Chapter 2 Eccentricity #3
“I wanted to check with you,” he said to Flynn. “Can you draft a preface for the Poems? I’m told the judges are all rather short of time.”
“No one reads prefaces in books.”
“Nonetheless, it cannot go to the printers without one. I know it’s been your baby pretty much from start to finish, Flynn, but it will be the official judges whose names will be on it. You don’t mind, do you?”
“A bit of a reprieve, actually. I’d prefer not to be associated with it.”
They were still easing themselves into the morning. Evans was engrossed in Trevelyan’s Social History of England. Badger was studying form in Sporting Life, while the Boy was juggling incompetently with two old rubber balls. Flynn had been gazing blankly at one of the more abstruse poems.
The Festival Poems had undergone a lengthy gestation.
It had taken Flynn a tiresomely long time to sift his way through the entrants—in their thousands rather than hundreds.
A shortlist had been drawn up for the judges, but then, as other things had come up, the anthology had somehow slipped down everyone’s agenda.
In fact, it had been forgotten about entirely until Denholm announced that they were due at the printers in Suffolk this week. “Rather short notice, I’m afraid.”
The final selection had been hastily rubber-stamped by the judges, although Flynn wondered if they had read all of the contenders.
He, on the other hand, had painstakingly sifted through each and every one of the entries.
They varied from relentlessly mediocre to downright awful.
There had been poems in coloured pencil and chalk, poems written in capital letters and others scrawled on any scrap that could be found, including one on cardboard and another scored in pencil on a crackling sheet of Izal toilet paper.
Many were little more than expanded cracker mottos, but there were also mind-numbing Imperial epics.
Sieges were popular—Khartoum and Ladysmith, and also Troy.
There were patriotic battle hymns (“Thunder of swinish gods”).
Waterloo garnered three encomiums, Trafalgar two, the Armada one.
There were also tedious, stupefyingly long pastorals.
Rural life was especially favoured amongst town dwellers, industry amongst countrymen (the coal pits were particularly popular), and who knew there were so many lowing cows making their way to evening milkings or so much birdsong greeting the woodland dawn?
There was some mawkishly sentimental stuff about flowers and a monotonous number of hymns to the charms of springtime.
There were odes to love, moonshine, starshine and sunshine.
There was a lot of early-morning dew. Skies were blue, hills were green, thunder was angry.
Many were completely impenetrable to sense:
Pessimist, proven through strata-prescience
Collected rock-wise lore.
This was a poem about coal miners apparently, although Flynn doubted that any self-respecting collier would recognize himself in these incomprehensible verses. He was inclined to slip in “ ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe” and see if anyone noticed.
The poems revealed a lack of any literary ancestry, no real evidence of any knowledge of the English poetic tradition, apart from a handful of sub-Prufrockian stanzas.
Instead, the competition had provided a release for a torrent of incoherent words bottled up by the war.
It was fascinating and revealing from every point of view except that of literary criticism.
Flynn, indifferent now to poetry, embraced them all. Shakespeare or Keats could have submitted a sonnet, Milton a Paradise Lost, and he would have judged them in the same egalitarian spirit.
His lacklustre task was interrupted by a commissionaire. No one ever knocked, Flynn didn’t know why they bothered closing their door. The commissionaire was carrying a chair and said, “Can I just park this here for a bit, gentlemen? We’ve run out of space elsewhere.”
“No,” Evans said. To no avail, as the commissionaire put the chair down in the middle of the room, tipped his cap and, with one last “gentlemen,” departed.
“It’s one of the rejected prototypes for the Fairway Café,” Badger said, absent-mindedly stroking the stuffed rabbit.
They all tried the seat in turn, a parade of unlikely Goldilocks. The chair, a rather stark metal and plywood affair, was declared uncomfortable by all except the Boy, who asked if he could have it.
“He means to sell it on the street,” Evans said when the Boy had left with the chair hoisted on his thin shoulders. “That child has the soul of a spiv. Shame he’s too young to have profited from the war.”
It wasn’t long before the Boy returned, the chair disposed of somehow, and brought the news that a skeleton had been trawled from the muddy banks of the Thames by the Royal Engineers, who had recently completed a Bailey bridge to carry Festival visitors across the river to the South Bank.
This was their second attempt, the first having fallen down.
During construction they had continually unearthed the debris and litter of the past. On display upstairs in Reception there was a glass case with samples of the smaller objets trouvés rescued from the river mud, but there was little to see other than broken clay pipes and shards of pottery.
“A skeleton?” an interested Badger asked. “It’s not Upstairs, is it?”
“Nah,” the Boy said. “The Ark-ee-olo-jists have got it.” He was being taught phonetics by Evans, who had grown tired of him mangling words.
The Boy, as well as knowing everything that went on in Savoy Court, also relayed news from across the river: the shortage of materials, the laying down of tools, the dreadful mud underfoot and the (painfully slow) progress of the buildings south of the river.
The Boy’s verdict on the Brutalist Royal Festival Hall was that it was like “an ugly big brick with a hat on.” He was less scathing in his judgement on the far-from-complete Dome of Discovery.
It looked “like a flying saucer that has crash-landed,” he said, although apparently bore no resemblance to a “real” one.
The Boy was a firm believer in extraterrestrial life, a faith fostered by the Eagle comic that Evans bought him every week and used as a text to coax him patiently out of his illiteracy, but even Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, had trouble teaching the alphabet to the Boy.
“You should write for the newspapers,” Flynn said to the Boy. “You’ve got a way with words.”
“Pity he can’t read or write them,” Evans said. “You know, Mr. Flynn knows of what he speaks. He was a newshound himself.”
The Boy failed to be impressed by this information. The skeleton was more worthy. “It could have been a murder,” he said. Invigorated by this thought, he cadged a cigarette off Badger.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” Evans said. “It’ll most likely turn out to be Roman.”
—
The Boy reappeared some time later and announced, “You were right—it was Roman. That skeleton what they found.”
“Told you so,” Evans said.
“Could have been a murdered Roman though,” the Boy said, unwilling to let his hopes die.