One would not think an undertaker’s mute would attract vilification. That, however, was precisely the fate of a blameless little Totnes undertaker’s mute in the early years of the last century.

The typical undertaker’s mute – and the Totnes mute was nothing if not typical – was a ragamuffin street urchin, plucked from the squalor of the stews and rookeries, dusted down and primped up, togged out in black and with a top hat usually too big for his undernourished head, and paid a penny or two to march at the head of a funeral procession, mawkish, mournful, woebegone and mute. Why on earth would anybody vilify such a mite?

It is not that the Totnesniks were a peculiarly vindictive lot. As everywhere else, they had their good and bad. Most of them, faced with a funeral procession making its way slowly through the Totnes streets, would stop, and bow their heads, and remain silent and solemn. Some would weep. Yet even the weepers, when they spotted the tiny mute, would cry out insults and imprecations, and in some cases even death threats. It was fortunate that the undertaker had his horses well-trained, or they might have taken fright and bolted, and ruined the funeral. Fortunate, too, that the enraged Totnesniks satisfied themselves with catcalls and shouting, and did not shower the undertaker’s mute with rotting fruit and pebbles. As for the little mute himself, he acquitted himself honourably, through funeral after funeral, never once breaking step, in spite of his rickets, and never once retaliating, in spite of the provocation. Did he break down, or complain, or vow revenge, when once more safe inside the undertaker’s office? Or was he simply happy with his tuppence? It was, after all, a tuppence beyond the most vivid dreams of the other Totnes urchins, and would buy him oysters or eels for his supper.

The most baffling feature of the whole business is the absence of any contemporary comment in the local press. I have trawled through the archives of the Totnes Bugle & Advertiser and of the Totnes Counter-Bugle & Advertiser, and even of the Proceedings Of The Secret Totnes Branch Of The Revolutionary Workers’ Anarchist Collective Steering Committee, to no avail. It is worth pointing out, however, that some malfeasant scamp has been through the papers with a snipping tool, and several articles are missing. Would they be revelatory, if ever discovered?

What we do have is a series of memoirs, published in the 1920s and 1930s, in which the author claims to be the now adult undertaker’s mute. I Was The Vilified Totnes Undertaker’s Mute (1922), Further Reminiscences Of The Totnes Undertaker’s Mute (1929), and Now I Can Speak : Funeral Processions In Turn Of The Century Totnes, Recollected By One Who Was There, But Mute (1933) were the only books ever issued by a mysterious publishing house based, not in Totnes, but in its anagrammatic counterpart. The author himself remained anonymous. Several critics have been persuaded into vertiginous flights of fancy by the fact, surely coincidental, that the first volume appeared on the very same day as T S Eliot’s The Waste Land. Great play is made of the fact that one of the funeral processions the author claims to have mutely marched at the head of was that of “the famous clairvoyante, Madame Sosostris”. What these fantasists never point out is that this funeral is mentioned only in the 1933 volume, which also, notoriously, contains the lines “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, has it begun to sprout?” and “Twit twit twit Jug jug jug jug jug jug So rudely forc’d. Tereu”. If compelling evidence that TS Eliot was not the author of the undertaker’s mute trilogy is still required – and I fear there are nutters abroad who persist in ever more fanciful conjectures – there remains the fact that no record exists, anywhere, of a Madame Sosostris, famous or not, clairvoyante or not, dying or being buried or cremated or in any way commemorated in Totnes in the year given in the book, or for a decade on either side. I have myself trawled the parish registers, and all sorts of other archives, as assiduously as I pored over the local Totnes newspapers and workers’ collective steering committee minutes.

We then have to ask if there is a word of truth in this trio of curious volumes. It is not enough to say, as Dizzleby does, “Well if Eliot didn’t write them, Ezra Pound probably did, but he was as mad as a hatter”. Dizzleby, let us remember, has used exactly the same words when referring to dozens of other obscure works of the interwar years, not least one written by his own grandfather, who was not, I hasten to add, Ezra Pound. At least, not according to the documentation, including birth certificates, measles inoculation records, and one width swimming achievement citations, which I have been through with a fine-toothed comb, as diligently as I beavered away at the local Totnes newspapers and workers’ collective steering committee minutes and parish registers and all sorts of other archives.

My researches have led me to the conclusion that we are unlikely ever to identify the author of the Totnes undertaker’s mute trilogy. If we cannot say who wrote it, then as sure as eggs is eggs we cannot vouch for its historical reliability. It may be the case, as Dizzleby’s own daughter argued, that the little Totnes undertaker’s mute, and the vilification to which he was so shamefully subject, never existed at all, and is a mere phantasm, a spectre, a ghost. We are then forced to ask, who would make him up?, and why?

To which the answers are, I would, and for my own amusement.

Previously on Maud : episodes one, two, three, and four.

“Dust that gewgaw, Baines. As you can see, I am slumped on the chaise-longue, listless and enervated, taking dainty sips from a china cup of what I am given to understand our Irish cousins call a ’tisane o’ the morning’. It is morning, is it not? Oftentimes my nerves are so shattered that I have not the foggiest idea what time it is. That you nod your head would suggest it is indeed morning, if that was a nod and not one of those involuntary spasms to which you are prey when the effects of the opium are wearing off. It being the morning, why in the name of heaven are you not down in the kitchen in the basement preparing breakfast?”

“I took the liberty, Ma’am, of handing breakfast preparation duties today to the devil incarnate, who you will recall is chained up downstairs and is acting as my skivvy and helpmeet.”

“Ah yes, of course. It slipped my mind for a moment that Beelzebub came here by way of Porlock and I outwitted him. My, what an exciting day that was. And he is still here? But of course he is, for the chains that bind him are stout, and iron, and used to belong to my dear departed grandpapa. I remember that goodly if somewhat rancorous patriarch dandling me on his knee when I was but a tiny tot, and telling me that not the devil himself could break free from those chains. It seems he was correct in that, even if much else he told me during those dandlings I later discovered to be the most arrant piffle. Did you know, Baines, that the Ancient Greeks were colour blind?”

“No, Ma’am.”

“Well, of course they were not. I give it to you as an example of grandpapa’s piffle. He got it, I think, from Mr Gladstone’s three-volume Studies On Homer And The Homeric Age. Have you read it, Baines?”

“No, Ma’am.”

“No, of course you have not, for you are lower class. It would surprise me if you could read at all. In any case, when would you have time to read, what with all the skivvying and gewgaw-dusting and scrubbing and polishing and cooking and cleaning and fire-lighting and boot-blacking and stitching and darning and so forth to which God has so ordered things that you and your kind must devote every waking hour? Though it occurs to me that you are in the extraordinary position of having the devil incarnate to lighten your burden. I wonder if I am failing as a mistress by neglecting to give you further duties to fill the empty hours or minutes which Beelzebub’s captive presence must have afforded you.”

“That won’t be necessary, Ma’am, for I have been taking the opportunity to give vent to my inner life.”

