The County Guides: The Sussex Murder

QUAINT IS NOT THE WORD I would use to describe Bonfire Night in Lewes. One thinks of ivy-clad country cottages as quaint. Toy museums, perhaps. Victoriana of all kinds. Love spoons. Staffordshire dogs. Pianolas. Morley’s fondness for Latin and circumlocution. Even Pablo the Bedlington might be described as quaint.

Bonfire Night in Lewes is not quaint. Bacchanalian, certainly. Strange, yes. Creepy, perhaps. And, alas – as it turned out that year – brutal and tragic. But quaint, no. English and German standards of the quaint are clearly not at all the same.

‘Goodness,’ said Miriam, as we ventured out from the hotel onto the street. The chaos that had descended since we had gone in to dine is difficult to describe: it was as if we had emerged from a state of slumber and tranquillity into a state of full public emergency, from a fairy tale into a nightmare. People were everywhere on the pavements, crushed and crowded, the road only kept clear by the considerable efforts of policemen armed with batons and good humour. As in any good old-fashioned English crowd, there was much lively trading of insults, or what according to Morley in Sussex is referred to locally as ‘chavish’, a sort of low-level chattering and exchange of abuse, largely consisting of the batting back and forth of various dialect terms, such as ‘heggling’, ‘grummut’, ‘dubersome’ and ‘fluttergrub’, the meaning of which one could easily work out by a simple process of substitution, certainly in simple sentences such as ‘What do you think you’re looking at? You sowing gape seed, you heggling fool?’, and ‘You great grummut, I wouldn’t fancy your nunty.’ Suffice it to say, the grummuts and nunties of Lewes were in good voice and full flow. (In Sussex, Morley makes the claim, entirely unsubstantiated as far as I can tell, and, I suspect, almost certainly influenced by his relationship with Molly, that there is a great similarity between various Sussex provincialisms and many words that we think of as uniquely and peculiarly American. Personally, I rather doubt that ‘boffle’, ‘brabagious’, ‘bumblesome’, ‘gifty’, ‘impersome’, ‘sprackish’ and ‘snuffy’ are at all common American terms, though there is doubtless more than a little of a Yankee tang to the oft-used Sussex ‘dang’, as in ‘That is dang nonsense, Mr Morley, nothing but dang nonsense.’)

Despite these signs of wit and good humour, the atmosphere in town was now rather dark and there were heavy hints of serious trouble ahead. The windows of the hotel had been fitted with wire blinds, for example, and a sturdy wooden barrier had been erected at the front entrance, manned by an equally sturdy-looking member of the hotel staff, who sported traditional cauliflower ears, a wide flat nose and mangled features – all of which were presumably intended to deter revellers from storming the building and damaging the premises. Fortunately, this same sturdy fellow – an ‘absolute darling’ according to Miriam, despite all evidence to the contrary – had earlier advised me to move the Lagonda to a safe place round the back of the hotel, otherwise it might already have been commandeered, requisitioned and set alight. Quite a trophy. When I say that the fellow had ‘advised me’ to move the Lagonda, what I mean is that when I asked him if I should perhaps move it, he had replied, ‘I wouldn’t misagree with you there, sir.’ And when I had further enquired if there was likely to be trouble, his memorably gnomic response had been ‘I’d say generally always yes and no, sir’, a phrase that I had repeated to Miriam, and which she subsequently and enthusiastically adopted as her own, ‘I’d say generally always yes and no’ becoming something of a Miriam motto.

‘Have you ever had wheatear, Sefton?’ Morley asked me, seemingly oblivious to the dark carnival atmosphere that had now engulfed us, and still dwelling on the discussion of the seven good things of Sussex back in the hotel dining room. For someone capable of the most extraordinary focus and insights, he was also a man capable of ignoring and overlooking both the most obvious and most peculiar circumstances all around him. This of course is what made him great – and absolutely insufferable.

‘You have led a rather sheltered life, culinarily speaking, if you don’t mind my saying so, Sefton.’

‘I can remember setting traps for the wheatear, many years ago. The shepherds would make little coops from turf and then simply set a horse-hair spring inside to catch the poor creatures. The high Downs were thick with coops back in those days. One might easily catch several dozen wheatears a day—’

‘Hmm. English fireworks,’ he said. ‘Best in the world. Brock’s, Paynes. In my opinion there are no rockets or Catherine wheels that can possibly hold a candle, as it were, to—’

‘Father!’ said Miriam, taking Morley’s arm and leading him past the hotel’s makeshift wooden gatepost and out into the crowds. ‘Come on! It’s about to start!’

