmer, no, since along West Lane in Kiddington I have lived close enough to the odour and ordure of husbandry to know they offer no attraction.

            D. Cottee might be a specialist cleaner of carpets and rugs in Western Australia, no job too small or too large, contact me and I’ll quote. As a reader of these pages you will soon begin to appreciate how often I do quote! When I do, I will usually refer, as my recently acquired academic respectability now requires. Back in the search results, I might be a retired public works officer from New South Wales, rather than an ex-electrician from Old West Yorkshire’s coal mines. In that alternative guise, I might have facilitated bicycle usage, initiated bush-care projects and demonstrated simple ways to store water. He sounds a far worthier specimen than the village lad of my continuing and, as yet, unrealised aspiration.

            As a lad, indeed, I might have played baseball in one Terre Haute American Little League, but I played rugby league and that none too well. The story of my sporting life deserved no Oscar nomination. Despite my origins down the pit, where players of the game reputedly bred, my time has been firmly on the spectators’ side, in that vast indefinable team that always turns up, never participates and never shares the victors’ pride, life being at best a temporal draw.

            But the one I would dearly love to have been is the researcher, the Cottie D., who has achieved fame via the intricacies of bronchovascular downstream blood pressure changes in exercising sheep. I applaud the specificity of his achievement but personally I aspire to a broader landscape, wondering whether a single lifetime might suffice if one were to travel upstream as well. But I applaud his achievement of academic respect, perhaps the only kind of respect that is more than academic. Academe has, indeed, become a recent obsession of mine, but it was human society that formed my focus, not the insides of an animal’s gullet.

            So if none of these is me, then who am I? At one level the answer is easy and already I recognise that I am stretching the etiquette of the blogosphere by not having introduced myself at the start. We can all have endless fun speculating on who we are not! I am Donald Cottee, usually Don. I am sixty-four years old. I am not losing my hair: it dropped out years ago. My wife, Suzie, is still my valentine and our newly-adopted Spanish residency has assured a copious supply of wine. I don’t stay out late, never did, though in future, and together, Suzie and I might try a little town painting in the local clubs. So no cottage in the Isle of Wight for Don and Suzie, and no grandchildren either, it seems. I can’t explain. Dulcie, our daughter, seems happy enough these days, though things maternal never really seemed her priority. But Rosie, our motor home in a Benidorm caravan park, is precisely what we wanted, our years of scrimp and save thus having borne enough fruit to juice up a few final years.

            Suzie and I have been together, more or less, since our teens and she has never called me Donald, always Don, a title that here in Spain endows me with unexpected and undeserved kudos beyond imagination. Don is actually short for my nickname, my extra name, which Suzie coined. It was Eccles, in the dark cellar, who told Bluebottle that most people called him by his nickname. “What is it?” the lad asked. “Nick,” said Eccles. But mine is Don, short for Donkey, not Donald. To Suzie, I have always been a donkey. This hypocoristic label has nothing to do with an alliteration of Donald, or any loose consideration of homophone. It derives from my large, fleshy, usually shining, salivated lower lip. Suzie would see a donkey on the television, or a horse, hippo, moose, camel or llama for that matter, and pronounce with a mocking finger wag, “That’s you, Donkey.” Anything but a llama, I used to say. They have harelips. I did call foul at a similar reference applied to a rhino. I may often get horny, but my nose is a quite normal length, width and shape, firmly within one standard deviation of the mean for a man of my size and shape. And that, incidentally, is one metre seventy-eight in height and eighty-five kilos in weight. That’s five ten and thirteen stone five in real money.

            You may have already noticed that I like to be accurate. My memory instinctively opts for precision on the grounds that its products may be needed one day. This tendency has landed me in trouble as often as it has been a saving grace. But years of accuracy and manual dexterity with my soldering iron, my insulation-stripping clippers and scrutiny of colour-banded resistors have fostered both accuracy and precision. Donkey does things right and in the right way, but no doubt the onrushing sloth of retirement will calm my over-active brain and teach it to let things pass. “That will be the day,” I can hear Suzie say.