“What wild talk is this? Pass me those invigorating smelling salts, Baines. I fear I might quite swoon away. “

“If it please you, Ma’am, I speak the truth. Ever since you and I dragged Beelzebub down into the basement and chained him there, and I have persuaded him to be of assistance to me on pain of being poked with burning hot toasting forks, he has proved of great worth as a skivvy. Thus in moments of unaccustomed leisure, for example while holding the toasting forks over the fire until they are burning hot, the better to poke the devil with, I have given free rein to wild imaginings and other fruits of the inner life. Only the other day. Ma’am, I got it into my head that the pots were pans, that the cutlery was the crockery, that the soap was the shoe polish. I turned the world topsy turvy inside my head.”

“No good will come of this, Baines. I wonder if I ought to summon Dr Slop, the mesmerist who has recently moved into the bungalow next door. He would place your head in a vice and make strangely significant passing movements of his hands and soon enough you would be back to your normal self and no longer prey to such miseries as the company of the devil has wrought.”

“Forgive my impertinence, Ma’am, but I fear you misunderstand me. I experience nought but immeasurable joy from my flights of fancy and nourishment of my inner life.”

“That is perplexing to be sure, Baines. I still think it would be best to have Dr Slop take a look at you. It is said there is not another man in Europe who knows more about the unfathomable nooks and crannies of the feminine brain. And I am sure it would be quite a novelty for him to probe the inner workings of a feminine brain of the lower orders.”

“As you wish, Ma’am.”

“But hark! From the depths of the basement I hear a din of infernal shrieking.”

“That is Beelzebub, Ma’am, announcing that he has finished cooking breakfast.”

“I suppose I must eat, for I am at the point of physical as well as mental collapse. Would you happen to know what toothsome delights the devil has cooked up for me this morning?”

“You will be having devilled kidneys, Ma’am.”

“Then I shall stagger as best I am able towards the breakfast table and take my seat, Baines.”

“Very good, Ma’am.”

To be continued…

I was leafing idly through one of Pansy Cradledew’s magazines when my eye was caught by an article entitled The Mighty Changing Orifice, written by one Jacey Boggs. Though the kettle was coming to the boil and I ought to have had the making of tea on my mind, I found myself riveted by Ms Boggs’ words. What was this orifice? Why was it mighty? What changes had it undergone? All these questions and more dizzied my poor pea-sized brain, and, ignoring the steaming kettle, I read on.

I learned that a hole and tube orifice “is the most common”, and is made by Ashford, Kromski, Lendrum, Louet, Schacht, and a variety of other makers. Ms Boggs chided me “not to discount them because they are unimproved,” (her italics), adding that some of her favourite breeds of sheep are unimproved. This seemed to me a non sequitur, but I made a mental note of it. I like to gain at least a vague idea of the personality of a writer whose words hold me spellbound, and knowing that Ms Boggs was an aficionado of sheep told me something about her. Admittedly, I was not sure what, precisely, it told me, but it was an arresting confession to make, in the context of writing about the mighty changing orifice. Not all of us care enough about sheep to have favourites among them, after all. I did not, at least not yet, ponder the difference between improved and unimproved sheep, in fact it was not at all clear to me what might be the nature of either an improved or an unimproved sheep.

But I cast all thoughts of sheep from my mind when I read the next line and was startled to discover “there is nothing that this orifice can’t do as long as the size is right”. Gosh!, I thought, that would explain its mightiness, sure enough. Nothing it can’t do? This “common” orifice, then, could predict the weather?, tie my shoelaces?, make a cup of tea?

Thinking of tea prompted me to put the magazine temporarily aside. The kettle had come to the boil, so it behooved me to leap up and place a teabag in a cup and pour boiling water upon it. I gave it a manly stir and added a plop of milk and stirred it further and then I used the teaspoon to squeeze the teabag against the inner side of the teacup, and then, very deftly, for I wished if possible to avoid any spillage, I hoisted the teabag from the cup with the spoon and tossed it into the bin, and then I ran the now empty spoon under the tap to rinse it and I placed it, bowl-end up, in a cutlery container on the draining board. There it shall rest, until such time as I make another cup of tea, or until I place it in the cutlery drawer, when it is dry. Though I have described the making of tea, it is something I do so often that I need not think about the process, so all the while I was placing the teabag in a cup and pouring boiling water upon it and giving it a manly stir and added a plop of milk and stirring it further and then using the teaspoon to squeeze the teabag against the inner side of the teacup, and then, very deftly, hoisting the teabag from the cup with the spoon and tossing it into the bin and running the spoon under the tap to rinse it and placing it, bowl-end up, in a cutlery container on the draining board, my mind was still entirely concentrated on the mighty changing orifice. Had I not been carrying a teacup full of boiling hot tea I think I would have scampered back to the sofa at high speed, so keen was I to pick up the magazine and continue reading. As it was, I made my way slowly and steadily, to avoid spilling my tea, and only when the teacup was safely on the IKEA “Benko” table next to the sofa did I sit and return to reading the words of Jacey Boggs.

She had mentioned that the orifice could do anything so long as the size was right, and now she turned her attention to this size. I was not particularly surprised to be told orifices came in very small, standard, and larger sizes – I might have guessed as much – but to be then told that “Ashford offers bushings that fit in large orifices to decrease the size” set my brain whirling. Quite apart from the whole business of altering the size of the orifice with bushings, which might be something to do with the “changing” promised in the title The Mighty Changing Orifice, I was left to wonder why Ms Boggs brought up Ashford again but had not another word to say about Kromski, Lendrum, Louet, or Schacht. Did they not have their own bushings? If not, why not? It was all becoming more and more mysterious. I took a sip of tea.

If I had hopes that all would become clear, they were dashed. Ms Boggs wrote about “innies” and “outies”, that an “outie” often results in “the wrap wrapping around the extended orifice”, that some orifices require an orifice hook, that use of a Delta orifice means there is no flopping or thwapping regardless of grist, that in addition to flopping and thwapping one might, if one is not careful, encounter thumping or bouncing, and that in the 1970s Jonathan Bosworth designed an open orifice shaped like a half moon or the letter C. It interested me that Ms Boggs gave Bosworth’s Christian name, a touch not afforded to Ashford, Kromski, Lendrum, Louet, and Schacht. Was this because Jonathan Bosworth, or his orifice, was a particular favourite of hers, like those unimproved sheep?

But answer came there none. The article finished with the thoroughly confusing assertion that Bosworth had done away with a need for an orifice hook, but that a “hook orifice functions in much the same way as the half-moon”. For crying out loud!, I wanted to shout, do I need a hook or do I not?

At this point, I remembered that the magazine was not mine but Pansy Cradledew’s, and of course I did not need a hook, nor indeed one of Jacey Boggs’ confounded orifices. What I needed was my cup of tea. I threw the magazine across the room, picked up my cup, and took a hefty slurp.

The magazine, by the way, was Spin-Off, subtitled It’s About Making Yarn By Hand, an American publication from Interweave Press of Colorado. Among their other titles are Handwoven, PieceWork, and Cloth Paper Scissors.

