I WAS MET AT THE FARMHOUSE by an elderly couple who had reached that inevitable stage in married life where they had begun to resemble one another: both silver-haired, both dark-skinned, both poorly dressed in clothes little better than rags, and both with deep brown melting eyes. It was like being greeted by a pair of very old and mournful mongrels.
The lady of the house introduced herself as Mrs Gooding and kindly offered me a cup of tea and a tongue sandwich, which she had already prepared, and which sat lolling expectantly on the kitchen table, attended by lazy flies. I declined the tongue sandwich.
‘But you’ll have a cup of tea, of course?’
‘I will, thank you, madam, yes.’
The man of the house, Mr Gooding, sat in a low chair by the kitchen range. He grimaced upon my entry, baring his teeth at me, which were rather few, and those few a troubling black and yellow. He looked like a man with a mouthful of wasps.
‘Good evening, sir,’ I said. ‘I’m Stephen Sefton. You’re kindly putting me up, I understand?’
Mr Gooding stared at me in his rotten, waspish, gaptoothed fashion, while Mrs Gooding poured the tea from the big black tinker’s kettle set on the range.
‘Oh yes, that’s right,’ said Mrs Gooding, ladling milk and sugar into my tea. ‘The headmaster told us you were coming.’
‘Good.’
Mr Gooding growled a little at the mention of the headmaster.
‘Don’t mind him,’ said Mrs Gooding. ‘Have you come far?’
‘Norfolk,’ I said.
‘Norfolk!’ she said, as if it were the moon. ‘My my. That is a long way.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed, sipping at the scalding sweet tea. ‘It is. Do you know I think I might turn in if that’s—’
‘Where is Norfolk?’ said Mrs Gooding. ‘I just can’t picture it.’
‘It’s over in East Anglia,’ I said.
‘East Anglia,’ she said. ‘Is that somewhere in London?’
‘Yes. Well, it’s … near, I suppose. Nearish.’
‘Is it a town?’
‘It’s a county.’
‘Ah, of course. Nor-folk,’ she said, emphasising the folk.
‘Anyway. It’s been a long day, so—’
‘Would you like some pie and custard?’
‘Well, that’s very generous of you, but—’
‘We’re coming to the end of our supply of blackberry and apple, I’m afraid. But they’ll be a new crop soon. And we’ve a nice beest custard to go with it.’
‘Erm …’ I wasn’t entirely sure what a beest custard was – assuming it might be a ‘beast’ custard, containing—
‘He loves a nice beest custard.’ She nodded towards her husband.
‘A beest custard?’
‘You don’t have those in Nor-folk?’
‘It’s possible we do. I’m actually from London myself, but Mr Morley is—’
‘From the beest milk?’
‘The beast milk?’
‘Third milking, lovely for making custards. Nice rich custard. Sort of …’
‘Meaty,’ piped up Mr Gooding. ‘A good beest custard.’
‘I don’t think I will, if that’s OK,’ I said. ‘I’ve just had a rather substantial meal down at the—’
‘Good,’ said Mr Gooding. ‘All the more for us.’
‘Now, don’t mind him,’ said Mrs Gooding. ‘He’s only joking.’ And then she added, lowering her voice, ‘It’s just he’s lost more chickens.’
‘Losht more chickens,’ repeated Mr Gooding.
‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘Well, I’m terribly sorry to hear that.’
‘Foxes,’ said Mrs Gooding.
‘Foxes!’ repeated Mr Gooding, spitting on the range.
‘Don’t that do that, Solomon,’ said Mrs Gooding. ‘We’ve company.’
‘Anyway,’ I said. ‘Foxes. Terrible menace, but—’
‘I’ve never met a fox that opens the door and shuts it behind him,’ said Mr Gooding, in a sudden outburst.
‘Solomon!’ said Mrs Gooding.
‘It’s them boys,’ he said. ‘Bloody boys.’
‘Surely not,’ I said.
‘Don’t take any notice of him now,’ said Mrs Gooding. ‘It’s just the shock.’
‘Jhust the schock!’ repeated Mr Gooding, who spat again on the range. ‘We never had any trouble before the school came.’
‘Anyway,’ said Mrs Gooding, ‘you’re wanting your bed.’ At which she hurriedly ushered me up a narrow staircase to a little room above the kitchen: drab, damp, undecorated and grubby, with distemper peeling from its walls, a dark dank wooden ceiling, a bed, a half-broken chair, and a small steaming iron stove. This was to be my billet.
‘There we are. This is you,’ said Mrs Gooding.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘You let me know if you need anything.’ And she bustled away.
I heard raised voices from downstairs.