            Our latest pride, our trusty steed, is Rosie, our Swift Sundance, our motor home, now driven all the way from a Yorkshire village to a Benidorm plot. We’re hooked up to water and electricity, we have satellite television for the football and now, as of today, we are on-line, hence this, the first blog entry of a new era, Donkey Cottee’s blogosphere retirement. It’s no more hiking through the rain to the pub, no more dashing down to the chippy in the car, no more fighting along the aisles of Asda in the prefabricated retail park outside Bromaton. From now on it’s t-shirt and shorts, flip-flops, salad and wine, beach walks and blogging. Our trusty Rosie, our Swift Sundance, may be something of a rusty plodder, but a Sundance is what it promised and a dance in the sun is precisely what it has faithfully delivered. Nowadays the dance is of necessity a linearity of age rather than a twist of youth, though we still manage the occasional rock’n’roll, just for old times sake, even if it does leave the hips and knees grinding.

            As a youth I was too eager to twist, rather than stick. It was a chequered childhood: I know that now. I knew it before I was twenty-five, but by then I was already bust, committed, even over-committed to the whirring and ever-speeding treadmill of consumerism’s cage. I was married - to Suzie, of course - and Dulcie was ready to start school. We needed more money, our aspired lifestyle demanded it. Like everyone, we wanted to be something different, someone else. In those days it wasn’t done, of course, but, if we were young today, we would have been first in the queue for a new face, a new image, a new identity to put alongside the new car, the new house, the washer, the camera, the holiday, the carpet and the garden lounger, things we had to have but never paused to enjoy.

            How we strove to be who we wanted to be! But the acquisitive affluence that society demanded needed resources we didn’t have, entitlements to which we were not entitled. I had drifted along in my job, doing well, earning good money, but the words ‘have a rise’ never quite rhymed with our avarice, and money was always short. But then, one day, there was a chance of promotion. I applied for the job I had already been doing for a year, covering for Ted who had gone long-term sick. I knew I could do it. My mates knew I could do it. My boss knew I could do it. But management appointed a lad, straight out of college, a newly qualified entrant to the industry. He’d had sponsorship, I think it was called, a label that was only ever mentioned in hushed terms, like a disease you shouldn’t catch. But it was far from an impediment. It was nothing less than a privilege for the already privileged. It meant that the Coal Board had paid all his college fees, his upkeep, his books and probably his beer since the age of sixteen. There he came, clutching his HND, still hot off the press, a diploma both national and higher. Along with the sponsorship, that made three things he had that I didn’t, four if you include the piece of paper. And so I was passed over, but it was a pass-over where I supplied the identifying blood and where I became the sacrifice. And so I embarked on what has since become my life’s mission: education, the enlightenment of the mind, plastic surgery for the persona.

            I only had myself to blame, of course. I passed my scholarship. Mrs Brown saw to that. There were two classes at the top of Kiddington juniors, Mrs Brown’s and Mr Taylor’s. She was a fiery, smock-wearing matron, whose temper could make you shake at the flip of an unspoken word. He was a soft-spoken Burton-suited genial gent in his middle age, with leather patches on his dark green jacket elbows, dandruff on his shoulders and bad breath. In a contest between the two of them, she would have insisted on shouting “go” and he would have been third away.

            All the bright buttons of the village went to Mrs Brown. The snotty-nosed, dribbling, farting, lice-shaven, frayed-end, scruffy rabble went to Mr Taylor. There was always much talk of sheep and goats. I said I preferred pigs and chickens, but they never took me seriously. It was a distinction I failed to comprehend at the time. Having already lost the basis of Christianity and with it the automatic association of sheep with the faithful, laudable flock, and goats with the opposition, I became doubly confused by Mrs Brown’s clandestine socialist subversion. You see, despite her professional insistence that we should all achieve the sheep status that entry to her class ought to endow, she regularly confused us by sharing her farmer’s daughter experience that sheep tended to follow blindly, whereas goats often practised independent thinking. Thus, she would tell us, she would rather see us become goats rather than sheep, thus inverting received values we hadn’t yet received. And I have remained confused ever since. At the time, the idea that Mrs Brown might even have borne a carnal respect for the animal never entered my head. Worship is a strangely human state. So, thus inverted, we became Mrs Brown’s goats, and, contrary to the divinely desired and naturally revered flock, we became a working-class inversion, transformed into independent-minded, perhaps subversive kids, Mrs Brown’s locally privileged goats in contrast to Mr Taylor’s predictable, second-class sheep.

