Herewith Chapter 49 of Pallid Ada, The Crippled Heiress:

Countless fathoms deep, far far below the roiling ocean waves upon which our battered leaking ship is pitched and tossed, down, down in the black depths at the very sea bed, in a crevice of a rock encrusted with a billion years of salty encrustment, what wonders would we see, lit by the glow of fat eerie beings that pulsate and drift in the undersea world! Directly below our ship, far, far below, nestled in the crevice, there is a man! Dressed in garb half tattered black cloth half trailing weed, he is breathing freely, from his perfume bottle atomizer air bulb invention. Around him are gathered ranks of aquatic beings, the finned and the tendrilled, the suckered and the eyeless, the translucent and those that are mere blobs. They are rapt. For, with glubs and gurgles, the man is preaching to them the Word of the Lord. The man is none other than Alonzo Plunkett, the kindly Christian gentleman we last saw being dragged into the sea from a deserted stretch of British beach in the lobster-like claws of a sea monster!

It is with the aid of compass and sextant and stout-hearted prayer that we have dropped anchor at the very spot, in the vastness of the oceans, below which the semi-amphibious benefactor of Pallid Ada, the Crippled Heiress, is converting the denizens of the deep. Following his briny abduction, a committee of seaside worthies raised funds for a voyage to go in search of Plunkett. No better captain could we have than the terrifying and God-fearing retired Admiral Pipstrew. Poring over his charts, sucking on his pipe, beseeching the Lord, our captain has steered us hither and thither for six long years, following the most fleeting of clues, until now the prize is in our grasp!

Auks and guillemots wheel madly in the sky above our ship as, out on deck, crewmen Totteridge and Whetstone laboriously engarb themselves in the very best shiny brass Victorian diving gear. The captain stands to one side, his highly-polished peg leg glistening in the sunlight. Having at the last affixed to their helmets unfeasibly extensive lengths of pneumatic rubber tubing, the crewmen topple over the side, but not before Admiral Pipstrew booms out a hymn, and we all join in. And then, first Totteridge, then Whetstone, are gone, vanished below the waves. We can but wait for their return, Alonzo Plunkett safe and sound in the net they carry between them.

Sound, did I say? However kindly, however Christian, however expert in the geological treasures of the British coastline, how sound can a man be after spending six years in the blackest deep, his only company the weird aquatic life-forms that God, having made, at once condemned to remain submerged in the depths of the blue tumultuous waters? From poop to orlop, as we wait, there are mutterings that the Plunkett restored to the world of men will be a twitching and shattered glubb-glubbing wreck, drooling brine, his once fine bouffant shockingly tangled with weed and sea-scum. The tension mounts, and we busy ourselves with abstruse nautical activities, as our captain broods on the bridge, absent-mindedly prising barnacles off a stray timber plank.

Night falls. Night at sea is very different to night on land. Better writers than I, immeasurably better, have evoked the arresting aura of the sea-night. So much greater are they, the very air around them is rarefied and pure and I am not fit to breathe an atom of it. If ever I were to meet such a writer, which I would not, but if, say, I was mistakenly invited to a swish cocktail party at which one was present, I would expect to be squashed beneath their boot like a mite. I am but a humble jack tar, eking my sorry living in the rigging, scribbling prose in my too few idle moments, smudging the brine-soaked pages as I sweep from them the crumbs of the hard tack biscuits that fall from my caried gob.

Dawn breaks, and still there is no sign of Totteridge and Whetstone. Dawn at sea offers a very different prospect to dawn on land. There are great painters whose canvases will show you why. My own daubs, done with the dregs from tins of ship emulsion, will not.

Our only means of communication with the two crewmen gone below to rescue Alonzo Plunkett is a coded system of tugs to the ropes to which they are attached. It had been thought prudent not to extend the complexity of the system by adding a series of secondary tugs to their pneumatic rubber tubing, as a single misjudged tug might disrupt their air supply and consign them to a watery death. Admiral Pipstrew, who has not slept, is ready to command one tug on the ropes, to signal, as previously arranged, “Is Almighty God keeping you safe from harm in the immensity of His fathomless oceans?” But he stays his hand when an eagle-eyed cabin boy pipes up to announce that both Totteridge’s and Whetstone’s ropes are being tugged from below. And as we look, indeed they are, not merely tugged but yanked, pulled with main force, so threatening to topple the mast to which they are lashed. That mast is the mainmast, so as it topples, the ship itself will keel over. We are in mortal danger!