It was the sort of room where one might imagine Keats – or more likely Chatterton – writing lonely verses. I did not that night write any verses, lonely or otherwise. Despite the poverty of the room and its decoration it was, like Mrs Gooding, entirely sincere. The sheets on the bed were crisp and dry and the pillows downy, and it had indeed been a long day, and so I lay down gratefully and immediately fell asleep, with the sensation almost of drowning in the embrace of some vast welcoming creature.
When I awoke the next morning I was shocked to find myself still dressed in my clothes. Resisting the temptation to practise my pranic breathing I instead smoked a cigarette lying on the bed, then straightened myself up and went downstairs, where I found no sign of the Goodings, though in the kitchen the big black tinker’s kettle sat rattling on the range, and a plate of farm bread and butter with apple jelly was set out invitingly on the table. I poured myself a cup of tea, took a slice of the bread, and sat down on an old wooden chair by the range to smoke, to compose myself and make my plans for the day.
Morley’s speech was scheduled for three o’clock that afternoon, my farming hosts seemed to be at work already, Miriam would not be up for hours and would then doubtless be preoccupied with Alexander, so I thought I might make the most of a quiet morning to explore the school grounds, the Devon coast, and to take a few photographs.
I was looking forward to an easy day.
Relaxed and resolved, armed with my camera, and slowly but surely beginning to uplift myself with quantities of tea and tobacco, I wandered back towards the main school building in the early morning sunlight and wondered about the difference the day made: in contrast to its forbidding features the night before, All Souls now appeared a place benign and wondrous. The turrets and gables sang and soared rather than grappled towards the sky, and the meadow down towards the clifftops and the sea glistened in the morning light. It was also as quiet as a monastery, which I knew could mean only one thing: breakfast. From reading the position of the sun in the sky – a trick taught me by Morley – and from my years of experience, I guessed that the traditional hour of porridge was upon us, and so I followed my nose into the school, which might have been every school: the murky seagreen paint, the clanging of cutlery, the stench of unwashed boys, and disinfectant and sewage. I could almost hear the porridge pots bubbling on the stove.
And sure enough, the dining hall, where only the evening before two dozen of us had feasted upon fine food and wine, was now packed with boys, perhaps three hundred of them, of assorted shapes and sizes, some of them seated and silently tucking in to their thin, gruel-like provisions, others queuing for theirs from a couple of cooks who stood guard over a cauldron of porridge and a jam pan full of steaming tea.
The sight of three hundred expectant faces turning towards me made me feel instantly queasy, and took me back to my own wretched schooldays, which had been characterised by all the usual privations and difficulties: the usual slaps and kicks and punches, the usual punishments and raggings, all the usual sadism and torture, the pointless endless public school jolly japes and roundabout of violence. It has of course become fashionable now to denigrate our great public schools, but in my experience they are – or certainly were – places more than worthy of such denigration. I remember there was one particular boy at our school, an Italian Jew, Levi, who we had tormented ceaselessly and mercilessly from dawn till dusk and from his first day to his last, excluding him from games and activities, staff and students alike, taunting him, beating him with even more than the usual ferocity. ‘Jew, Jew, a smoggy smoggy Jew’ was the rhyme. And then one day in assembly we were singing a hymn and Levi laughed at something we were singing – something to do with Jesus, meek and mild. He actually laughed out loud: I suppose it must have been all the pressure and tension building up inside him, a kind of release of tension. And the headmaster, who was also our divinity teacher, rushed down and pulled him from the line by his hair and started beating him there and then, in front of the whole school, and we were all laughing, it was so shocking. We didn’t know what to do. And then the headmaster dragged him out of the school hall and I don’t know what happened next but Levi simply never returned. He disappeared from our lives. And we never asked why. Nor did we care. It was the natural order of things.
Several of the teachers – including my German friend, Mr Bernhard – beckoned me from my reverie and over towards the high table, where they suggested I join them for breakfast, but there was no sign there of Morley, or indeed of the headmaster, or of Miriam, or Alexander, and with the hungry eyes of both teachers and pupils upon me I excused myself, explaining that I needed to go and take some early morning photographs of the school estate.
Relieved, I made my way out of the front of the building, gasping in the fresh air, and strode swiftly on past a gatehouse, and then down a long, steep, wooded, winding dirt road – which must have been the road we had taken in the car the previous night with Miriam. At the bottom of this road was what appeared to be a water-pumping station – not something I had noticed the night before, an odd, incongruous redbrick lump of a building in a patch of trees – and then the road abruptly stopped, and there were the cliffs, over which and upon which we had almost sacrificed ourselves the night before.
