From far California, my brother has sent me a snap of something so sausagey and preposterous that I feel compelled to share it with you. Constructed by a drama teacher who once put my nephew through his thespian paces, this is a Christian nativity scene made entirely from sausages and bacon. Warning : may contain sausages and bacon.
It is Sabine Baring-Gould Week at Hooting Yard, and today our hero sinks into a bog. He is out on Dartmoor with a man called Thomas from the Ordnance Survey. As night falls, the pair realise they are hopelessly lost. This passage is quoted in William Purcell’s biography, but he does not tell us from where in Baring-Gould’s preposterously profuse writings he has extracted it:
“The bog at night exhaled a deathlike sickly odour. Not a sound could be heard. No bird was roused, not an insect hummed. It was night now; not even a spark, not a Jack o’ Lantern. We could no longer see each other, and we had ceased to call to each other. Then all at once a fear came over me that we had got into Crowdy Marsh. I had seen quite enough of that. It is not composed of peat; it is simply water which is slimy with decomposing vegetable matter. It is dangerous to men and fatal to beasts…
“All at once I uttered a cry of ‘Help me’, and sank to my armpits. It was instantaneous. I was in water, not on moss; and in sinking all I could do was to catch at some particles of floating moss fibre, half-rotten reed and water-weed, and rake myself forward with strokes like those of a swimmer till I could lay hold of the spongelike surface of moss that formed the skin over the quaking bog. The moss was a foot thick, very porous but light, so that it floated till saturated with water. In my struggles I drew much of this moss towards me, but, as I pressed on it it sank under my weight, became waterlogged, and surrounded me, helping to suck me down. Against the wan sky I could see the moss as a mound black as ink, which wavered and rolled as I clung to and dragged at it.
“Finding that my efforts were unavailing, and by this means I could never extricate myself, I extended the bamboo I held horizontally, a hand at each extremity, and pressed this down on the surface of the moss. By this means I managed to heave myself up, and I had just enough power to throw my head and my neck forward on the moss, with arms extended like a spider. I felt as if I were striving against a gigantic octopus, that was endeavouring with boneless, fleshy arms to drag me under water. So great indeed was the suction that the leather gaiters that extended to the knee were torn off my legs.
“Having thus reached the surface, and spread myself upon it, I worked myself along till I arrived at a hassock of coarse grass or reed, and on that I planted myself to breathe… I was quivering in every muscle after the supreme strain of wrenching myself out of the mire… There was still a long tract of moss very similar in nature to that through part of which I had struggled, and I was fain to go through it in the same manner as before, writhing along like a lizard.
“At length, I came to firm land, exhausted, panting, my brow beaded with sweat, yet at the same time conscious of extreme cold from immersion. I called again and again… and soon came up with Thomas. The stench of the decomposing matter in my nostrils sickened me. However, a sense of relief and exhilaration came over me, and we made our way on till we struck a road, and finally reached our inn. I found my purse in my pocket sodden, my watch in my waistcoat pocket stopped…
“I found moss on my left shoulder, so that I had sunk that far, and, as I had said, the suction tore my gaiters off my legs.”
“In the dying hours of the year, in a foul and ill-lit alleyway, a raddled roué, staggering out of a den of vice, was set upon by a ruffian. The ruffian biffed the roué upon the bonce, and kicked him on the shins, just above his spats, and thumped him in the stomach, and the roué crumpled to the ground, winded and helpless in the noisome filth. Then the ruffian stamped his big black boot upon the roué’s biffed bonce, and spat upon his person, and stalked off down the alleyway into the night. And soon thereafter came the pealing of bells, ringing in the new year, and from a clump of dark trees in the park, the hooting of an owl.”
Thus begins Pebblehead’s paperback potboiler The Ruffian Biffo, His Book, surely the most relentlessly violent novel ever published. Its four hundred pages consist of little more than descriptions of the ruffian Biffo biffing and kicking and punching and thumping a series of victims, from the raddled roué staggering from a den of vice to a preening fop on a roister doister, a dandy in the doorway of a bordello, a macaroni on horseback and a pantalooned magnifico on his way to un ballo en maschera.