Two things serve to persuade me that the Ancient Egyptians were a peculiarly dim-witted rabble.

There is a tendency to regard the great civilisations of the past through rose-tinted spectacles. One thinks of Edgar Allan Poe, writing of “the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome” in To Helen (revised 1836) or Neil Young babbling, of the Aztecs, that “the women all were beautiful and the men stood straight and strong… Hate was just a legend and war was never known” in Cortez The Killer (1975). I think we may safely say that these aperçus are what Ambrose Bierce, using a favourite term, would call “bosh”. What we overlook, with our romanticising blinkers, is the stark fact that much of human history was attended by filth and squalor and hunger and disease and slavery and violence and stink and flies and rats and brutality and terror and mud and ignorance. All that, of course, being your daily lot if you managed to live long enough to experience it, which untold millions, given infant mortality rates, did not.

In view of this bloody awful state of affairs, let us imagine some Ancient Egyptians, broiling one afternoon under a battering sun.

“I have an idea,” says one, “Let’s tramp into the desert and build an enormous, windowless, pointy-topped edifice of no practical use whatsoever.”

“I have a better idea,” says the other, “Let’s build two!”

Now you or I might have thought of more constructive ways to spend our time. But not the Ancient Egyptians, who went on to build over a hundred of these pointless pointy-topped buildings all over the arid hellhole where they lived. It is all very well to say that they were in thrall to a particularly vicious and mercurial pantheon of gods, but it seems to me that only supports my theory of their fundamental stupidity. Other civilisations, at other times, have also laboured under the delusion that they were ruled by deities we might sensibly consider as nutters, and dangerous nutters at that, but few have built such pointless yet enormous and pointy-topped structures. Others do exist, but not in such profusion as in Ancient Egypt.

Their enthusiasm for wasting their lives in the tremendous effort of building these idiocies is the first thing that persuaded me of their dim-wittedness. I asked myself what could have prompted such tomfoolery, and that led me to the second point. What possible hope could there be, I concluded, for a civilisation that worshipped cats?

Don’t get me wrong, I adore cats. I am definitely a cat person rather than a dog person, and have in the past had several pet cats, and never a pet dog. There are few experiences as conducive to relaxation as being slumped in an armchair with a purring cat dozing on one’s chest. But there is a deal of difference between a feeling of affection towards, say, a tabby called Tiddles for whom one is happy to provide bowls of food, and a sense of abject awe and subjection towards Bastet, or Bast, or Baast, or Ubasti, or Baset, the cat goddess of the Ancient Egyptians.

The thing we must always remember about cats is that, for all their grace and elegance and litheness and poise, they are unfathomably stupid creatures. Some will protest that an animal that has so arranged things that it can spend its life eating food from a bowl, sleeping, playing with wool or shoelaces, and chasing small mammals and birds has clearly worked something out. Perhaps so. The average domestic cat lives the life of Riley, and one I find mightily enviable. Given half the chance I would arrange my affairs likewise. But let us keep things in perspective. Far from being a divine being possessed of great power and wisdom, the cat is a halfwit. You only have to observe them, hopelessly chasing birds which – surprise, surprise! – fly away as soon as they come close, or gazing intently at nothing on the wall of a room, or toppling off a windowsill when half asleep, to recognise that, whatever is going on in the cat’s brain, it is neither complicated nor astute.

What, then, does it tell us of a civilisation that it elevates the cat to a godhead, and duly worships it? It tells us, I think, that the Ancient Egyptians must have been ineradicably thick. And the evidence is all those pointless pointy-topped buildings, constructed with unimaginable toil in the middle of nowhere, for no pressing reason.

I rest my case.

ADDENDUM : In pondering the sheer ridiculousness of the brain of the cat, I am reminded of a little geographical mystery. In the last decade of the previous century, I often had reason to visit the city of Bristol, the northern part bordering South Gloucestershire to be more precise. Looking at maps, I noticed that on many of them the area had the name “Catbrain” emblazoned across it. Yet whenever I asked a local person about this nomenclature, I was met with blank looks. Nobody I questioned had ever heard of Catbrain, and I concluded that it must have been one of those mapping mistakes which, committed once by a slapdash cartographer, was then repeated by others. I now learn, from the Wikipedia, that Catbrain – or, properly, Catbrain Hill – does actually exist, though I am rather disappointed to discover that the name has nothing to do with the brains of cats and is derived from the Middle English “cattes brazen”, which is a reference to the rough clay mixed with stones that is the characteristic soil type thereabouts. None of which explains why the locals had never heard of it. Unless, of course, it is one of those eerie English countryside locations that are kept secret from interlopers.

Greetings. My name is Beelzebub, and I am the devil incarnate. You may have seen pictures of me, colour plates in books or crude engravings in religious tracts, where I am often depicted with a goaty appearance, with horns and cloven hooves and a tail. The accompanying texts attribute to me all sorts of dark powers, and give the impression that I am to be feared more than anything else in the world. All I can say is that such powers, such fear, if real, would come in extremely handy in my current predicament. For the past six months I have been held captive in the basement of a bungalow, by a neurasthenic Victorian lady named Maud and her slovenly yet devoted maidservant, Baines.

The latter is my chief tormentor, for the length of chain which restrains me keeps me confined to the kitchen and the scullery and the pantry, where Baines rules the roost. When she is in particularly vindictive mood, Baines likes to poke me with burning hot toasting forks, cackling that she is giving me a taste of my own medicine. I have no idea what she is inferring, as I have never once in my life poked anybody with a burning hot toasting fork, oh, except for the occasional sinner, who richly deserved such hot poking on account of the crimes and naughtinesses and debaucheries and malfeasance they committed before they were delivered into my care. I, on the other hand, get poked with burning hot toasting forks purely for Baines’ amusement, which seems to turn the moral order on its head. But what can I do? I am enchained, below stairs, forced to work as a skivvy.

I suspect things would not be half so awful were this not a Victorian kitchen. The sheer amount of work involved in cooking and cleaning is exhausting even to think about. I have spent entire days scrubbing the grease from pots, using hard brown soap and soda and boiling water, and as soon as I am done Baines comes a-clattering with another load of caked and filthy kitchenware. Down here in the basement, there is no window to look out upon the world, and precious little ventilation, so the air is foul with fumes and smoke. Baines taunts me and says I must feel at home, but again, I have no idea what she is talking about. The infernal realm from which I hail is like a child’s playpen in comparison.

Things started out so well. On the way to my appointment with Maud, I stopped off in the little village of Porlock on the Somerset coast, where I poisoned a couple of wells, introduced an amusing new bacillus into the cows’ milk, and blasted an orchard with firebolts. At the inn where I stayed, I joined the other guests in rustic sing-songs and games of shove-ha’penny before casting them into the pit. It has slipped my mind, but I might even have poked one or two of the more inebriated peasants with a burning hot toasting fork, as Baines suggests. When dawn broke on the fateful day, I was feeling chipper, and tucked into a breakfast of offal and hot coals.