            When Mrs Brown’s goats practised their fractions for the umpteenth time, Mr Taylor’s ovines were out gardening. Well, at least the boys were. The girls were probably elsewhere learning to wash and iron. While goats recited tables, forwards, backwards and at random, there was touch and pass for rams and rounders for ewes. Goats wrote essays, while sheep copied from the board. When goats studied the Roman Empire, sheep returned to that sojourn of the infant school, desktop sleep, head placed comfortably to the side, resting on folded arms, eyes no doubt surreptitiously staring out the most recent playground target.

            Mrs Brown’s goats, of course, were being prepared for the eleven plus, or Galton’s Pleasure, as I prefer to call it, that enshrinement in rationally-justified science of Britain’s feudal class system. Mr Taylor’s sheep were being schooled for life minus, the goats for life plus, a grading for life, if that’s the right word to describe what might be left after Galton had taken his prurient pleasure. Plus-graded goats headed for a grammar school, complete with Latin and French, while sheep were branded with the equally obnoxious pair of labels, secondary and modern. Rams would practise the skills of metal and wood that British industry had already exported, while the ewes were confined to the practice washing of plastic babies in an era when the birth rate would drop to historical lows as the command of the dual domestic income sent most women out to work. Goats, for the most part, at least in terms of what they read or wrote, were sexless.

            But I passed, achieved my goat status along with twenty others from Mrs Brown’s class, the nine who didn’t subsequently being referred to as ‘tailored’ by the exam. That year two of Mr Taylor’s class actually passed. God knows how.

            So I went off to the grammar school in Bromaton. It meant having a uniform, and that had to be bought. Just one shop had the franchise. It was called The Queen’s in The Springs, that gentle incline of a street that skirted the cathedral. It was an unfortunate name for the lads, since every year the ovine rejects would goad the goats with bent wrists, swinging hips and creamy voices, asking whether they had yet been to The Queen’s. When you shouted at them, saying it was because you had an IQ, they would retort their version, which was ‘indisputable queen’. The street is a precinct now, a word that when I went there for my school blazer and cap, we only knew from the scripts of black and white American cop shows. And what stupid hats they used to wear!

            Going to The Queen’s in August was a village ritual. It marked you out as different, determined which friends you would keep, and which would reject you. The chosen would advertise their anointment by going to the chip shop in their new uniform, complete with their silly quartered or target caps, just to show off. The kids hated it, but the parents seemed to lap up the status. Whenever I see mutton-dressed-as-lamb middle-class women with an haute coiffeur miniature dog in tow, I am reminded of that annual parade of newly uniformed Kiddington kids being pulled along by their mothers.

            There were two primary schools in Kiddington, ours, the large, newer one, and an old church school with too few children to have a class per year. It’s been demolished, its triangular plot large enough only for a single house. The kids who went there, sent more out of tradition than choice, had about zero chance of learning anything. Half the time they had to look after the younger ones in the same class while the teacher marked books. But pass some of them did. Kiddington’s Galton Pleasure roll each year was probably about seventy-five, of whom twenty-odd passed. It wasn’t a bad show for a mining village, I later learned. It still meant that two-thirds of the population went economically in the direction of the slag heaps that surrounded our pit.

            “Of course we’ll have to go to The Queen’s in the holiday,” was a phrase that successful parents bandied around the village after the results came out. In the queue at the chippy, in the queue at the butcher’s, in the queue at the bus stop, in the queue for the one-armed bandit in the Working Men’s Club, “Of course, we’ll have to go to The Queen’s in the holiday,” would rise above the babble of village gossip, intoned loud enough to ensure even the distant might hear. Ribs would be nudged, eyes would glance their momentary lift skyward and “Hark at her” would be whispered aitchless by those whose families had been branded secondary and modern.

            Except in the famous and still recalled case of Mrs Turner, of course... She made a right laughing stock of herself and her family by anticipating the result. Whether she had married into poverty was never clear, but her aspirations were forever above her status. Whenever she asked, in a plummy-vowelled, tight-lipped voice full of cream for strips of ‘stomach’ pork in Elseley’s, the butcher, the mimicking titter that would ripple round the queue was nothing less than memorable, no matter how many times you had heard it.

