Thrills from the past 20

I had moved on to adult literature around the time I read My Brother Michael, though I did not buy many English books in this connection. This was because there were plenty in the library at home, and after my father challenged me, saying that I should read Dickens and Thackeray instead of just Enid Blyton and her ilk, I moved swiftly to the Victorians, and then earlier and later English novelists, and also all of Shakespeare.

What I did buy, and still have on my shelves, are classics from Europe, French and Russian and a few German books too. And then when at Kurunagala I read my aunt Lakshmi’s collection of modern classics, including Gide and Moravia.

But these, as I have noted in talking about what might be termed modern classics, English and otherwise, are relatively serious, and this was not what I wanted in this recent period of convalescence. But I knew that My Brother Michael would qualify as easy reading, as had been the case with the thrillers I read, while at Nuwara Eliya and then in Canada, when I had periods of total relaxation in holiday homes, with Shan in Nuwara Eliya and at a lakeside cottage of friends of hers in Canada though sadly she could not join us.

Another book I thought would be easy reading, though I had not read it previously, was The Go Between by L P Hartley. While at Oxford I had seen the glamorous film of the book, made with Julie Christie and Alan Bates in 1971, and I knew the basics of the plot. The novel was about a schoolboy used by the sister of a friend he is staying with to carry messages to a farmer with whom she is having an affair.

That the story ended tragically I remembered, though I could not quite remember who it was that died. And then in reading the book I found that the meat of the book lay in its presentation of class divides, with the awkwardness of the boy who does not quite fit in a country house contributing to his willingness to be made use of.

But the plot was certainly gripping, if not entirely convincing, for as the boy wondered, how had the couple communicated before he arrived? But the manner in which he gets enmeshed, his anxiety to get away when he realizes the situation is serious (which is tempered by a desire to stay till his birthday which is to be celebrated in grand fashion), the slowly increasing awareness of his hostess that all is not as it should be with her daughter, are forcefully presented in the novel.

The denouement is dramatic, but what struck me most, which I could not recall at all from the film, was the aftermath, the boy’s discovery when he has grown old that both his friend and his older brother had died in the war. But the sister was still alive, having as her mother had wanted married a Viscount, and borne him an heir not long after they were married. The grandson, who is wary of his grandmother, resembles the poor farmer who had killed himself when he and his paramour were entwined on the ground by the boy and his hostess.

Looking Back – Childhood Reading 20

Back to Enid Blyton, and a very old favourite, though I was upset to find that I had not really remembered much about the book. This was The Mystery of the Disappearing Cat, the second in the Five Find-Outer series, and like its predecessor it had a subtle twist in the tale. And in the tail, for it was about the theft of a precious Siamese Cat, which was distinguished by having a few light coloured hairs in its tail.

The main plot I remembered, for once read it was unforgettable: the wicked gardener took the cat early and then painted the tail of another cat so that those who looked at the cage vouched for Dark Queen being there at a much later time. Then he arrived with a witness and swiftly removed the creamy paint with turpentine, so that the disappearance was deemed to have happened between this time and when the painted cat was last seen. And he had arranged for his assistant to be near during this period, so that suspicion would fall on him, and to strengthen this he dropped in the cage on both occasions the wooden whistles the boy used to make.

But I had completely forgotten the boy, whose persecution is central to the tale, and how the Five Find Outers concealed the whistle on the first occasion and replaced it with ridiculous clues which completely fooled the village policeman, their long-standing enemy Mr Goon. And since the absurdity of those clues was established before the next disappearance, though the whistle was discovered, Mr Goon belittled the two real clues the Five Find Outers registered, a smell of turpentine and a little stone with a spot of cream coloured paint.

When the children got into the cage and traced the smell to the tail of another cat, and then found that the turpentine that used to be kept in a garden shed was missing, the case was complete. Their dog Buster was set on the trail, and found the bottle buried in a rabbit hole together with the wicked gardener’s handkerchief, whereupon he fell to pieces. So young Luke was saved, and the Five Find Outers once again won plaudits from Chief Inspector Jenks, their great friend, who had persuaded Luke to go back to work when he ran away. Naturally this was to a circus, and the children traced him there, and got him away before Goon found him.