Transporting myself from the inn in Porlock to Maud’s doorstep in a single bound, with a thousand times the leaping power of Spring-heeled Jack, I hammered my fist on her door. When she opened it, I was struck by her fragility and neurasthenia and pallor, and I intuited that she had not long awoken from an opium daze occasioned by a goodly dose of laudanum. But of course I was far too polite to mention it, merely announcing that I was a person from Porlock, come on business, which was more or less the truth. Some might cavil that it would have been more honest to say I was Beelzebub, the devil incarnate, come to strike a bargain whereby Maud would sell me her soul in exchange for… well, for whatever it was she wanted in the mortal world. By the looks of her, she would probably have been happiest with oodles more laudanum. But long experience has taught me that, honest though such a direct approach may be, it is less than helpful when deployed with neurasthenic Victorian ladies prey to hysteria and attacks of the vapours. Much better to proceed gently, to inveigle one’s way into their parlour and accept refreshments in the form of tea and cucumber sandwiches, before addressing the main business. But I made the foolish, foolish mistake of taking off my Homburg hat, thus exposing the 666 tattooed on my scalp and the hint of devil’s horns.

Chained in the cellar, in the smoke, up to my elbows in grease and boiling water, awaiting the next poke from Baines’s burning hot toasting fork, I have replayed that parlour scene over and over again in my goaty head, as if it were a clip from a horror film. I should have kept the Tarot cards in my pocket and my Homburg on my head, at least until such time as the slovenly yet devoted maidservant had awoken from her own laudanum daze and served the tea and cucumber sandwiches. I should have used the time to lull Maud into my confidence, to gaze at her with my hypnotic goaty eyes, to compliment her on her Pre-Raphaelite tresses and the decor of her parlour, the showy napery, gleaming silver, glittering glass! In the centre of the table, in a vase that had a mirror for its base, white flowers always in bloom. Arranged around the edge of the mirror, in a clever contrivance that held water, was a border of blue or violet flowers. Tall, graceful jugs and goblets of Bohemian and Venetian glass held iced and plain water, lemonade, soda-water &c. Some oranges were in an old blue and white Delft dish to her right; on the left a glass dish held some olives. A silver toast-rack stood well filled before her. A tiny fountain played over some carefully picked watercresses, keeping them fresh. Raw and cooked fruits were arranged with an eye to colour in various old china dishes about the table. “Madam,” I should have said, “You must surely have attended carefully to The Modern Housewife or How We Live Now by Mrs Pender Cudlip (1883). I commend you.”

But, fool!, fool!, I revealed my devilry too soon, and was outwitted and bound in chains and, when Baines awoke, dragged down into the basement and enslaved as a skivvy. My only solace is that I have devised a plan of escape. Tomorrow, Baines has decreed that I shall cook breakfast. Nobody, she asserts, could better prepare devilled kidneys than the devil himself. I agree. And if I have my way, the kidneys are not the only things that will be devilled tomorrow morning.

To be continued…

There has been a bit of a kerfuffle in the world of puppetry, where radical puppeteer Corky De’Ath has performed a volte face. A press release from the Corky De’Ath Puppet Theatre has created a hoo-hah:

For the past forty years, we have been at the cutting edge of contemporary puppetry, creating a counter narrative to the dominant ideology, interrogating the contradictions of capitalism, and speaking truth to power. Puppet shows such as What Can We Learn From The Uxbridge By-Election?, Smash! Smash! Smash The Social Contract!, and Che Guevara May Have Been A Murderous Psychopath, But He’s Cool, Innit were instrumental in undermining puppetry’s status as a reactionary plaything of the elite. Over the decades, dozens of people, not all of them students, watched our puppet shows with goggle-eyed fascination. It has been said of the beat combo The Velvet Underground that only a few people bought their first album upon its release, but all of those people went on to form beat combos of their own. The same is true of our puppet shows. We have changed the landscape.

However, I wish it to be known that I have now finished my interrogation of capitalism, asking all the questions I needed to ask to wring some sense out of it. Having studied the answers, I have decided that it is the best possible system yet devised to order our affairs. The alternatives are either totalitarian horror or naïve, woolly-minded tree-hugging fatuity. In future, therefore, the repertoire of the Corky De’Ath Puppet Theatre will be devoted to new works of a more traditionalist flavour, but with a contemporary resonance, starting with Punch And Judy And Allah And George Galloway. Audiences will cheer to the rafters as a gang of Islamist puppets stone a George Galloway puppet to death for adultery, using real stones.

As we might expect, the consternation in the radical puppeteering community is profound. Hot-headed young student puppeteers have already set up an encampment of tents around the Corky De’Ath Puppet Theatre, blocking access to the pier at the godforsaken rain- and windswept seaside resort where it is based. Corky himself has had to go into hiding, having received puppet-string-cutting threats from radical puppeteers armed with knives and scissors. The puppet twittersphere is in uproar, particularly from those more skilled puppeteers who can manipulate their puppets with sufficient skill to type messages on a keyboard. This is actually more difficult than a non-puppeteer might think. Even the most sensitive keyboard requires a certain amount of pressure in order for the keys to be depressed, and a series of workshops has been set up to teach puppet-typing skills. Adding small lead weights to the fingers of puppets is often all that is needed to do the trick. The practice of typing with finger puppets, however, has been condemned by purist radical puppeteers.

But Corky De’Ath, in his hidey-hole beneath the pier, seems unbowed. He is hard at work making a new set of so-called “neocon puppets” for use in future puppet extravaganzas. But he also intends to branch out from his political shows, and has some intriguing projects in development.

“Ever since I was a little tot,” he told our reporter, “and barely able to grasp the strings of my puppets, I have wanted to present The Wreck Of The Deutschland by Gerard Manley Hopkins, interpreted through the medium of puppetry. I have already made a puppet of the Tall Nun, now I just need to make the other four nuns, some of the ship’s crew, and a puppet of Adalbert Falk, the Prussian education minister who enacted the anti-Catholic laws which led to the nuns fleeing Prussia in 1875, hoping to find refuge in the Franciscan convent in Wheaton, Illinois, but drowning when the SS Deutschland was wrecked on the Kentish Knock off the Thames Estuary, and ending up buried in St Patrick’s Cemetery in Leytonstone, east London, where I often visit the grave to leave flowers. Well, when I say I leave flowers, I should say that I manipulate one of my puppets to place the flowers on the grave. This takes a good deal of puppeteering skill, not so much as puppet-typing, but you have to make sure the puppet grasps hold of the bouquet tight and doesn’t drop it on the cemetery path before you actually reach the tomb of the nuns, otherwise your visit of homage is in vain. I can’t count the number of cack-handed puppeteers I have seen whose puppets drop their flowers on the path, or on the pavement before they even get to the cemetery. In some ways I feel responsible, because for years and years my radical puppetry, espousing all sorts of lost or wrong-headed causes, must have had a baleful influence on these tyro puppeteers, and addled their brains if not their puppet-manipulating fingers. Once I have got the stoning of George Galloway out of the way, I want to concentrate on my Hopkins adaptation as a way of making some kind of amends for my past. After that, I want to work on a puppet version of Six Crises by Richard Milhous Nixon, presenting the ex-President sympathetically instead of as the bogeyman figure of my 1970s puppet show about him, Watergate – With Puppets! It was a resounding success, of which I am now ashamed.”