            Her husband, a stooping, tweed-suited, wiry man with a thin black moustache, a cowering manner and a body volume about a quarter of his wife’s, suffered terribly. Without his knowledge, Mrs Turner had taken Galton’s Pleasure for granted and fitted out young Adrian at The Queen’s long before the results were known, before he had taken the test, long before they learned he had failed. The father hardly spoke for six months, and never showed his face in the village, except to catch the bus towards Gagstone at the stop at the end of the common, the stop hardly anyone else used. His ploy worked because the bus was always full by the time it reached the end of the village, meaning that he had to hang on to the rail on the conductor’s platform at the back, the noise of the road across the open space precluding any social contact with his fellow Kiddingtonians.

            The son, Adrian, suffered the real butt of the communal joke, however, and found himself branded for the rest of his life. He had to leave Kiddington in the end. He couldn’t stand listening again and again to “Oh, yes, you’re the one whose mother went to The Queen’s and…” He would try to stop listening, but you could see the hurt in his face, a hurt inflicted for life by nothing more than an untimely purchase of clothing, clothing that proclaimed a status that was not his to claim.

            Adrian had been in Mrs Brown’s class, and a dead cert for the cert, so to speak. Mummy took Galton’s Pleasure for granted. Every weekend he was instructed to wear the barathea blazer she so proudly bought, on tic no doubt, so that he could be paraded up the road by the common, tugged determinedly by the hand by his leading mother. The knife-edge pressed grey turn-upped flannels accompanied, as did the quartered cap in blue and brown. All of us lads in those days used to wear shorts, by the way. I didn’t go into long trousers until I was fifteen! So there went Adrian, resplendent in his new uniform, a spick and span member of the class to which his mother aspired. And the poor bugger failed! Oops! I used a non-word…

            Adrian couldn’t show his face for weeks. While the rest of the anointed goats paraded their Queen’s purchases through the village and the sacrificed sheep publicly gathered, he stayed firmly locked indoors. “Is Adrian coming out to play, Mrs Turner,” delivered by conspirators with convincing innocence across the doorstep, presented respectably, yellow-edged with scouring stone, would elicit the curt response, “He’s poorly,” and inside he would stay. They kept it up for the whole summer. You could see the curtain twitch as Adrian peeked out to see who was asking after him. Eventually he did transfer from his secondary and modern to the grammar, one of the few that made the impossible dash. You had a better chance of crossing the Berlin Wall than passing the thirteen plus, but Adrian did it. These days he would have been diagnosed dyslexic, syndromed into a corner, boxed into a stereotype, excused his birthright, but back then he was simply given the second chance that most dismissed. By then, of course, he had long outgrown the barathea and the flannels, and anyway he was already into long trousers, unlike most of us, his mother convinced he was mature beyond his years. As far as I know, the original uniform is still in his wardrobe. His mother was too proud to offer it second hand and probably afraid to throw it away, since its unread name tags had been dutifully attached at every specified place.

            But now, from the perspective of a life lived, I can see that we Kiddington lads were out of place at the grammar. The girls at the high fared better, basically because the ladies found it easier to adopt airs and graces, even if they later rubbed off just as quickly. I did all right. I was never top of anything, and never at the bottom either. There were O-levels to take at sixteen, but I, along with most of my Kiddington mates, left at fifteen to go down the pit, because the local competition we had entered had already been won, and that was the limit of our ambition. We had taken Galton’s Pleasure and were neither secondary nor modern, blissfully unaware of any competition beyond Kiddington’s borders. So apprentices we became. We learned a trade, that essential adjunct to the human being that would not only automatically assure an income, but also, by virtue of endowing title and role to a name, would supply an individual identity. Any idea that we might ‘stay on’ and train as solicitors, bank managers or even teachers never entered our heads. It wasn’t for the likes of us. You tried to stay clear of the law and most Kiddington people were paid in cash, solicitors and bank managers thus being generally associated with life’s problems, not its advantages. There were always a couple of Kiddington kids who broke this mould, but usually they were from the big houses at the top of West Lane and they went to the toffee-nosed schools in Punslet, or that other one, orbiting in its own universe, a place where people paid for education, a dimension the rest of us could not even imagine.

            But then it’s all different now. I have that piece of paper I needed all those years ago. I’ve studied my units, done as the great course designer has deemed, jumped hoops, hurdled intellectual challenges like a pro. I now have my honours and can proudly attach BA to my name, courtesy of The University Of The Air. We used to joke, Suzie and I, with her parents, who used to tell her that she should get a BA. We told them that she already had one, if it stood for big arse. Oops, there’s another one… Anyway, we wanted to get married and she was pregnant straight away. Dulcie was the sweetness of our life.