Class consciousness permeates the book, with the Find Outers on the side of empathy, though given the time at which Enid Blyton wrote there is more than a hint of patronage in their approach. Goon gets no sympathy, but since he uses his position to abuse those less fortunate than himself, that the children patronize him even more blatantly seems acceptable. And while Lady Candling who owns the cat is graciousness personified, Mrs Hilton, the mother of the two youngest children, is presented as a hide-bound representative of gentility.

These elements were not of course apparent to me in the early sixties, but now they make it clear that Enid Blyton was not the prisoner of her class as is alleged in the reaction to her work that set in while I was growing up. 

Lost Worlds 19

In the last couple of months I read three short books, more accurately pamphlets perhaps, published in the seventies. Two were accounts of school principals who had contributed much not only to their students but also to education in this country. One was the legendary Kularatne of Ananda, celebrated by a junior colleage at Ananda, K D de Lanerolle. The other was Helen Park, who had been principal of Methodist College.

She arrived in Ceylon in 1912 as Deputy Principal of what was then the Kollupitiya Girls High School, and took over as Principal in 1926, by which time it had been renamed Methodist College. She stayed there till 1944, when she was in her early sixties, but continued in touch with her students until she died in 1970, having come back twice, including to lay the foundation stone for a new building.

The book is a collection of appreciations by past pupils, including by my aunt Seelia, amongst whose books at Roshanara I found this copy. It notes in different articles her innovations, principally in introducing Science Education, but also in starting the house system, and also in encouraging girls to donate for the benefit of people less fortunate than themselves. She and her fellow missionaries lived in the school and were constant presences for the children, providing ready assistance and comfort to those who needed it.

Kulartatne, who was nearly a quarter of a century younger than Helen Park, started his teaching career a few years after her, having been selected when he was in England to take over the Principalship of Ananda. He started in 1918 and retired around the same time as Miss Park, when he was 50. He made it clear, when asked to stay on, that he thought it time for a younger person to take over. 

He too did much to popularize the teaching of science, and like Miss Park added to the school buildings. Though less involved with individual students than the lady, he too was enormously respected by both staff and students.

But apart from the sterling qualities, and capacity for innovation, of these principals, what struck me was the independence with which they acted, and the ease with which they took important decisions, without the bureaucratic constraints that educationists now have to face.

The third pamphlet was on a very different subject, The Sinharaja Forest. It was written by Thilo Hoffman, the Swiss head of Bauers who was a pillar of the Wildlife Society of Sri Lanka which published the book in 1972. It was written in response to a logging project of the government, which prompted ‘the almost certain knowledge that within 10 years the last large tract of virgin rain forest in Ceylon will have lost its original character’.

I fear Thilo Hoffmann was right, and the Sinharaja is now a shadow of its former self. But while reading the pamphlet was a melancholy experience, I was also impressed by the intensity with which Hoffmann pursued his brief, and also the splendour of his descriptions, not just of the forest but also of the villages which he went through on his explorations.

I used to think the world had changed enormously in the half century after the First World War, but reading these books made clear to me how that change has continued, relentless, over the last half century too.

The pictures are of Kularatne and the book about him, and then a book about Hoffman with a picture of him on the cover. I could find no pictures of Helen Park.

Thrills from the past 19

I had moved on to adult literature around the time I read Michael O’Halloran, though I did not buy many English books in this connection. This was because there were plenty in the library at home, and after my father challenged me, saying that I should read Dickens and Thackeray instead of just Enid Blyton and her ilk, I moved swiftly to the Victorians, and then earlier and later English novelists, and also all of Shakespeare.

What I did buy, and still have on my shelves, are classics from Europe, French and Russian and a few German books too. And then when at Kurunagala I read my aunt Lakshmi’s collection of modern classics, including Gide and Moravia.

But these, as I have noted in talking about what might be termed modern classics, English and otherwise, are relatively serious, and this was not what I wanted in this recent period of convalescence. There was however one adult book which I knew qualified as easy reading, as had been the case with the thrillers I read, while at Nuwara Eliya and then in Canada, when I had periods of total relaxation in holiday homes, with Shan in Nuwara Eliya and at a lakeside cottage of friends of hers in Canada though sadly she could not join us.