‘Is all this strictly necessary?’ Molly asked, surveying the dense crowd anxiously, and grasping my arm.

‘It does rather look like they’re preparing for war,’ said Henry, her dutiful son, whose arm she was grasping with her other – and who had clearly never been to war.

‘English high jinks, that’s all, my dear!’ called Morley back to her, as we pushed our way towards the front of the crowd. ‘High jinks and jolly japes! We must give the Lewesians their head.’

The way Morley said ‘Lewesian’ made the inhabitants of the town sound rather like H.G. Wells-type aliens, and like aliens they indeed appeared, for at that very moment half a dozen men came hurtling – or in the local dialect, ‘spannelling’ – down the middle of the road, done up in the most peculiar fashion. They looked, in my opinion, rather like jolly jack tars in an amateur production of HMS Pinafore, staged on Mars, or the Moon: Miriam thought they looked rather handsome. They were dressed smuggler-style, in striped guernseys, with white trousers and caps, and they were all wearing metal spark goggles – described by the man standing next to me, rather wittily I thought, as ‘sparktacles’ – which gave them the appearance of huge, knavish insects.

‘Wow,’ said Miriam, who was leading us slowly but surely towards the front of the crowd, with a natural authority that seemed to be instinctively understood by the overcoated locals, who parted in silence as she made her way through: she was as sharp-elbowed as she was sharp-tongued. She was also, on this occasion, absolutely right: this really was a wow, and indeed a gosh and a golly, for the Lewesians were not only done up all strange in their smuggler style, they were also dragging behind them on iron chains vast flaming tar barrels. It was – well, the only word is wow.

‘I was thinking more like some of the masked balls I’ve attended over the past few years,’ said Miriam.

‘Indeed,’ said Morley, who wasn’t listening. ‘Promethean rebelliousness! Pagan in its origins, no doubt, coming so soon after Samhain.’

‘What on earth is this?’ asked Molly, huddling close to Morley as the Lewesians thundered past, the stench of burning tar thickening the air.

‘It is perhaps really a symbolic marking of the summer’s end and the onset of winter,’ said Morley. ‘People coming together to gather round fires, similar to what one sees celebrated in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, where—’

‘I think she means what actually is this, Father, rather than symbolically or metaphorically,’ shouted Miriam over the noise of the crowd.

‘Oh, this. This? This is the famous barrel run,’ said Morley. ‘These lads are the Bonfire Boys. You have the camera, Sefton?’

I did indeed, having taken the precaution of bringing it with me to dinner, but I did not alas have the necessary flash equipment, which meant that all our photographs of Lewes Bonfire Night were rather dark. They do at least capture the mood.

As the barrel run raced off down the street, crowds of Bonfire Boys came following, men rather than boys, lustily bellowing and singing songs, making what Morley in Sussex describes as ‘a joyful noise’ but which might just as easily be described as a terrible racket. It can sometimes be difficult to distinguish between crowds singing with joy and crowds chanting in fervent hate, though the words of the song were innocent enough:

For we’re the men of Sussex

Sussex by the Sea,

We plough and sow and reap and mow,

And useful men are we:

And when you come to Sussex,

Whoever you may be,

You can tell them all that we’ll stand or fall

For Sussex by the Sea.

As they reached the last line of this song-cum-chant-cum-infernal-roar, several of the Bonfire Boys attempted to push each other over, and several indeed succeeded, one of them falling directly at Miriam’s feet, who had of course now made it to the very front row of the crowd, having parted all before her, a female Moses in Schiaparelli. Strong drink, I think it would be safe to say, had most definitely been consumed by this poor prone fellow, who lay for a few moments, goggle-eyed and insensible, staring up at Miriam, until one of his fellow smuggler-styled companions pulled him up from the floor.

‘Come on, Jack,’ said his hale and hearty companion, who was a giant of a man blessed with the rough, roguish and sea-spray-weathered look of an actual smuggler.

‘Come on, Jack, leave this good lady alone,’ said the giant sea-spray-weathered smuggler.