Interspersed with these almost identical scenes, Pebblehead makes a few half-witted attempts to probe the interior life of his ruffianly protagonist. Biffo, we are told, is variously “a card-carrying communist”, “devoted to his dear old mum”, and “a wizard at the loom”. To be fair, there is one lengthy and anomalous passage (pp. 103-149) where Biffo weaves a blanket for his mother, a blanket emblazoned with a hammer-and-sickle and a daringly avant-garde portrait of Stalin.
In an interview, Pebblehead did not claim, as one might have expected him to, that this scene – beautifully written and astonishing in its detail of blanket-weaving and communist ideology – is the “heart of the novel”. In fact he was quite shameless in his insistence that Biffo’s biffings and kickings and punchings and thumpings are what the book is “about”, adding that he only threw in the other material because he had a head cold and drank too many beakers of Lemsip.
It is difficult to know what to make of the book, but like all Pebblehead’s paperback potboilers, it is a bestseller. Apparently, he plans to follow it up with a spin-off about the raddled roué, following his debauches in the weeks leading up to the fateful encounter with Biffo. “I am hoping,” announced the writer from his chalet o’ prose, “That the next book will prove to be the most relentlessly debauched novel ever published. After that I shall move on to a mawkish and vapid heist ‘n’ espionage romantic science fiction teenage detective blockbuster, with vampires.”
Sabine Baring-Gould Week continues, with another snippet from Purcell’s biography. It is 1867, and our hero (aetat. 33) has been appointed to the position “with the depressing title of Perpetual Curate” to Dalton…
“Dalton, a hamlet in Swaledale, was called, not without reason, ‘Dalton i’t Muck’, by reason of the remarkable amount of mud through which its few inhabitants had in winter to make their way. A profusion of wild flowers in summer was an agreeable feature of the place though somewhat outweighed by at least three disadvantages: the smallness of the stipend, the stupidity of the people, and the enthusiasm of the Viscountess Downe…
“The natives were perhaps affected by the mud.”
I am reminded of Ruskin’s peasants of the Vaudois valleys, “where the marshes… blast their helpless inhabitants into fevered idiotism”.
A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I had armed myself with a trio of books by or about Sabine Baring-Gould. I have now set to reading them, and so confident am I that they will furnish much instructive and amusing material that it seems a good idea to dub this postage the inaugural one in what I intend to be Sabine Baring-Gould Week at Hooting Yard.
Let us begin then, with a snippet from William Purcell’s 1957 biography, Onward Christian Soldier:
“Sabine had a warm liking for his tutor. And that he in return was looked upon with affection is surely to some extent shown by the fact that he was asked by Mr Goodwin to choose his wife’s hats. Mrs Goodwin, it seems, had appalling taste. The results of leaving her to dress herself could be shocking in the extreme. Her husband’s pupil was therefore asked, and apparently agreed, not only to accompany the lady in an advisory capacity when she went shopping but also to inspect her before she left the house.
“Mr Goodwin was later made Bishop of Carlisle, a characteristic choice for one of those bishops who, as the century progressed, found themselves faced by forces greater than they were equipped to understand. Who supervised his wife’s choice of hats in Carlisle is not recorded.”
The third sponsored Drabblecast is now up, where you can listen to Mr Key and his occasional radio helpmeet Mr Dickson read the Goat God Catechism, with the added bonus of a brief bit of blather from Mr Key, recorded, just the other day, on a telephone device. Many thanks once again to both Norm Sherman and Salim Fadhley.