The book I devoured when back in Colombo, looking after the puppies, was My Brother Michael by Mary Stewart. I remembered that I had hugely enjoyed it, and that it was set in Greece, and that it was quite thrilling, but I thought that Michael was the brother of the heroine, and the story was about her finding out how he had disappeared.

That was all wrong. The heroine, Camilla, has thrust upon her a car which has been hired by a person called Simon. She finds Simon soon enough, but he knows nothing about the car. However she soon gets involved in his quest to find out what had happened to his brother Michael during the Second World War, when he had died while providing support to Greek partisans. Simon had felt compelled to find out more when, after his father died, he found a letter from Michael suggesting mysterious goings on.

He and Camilla go, the very night she arrives, to see the shepherd who had buried Michael, and are told that he had been murdered by a Communist partisan, who had been secreting weapons and money sent by the British to be used, when the Nazis had been got rid of, for a Communist Revolution in Greece. That Revolution failed, and the villain Angelos, had fled to Yugoslavia, where he was presumed to have died.

But he has a cousin who has been prowling around, and Simon suspects that he then follows him to the place where Michael had died, for it was likely the cave where Michael had hidden, and where the gold and arms were hidden, was nearby. The cousin seems to be working with a French girl called Danielle who had been on an archaeological dig, and who it turns out had hired the car, though it was not meant for Michael.

There is high drama the next day, when Camilla and Simon go to the cave, and then Simon follows the cousin, only for Camilla, left behind, to see Angelos emerge, and then Danielle join him.

Simon returns in the nick of time to save Camilla from Angelos, and then kills him in the fight that follows. And he and Camilla decide to keep secret the statue that lay behind the cave from the police who have been summoned to take care of the guns and the gold.

Grand stuff, and I was as thrilled nearly sixty years later as when I read the book as a teenager. The pictures are of paintings of partisans I saw at an exhibition in Rhodes last year.

Looking Back – Childhood Reading 19

The Mystery that never was was fascinating stuff, and my predilection for Enid Blyton was strengthened since I had read before that another book culled from the shelf of my childhood treasures which was not at all in the same league. This was The Happy Hollisters, an American effort which I was delighted to find since I thought I had allowed my mother to give away my American children’s books on the grounds that they were not worth keeping. This seems to have been true with regard to The Bobbsey Twins since none of the few books in that series that I owned remains, but there are two Hollister books, perhaps because I thought them a bit better.

They were not that good, pedestrian adventures and lots of fooling about, but I was pleased to reread the book, and not least because it had been a birthday present in 1962, when I was 8. The inscription was from my Aunty Ida, though the writing was my grandmother’s, understandably so for Ida was blind. But I was touched at the thought that she had got me a present in line with the reading I was devoted to in those distant days.

The plot was thin, but there was some interest in the Hollisters having moved house, to a town in which their father had bought a store. How they make friends, and cope with the one nasty boy in the area, is described along with how the store becomes a success. And there are lots of crises such as the youngest child nearly getting burnt when she goes too near a fire, and the two older  girls losing their oars when on a boat in the lake by their garden. But what might seem major crises are rapidly resolved, and the action moves on.

Sustained drama is provided by the van with the children’s toys being stolen during the removal, with toys turning up at intervals, while there is a mysterious intruder in the new house. This is a nasty man who was looking for riches hidden there, and who also happened to have stolen the van. But he is found out without too much trouble and the lost goods and the hidden money are recovered.

All good fun for children, but one missed the added value Enid Blyton brought to her adventure stories. The five Hollisters are all good kids, and differentiating the second boy by making him gung-ho about everything does not really make

a difference. The interactions Enid Blyton developed between youngsters of different families, and the special resourcefulness of her particular favourites, get the reader involved, while her villains are either dangerous, in the adventure books, or else quite subtle in the mystery ones.

And her settings are glorious, even a pedestrian town as in The Mystery that never was having ruined buildings and secret passages, while the landscapes of her adventure books is dramatic. The Hollisters with their standard urban setting simply could not compete. But I will read the other book in the series which I have and hope for the best.

Apart from the book and the author, Andrew Svenson though he used a pseudonym for this series which he started, and for others to which he contributed, the pictures are from the Hollisters Facebook page, including a French cartoon.