Whatever is tugging those ropes has inhuman strength. Our captain has to decide whether to sacrifice two of his crew for the good of all. But a night without sleep has scattered his wits, and he delays too long. With a last mighty heave, the ship is overturned, and every man jack of us is tossed into the sea.

Our descent to the depths is calm and dreamlike. There is no panic, no thrashing about, no bobbing to the surface for a last hopeless gulp of air before plunging again. We sink, every one of us, slowly and peacefully, until we land, with scarce a bump, on the sea bed. And there before us, in translucent shimmers, we see Alonzo Plunkett, and Totteridge, and Whetstone, and any number of fantastic marine life-forms, greeting us with glub-glub hosannahs, in the undersea paradise built with his bare hands by the kindly Christian gentleman during six years of hard subaquatic toil, to the glory of God.

My father was a hedger and ditcher. My mother did nothing but spin, but hers is a tale for another time. In those long years of hedging and ditching, my father learned much, perhaps too much, about the birds that nest in hedges and the creeping things that slither in ditches. With infantile enthusiasm, I used to tell my father he should write a book about the birds and the creeping things. Sometimes, when I babbled so, he grunted. Sometimes he coughed up phlegm and spat it into the embers. And sometimes he boxed my ears. Or rather, ear, for I was born with but one, on the left side of my head. Where the right ear ought to have been there was a patch of fur, rough and bristly fur, in the shape of a hoof. That, like my mother and her endless, demented spinning, is a tale for another time.

My father was not a bookish man, so the idea that he should write about the life-forms he found in his hedges and ditches was outwith his wits. Strictly speaking, he was not illiterate. He could write his name, and the name of my mother, and possibly even my name, and he was familiar I think with the formation of the words hedge and ditch and bird and creeping and thing, and of some others, such as toadstool and post office and President Nixon. And he could read, though the only book I ever saw him pore over, tongue lolling out of his mouth, was Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. In the few leisure hours he enjoyed, he preferred to paint vast inexplicable apocalyptic landscapes, in oils or watercolour or gesso. They were artistically worthless, according to the tastes of the time, and of all times, and he knew as much. Nonetheless, he had me give his paintings Latin titles, to lend them, he hoped, an air of profundity. I never told him that my Latin was ill-taught, by Mistress Pilbeam, and ill-learned, and thus would be laughed at by elegant nobs in salons, had ever any of his paintings been hung in one. As it was, they were stacked, slowly rotting, in a spare barn on a farm along the lane, forgotten.

I know only too well that others have written of birds in hedges, and creeping things in ditches, with greater facility than my father could ever muster. And yet, when I stand at his tombstone, every Friday afternoon, clutching my little fistful of chrysanthemums, I weep for that unwritten book. I weep, too, because what I know about hedges and ditches, and the birds and the creeping things that nest and slither within them, would not make a sentence, nor a paragraph, let alone a mighty, timeless tome such as my father could have written. What do we do, when we know what is lost?

Revenge Of The Pig is a new film by Horst Gack. Horst Gack, remember, is an idle, light, evilly deceitful and proud fellow who whispers insulting jests basely and obscenely and is rightly called by the people by the name of Mimmus. Revenge Of The Pig is a greasy, sad piece of cinema. Many gelatine plates were used in its production. It comes out in October. You would do well to make a note of that and to carry the note in the lining of your hat, through the coming months. Mimmus has made a film and the world will want to see it. Horst Gack now, now, now he is on a boat and the boat is at sea. The boat is golden. It has sails. Sail away, Mimmus, sail away and we will watch your magic lantern show in due time. And we will have pliers in our hands and we will pull with them. We will pull.

Herewith, Chapter One of Pallid Ada, The Crippled Heiress, originally published in weekly parts between 1851 and 1854.

The wind was howling across the desolate moors. It was an incredibly howly wind, and they were almost unbelievably desolate moors. Such desolation has seldom been howled upon by wild winds anywhere, ever, throughout the records of time, since the unimaginably distant past when the moors were an alluvial plain across which roamed weird primitive beasts. Once those beasts howled here, now it was the wind, ferocious in its onslaught upon the barren emptiness of the moors. Barren and empty and desolate but for a tiny ramshackle near-dilapidated cottage hunched alongside the single faint path that stretched across the moors, twisting and winding and leading none knew where. It was in this vile brickish habitude that Pallid Ada, the Crippled Heiress, eked out her sorrowful existence.