The television presenter Adrian Chiles read the headline Porpoises rescue Dick Van Dyke and was consumed by jealousy. Ever since he was tiny, Chiles had hankered to feature in an exciting news story alongside sea creatures, and now his thunder had been stolen by the octogenarian pretend chimney-sweep! It was too much to bear. Yet, rather than turning his twisted mental havoc upon Dick Van Dyke, the West Bromwich Albion-supporting anchorman began to plot vengeance against the very sea creatures which until now had fascinated him. In his mania, he decided to obliterate the largest sea creature he could obtain, to obliterate it in the most disgusting way, by eating it. And he decided to make of his revenge a festive occasion, by arranging his foul dinner to take place on the day when we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. What demons swept through his maddened mind, to so finesse his unutterable act? Alas, no hint was given of his motives in the newspaper report which followed, in the cheaply-photocopied Weekly Cetacean News Roundup, under the headline A Whale’s Christmas In Chiles.
O baleful pig! With your look of reproach, you fill me with feelings of guilt. And so I’ve embroidered the image of you upon my tattered quilt. Yes, it is tattered, yes, it is torn, and my sewing is shoddy and frayed. You look more like a moorhen or even a goat-boy disporting himself in a glade. I spread out the quilt for my kinsfolk to see and they mocked my hamfisted cross-stitch. Aunt Mab bundled it up and carried it off and tossed it into a ditch. So your imperfect image lies soaked in a puddle, O baleful, baleful pig! And I blame myself and my cackhanded ways and I sob as I light up a cig. And I puff on my cig at the edge of the ditch and remember your low mordant grunting when you stood on your plinth at the champion pig fair ‘neath a string of shabby old bunting. I sewed that too, and it showed, it was tatty and filthy and stained and made out of rags, when I was a convict and should have been using my needle in sewing up mail bags. They let me out in time to see you win the prize you hated winning. And now within my head I hear relentless dinning, dinning, the dinning of the rain pour down on my pig picture sewn from thread, oh badly sewn, I know, with cotton cerulean blue and red. A blue-red pig? Or is it a goat-boy? Or a moorside bird? They mock. Your heart was weak. When they made you champ, it cracked. You died of shock/ O baleful pig, R.I.P. I buried you under the Joshua tree.
“Olivier doesn’t fall asleep, for him ‘the god Morpheus had applied his gentle pressure to my dormic nerve’; he doesn’t go for a quick shag, Olivier has ‘tender venturings into the blessed unction of sex’. It’s a masquerade.”
Roger Lewis, The Real Life Of Laurence Olivier (1996), quoting from the actor’s autobiography.
In my cupboard this week, I bring to the huddled masses of Dabbler readers Maud Pastry’s recipe for alphabet soup. Within seconds of it being posted this morning, my email inbox emitted a raucous clanging noise, audible as far away as Timbuctoo – a signal that I had received a missive from the bluestocking soup maven herself. It reads as follows:
“It is a crying shame, Mr Key, that you did not seek my permission before letting those Dabbler people, whomsoever they may be, reproduce my receipt for alphabet soup. Either through neglect or mischief you omitted a crucial passage from the receipt, and I feel sorry for any reader who prepares the soup according to the bastardised version which is now so regrettably in the public domain. It occurred to me to issue a corrective as a tweet on The Dabbler’s Twitter feed, but on reflection I realised I do not even know what that means, being as I am a creature very much of the previous century, if not the one before that. I therefore insist that you air this letter on your weblog.
“Please note that when leaving the bowl to stand, and before transferring the contents to a cauldron, one should introduce into the liquid a duck, preferably a merganser or teal. The duck should be left to plash ‘n’ dabble in the bowl, as if it were a pond, for at least two hours. You should then remove the duck, gently, wearing gloves, and allow it to go on its merry way, perhaps to rejoin its family of other ducks, wherever they may be. The soup will contain a “memory” of the duck’s presence, plashing ‘n’ dabbling, and this adds a piquancy to the flavour which, though imperceptible on the palate, is such stuff as soups are made on, as the Swan of Avon (a man, not a duck) might have said.
“I shall look forward to seeing this important note appear, Mr Key. Do this in memory of me.”