            I have overstated my welcome … and I am going to be told off for my non-e language[1]. I blog. You blog. He, she or it blogs, but not too much. Enough.

           

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[1] The terms used in this first entry are informal rather than vulgar, with the exception of ‘bugger’ - edA Search For Donald Cottee

The Banana Tree Crisis by Insankya Kodithuwakku, a visit to Sri lanka

Occasionally a reader chances on a real discovery. A few rupees to spare in Colombo International Airport in Sri Lanka prompted the purchase of a few books by local authors. Travel, if undertaken with interest in the world rather than the self, has cultural immersion and experience as a requirement. Foods, art, history, religions, cultures and music are all on the list, but literature and writing must also figure. What a reader would not predict from a cover that featured bananas and little else would be the fact that this set of short stories would prove to be nothing less than a revelation sufficient to deserve the description of “masterpiece”.

The Banana Tree Crisis by Insankya Kodithuwakku is the book in question. It features seven short stories running to a total of around fifty thousand words, so is short enough for the traveller to consume before the west-bound aircraft out of Colombo even reaches Doha. But do not think that this implies something slight. On the contrary, the subject matter of these stories gets right to the heart of the social structure of Sri Lanka, its political and religious conflicts, its war, its highly unequal society, even its often fractious relationship with Britain, its former colonial master.

These stories address many issues and illustrate many arguments, but do not think for a moment that they are in any way didactic or heavy. The reality is quite the opposite, in that the writing style is sophisticatedly simple and transparent, the plots deceptively straightforward in their ability to convey complication with superb empathy. There is the Hindu-Buddhist-Muslim triangle, the Sinhalese-Tamil war, relations between the sexes and the generations, devastation by a Tsunami, the effects, intended and otherwise, of foreign aid, and even cricket. Anyone who has visited Sri Lanka will marvel at the brilliance with which these contexts are woven deftly into the tales of ordinary folk. A reader who has never been to this beautiful, troubled, welcoming and often frenetic island might even feel that these stories were the same as a visit, so vivid are the descriptions and so apparently real the scenarios. We even have a government minister being pushed though a crowd by the driver of his four-wheel SUV. Anyone who has visited Sri Lanka will recognise the requirement to get off the road. The reason, by the way, why minsters’ convoys behave so boorishly in traffic, is that they assume that bombs are never far away.

If this set of stories, The Banana Tree Crisis by Insankya Kodithuwakku, contained only The House in Jaffna, it would still be worth buying, just for those twenty pages. In just a few thousand words, Insankya Kodithuwakku addresses inter-generational and cross-cultural differences, captialism’s empty consumerism that sees personality as merely the sum of consumption, the nature of nostalgia, the Tamil-Sinhalese conflict, the fate of Jaffna and, overall, the appreciation of life being a process of change. It is nothing less than a masterpiece of the genre.

And Insankya Kodithuwakku’s writing style is always beautifully transparent, always engaging and regularly surprising throughout this set of stories. Insankya Kodithuwakku certainly displays a great talent. If you know Sri Lanka, you will adore these stories. If you have never been, then they will take you there for an authentic, enlightening and thoroughly entertaining visit. Please do read The Banana Tree Crisis by Insankya Kodithuwakku.

The Warden by Anthony Trollope

Though written in the mid-nineteenth century, The Warden by Anthony Trollope addresses themes that are highly relevant to contemporary issues. Prime amongst them is a consideration of the freedom and integrity of the press. In the novel, the eponymous warden, one Mr Harding, finds himself subjected to something of a public witch-hunt over payments of money that apparently cannot be justified.

Mr Harding is paid by the church, the Anglican Church, of course. At least that’s how things seem on the surface. He is the warden of a sheltered house that is home for a handful of aged and infirm workers, whose welfare is provided for by a long-standing trust fund. The legacy also provides for the allowance paid to their warden. The allowance is, shall we say, generous, especially compared to the funds that contribute directly to the inmates’ welfare.

Mr Harding has a daughter of marriageable age. She is courted by a Mr Bold whose character demands that he is duty bound to seek out justice where other may prefer continued indifference or ignorance. Mr Bold begins to take an interest in Mr Harding and the legacy. Stories - accusatory stories - begin to appear in the press. The newspaper, one in particular, is just not going to let the story rest. The unsuspecting Mr Harding is embarrassed in the extreme.