Our reporter’s interview with Corky De’Ath was interrupted at this point, when a huge wave came crashing in under the pier, sweeping him and his puppets out to sea, where they were last seen drifting helplessly towards the Kentish Knock, and the terrible horror of the briny deep.

The title of this piece ought to be For Those In Peril On The Sea, but so caught up am I in my series of “On…” essay titles that it seemed a shame to muck it up. Hence the somewhat forced rephrasing, which doesn’t even pass muster as an entry in an index, where it would be better put as Sea, The, For Those In Peril On. I am sure there are other ways to rearrange the words, depending upon which term one wished to give due prominence – Those or Peril, for example – but I am not going to waste my time and yours by further shilly-shallying. We need to get down to business, which today is to respond to the following letter, received from reader Tim Thurn:

Now look here, Mr Key, he hectors, I cannot be alone in wondering why you seem never to mention the sinking of the RMS Titanic. You bang on and on, to the point of tedium, about the Munich Air Disaster and the Hindenburg and, though they are not disasters of the same kidney, notable twentieth century events such as the Kennedy assassination and the Tet Offensive. Yet of the Titanic, barely a word, though a brief search reveals that you use (or overuse) the word titanic to describe the pamphleteer Dobson. This weekend we will mark the one hundredth anniversary of the loss of the liner in the icy wastes of the north Atlantic, so I think it is about bloody time you turned your attention to it, if you can drag yourself away from peering myopically out of the window at crows and at whatever else you peer at when you look out of the window. Get a grip. Passionately yours, Tim Thurn.

Well, that’s me told. It might surprise Mr Thurn to learn that I am something of a Titanic scholar, having at one point in my life read many, many books on the subject. I think I may acquit myself fairly well were I to take it as a quiz subject. To take a snippet at random, I know, for example, that second mate Charles Lightoller, who survived the sinking, was later decorated for various heroics during the First World War and played his part in the Second by sailing one of the “little ships” across the channel in the evacuation of Dunkirk. Also, if he had been reading these essays, Mr Thurn would know that I grew up living not far away from Eva Hart, one of the longest-lived survivors of the disaster, though it is true that I never went calling on her to winkle out her memories, nor did I ever go the pub named after her to raise a glass in memory of all those who drowned on that dreadful night in what Mr Thurn likes to call “the icy wastes of the north Atlantic”.

Of all the books I read, my favourite was Titanic : Psychic Forewarnings Of A Tragedy by George Behe (1989), which collects over one hundred accounts of premonitory dreams and visions and so on. Amusingly, as far as I recall, every single one of these accounts was recorded after the fifteenth of April 1912, so we have someone writing in, say, 1920 about a dream they had in 1910. Interestingly, not one of the psychic forewarnings features either Kate Winslet or Leonardo Di Caprio, who many young persons today believe portrayed real historical characters in the 1997 James Cameron blockbuster. Given the parlous state of history teaching in our self-esteem and diversity hubs, it is a small mercy that I have yet to hear of a youngster exclaiming with shock that the ship sinks at the end of the film.

On Sunday, I shall be marking the anniversary as I always do. I corral a choir of tinies and take them to Nameless Pond, my local duckpond. It is not the north Atlantic, nor at this time of year is it icy, nor is it indeed the sea, but I live far from the sea, and it is, after all, a body of water, and a better site for the commemoration than, say, a bathtub or butler sink. We launch a paper boat upon the pond, and then the tinies sing the Victorian hymn Eternal Father, Strong To Save by William Whiting, which, of course, contains the couplet “Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee, / For those in peril on the sea!” The hymn was also used by Benjamin Britten in Noye’s Fludde (1957), though not sung by the tinies. It was also the final hymn sung at the Sunday service on the Titanic on Sunday the fourteenth of April 1912, just hours before the sinking. If our paper boat has been folded into shape with sufficient cack-handedness, it usually sinks under the weight of its cargo of pebbles while the tinies are singing. If it does not, I get them to repeat the hymn from the beginning, while chucking further pebbles at the paper boat in hopes of scuppering it. We like to pretend that the various ducks disporting themselves upon the pond are the Titanic’s lifeboats. In order to compensate for the disparities in scale – some of the ducks are actually bigger than our paper boat – we squint or, in my case, remove our spectacles so the whole scene is a blur.

One year, during this mournful little ceremony, a passing duckpond-circumnavigating pedestrian buttonholed me to ask what we were doing. When I explained, he pointed out that, though we had recreated the ship (a paper boat) and the lifeboats (the ducks), there was nothing to represent the iceberg. Without this, he said, our memorial singsong was a mere farrago. Sadly, I had to agree. It is thus pleasing to note that, as the tone of Nameless Pond and its surroundings are dragged ever further into barbarism by the local riffraff, some antisocial scalliwag has tossed an abandoned fridge into the water.

Perhaps Mr Thurn should come and join us on Sunday, and bring his funerary violin.

[Voiceover:] Previously, on Maud. Having refused to go into the garden with a cad, Maud has taken a draft of laudanum. On waking, she is disturbed by a knocking at her door. The visitor is a person from Porlock, come on business….

“Good heavens, sir. By the evidence of the number 666 tattooed on your scalp and that hint of horns, one might think you are the very devil himself, come from hell by way of Porlock. Are you indeed Beelzebub, and if so, what do you want with me?”

“I compliment you on your perspicacity, madam. Or do I mean perspicuity? Whichever it may be, I am, as you adjudge, the devil incarnate. But if you do not think it unforgivably ill-mannered, I shall put my Homburg back on my head, so you will not be unduly distracted by those demonic signs atop my cranium. We shall be better able to conduct our business if you are not goggling wide-eyed all the while above my eye-line.”

“The many and various manuals of etiquette weighing down my bookshelves, of some of which I am myself the authoress, are unanimous in declaring that it is most improper for a gentleman to wear a hat indoors, especially in the presence of a lady. Howso that may be, you can hardly be regarded as a gentleman, in light of your admission that you hail from the infernal realm of darkness. Do, please, put your hat back on. I would ring for tea and cucumber sandwiches were it not that my slovenly yet devoted maidservant, Baines, is collapsed insensible against the wainscot in my sitting-room, having taken an unconscionable dosage of laudanum earlier. I would hope that she will be up and about within the hour, if you have patience.”

“It might surprise you just how patient I can be, madam. Millennia have passed since this, our present appointment, was inscribed in my day-book by my recording demon.”