Lost Worlds 18

A few months back I read Thor Heyerdahl’s The Maldive Mystery and wrote about it for the last post in the Coronavirus Reading series that appeared on my literary blog for over three years. I said then that I could not do it justice, but that it had given me an idea for a new series, which I then started under this title.

What I wanted to say about Heyerdahl’s book fits in even better with this title in that, soon after I finished that, I found in my father’s library a book entitled Sri-Lankan Maldivian Cultural Affinities by Vini Vitharana, whom I knew as the father-in-law of the Sabaragamuwa University Registrar. It was Prof Vitharana who helped us find a suitable Sinhala term for the degree in Military Studies we awarded cadets at the Military Academy.

His book looks primarily at language to assert that the Maldivian civilization was based on the Sinhalese. There is also some attention to cultural practices, including much about the socialization of infants. But what most held my attention was his studies and the accompanying pictures of statues. Like Heyerdahl he shows links between Maldivian statuary and Sinhala Buddhist images, but in affirming the connection with this country he rejects Heyerdahl’s conclusions with regard to Hindu and other Indian influences, including from the North West Indian port of Lothal. I saw the ruins of that place, going back many centuries, some years back, and realized there was much more to the history of that area which I had hitherto thought of as just the gateway from the near east to the subcontinent. Its long maritime traditon was however lost centuries back since the sea moved away, leaving the site far inland.

I am not of course qualified to judge as to who is correct, but both have done much work to show the affinities, and this is the more remarkable in that I had long thought that the Maldives had rejected its pre-Islamic past. Certainly this had happened at some stages, but what was impressive was the support offered to both these scholars by the Maldivian authorities and their efforts to preserve elements of the past. In that respect they seemed to me to fulfil my concept of what I have termed South Sea Islam, an inclusive perspective that, while giving priority to the dominant faith, provides space for other cultural elements in the society.

It was good to have found Vitharana’s scholarly tome, but of course I found much more enjoyable Heyerdahl’s adventurous approach, and in particular his accounts of excavations and the links he found between not just statues but architectural elements including the fresh uses of decorated building blocks. Though other scholars have scoffed at some of his theories, he remains for me a most impressive character, as not just adventurer but also thinker, whose arguments, if not watertight, certainly expand our understanding of past times and past civilizations.

Thrills from the past 18

The title of this series is not especially appropriate for this book from my past that I reread after years, for there is not much suspense, albeit there is a question mark about who might have been defrauding the city – and a touch of macabre in the manner in which a little girl dies. But these are passing events in the story of the hero, a newspaper boy in a big city.

And I fear the book did not thrill me in any other sense either. I recalled enjoying it in the past but this time round I was not so enamoured, one of the few instances of such disappointment.

The book was by a writer I read in adolescence, Gene Stratton Porter, whose name rang a bell when I came across her at Roshanara though I could only remember one of her books that I had read, called Michael O’Halloran. I remembered that it was about a newspaper boy who had to make his way in the world, but nothing else, so I looked forward to rereading it, when I found a copy at Roshanara. But first I read a book by her that I did not know, called Freckles.

That too was about a boy on his own, who turned up at a lumber camp in the limberlost forest, and asked for work, and charmed the owner enough to be given some, though he seemed far too slight to cope. But he proved immensely conscientious, in patrolling the borders of the concession, and soon became a favourite.

Meanwhile he met a girl who was interested in wildlife, and the lady photographer who had brought her out to the limberlost, and they bond over the little nature room he had created. There are high adventures after that when together they foil tree thieves, which provides some suspense, but then when all seems well Freckles, in saving the girl from a falling tree, is injured.

But he rallies in hospital when he understands that the girl reciprocates his love, and she manages to find out who he really is, the descendant of an Irish lord. So all ends well, with him deciding to stay on in America with the owner of the business who has adopted him, rather than go back to Ireland with his uncle.

Heady stuff, but a good read, and not excessively sentimental. Quite otherwise was Michael O’Halloran, which was indeed positively soppy in its descriptions of the hero’s interactions with the little crippled girl whom he rescues when her grandmother dies and keeps in his little room.

There is a dramatic sub-plot, about a rich man whose elegant wife neglected her children, which led to the death of her daughter. When the man finally decides, having found out what happened, to take his children away, it is just after the lady has been converted to a different way of life through what might be termed one of the juvenile leads, a girl engaged to a hard-working investigator of fraud in the accounts of the city.