What the contemporary reader will find difficult in this scenario is appreciating the role and status of the church in the story. Mr Harding is employed by the Anglican Church. He is answerable to a Bishop, who lives in something known as a palace. A century and a half ago, the church was the very epitome of the establishment and respectability, whilst its employees and associates were professionalism and integrity personified. To some extent, they were above criticism and, crucially, they themselves believed this. And when the eight hundred pounds a year income that Mr Harding currently receives turns out to be misappropriated from funds that the bequest intended for the home’s inmates, all hell breaks loose.

The press continues its campaign. Both sides employ expensive, posing lawyers and both sides visit potentially influential friends in high places. And, in the midst of it all, we have Miss Harding on the opposite side of the argument from Mr Bold, her sweetheart.

But it is the involvement of the press that captures contemporary interest. Scandalised by the alleged mis-appropriation of charitable monies, stinking rich newspaper proprietors beat drums on behalf of the poor to make a hollow, if penetrating sound. The pursuit of celebrity, the nose for scandal, the propensity to claim a status above everyone else’s morals, all of these aspects of public posturing by the press remain familiar today. Apparently it was always in the public interest to sell as many copies as possible and by whatever means. And it always was the case that a public scandal over hundreds of pounds produced profits for the press barons measured in thousands.

The issues are all resolved, but not in a way that might have been predicted at the outset. A modern reader may well find the detail of the ending unlikely, but also it might be refreshingly unlikely. But it all goes to prove that in the last one hundred and fifty years some things have actually changed.

The School of Night by Alan Wall

At first sight, The School of Night by Alan Wall seems to be a novel about English social class. The childhoods of Sean and Daniel are spent in Yorkshire, Bradford to be precise, though the town remains recognisable but strangely anonymous throughout.  Social class differences can be keenly felt against a backdrop of contrasted industrial revolution profit and graft of the type presented by this city whose fortunes were spun in wool.

Sean, whose mother died young and whose father is usually inside – and that does not mean in the house, has been brought up fairly conventionally by his grandparents. His only eventual inheritance is his grandfather’s snooker cue. Dan, on the other hand, is from a professional family with a large car and a detached house. Daniel’s mother has the same vowels as everyone else, but she is also beautiful and made up to be different. She adopts a few airs and graces to keep the world at bay. The two lads, however, forge a pragmatic friendship. Both are academically gifted. They might just get to Oxford.

Sean does just that. He reads history and literature and develops what becomes a lifelong interest bordering on obsession with an Elizabethan group centred on Sir Walter Raleigh. Their name, The School of Night, gives the book its title and also figures in a rather opaque and otherwise perhaps inconsequential line in a Shakespeare play. Further research leads Sean to a quest into the authorship of Shakespeare’s work. He cannot accept that a man whose daughter remained illiterate could have authored such work. Sean seems to forget the example of his own origins, or perhaps he might be rejecting them? Of this we are never sure.

Daniel, on the other hand, does not make it to Oxford. He doesn’t get the grades and decides to stay on at school for an extra year to improve his scores. The friends are thus separated. Dan never makes it to university. He abandons school, enters the family business in perishables, takes up with the girl that Sean left behind, marries her, has children and builds businesses, successfully.

Sean drifts into a steady if undemanding job as a researcher in the BBC while Dan builds his mansions. Sean takes up with Dominique and soft gates open into the promise of a new life only to close again for familiar reasons. He continues to meander through the intellectual challenges presented by his study of The School of Night and the identity of William Shakespeare while his own life itself meanders from one day to the next. Dan, meanwhile, makes more money, pots of it, and intervenes occasionally. We know early on, by the way, that Dan has died, leaving Sean an immense sense of loss.

As the characters’ lives unfold, the reader begins to expect some form of resolution of the book’s multiple and apparently disparate themes. The School of Night, Sir Walter Raleigh, Kit Marlowe, William Shakespeare, literature, history, sexual awakening, education, social class, friendship, loyalty, Bradford, they all mingle without ever really forcing a mix. Surely there will be some significant event that creates a synthesis powerful enough to round off this admixture of elements into a single, plot-forming whole. But Alan Wall is far too good a writer to stoop to such banality. These are characters who retain their interests because they are interested in them, not because they can be made to serve some cheap literary trick.