“It occurs to me, sir, that had I succumbed to the blandishments of the cad and gone with him into the garden, there to stroll and engage in a chaste yet tingling embrace in a verdant arbour, you would have come a-knocking at my door in vain. Had I been in the garden, I would not have heard your rat-a-tat. About Baines, you know. There is no doubt a lesson to me there, but one which I fear it is too late for me to digest. You will assert, I suppose, that once our encounter was written down in your day-book or appointments diary, whether yesterday or millennia ago, it was fated to happen, and no imaginable circumstance could have prevented it, certainly not a cad’s blandishments.”

“That is correct, madam.”

“I find myself frantic with irritation, then, that my resistance to the cad was not of my making, not an inner strength belying my status as a fragile and neurasthenic specimen of the weaker sex, but merely the playing out of cosmic forces quite beyond my control. I ought to clarify that my irritation is with myself, not with you. Of you I am rightly terrified, and I wait with tremulous palpitations to learn what business brings you here.”

“All in good time, madam. Porlock is a goodly distance from your bungalow, and though I be the devil I am yet prey to the aches and pains brought on by an arduous hike across the windswept moors. The promised refreshments of tea and cucumber sandwiches will thus be more than welcome, when Baines awakes from her daze.”

“Hark! I hear clattering and groaning which, if my ears do not deceive me, are the sounds of Baines regaining consciousness. I shall go at once to give her instructions. Wait there, sir.”

“In the temporary absence of the lady of the house, or rather bungalow, I muse to myself aloud. Why, I wonder, did she not ring for her maidservant, using the broken and clunking yet effective bell installed for that purpose? It is true she may have lost her wits in my foul and damnable presence. Most people do. But it seems passing strange that she should lose her wits so irrevocably that she neglects, or forgets, the manners and mores of civilised society, and in going to her maidservant, rather than the other way about, risks bringing the social order crashing to the ground. Eek!”

“Well may you say ‘Eek!’, Beelzebub! Your confidence in your own demonic power is severely misplaced. As you are now all too well aware, I have not lost my wits. If anything, they are heightened. Thus it was that I was able to devise the stratagem of leaving the room to fetch Baines, when instead I fetched these heavy iron chains and crept in through a different door, behind you. It was the work of a moment to bind you, helplessly, in the chains, using the element of surprise. There will be neither tea nor cucumber sandwiches for you. When Baines wakes, the two of us together will drag you down into the cellar, where you will languish in the darkness, nibbled by rats, until such time as I decide what to do with you. I may hand you over to the cad, for sport. Or perhaps Baines will wish to have you help out in the kitchen, as a skivvy. We shall see. For the time being, I shall take your unholy pack of Tarot cards and stuff them into your mouth, depriving you of the ability to utter fiendish spells and abracadabras which might loosen the chains that bind you. I must say you have inadvertently provided a most amusing diversion in my otherwise tedious and uneventful day.”

“But, madam, I implore you – gaah!”

To be continued…

I am angry, I am ill, and I’m as ugly as sin. My irritability keeps me alive and kicking.

That was me, sitting bolt upright in bed upon waking at dawn, singing my little heart out, like a chaffinch or a linnet. I sang A Song From Under The Floorboards by Magazine. Now, regular listeners to my radio show on Resonance104.4FM, Hooting Yard On The Air, will be well aware that I cannot sing for toffee. Recite prose, yes. Sing, no. But while I would never dream of assailing the ears of an unsuspecting public by singing – or attempting to sing – on the airwaves, there is no reason why I should not do so in the privacy of my own home.

It has become apparent to me, you see, that the lives of people in film musicals have that little extra spark, simply because they have the facility to burst into song at appropriate moments in their day. I am not personally acquainted with any chimney sweeps, but it seems clear that Bert, in Mary Poppins (Robert Stevenson, 1964), as portrayed by Dick Van Dyke, almost certainly has a happier and more fulfilling life than the average sweep, simply due to the fact that he gets to sing about it. The same is true of many of the nuns in The Sound Of Music (Robert Wise, 1965). Their lives, circumscribed by the iron rules of convent life, and with Nazis running rampage outwith the nunnery walls, must have been fairly grim. Who can doubt that by belting out Climb Every Mountain once in a while, their hearts were immeasurably cheered?

Having recourse to a repertoire of songs also allows one to provide a musical commentary upon one’s day, which can be a straightforward reflection of one’s mood (Zippity Doo Dah) or an ironic commentary upon it (Zippity Doo Dah, Queuing In The Gutter For The Soup Kitchen Version). In the more anarchic musicals, of course, there is little or no connection between what is going on in the characters’ lives and the songs they choose to break into, often suddenly and without warning. It is this latter approach that appeals to me. After all, when I woke up I was not particularly angry, nor ill, nor even irritable. I may have been somewhat ugly, before preening and primping myself in the mirror until I took on the bedazzling appearance of a Sun God. But Howard Devoto’s Dostoyevsky-inspired ditty seemed just the thing, at the time, as did Hans Werner Henze’s raucous and discordant Essay On Pigs while I prepared what our Belgian pals call het ontbijt.

In musicals, the characters usually have the benefit of accompaniment, whether it be a full orchestra or, in certain trendy pop musicals, a beat combo. A penurious scribbler such as myself obviously cannot employ a troupe of musicians to stand ready, out of sight in a corner of whichever room I happen to be in, to strike up the tune in those heady moments before I start singing. At the same time, one does not wish to limit oneself simply to an a cappella soundtrack. In the circumstances, the best thing to do is to throw caution to the winds and to carry on regardless. That is why, after breakfast, as I pottered aimlessly about before taking my morning stroll, I delivered a spine-tingling version of Oye Como Va by Santana.

Later, as I trudged along the towpath of the filthy old canal towards the newsagent, there was a fortuitous conjunction of life and song. I was accosted by a yapping dog which had slipped its master’s leash and was now making a canalside nuisance of itself. I could not help noticing it was a slow dog, with see-through skin, the kind of dog you can see through, so I sang Slow Dog by Belly, or as much of it as I could remember.

Though I decently refrain from singing into a microphone at the Resonance studios, and thus broadcasting my tuneless caterwauling to the masses huddled over their radio sets, I have no such compunction when I am out and about in my bailiwick. If I am overheard, say by a man trailing a leash in search of a fled dog on a canal towpath, I may stop my singing if, in sizing him up, I suspect he is intent on silencing me by means of violence. The wisdom of ceasing to sing when so threatened was brought home to me after a memorable incident involving a whirling tangle of intoxicated ruffians and my rendering of The Windmills Of Your Mind, famously sung by Noel Harrison in the film The Thomas Crown Affair (Norman Jewison, 1968). That I was in the vicinity of a windmill at the time was perhaps pertinent, as was the fact that the ruffians had been drinking all day in a squalid tavern called the Cow & Pins.