The slack-jawed dribbler drooled as he danced. In spite of his dribbling and drooling, he executed as fine a waltz as any man alive. His partners, fey ladies prone to fits of the vapours, learned to wear protective shawls, of plastic or rubber, to parry the drool. It was viscous drool that dribbled from his slack jaw. We do not have time here to delve into his innards and their startling chemistry to explain the equally startling viscosity of his drool, suffice to say he had been studied by boffins, who found him fascinating, though they cared not a jot for his waltzing. But perhaps they ought to have cared, and investigated, for it may be that there was a link, unsuspected but adamantine, between his anomalous innards and his terpsichorean talent.
Because of his drooling, the slack-jawed dribbler was a man of few words. It was said that he expressed himself more fully in the waltz than he could ever manage with words. When he spoke, he slurred and slurped and his eyes grew wild. The fey ladies shuddered or swooned, and who can blame them? It is also true that he had no conversation, of the kind suitable for tea dances and soirées. He had fixed views on two or three topics of limited interest, and these he expounded, so far as his drooling and slurring and slurping allowed, in a low monotone indistinguishable at times from the buzz of a distant swarm of hornets.
And hornets were indeed one of his topics of interest, along with taxidermised plovers and steam power. He was learned, but limited in his learning, as if mighty ramparts of concrete surrounded his mind. This, too, may have been connected to the curious chemical reactions within his innards. It does nothing to explain his waltzing, which was a wonder.
He haunted the drawing-rooms I myself haunted for a decade or more. I always stood on the other side of the room, peering at him through my binoculars from the shadows. I studied him as one might study a bluebottle fly, or one of the worms. But before I could reach any conclusions, one afternoon he was no longer to be seen, dancing so elegantly across the parquet. He was gone, and nobody ever spoke of him. The fey ladies took up with other dancing partners, men with medals and moustaches who did not drool. I had neither medals nor a moustache. I had just my binoculars. And with the slack-jawed dribbler gone, I trained them upon other subjects. But I trained them in vain, for by now the lenses were cracked and smudged, and all I saw was blurs.
Then they ejected me from the drawing-rooms, and barred me for the future. I sought the slack-jawed dribbler high and low, mon semblable, mon frère!, but I never tracked him to his lair. I made my own lair, in a horrible cave, and here I’ll stay.
“Oi, Key! Where’s the blinkin’ prose?” shouts a gruff and guttural voice inside my skull, in a dream or nightmare. It’s a good question, however impolitely put. I can’t plead that my brain is empty, for the usual shenanigans are going on in there, the witterings and sparks. But for some reason, over the past few weeks, when my fingertips get set to tippy-tap at the qwerty, something seizes up, and I stare out of the window or light a cigarette or pick up a book and bury my head in it. (I haven’t been keeping up with the usual blogs I read, either.) Perhaps, with Impugned By A Peasant & Other Stories unleashed upon a palpitating world, I am drawn to paper, not to screen. Yet all the words begin upon the screen, and have done for the last decade and a half at least. I can’t quite recall when I last saw the typewriter I used to own, and upon which I typed out, on paper, and with much use of Tippex, the first few Malice Aforethought Press pamphlets. What became of it, that Olivetti, first acquired by my family when I was nine or ten, and on which I tapped out such juvenilia as a magazine devoted to the very sensible hobby of nisbet spotting? (How I wish I still had the five or six issues of that important journal! Too late now for them to be found in a skip, or at the bottom of an abandoned mineshaft – they will have rotted long ago.) Had I been born a generation later, of course, all that nisbet spotting stuff would have been online, imperishable. I don’t remember much about it, save that I invented a cast of characters who formed a nisbet spotting club, and who never actually spotted any nisbets. For some unearthly reason the HQ was placed, very firmly, in Biggleswade, a town I have never knowingly visited. Ah, the fripperies of youth! Not entirely different, in many ways, from the fripperies of my Hooting Yard-based adulthood, and impending dotage.
I was going to write something about pipe-smoking, not that I have ever smoked a pipe. There was something I read, or saw, on pipes, that made me want to write… but what it was, I cannot say, it’s gone, it’s gone…
Forthcoming : Huz and Buz. Soon.