But needless to say all ends well. The girl’s father had been responsible for missing money, but it was to help a friend and he puts it back before the storm bursts since Mickey persuades his friend the newspaper editor to hold back on the story; Mickey comes across a rural couple who decide to adopt both Mickey and the girl, which he prefers to a life with the juvenile leads in town; and the businessman is convinced of the reality of his wife’s conversion, and takes her back, though to a family where the spoilt boys have been toughened up.

I might have coped with all the coincidences, and the dramatic changes of personality, but the pervasive soppiness of Mickey and his Peaches was exhausting, and I could not quite understand why I had remembered the book fondly.

Looking Back – Childhood Reading 18

The books from the shelves of my childhood which I wrote about in the last several months were a small fraction of the books that still survived from the decade of the sixties. And since I have read so much, it made sense, since that is now the principal activity of my life, to talk about those books in this series, at least for a few weeks.

Not entirely surprisingly, I begin with Enid Blyton. I was a devotee of hers in childhood and, as with Wordsworth and his rainbow, my heart leaps up even now when I come across her works. I was about to write that this is in line with his assertion of his joy ‘now I am a man’ but I think I am past that, and his wish that this joy would last when he grew old has been fulfilled in my case.

So I was delighted to rediscover, a few weeks before my 70^th birthday, a book I had first read well over 60 years ago. This was The Mystery that Never Was, a stand alone story first published in 1961. Reading it, I thought I had first come across it in a collection of three short novels by her, which included The Treasure Hunters and Shadow the Sheepdog. Now however, having tried to trace this collection, and failing, I feel that the third story was one called The Boy Next Door since like the other two it was published in the forties.

The Mystery that Never Was I have in a volume by itself, and I started it in the days when I had to spend much time, with little sleep in the nights, with my new puppies. It was ideal for that time, a very easy read, with an ebullient hero called Nicky, and a supporting cast of his neighbour Ken, and Ken’s sister and a cousin the boys find irritating, though the girls end up playing a major part in the tale. The sister is called Penelope, and there is a fascinating diversion when Ken says she no longer wants to be called Penny, since she had read about a Greek heroine called Penelope.

The plot springs from Nicky creating a mystery to entertain his uncle Bob, a private detective who has come to his home for a rest, but seems bored with nothing to occupy him. But the information in the letter in code he and Ken prepare turns out to be accurate, with flashing lights at night from the tower of a ruined house. The code is so simple that Bob suspects the children have written the letter, and refuses to believe them when they wake him up just too late to see the flashes.

So the children decide to investigate themselves, and the very next day go into the cellars of the ruined house, which had belonged to a foreign prince. And in the cellars, which had also been mentioned in the note, they find men digging out the treasure which the prince had left behind when the house was burnt down.

Lost Worlds 17

Side by side in The Story of San Michele with Munthe’s account of the paradise he built for himself in Capri is his vivid description of both patients and colleagues in Paris and in Rome. He was a very successful doctor and, though he is modest about his skills, he is not modest about the attraction he had for fashionable ladies who came to him in droves. He mocks them relentlessly but also records his romantic involvement with one, which led to a duel when he confined a rival to bed by a diagnosis that was quite nonsensical.

But there are also moving episodes as in his description of the Little Sisters of the Poor who looked after the old and homeless, including a man who was always clad in a frock-coat and a top hat, threadbare, so that he went out only when Munthe had found him substitutes, taken from a Pittsburgh millionaire whose son had died of diphtheria. In cleaning things out, Munthe got the hotel to discard the carpet in the room, which he presented to the Sisters.

Then there was the English lady who delivered an illegitimate child whom Munthe traced for her, so she was able to be with him when he was dying, not quite sure he was hers till Munthe showed her the diamond brooch she had given the woman who arranged the adoption. Even though Munthe lays it on thick in these tales, he does create a strong sense of the helpless emotions of the people he helps in his unorthodox ways.

Then there is the account of the gentlemen who gave him shelter when he was working in Messina after the earthquake, who turned out to be convicts escaped from jail when ‘while of the eight hundred carabinieri in the Collegio Militare only fourteen escaped alive, the first shock opened the cells for over four hundred unhurt professional murderers and thieves on life sentences in the prison by the Capuccini’. Munthe being stopped by the police leads them to his friendly convicts, who think he has betrayed them, so that he narrowly escapes being shot and has then to leave Messina.