The sun was now blazing, burning off any early mist, and in the autumn morning light I saw that there was a perilous pathway cut down and through the cliffs, with ropes attached as handrails to the rocks, and below that – somewhere, five hundred feet or more below – the beach. I finished my cigarette, slung the camera across my back, and clambered slowly down.
And there on the beach, astonishingly, was Morley, standing by a mound of twisted black metal, which appeared to have recently been a car.
And neatly laid out next to this wreckage was a body – the body of a boy, a boy horribly mangled, carefully arranged.
Morley had his back to me and was busy making notes. He did not look up.
‘Ah, Sefton. Good of you to join us.’
The scene was distressing: Morley, as usual, was calm.
‘What … ?’
‘Indeed, that is the question, as our friend Hamlet might say. I was walking down here early this morning and discovered this poor blighter, who seems to have made the same miscalculation as us last night. Did what I could, but nothing to be done.’
The boy’s limbs were horribly twisted, his face contorted in a grimace, as though he had stared at Death itself.
‘Horrible,’ I said.
‘Quite. Now, could you hold this?’ Morley held out a tape measure. ‘The police will be here with their cameras and dusting powders in short order, I have no doubt, but in the meantime …’ He paced over towards the cliff, measuring the distance, then strode back and began poring over the wreck of the car, as if it were an ancient manuscript, or a book contract.
‘Come on then, photographs. Straight documentary, if you please. None of your artistic touches.’
‘Yes, Mr Morley.’ I had no intention of aestheticising the scene. And I had no intention of taking any photographs: it would have been a desecration.
But then, automatically, almost without thinking, while Morley busied himself with more measurements and calculations, I took up the camera and took the required photographs, attempting to record every detail as accurately as possible. We worked in silence for perhaps fifteen minutes.
One of Morley’s very last books is about photography, On Photography (1940): he has a theory about it, obviously. I have no such theory. All I do know is that a horrible scene like the one that was laid out before us on that bright Devon morning is something that – alas – demands a witness. Morley always spoke of the purpose of The County Guides as a form of witness. ‘This is here,’ he would sometimes say, in explanation of the books. ‘This is what this place is. What these people are. These are its glories.’ And these, I might add, are its horrors and its ruins: The County Guides tells one story about England and Englishness; my photographs, I suppose, tell another; they are perhaps the negatives of Morley’s words. Or the shadow.
I could not have described our work as such then, of course. What struck me most about the scene on that awful morning was the smell – precisely because there was no smell. There was just the smell of the sea, vast and thorough and entire, erasing everything, the waves crunching against the pebbles on the shore as though intending to devour the earth entirely – and I snapped back with the camera.
Then above the noise came another sound, and I looked up to see Dr Standish arriving with Alexander, their faces solemn.
The headmaster was dressed in the same clothes as the day before but Alex was the sort of man who likes to dress differently for different occasions. That morning he was sporting an outfit suitable for a stroll: a cap, a tweed jacket, plus fours and sturdy boots.
‘Good grief,’ said the headmaster. ‘What’s this?’
‘Ah,’ said Morley. ‘Good morning. Out for your morning constitutional?’
‘What?’ As they approached closer the headmaster was speechless. Alex seemed unperturbed.
‘Good grief. It’s …’
‘One of yours?’ asked Morley.
‘I … It’s …’ The headmaster was too disturbed to speak.
‘Michael Taylor,’ said Alex. ‘Well well.’
‘Michael?’ said the headmaster. ‘Not Michael!’
‘Stolen a car and taken a wrong turning, eh?’ said Alex.
‘Really?’ said Morley. ‘That’s what you think?’
‘Oh yes, he is – was – a terribly inquisitive sort of child, Michael. Forever fiddling around with things, poking around where he didn’t belong. Taking things apart, failing to put them back together. You know the sort of thing. Engines, all sorts. Isn’t that right, Headmaster?’
‘Is that right, Headmaster?’ asked Morley.
The headmaster was lost for words. He was down on his knees by poor Michael Taylor. All the colour had drained from his already ashen face, giving him the appearance of a ghost that had caught sight of itself. He touched the back of his hand to the dead boy’s face. The grey sea continued to spit pebbles up the beach towards us. He blinked several times in disbelief and then turned to stare at Alex, who in turn stared out to sea. Morley continued to fuss around the vehicle. And I stood with my camera, waiting.
And suddenly the headmaster became animated: it was like seeing a man regain his strength after having been knocked down, like a boxer getting up from the canvas. He stood up and strode ramrod straight over towards Alex, but then seemed to change his mind, and turned instead towards Morley, gripping him by the elbow and whispering something in his ear, taking him by the arm and leading him away from the vehicle and over towards the cliffs. I smiled weakly at Alex, who smiled confidently back. Though they were now some little distance away we could both still hear Morley and the headmaster speaking above the sound of the sea.