‘You know what they say about Sussex women, miss?’ asked the gallant fellow.

‘Gosh,’ said Miriam, caught momentarily off-guard. If it hadn’t been so dark, one might almost have suspected her of blushing. ‘Well, I’m not actually—’

‘For pulling out of the Sussex clay,’ mumbled Jack. ‘You’d burnish nicely, miss.’

‘Come on then, mate,’ said the Bonfire Boy. ‘Sorry, miss,’ he called back, as he led his friend away. ‘He’s a little beazled, that’s all.’

‘The useful men of Sussex, eh?’ said Morley disapprovingly. ‘Useful for what one wonders?’

‘Oh, I can think of several things,’ said Miriam, gazing after the smugglish-looking smuggler, clearly rather impressed by his— ‘Courtesy,’ she added. ‘They were very courteous, weren’t they?’

‘Oh yes, terribly courteous county, Sussex,’ said Morley. ‘They’ll now be throwing the barrels into the River Ouse. We won’t make it down there. Let’s wait here for the crosses, shall we?’

Seventeen large burning crosses representing the seventeen Lewes martyrs soon duly appeared, carried by men dressed in what was presumably intended to be some approximation of sixteenth-century Puritan costume – tall hats, frock coats, ruffs and all, the local Lewes tailors and costumiers having clearly been working overtime in the weeks leading up to Bonfire Night. If the sight of the burning barrels was strange, the sight of the burning crosses was truly shocking, and not at all the sort of thing one expected to see on the streets of the south-east of England; on the streets of the southern states of America maybe, but this was Sussex, not Montgomery, Alabama. At the sight of the crosses the crowd at first grew silent but then became quite ecstatic, cheering and clapping, as though welcoming the devil himself into town. Morley later recalled that he’d heard nothing quite like it since Ted Drake had scored the winning goal at Wembley for Arsenal against Sheffield United in the closing minutes of the FA Cup Final in 1936.

‘This has nothing to do with the Klan?’ said Molly. ‘It is rather reminiscent. Of those terrible—’

‘Oh no, no, no,’ said Morley. ‘Absolutely not. I blame D.W. Griffith for all that nonsense. These are English martyrs’ crosses. Entirely different. Perfectly harmless.’

‘We’ll take your word for that, Mr Morley,’ said Henry, who seemed, I thought, rather distracted and bored by the evening’s proceedings.

We then followed the crowds, who were following the crosses, up towards the town square, where yet more people had gathered. ‘“A fair field of folk,”’ remarked Morley.

‘Very good, Father,’ said Miriam, quietly enough to be just out of Morley’s hearing, ‘but an allusion rather lost on your small round American friend, I think.’ There were few moments during our time together in Sussex when Miriam did not take the opportunity to dig, to poke and otherwise attempt to undermine Morley’s relationship with Molly. It was an entertaining, if not an edifying sight: Miriam was often at her best when at her worst.

Huge banners being held aloft proclaimed ‘Our Faith and Freedom We Will Maintain’, ‘May We Never Engage in a Bad Cause or Flinch in a Good One’, and numerous other similar slogans, all of a vague, perplexing and yet rather threatening kind, profoundly odd and profoundly Protestant, and richly illustrated with crowns and Bibles. The crowd remained silent during the megaphone prayers and condemnations of Roman Catholicism and Guy Fawkes that followed, conducted by various men in various sorts of regalia who seemed to be at least nominally in charge of proceedings from up on a podium in the middle of the square, and then the Bonfire Boys and the crowd took up a tune whose refrain seemed to consist of the repeated phrase, ‘Bonfire Boys Are Out Tonight’.

All this was only the beginning. What followed was as confusing and chaotic an event as I ever attended during my years with Morley, years that included, I should point out, trips to the Appleby Fair, the Colchester Oyster Feast, May Day in Oxford, the Durham Miners’ Gala, the Bridgwater Carnival in Somerset and the infamous Tissington Well Dressing, and many others, at which various events there were deaths, murders, robberies, outbreaks of mass hysteria and goodness knows what other kinds of bizarreries, strangenesses and shenanigans. The Lewes Bonfire Night was, in Morley’s words in The County Guides: Sussex, ‘a riot of rowdiness’, which was an understatement. If you’ve ever perused Gustave Doré’s famous illustrations to Dante’s Inferno, you’ll perhaps have some idea of the scene – except of course Bonfire Night in Lewes takes place live, every year, and in full widescreen Technicolor.