Most of the people whose ears may be assaulted by my singing out of doors will not actually beat me insensible, as the ruffians did. They will simply pass on by, perhaps with a look of reproach, or nausea, or pity. But it once happened that I was on my way to the newsagent, trudging along the towpath of the filthy old canal, when I encountered a trained, professional, indeed famous, musician. He was standing on one leg, playing the flute. I wish I could remember his name. Anyway, along I came, happy as a lark, singing Jack In The Green by Jethro Tull, and this fellow, rather than ignoring me or attacking me, gave me a useful piece of advice. Why, he asked, did I not limit my repertoire to works intended to be performed in Sprechgesang, or even better Sprechstimme? I need not sing at all, but could still indulge my musical passion. Well, all I can say is that I tried it, for a week or two, but quite frankly Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire begins to pall after a while, and there are only so many bits of grumpy Germanic avant garde folderol a man can tolerate. The Hans Werner Henze piece works well enough before breakfast, but after that I like something a bit less… difficult.

That is why, today, on my way back from the newsagent, I sent whole flocks of birds scattering from their perches with a spirited rendition of Hungry Freaks, Daddy by the Mothers of Invention.

Easter Sunday is the most important day in the Christian calendar, the day when we celebrate the ineffable mystery of the resurrection. In this godless age, some of you may have no idea what I am talking about. I refer you to the 1974 hit single by Mott The Hoople, Roll Away The Stone, which in turn refers to the scene in the Gospel of Matthew 28 : 1–6,

In the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre. And, behold, there was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it. His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow: And for fear of him the keepers did shake, and became as dead men. And the angel answered and said unto the women, Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified. He is not here: for he is risen, as he said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay.

and the Gospel of Mark 16 : 1–4,

And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him. And very early in the morning the first day of the week, they came unto the sepulchre at the rising of the sun. And they said among themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre? And when they looked, they saw that the stone was rolled away: for it was very great.

The evangelists Luke and John cover the same material, but you get the idea, I hope.

For many years now, my own way of celebrating Easter has been to bathe in the blood of the lamb. During the rest of the year, I bathe as normal, in hot water, perhaps with an admixture of bubble bath, but on Easter Sunday I like to make a special effort in honour of He who is risen. From time to time I have been asked to provide a set of instructions so that others may do as I do. This is not surprising, as I know many of you seek to live your lives as closely as possible according to the tenets of Hooting Yard. To date, I have kept my Easter light under an Easter bushel, but recently I found my arm twisted, as if I were Peter Lorre as Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon, until I agreed to explain exactly what you need to do.

First of all, load up your cart with empty buckets and an axe, the blade of which should have been sharpened, lethally, on your whetstone. Get dressed in a big black cape, or alternately in a winding-sheet, the better to suggest an angel of death, and set your features in an awful rictus of terror. Then set out for a nearby field where sheep and their lambs are likely to be gambolling. If you have a yapping dog that could be useful in rounding up lambs and running in circles around them, so they are too frightened to escape, take it with you. It can either ride on the cart along with the buckets and the axe, or, if it is a particularly frisky yapping dog, let it trot beside you.

When you reach the field, take your axe and run screaming at a lamb. Smite it. A cursory knowledge of lamb anatomy can come in useful at this point, for you should if possible try to sever an artery with the first smiting. Then pick up the lamb by a hind leg, hold it over one of the buckets, and squeeze as much of its blood out of it as you can. When you are done, toss the drained corpse of the lamb to one side, run screaming at another lamb, and repeat the process. You should continue until all your buckets are brimful of blood.

If you are a namby-pamby do-gooder who blubs at the sight of, say, a baby sparrow with a broken wing, or a weeping doe-eyed orphan, you might want to hire a ruffian from the local tavern to do the slaughtering and blood-draining for you. I cannot say I recommend this method, however, as tavern ruffians are not the most trustworthy of men, and you will have no guarantee that the buckets he delivers to your door are filled with the blood of lambs. Give a ruffian an axe and he will probably just go and slaughter the first things he sees, which might include your yapping dog, a defenceless widow-woman, or indeed you.

When your buckets are full, trundle the cart home, and clean the blade of your axe with swarfega and borax. You can then take the buckets up to the bathroom. Remembering first to put the plug in the bath, tip the blood from each bucket into the tub. Take off your cape or winding-sheet and whatever else you are wearing, and climb into the bath. Lie back, relax, and hum a hymn. I usually go for The Old Rugged Cross. If you do not know any hymns, that Mott The Hoople hit is a good substitute.

It may be that you live in an area bereft of lambs, perhaps in some sea-girt hellhole where turtles are rife. I have not been able to ascertain any specific Christian connotations relating to the blood of turtles, but the ancient Romans used it for both shampoo and toothpaste and, mixed with human milk, as a cure for earache. The ancient Romans, of course, were pagans, and lived in benighted ignorance of Christ, so do bear that in mind as you, or your hired ruffian, stalk down to the beach bent on slaughter.

NOTA BENE : I am not sure I have my Peter Lorre reference right. It may be that he pleads “Stop twisting my arm!” in a different film – Casablanca? Chapter and verse from a film buff reader would be appreciated.

And so it happened that Maud, having resisted the blandishments of the cad whose dearest wish was to coax her into the garden, repaired, not to her inner sanctum to do her devotions, but to her sitting-room, where she collapsed on a sofa and rang the bell to summon Baines, her slovenly yet devoted maidservant. The bell in the scullery was cracked, and it clunked rather than rang, but it had the desired effect, and Baines went staggering along the bungalow corridor to her mistress, leaving smudges on the wall where she stopped to lean against it, to catch her breath, every few paces.

“Shall I be getting madam her invigorating tisane?” asked Baines, when eventually she toppled into the sitting-room.

“You may rise, Baines,” said Maud, mistaking her maidservant’s sprawling upon the carpet as a posture of subservience rather than exhaustion, adding “And no, I have decided instead to take a goodly draft of laudanum. Be so good as to fetch it.”

Fetched it was, eventually, and Maud knocked it back and fell into a welcome stupor, during which she dreamed vivid, unsettling, and visionary dreams, so vivid and unsettling and visionary that as soon as she woke from her opium daze, she dragged herself to her escritoire to record them for posterity, and literature, and immortality. But hardly had she picked up her biro than she was interrupted by an urgent hammering at the door.

Readers alert to anachronism will have spluttered at that mention of a biro. Surely, they will ejaculate, a Victorian hysteric could not wield a biro to write down her effusions! However, Maud’s biro was not the biro invented by the Hungarian ballpoint pen inventor László Bíró, but a writing instrument of her own devising, more akin to a steel-nibbed fountain pen, which she dubbed a “biro” on account of a suggestive voice in her head which had spoken to her in a vivid and unsettling and visionary dream during an earlier opium daze.

The wondrous sights and sounds vouchsafed to her in the present dream, which she was going to write down, were lost forever due to the hammering at her door. When, later, she returned to her escritoire, she found, to her no small surprise and mortification, that though she still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!