When Sean is made redundant by the BBC, Dan reappears in his life with an offer he cannot refuse. New, previously only imagined realities unfold and an occasional, sometimes disturbing truth surfaces. But Sean realises it is better not to ask questions. It is amazing what we will do to help a friend, even if the friend might not deserve the attention, let alone the required and inevitably assumed devotion.

The School of Night is about deception and eventual resolution via discovery. We interpret any situation only with knowledge currently available and inevitably there remains much that remains unknown, even about ourselves, let alone our closest friends and acquaintances, let alone shady figures from history. The School of Night seems to be a novel about doubt and our insatiable desire to resolve it, always with at best only partial success.

American Scoundrel by Thomas Keneally

The title of Thomas Keneally’s American Scoundrel leaves little to the imagination. The only unknown is to whom the label might be attached. Before we begin the title tells us that the declared subject, one Daniel Sickles, is charged, sentenced and already committed. The fact that in reality he was charged but also acquitted leaves enough space of doubt to generate sufficient interest to prompt a reading.

Daniel Sickles, in short, was a cad and a bounder, but perhaps might not have appeared so by the standards of contemporary mores. An inhabitant of high society in mid-nineteenth century USA, he managed to achieve fame, notoriety, wealth, military success, national stardom and much else, apart form the Presidency, itself. He lost a leg at the battle of Gettysburg, a leg that had fame of its own, celebrity sufficient to find a place in a museum cabinet. It was an exhibit that the be-crutched Sickles liked to visit with his guests. “I’d like to show you my leg,” he would whisper to his female acquaintances, a phrase that from anyone else would not be suggesting a ride in a carriage.

Daniel Sickles was a member of the social and political elite of New York and Washington society. He was a member of Tammany Hall, and so had some pretty influential and powerful friends. He was a Democrat who leaned both ways on the issue of slavery until the split finally came, when he declared decisively for the Union. He became an officer in the army and commanded a unit at the Battle of Gettysburg. By chance, planning, talent or incompetence, depending on whose version of history is trusted, he led a decisive move in the battle. He also lost a leg. As a result, Dan Sickles became something of a famed hero as well as an infamous manipulator, his supporters worshipful, his detractors derisive.

His reputation derived from before the war. He had married Teresa, a beauty of Italian descent several years younger than himself. In what was at the time perfectly acceptable and even honourable behaviour, he continued to visit prostitutes - and even take them as travelling companions - while he expected a faithful and devoted wife to care for house and home and also provide for all his surplus needs. When Dan’s wife sought her own physical solace via an affair, Dan shot the fellow, out in the open in Washington’s Lafayette Square.

Along with descriptions of Gettysburg’s battle, Dan’s trial for murder forms a second major part of the book. Basically, Dan toughed it out on the basis that his wife was his property and her lover had violated that property. He was acquitted. He also, it must be recalled, had some significant friends. Thomas Keneally’s treatment of the case and its associated issues makes the book worth reading if, at times, tending to the prolix.

Overall, we appreciate that Dan was gifted with longevity and was an obviously powerful character. Equally, Teresa’s beauty, her passion, her lamentable marriage and her eventual withering demise from tuberculosis present a vivid and rather endearing picture. But then by the end we also feel that we have never really got to know either of them. American Scoundrel is a very good book, but one feels that its subject might have demanded better.

The Needle's Eye by Margaret Drabble

The Needle’s Eye by Margaret Drabble is at one level a story of two marriages, the Vassiliou and the Camish. Its focus is on two characters, Rose Vassiliou and Simon Camish who, even at their first meeting, find themselves inexorably drawn to one another.

Rose Bryanston was brought up in an upper middle class English family. The rambling country house in Norfolk figures large towards the end of the book when Rose and Simon make an unscheduled weekend visit to her parents. Rose has married Christopher Vassiliou, of Greek origin, and has settled near Alexandra Palace in north London. They have three children and have separated. Rose has also inherited and has given the money away, taking to heart the Bible’s advice on rich men and the eyes of a needle. Perhaps that’s why Christopher has left her. They are squabbling over the children, as one would expect when rational people, so capable in the area of analysis and reason, apply their powers selfishly.