‘This is rather difficult … You understand of course that parents are going to be arriving all morning?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I wonder … if we might not mention this … immediately to the boys? It might cause distress.’
‘Distress, yes.’
‘And panic, even.’
‘Panic?’
‘Well … A tragedy like this. At this time. It would be very difficult for—’
‘For the boys.’
‘Precisely.’
‘What about the boy’s parents?’
‘Whose parents?’ said the headmaster.
‘The dead boy’s parents, Headmaster. Michael.’
‘Michael is … was … one of our orphans.’
‘You take in orphans?’
‘Their fees are paid for by some of our benefactors. It’s an arrangement we have. For boys who show exceptional promise, but who …’ He stared at the boy’s body lying motionless on the cold grey rocks. ‘Well. It would just be better if we could … Do you understand, Morley?’
There was a long lingering pause then as Morley hesitated before answering.
‘I understand,’ he said.
‘So might we keep this … for the moment?’
‘Between ourselves,’ said Morley. ‘But the police will be notified of course.’
‘Directly. Yes. Of course. But the boys, the parents, the staff …’
Morley glanced in our direction, and he looked for a moment lost.
‘Yes. I think we can keep this to ourselves.’
The two men then walked back towards us.
‘Gentlemen,’ said the headmaster.
‘We’re to keep it between ourselves,’ said Alexander.
‘Yes,’ said the headmaster.
‘But wouldn’t it be better to postpone the Founder’s Day—’ I began.
‘Good, that’s understood then,’ said the headmaster, ignoring me.
‘A tragic accident,’ said Alexander, ‘and to have occurred at this time seems particularly unfortunate.’
‘But—’ I started again.
‘Exceedingly,’ agreed Morley. ‘Yes, I quite agree.’
‘Perhaps you’d like me to remain here, to explain matters to the police?’ asked Alex.
‘No, no,’ said the headmaster. ‘I would prefer to stay, and if you wouldn’t mind taking Mr Morley and Mr Sefton up to the school and making a call to the local police station that would be most helpful, thank you.’
‘Certainly,’ said Alex. ‘The police will be here shortly, Headmaster.’
Wherever we went, in those years, there were always – eventually – police.
Morley glanced at me. ‘OK, Sefton?’ he asked.
‘Fine,’ I said.
And so we began the long climb back up to the school. As we reached the point from where the car had driven over, Morley bent down to examine the tyre tracks. Alex continued on ahead.
‘What do you notice, Sefton?’
‘Tyre marks.’
‘Several tyre marks,’ said Morley, pointing to a writhing mass of lines and marks.
‘Yes. Presumably where we also got stuck yesterday, Mr Morley.’
‘Presumably so, yes. Presumably so.’
A disturbing scene
We walked slowly and in silence back up to the school.
‘I do hope this won’t put a dampener on your speech, Mr Morley,’ said Alex.
‘I see no reason why it should,’ said Morley. ‘As you say, a tragic accident.’
‘With any luck we’ll have the matter all cleared up by this afternoon,’ said Alex.
‘I’m sure we will,’ said Morley. ‘I’m sure we will. But do tell me more about poor Michael Taylor.’
‘Not much to tell,’ said Alex. ‘Perfectly pleasant young boy. Nothing wrong with him. Mischievous, I would say. Accident-prone.’
‘Really?’
‘Well, clearly, given his unfortunate demise.’
‘Assuming it was an accident.’
‘I can hardly see any other explanation.’
‘Perhaps not,’ said Morley. ‘Perhaps not.’
‘I know he was a great favourite of my brother.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Morley. ‘Clearly.’
‘Your brother?’ I said.
‘The headmaster,’ said Alex.
‘You’re brothers?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I thought you knew, Sefton?’ said Morley.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I had no idea.’
‘Yes.’
‘Younger brother,’ said Alex, smiling.
‘I met Dr Standish, what was it, around 1917, I suppose?’ said Morley. ‘You were away at the war, Alex.’
‘For my sins,’ said Alex. ‘Hence’ – he held up his left hand, which, I suddenly realised, was lacking a thumb.
‘Cause you much pain?’ asked Morley. ‘We have a handyman who lost his arm. A kind of ghost pain. Causes him terrible agonies.’
‘Mustn’t grumble,’ said Alex. ‘It’s nothing really. One learns to manage these things.’
‘Of course,’ said Morley. ‘Though of course some pain never goes away.’
Reaching the top of the cliff, I looked back and saw the headmaster standing at the edge of the water, staring out into the distance, the waves dashing over his feet, for all the world like he was Canute, driven to the edge of his kingdom and his authority.