And sorrowful it was indeed, for Pallid Ada lived alone save for the company of her wizened uncle and even more wizened aunt, both near-blind and shrivelled and filthy and irascible. To them, Pallid Ada was more drudge than niece, and she skivvied all day and all night, every day and every night, with barely a moment’s rest, without them showing a scrap of gratitude. Quite the opposite, in fact. Pallid Ada was spat upon and insulted and shouted at, and had either her wizened uncle or wizened aunt had the strength they would have beaten her with broomhandles and flung breakable household objects at her head.

Pallid Ada’s ghastly pallor was due to a fundamental ignorance, or at the very least misunderstanding, of vitamins. She subsisted on slops-in-the-pot and sop-in-the-pan, and though from time to time she went out on to the desolate moors foraging for vegetables, such foraging was always hopeless, there being no farms for many miles around. The only greenstuffs she might ever find were rotten things chucked out of passing carts, and few carts were ever seen lumbering along the faint path across the moors, for the moors were horribly desolate and wild winds howled.

Lack of vitamins, too, may have had something to do with Pallid Ada’s becripplement, the precise nature of which would bring tears to the eyes of the most hard-hearted reader. For crutches, the poor pallid creature had only a couple of bits of worm-eaten timber salvaged from the wreck of the ship upon which she had been a passenger, and from which she had been hurled into the pitiless sea, many a moon ago. The ship was sailing for a distant land of pomposity and riches when it was boarded by pirates from the Symbionese Liberation Army’s maritime wing. They carried out acts of the most gross moral degeneration among both passengers and crew before scuppering the ship on a rocky atoll. Clinging to the two pieces of timber upon which she now hobbled about the semi-dilapidated cottage on the moors, Pallid Ada, monstrously violated and newly becrippled, drifted in the broiling sea for weeks and weeks before being washed up on the shingle of a foul tempestuous stretch of coastline. Soaked in seawater, exhausted, vitamin deficient and with the pallor of curd, the half-dead girl was found by a kindly Christian gentleman who was roaming the strand collecting geological specimens in a little bag. He took her to his coastal manse and fed her on broth, and gradually she recovered her wits as she lay on a sofa in his conservatory surrounded by tweeting budgerigars in birdcages. In the evenings, the Christian gentleman sat with her, reciting improving passages from the Old Testament.

Pallid Ada’s pallor grew less, and the first faint flush of health appeared on her cheeks. Eventually she grew strong enough to begin dragging herself around the conservatory on her makeshift crutches, and before long the whole lower floor of the manse was hers to explore. Now she ate her broth in the dining room, where linnets sang in birdcages and there was a cabinet of interesting geological specimens to look at. The kindly gentleman was often out, traipsing up and down the beach gathering additions to his collection, and when he was home he rarely spoke except when reading from his big leather-bound Bible, but Pallid Ada felt safe and secure. And as her own troubles faded, she became aware that often, her Christian rescuer’s brow was furrowed and his posture stooped and his fingernails gnawed to the quick, as if he were careworn, crushed perhaps by the weight of an awful family secret he durst not divulge to his pallid crippled houseguest.

Had Pallid Ada not been such an innocent, she may have intuited that the gentleman’s clouded countenance was connected in some wise to the thumping and scraping noises she had begun to notice, which set the ground floor ceilings all a-tremor. If it happened that the gentleman was with her, reading his Bible or munching on a celery stick as his frugal luncheon, when the noises from above shattered the peace and drowned out the tweeting of the cagebirds, he would rise from his chair and excuse himself, and she would hear him clump up the stairs, and shortly afterwards the thumps and scrapes would cease. It was to be many months before Pallid Ada learned their cause and origin.

But one dreadful day, her idyll ended. She was reclining on the sofa, fashioning a pin cushion out of a couple of old rags and a handful of kapok, when of a sudden a panting hobbledehoy scampered in from without. Pallid Ada recognised him as the trustworthy local urchin who was employed to carry messages between the manse and the village. Scarce able to draw breath, the boy told Pallid Ada of the calamity that had befallen her benefactor. The kindly Christian gentleman had been collecting seashells at a deserted part of the beach when a hideous aquatic monster reared up from beneath the waves and grasped him in its savage lobsterian claws. He had time to cry out for the mercy of God before the monster, flailing and thrashing, dragged him into the sea, and plunged into the cold black depths.

No sooner had the urchin imparted his terrible news than the thumping and scraping sounded from above. Without the kindly gentleman present to climb the stairs and make it cease, howsoever he did so, the mysterious noise continued, and grew louder and louder, until poor Pallid Ada covered her dainty ears in fright. And then, with a mighty crash, the ceiling stopped shaking and the noise did stop… only to be replaced by an even more menacing sound of something descending the staircase. Pallid Ada was transfixed with terror, and her cheeks which had so recently had a healthy rosy bloom were once again bleached to a deathly pallor.