In summary of the chaos, or at least as Morley explains it in Sussex, Bonfire Night in Lewes is organised, if that’s the word, by the various bonfire societies from different areas of the town, the Borough, Commercial Square, the Southover, the South Street Juveniles, Cliffe, St Anne’s, as well as a number of other societies from nearby Barcombe and Burwash, East Hoathly, Halland, Edenbridge, Firle and etcetera. After the initial gathering of the societies and the flaming barrel run, these groups then parade individually and collectively throughout Lewes in a series of processions. The societies spend months preparing for Bonfire Night, building their bonfires all across the town, using scrap wood, faggots and brushwood collected from local groves and copses, and stockpiling petrol, fireworks and every other imaginable kind of flammable, sparking and incendiary material. In Sussex Morley rather sweetly describes this sort of activity as ‘community building’. (He also takes the opportunity to reprint his popular article – one of his true hardy perennials – on ‘How to Create the Perfect Fire’, which bears no relation whatsoever to the bonfires of Lewes, but which, in case you haven’t read it, advises that for the perfect hearth fire you need exactly 20 split hardwood logs, 2 large oak logs, 16 hardwood sticks at 3 inches in length, 20 assorted kindling sticks at 7 inches in length, some orange peel, some pine cones and some copper nails.)

On Bonfire Night, this ‘community building’ reaches its natural conclusion with members of the societies soaking torches in petrol, donning their smuggler outfits, and heading out onto the streets to denounce Guy Fawkes and the Pope and generally to carry on like pagans. As for the smuggler costumes, each society has its own slight variation on the theme, as well as a range of other fancy dress options: I spotted phalanxes of Lewesian Zulus and Red Indians parading that night, but there were also, apparently, Beefeaters and Vikings roaming abroad, and Morley claimed to have seen packs of women dressed in traditional Valencian costume, though it’s possible of course that they may simply have been actual women visiting from Valencia. Each society also builds its own enormous effigy that gets paraded through town and then on to each bonfire site, where there are firework displays, yet more speeches and condemnations of the Pope, politicians and all other enemies of the people, until finally the effigies are violently beaten with sticks, have their heads blown off with fireworks and their remains cast to the flames, while the revellers dance around the fire, whooping, hollering and carousing until the early hours.

Almost as soon as the processions began that evening, I became separated from Morley, Molly and Miriam: it was impossible to stick together in the crowd, which surged this way and that through the narrow streets of the town, following a giant papier-mâché Hitler head this way, a blimp-like Mussolini that. Processions passed by with Lady Lancers, brass bands and firework wheels flaming, everywhere underfoot there seemed to be small boys skimming fireworks along the ground, and the chanting of various bonfire songs echoed throughout the town – ‘Burn him in a tub of tar/ burn him like a blazing star/ burn his body from his head/ then we’ll the say old Pope is dead!’ – as did the repeated call and response, ‘What shall we do with the Pope?’ ‘Burn him! Burn him! Burn the Pope!’ I have never been to Belfast but I assume that the famous Orange marches on 12 July echo to a similar sound. Purely for the purposes of avoiding such sinister jubilations I found myself in and out of various local hostelries: the Snowdrop, the Anchor, the Bargeman’s Arms, the Schooner, excellent establishments some of them, though I cannot alas recall which, but which I do recall were more like old country pubs, where the beer was kept in barrels in the cellar, accessed by steps down from the pub kitchen and brought up a glass at the time. Bare floors, a few old tables and chairs: one might almost have been drinking in the sixteenth century. Entirely without aim or intention, I eventually found myself with a bunch of local lads at a bonfire site some time in the early hours in the suburb of Cliffe. The masquerades and fireworks having long since concluded, small groups of men and women were running and jumping through the glowing embers of the bonfire. I dimly recall our all extinguishing the flames by the traditional method, while singing the National Anthem, and my returning to the hotel to find the doors firmly locked and bolted.

Making my way round the back to the old stables, past the undamaged Lagonda, I found where the kitchen staff had kindly settled Pablo the Bedlington on some old flour bags, and settled myself down beside him for the night.

CHAPTER 17