The slovenly yet devoted Baines, having glugged twice as much laudanum as her mistress, was slumped insensible against the wainscot in a corner of the sitting-room, so Maud went to answer the hammering at the door herself. She opened it to reveal a man. He was of medium height, thin and sallow, with grey whiskers, thick grey hair, bushy eyebrows, and small, pointed and inquiring features which gave him rather the aspect of a prying bird. His eyes were little and sparkling. His mouth, strangely enough, was ecclesiastical. He was clad in very light-coloured clothes, yellow-grey tweeds, a yellow silk necktie, and a fawn-coloured Homburg hat. And no human being had ever encountered him in a pair of boots unprotected by spats. He was strikingly similar to the dweller on the threshold in the story by Robert Smythe Hichens.

“Good day, madam,” he said, the more familiar, to us, “hello”, having not yet been introduced, by Thomas Edison, as a common greeting, “I am a person from Porlock, come on business.”

“Where is Porlock, and what is your business?” asked Maud, who did not mince words with persons she supposed to be “in trade”.

“Porlock is a coastal village and civil parish in Somerset, England, situated in a deep hollow below Exmoor, five miles west of Minehead, madam, and my business is of a delicate nature the like of which I would beg to suggest is better disposed of indoors. May I come in?”

Maud was rather startled, but she did not forget the social niceties, and instructed the person from Porlock to walk through the grounds to the rear of the bungalow where he would find the tradesman’s entrance. He was not actually in trade, but the very thought of engaging in a discussion, which might become an argument, with a Victorian lady on her doorstep caused him such a mortification of the bowels that he immediately doffed his Homburg and went off as he was bidden. Maud, meanwhile, slammed the door shut and returned in haste to the sitting-room to rouse Baines. Baines had the only key to the tradesman’s entrance, and had naturally never divulged to Maud where it was kept. It was while she was pouring a bucket of cold water over the prostrate form of her maidservant that the last remembered fragments of her dream vision fled from Maud’s brain, and her chance of literary immortality was forever lost.

Some hours having passed, the person from Porlock was admitted to the parlour, where he laid his cards on the table. They were Tarot cards.

“What devilry is this, sir?” expostulated Maud, who was a devout Anglican.

“I did say it was a delicate matter, madam,” said her visitor, and he removed his Homburg to reveal that his scalp was shaved bare, and upon the flesh, in livid colours, was tattooed the number 666. And was there a hint of the horns of a goat?

To be continued…

“Come into the garden, Maud.”

“Not on your nelly. You know only too well that I am a neurasthenic recluse, and I prefer to remain in my bungalow with the windows shuttered, sitting at my escritoire penning tear-stained verses. When I have finished a particularly mawkish poem, I am given to flinging myself onto the floor and having a fit of the vapours, screaming and drumming my heels on the linoleum and beating my white fists upon the wainscot until they are bloody and bruised and require bandaging by Baines, my slovenly yet devoted maidservant. Why on earth should I risk my fragile mental equilibrium by coming into the garden?”

“Oh, come on. The black bat, night, has flown.”

“I am reassured to learn that the garden is innocent of bats which do swoop and squeak, but there is much else out there guaranteed to send my weakling constitution into panic-stricken trembling. Those plants, for example. I grant you they are gorgeous, but their gorgeousness seems fierce, passionate, and even unnatural. There is hardly an individual shrub which a wanderer, straying by himself through a forest, would not be startled to find growing wild, as if an unearthly face had glared at him out of the thicket. Several, also, would shock a delicate instinct, such as mine, to pluck a delicate instinct at random, by an appearance of artificialness, indicating that there had been such commixture, and, as it were, adultery of various vegetable species, that the production was no longer of God’s making, but the monstrous offspring of man’s depraved fancy, glowing with only an evil mockery of beauty. They are probably the result of experiment, which, in one or two cases, has succeeded in mingling plants individually lovely into a compound possessing the questionable and ominous character that distinguishes the whole growth of the garden. It would not surprise me to learn that every single plant is a poisonous plant, as in the garden of Doctor Rappaccini in one of the mosses from an old manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne. And it is into the midst of this toxic organic miasma that you wish me to come skipping, without a care in the world? You must be insane!”

“Maud, all I am saying is that the bat has flown away from the garden for the time being, and I want you to take advantage of its absence to come for a stroll. Come nightfall, it will be back.”

“You wish me to stroll with you in the garden, but you make no provision to protect me against being pricked by poisonous nettles or pointy thorns. It seems to me I would be far better off slumped on a chaise longue, my limbs hanging limp, keening with woe and summoning Baines to fetch me an invigorating tisane.”

“Well, I thought a stroll followed by a chaste yet tingling embrace in a verdant arbour might be a welcome diversion from your long silent empty days. I am here at the gate alone.”

“It has not escaped my notice that you neglect to address my point about protective clothing, a point I feel quite justified in making on account of those monstrous experimental plants with which the garden is rife. Prone to hysteria I may be, and I do not dispute the fact, but I can still exercise my ladybrain to deduce logical conclusions, and in this case I suspect the stroll is less important to you than the embrace in the arbour, an embrace for which you are reluctant to have me encumbered by, for example, a beekeeper’s suit.”

“There are no bees in the garden, Maud.”

“Perhaps not, but as I have already made crystal clear, the gloves and hooded suit and hat and veil of the standard beekeeping suit would afford me protection against the perils of poisonous spiny vegetation. It is true that, with me thus engarbed, you may find any embrace we recklessly throw ourselves into a measure less tingling than you desire, but I would have you recall that Sylvia Plath kept bees and I am sure her embraces with Ted Hughes were never less than torrid.”

“It sounds to me as if you might after all be considering coming into the garden, Maud, if I make all the necessary preparations.”

“Do not get ahead of yourself. Thus far we have merely addressed the issue of appropriate apparel. If I am not to be reduced to a quivering quaking screaming doolally flibbertigibbet, there is much else to be discussed, negotiated, and decided, and plans set afoot to meet my conditions in full. You tell me that the black bat of the garden has flown. But how can I be sure you are not just trying to pull the wool over my eyes, in your eagerness to stroll and embrace, albeit chastely, but with tingling, in a verdant arbour? The bat may already have come back, and be hiding somewhere, concealed behind a frond, ready to flutter forth and come swooping and squeaking and get itself entangled in my flowing Pre-Raphaelite tresses, a circumstance that would inevitably lead to my being undone by palpitations and convulsions, leading to insensibility and possibly coma. Baines would have to run, run like the wind, to the grim bleak asylum on the hill to collect the necessary paperwork to have me admitted therein, and I fear she is no longer capable of running, being aged and infirm herself, as well as slovenly and devoted.”

“Oh, come on, Maud, just come into the garden for Christ’s sake!”

“Blasphemy will get you nowhere. In fact, now my girly ears have been assailed by the sound of the Lord’s name taken in vain, I must retire to my inner sanctum, armed with a copy of The Book Of Common Prayer, and I shall do my devotions with the last reserves of energy I possess, before crumpling to the floor in a pitiable heap of exhaustion and neurasthenia. A pox on your garden, sir!”

“Well, if that’s your final word, Maud, I think I shall instead go for a spin on my penny-farthing, out on the moors, in fog and mist, there to be set upon by werewolves.”

“As you wish. Toodle-pip!”