Then, into the conservatory lumbered a misshapen wretch with filthy matted locks straggling down almost to his huge ungainly feet. He was dressed in noisome rags and his eyes were those of an unhinged maniac.

“Cripes!” cried the hobbledehoy, “Tis the kindly old gentleman’s weak-brained brother, who has not been seen in this parish since before I was born!”

Pallid Ada swooned.

When she awoke, the pallid cripple found herself bound hand and foot on the back of a cart. She could tell, from its jiggery juddery bumpety progress, that she was travelling along pitted rutted rustic lanes, pulled by exhausted horses. She wondered who it was who was in the cab, shouting his head off in guttural gibberish and repeatedly striking the miserable steeds with a whip. The reader will not take too long to guess that it was the kindly Christian’s maniac brother. But what may surprise any but the most astute is the knowledge that this vile abductor was merely following the command of Pallid Ada’s wizened uncle and wizened aunt.

Ever since the yet uncrippled girl had set out on her journey from Mistress Pilbeam’s Academy For Naive Young Virgins, to voyage across the seas and claim her inheritance, her dastardly ancient relatives had been plotting to have her waylaid and brought to their ramshackle cottage battered by howling winds, out on the desolate moors, there to be enslaved as their drudge, working her fingers to the bone and fed on slops-in-the-pot and sop-in-the-pan. Oh, how they cursed as their evil plans went all kim kam with the intervention of the kindly gentleman! And then how they cackled with fiendish glee as their eldritch powers gained strength and their spirit communications with the manse-trapped maniac bore fruit. And what an evil fruit it was, as cankerous and rotten as the innards of the apple with which the serpent tempted Eve!

So it was that Pallid Ada, the Crippled Heiress, was brought to the cottage where we found her at the beginning of this chronicle. Alas, she has much yet to suffer before our tale is done.

Reynolds mentions slop-in-the-pan, but not that almost identical item of Victorian cuisine, slops-in-the-pot. Each had its adherents, its devotees. There was a sort of tribal loyalty to one dish or the other, so that brawls in taverns or dens of vice, or out in the stinking streets, might be occasioned by the “wrong” answer to the challenge “are ye a potman or a panner?”

Victorian readers were so familiar with the rivalry between the two that it drives the plot of many novels of the era. In Pallid Ada, The Crippled Heiress, for example, the eponymous heroine is torn between her guardian, a slop-in-the-pan man, and her suitor, who favours slops-in-the-pot. I haven’t actually read the book myself, so I can’t tell you how things work out. It is just one of a great pile of novels referred to in a majestic academic study of fictional slop and slops from the Victorian era that I borrowed from the library but had to take back because umpteen other borrowers had reserved it. I wish now I had photocopied some of the more startling bits.

On the face of it, one would think slops-in-the-pot won out over slop-in-the-pan every time. After all, with the former you’re getting more than one kind of slop presented in a presumably ceramic pot, whereas the latter promises just a single slop still in the pan in which it was boiled. I suppose what we have here is an echo of the eternal battle between Cavaliers and Roundheads, hedonists and puritans. The louche and foppish Victorian man-about-town with his decisive cravat and gaudy cuffs would plump for multiple slops in a decorative pot, while the severe hawk-faced miseryguts groaning under the weight of self-imposed moral strictures would deny himself anything but a simple slop in a simple pan.

If I still had my library book I could copy out its summary of the plot of another novel, or rather part-work, A Canker In The Belly Of The Immoral Maniac Husband, or The Ruination Of Captain Purvis. In this piece of virtually unreadable tosh, seemingly hundreds of characters, whom we have difficulty keeping track of, devour endless pots of slops and pans of slop, chapter after chapter, in between taking part in scenes of unimaginable vice and degradation, not the least of which is the tying of a tin can to the tail of an orphaned puppy. They don’t write ’em like that anymore, for which perhaps we should be thankful.

NOTE : Reynolds refers to sop-in-the-pan, not slop-in-the-pan. My mistaken recollection, twenty-four hours after typing up the original quotation, clearly makes a nonsense of this entire piece. But I refuse to apologise. My short-term memory may be in as ruinous a state as Captain Purvis’s domestic hearth, but I shall carry on regardless, contemptuous of brickbats, and I have no doubt that I shall prevail, in the end, whenever an end may come.