There are lots of such set pieces but perhaps I should confine myself to just one more, relating to the monkey Billy, which may have been part of the extract I recall having enjoyed so much. Billy likes his alcohol, and has to be locked up when he imbibes too much, but he generally manages to get out when he thinks it necessary.

His most impressive exploit concerned the parish priest of Capril between which and Anacapri, where Munthe in fact had his home, there was great rivalry. Munthe had no regard at all for Don Giacinto, who was supposed to be the richest man on the island, ‘squeezing the last penny out of his poor tenants, evicting them from their homes when the olives had failed and they could not pay their rent, leaving them to starve when they were getting old and had no more strength to toil for him’.

When he died he was kept in state in his church, but fire broke out there in the night and the coffin was consumed by the flames. The villagers thought it was the devil who had done this, but much else had been destroyed including paintings in the new Sala de Esposizione in Capri. 

The citizens of Capri thought that Anacapri was behind this and in a sense they were right. For when Munthe found Billy, he notices Billy’s scorched tail. The chapter ends with his exhorting Billy, after informing him that clearly the devil was his father, to tell him, ‘just to satisfy my curiosity, was it you or your father who knocked down the was candelabra and set the coffin on fire?’

Thrills from the past 17

A thrilling novel of a very different type, written in 1959 and added to my library a few years later, which I read again only after several decades, was Friday’s Tunnel by John Verney. The title had fascinated me, and it still does, though I remembered nothing about the story save the obvious fact that it was about a tunnel, and the less obvious fact that this tunnel was being dug by a boy called Friday. But I had totally forgotten his sister February, who is the narrator of the book, and its heroine, for she solves the mystery and deals very firmly with the villain. She does all this despite the conviction of the good grown ups that they need to keep what is going on from the children.

They, and four others, are the children of Augustus Callendar and his wife January, who tired however of the calendar when naming their four subsequent children. Gus is a journalist, who is about to leave when the story begins for a Mediterranean island called Capria, where it is claimed a coup against the President Umbarak is being perpetrated by his half brother Zayid. Gus thinks this is nonsense and says so in an article he writes before leaving for Capria. But he is interested enough in what is going on there, in that Zayid has found on his land a mineral called Caprium, in which both the Russians and the Americans are interested, to the extent of sending their fleets into the Mediterranean.

Gus wants to avoid a world war, but he also along with his editor, John Gubbins, wants to find out what is happening with regard to the caprium, for he thinks the British too are involved, through a millionaire called Lord Sprockett. And his other great friend, a former Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Fawcett, while also keen to prevent war, seems to be involved with Sprockett in a way Gubbins and Gus do not like.

The novel is brilliant in showing how, for their own reasons, the good guys conceal knowledge from each other, including also Jan Callendar, who gives Gus refuge when, having not taken the plane to Capria, he wants to pursue his investigations in the neighbourhood. His decision was fortunate, for the plane crashes, probably because of an explosion in the luggage compartment, which taken together with a bullet that grazes his car on the way to the airfield suggests that someone, probably Sprockett, will do anything to conceal his j 

The climax comes inside Friday’s tunnel, which gives upon an old underground canal, where Sprockett is concealing the caprium that Zayid sends to him in empty crates which had taken his cigarettes out to Capria. When finally the good guys pool most of their information – though Jan conceals not only that she has been concealing Gus, but that she had sent Umbarak gobstoppers which had been returned in the crates instead of caprium – February dashes off into the tunnel into which she had seen Friday and the next sister disappear. They dodge him but she runs into Sprockett, and fears he plans to throw her into a pot-hole but, with the help of a gobstopper to distract him, she hits him with a torch and scampers away.

All very thrilling, and all ends well, with Zayid bringing champagne to celebrate at the behest of Lady Sprockett, whose loose tongue had started the coup story. And even Sprockett is rehabilitated, since exposing him would expose General Fawcett’s complicity in trying to get the caprium for Britain, and he uses the money he got from government to restore the canal in Friday’s Tunnel.

In looking for pictures today, I found that there are four more books in the Callendar series, which it would be wonderful to find.