Simon Camish is a specialist on labour relations and trade unions. He is also a writer and is co-authoring a book on aspects of his specialism. He is also resident in north London and also has three children of his own. He is married to Julie who, despite everything we are told, does not appear to be the kind of person who would fall for a man whose main interest was trade unionism. Her dismissive materialism is often tinged with a barbed anger.

These characters soon begin to develop their obvious penchant for thought and analysis. They seem to be capable of endless, un-paragraphed free association from almost any starting stimulus and leading to any imagined end. And it soon becomes a process apparently without end. Consciousness streams forth in long, unbroken flows, often appearing strangely directionless, sometimes almost repetitive. At times Simon and Rose seem to be so obsessed with themselves that they seek to analyse even the mundane, a process that always endows the mundane with deep, if passing significance. It seems that they seek implications in every catchable breath. Christopher, Rose’s husband, on the other hand, seems to be direct and largely pragmatic, while Julie, Simon’s wife,  is often short tempered, dismissive, prejudiced and more inclined to worry about the curtains than the eternal.

By the middle of the book, we are completely engrossed with these people but, to be charitable, we can hardly associate with them. They dwell on every thought, meander through past and future, while apparently taking any present for granted. Rose and Christopher are fighting over the custody of their children, but we feel that they themselves are the only people in their thoughts.

Eventually, The Needle’s Eye does develop its own direction. But it is a long journey and, despite a drive from London to Norfolk, we feel we have travelled very little from where we started. But then life is like that, isn’t it? How many plots do we live? In The Needle’s Eye we share the lives of people, perhaps live them a little. We become participants, not mere observers, but we never really know the characters because they probably don’t really know themselves. I suppose we are different nowadays…

A Summer Bird-Cage by Margaret Drabble

A Summer Bird-Cage by Margaret Drabble is a book with a hyphen in the title. This is apposite, since it presents a tale of two sisters, Louise and Sarah who, in a short but intense period of their lives, realise that there is an enduring bond between them, even if that bond may be no more than an agreement to compete.

Louise and Sarah have both been to Oxford. Louise is three years older than Sarah, who estimates that her sister is thus also three inches taller than herself. They are both beautiful, desirable young women, clearly drawn from society’s existing elite and destined not to tread beyond the boundaries of their class. Sarah’s first person narrative begins as she graduates, just as her older sister is about to marry Stephen Halifax. He is an awfully sophisticated author – whose books, nevertheless and by common consent, are pretty ropey – who seems permanently to roll in it, where ‘it’ refers to a mixture of money and whatever it is that allows an individual to claim the label ‘Bohemian’. (Being born in Bohemia would not endow that status, of course. We are literary, darling, not literal!) And Louise is twenty-four, for God’s sake, if we still demand His approbation in the 1960s.

It is time she did something with her life, settled down, started a family, at least aspired to the respectable. Sarah laments her sister’s good fortune. For years one side of her assumed future has yearned to attach such trappings to her own life, a standpoint to which she might only occasionally admit in mixed company. There is a gentleman friend, but he has hopped it across the Atlantic for a while to do some research. She wonders if he will ever come back. In matters of the heart, the immediate is always more likely to stir the emotions. Throughout A Summer Bird-Cage the two sisters interact and we hear Sarah’s version of the envy, the bitchiness, the conflict, the resolution, the co-operation, the closeness and distance of their relationship. There are several parties where new people appear to gossip, to speculate or to provoke. Much is learned in these highly ceremonial gatherings about others. And, as far as plot goes, that’s about it. There are some flaming rows, but no-one draws a gun. There is conflict, but no-one’s life is threatened. There’s duplicity, but the greatest sting is committed by a taxi driver who goes off with a whole two shillings of extra and undeserved tip. 

But even as early as the nineteen sixties lovers would sometimes take baths together! Via Sarah’s frailties, imaginings, intellect, prejudice and eventual good sense and loyalty, Margaret Drabble presents a magnificent study in character and the human condition. If the reader were to pass Sarah on the street, not only would she be recognisable, she would immediately demand greeting. “By the way,” the reader might ask her, “did you really feel such resentment at everything your sister…” And no doubt Sarah would reply at length and in detail. In A Summer Bird-Cage the encounters are real. The events are credible. The failings of these people are purely human, rendering them completely three dimensional. Yes, the society they inhabit is rarefied, elitist and limited in its world view, but surely they existed and, via this superb novel, still do.