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!”