After Bathing at Baxters (6 page)

‘Always take an interest,' my mother had said of her dealings with the Breckland people, ‘never interfere.' To this end she had patronised village charities, exhibited cakes in draughty barns and church halls, and very occasionally – for my mother was a liberal-minded woman – circulated leaflets on contraception. Thetford Jim loomed into view late one Saturday night at a pub talent evening in Brandon, in the slipstream of two stand-up comedians and a xylophonist, when a deedy-looking ancient clambered onto the makeshift stage to announce ‘Here's something for you old-timers to enjoy'. There was a smattering of applause and a short, spare man in middle age began to sing in a reedy tenor, accompanying himself with a limping acoustic guitar. The first half-minute of the performance escaped me, so absorbed was I with the singer's appearance: knobby forehead, horn-rimmed glasses, disappearing hair; an ageless peasant's face, toothy, preoccupied, innocent and conniving by turns. To begin with he played a couple of country and western numbers, but there was a song called ‘The Squire's Walk', about harvesting in the 1930s, so far as I could deduce, another called ‘We Got Married in Church', with a chorus of
a register office woudn't suit for her ma
. He had a clipped west-of-the-county accent which pronounced ‘do' as
du
, and the songs were clearly self-penned as I noticed he had a handwritten lyric sheet unravelled on the sidetable next to his half-pint of Adnams.

Who to ask for information? The vicar had been there for four years, a grain in the hourglass of this remote, rural life. The local lore accumulated by the handful of solicitors and bureaucrats with whom I was on nodding terms rarely exceeded the London train timetable. Fortunately Mrs Nokes, who cleaned for me two mornings a week, had the story. ‘It was a shame really, that Jim – and his name's not really Jim, it's Trevor, Trevor Bell. His dad used to work over at Watton in the painting and decorating line. His mother, she was a Fisher, big local family they was sixty or seventy years back, all gone now. But Jim's dad, he died young, and Jim's mum, she took on over Jim. Never would leave him be. He joined the Navy once, but he came back in three months on account of she said she missed him. And then when she died, five years back, people thought Jim wouldn't stand it. Rode that motorbike of his round the place at all hours. Calmed down a bit now, Jim has. Still lives in the old house, but I hear he does carpentering work out Garboldisham way.' I saw it all, or I thought I did: the slow, intent life, the long-burning fuse suddenly exploding. I remembered, too, a few subdued remarks heard in the pub. ‘Did they? I mean …' Mrs Nokes shrugged tolerantly, in the way that I recalled my mother shrugging when confronted with a broken gate, a badger killed on the swarming roads. ‘You don't want to believe talk,' she pronounced. ‘Jim was struck on his mum, and they was close as peas in a pod, but that's as far as it went and don't let anyone tell you different.' I had the feeling that Mrs Nokes was holding something in reserve about Jim, some prized nugget of data not to be vouchsafed to writers in four-bedroomed houses with city minds.

Take an interest; never interfere. It was difficult to establish where these injunctions broke apart from one another. Once a bundle of my mother's leaflets from the Brook Advisory Clinic had been pushed back through her letter box, doused in petrol and set aflame. After that I began to notice Jim, a small element in a wider tableau suddenly foregrounded by ulterior knowledge. I saw him astride his elderly Triumph motorcycle, labouring along the county backroads, buying groceries in Northwold. He had that vague, dreamy countryman's look, the kind that does not so much see through one as round one, a nod that might have been an acknowledgment or a dismissal. On the pretext of wanting some shelves, I even drove over to the cottage, a mile out of Feltwell, halfway along a lane that went nowhere, crowded out by osiers and long-dead elms. He was cagey but affable, admitting that he did ‘carpenteering', that shelves ‘wouldn't be no trouble'. At close hand, I saw, his face had even more that rapt, simpleton's stare. The cottage was small, dark, meekly furnished. From mantels, tables and wall-brackets, parched Norfolk faces stared out of their frames: old men in caps flanking dray horses, a labourer with pitchfork flung over his shoulder like a gun. Mrs. Bell hung above the fireplace: bolster figure, the same vague eyes, set in brick-red nutcracker features. Jim's guitar lay propped against the table edge. Putting up the shelves took a couple of visits. He came early in the morning, tapping on the hall door at half-seven, quarter-to-eight. I imagined him caught in the old fieldhand routines mandated by his mother forty years before: rise at dawn, main meal at midday, bed at sunset. While he worked he smoked tiny, pungent cheroots: the inside of his right index finger was a long, mahogany smear. He was friendly enough, but I fancied that he half-despised me, wondered at the cossetted, idler's life that could contract out the putting up of shelves. On the second visit I asked him about the songs. As I suspected, they were his own compositions, or at any rate familial. ‘My old dad now, he was a singer. Sung in the pubs, Watton way. Lot of them I got from him. Others are my own. “Sheringham train takes a fine long time”, now. I did that years ago, back when they were thinking on cutting the service.' He pronounced it sarvice, in a way I hadn't heard for twenty years.

By degrees I discovered a context in which Jim's songs lived and grew. The county radio station sometimes featured what it called ‘local entertainers'. They had stage names like Dandelion Joe or The Buttercup Boy, dressed up in smocks and other yokel appurtenances, sang irksome songs about shovelling muck and cows' udders, and conducted beauty pageants at the village fêtes. Set against this tide of bucolic idiocy, Jim looked like a folk poet, a gentle elegist of bygone rural decencies. In amongst the book reviews and the grinning ‘middles', I was writing a column for a Sunday newspaper called ‘Country Retreats'. I put Jim in it, talked about a few of the songs, mentioned some contemporary folk singers with whom I thought he could stand some kind of comparison. The piece was headed ‘Norfolk Voices'. Later, there was a clutch of letters, from people who wanted to buy records or claimed to have heard him singing in pubs. On the Monday morning I put a copy of the article through Jim's rusting letterbox. Passing me on the road a day or two later he made a definite salutation, arm raised stiffly in greeting like a flipper.

Mrs Nokes approved of my interest. ‘There were folks used to reckon Jim was simple,' she explained cautiously. ‘Kids mostly. They used to stand in the lanes and shout at him when he went past. But you have to make allowances. Jim's dad now, he could hardly write. And the old mawther, well, she'd die sooner than have to fill in a form. Come election time you couldn't get her to vote for love nor money.'

Another piece in the jigsaw of Jim's early life clicked into place. Even now, I realised, beneath the surface old patterns of existence ran on, like black hounds under the moon. An old woman died in Watton that summer, aged eighty-seven, carrying a tumour on her abdomen that weighed eleven pounds. ‘We didn't want to go bothering the doctor,' her daughter was reported as saying.

The shelves had been up a fortnight now. The topmost one was slightly askew. I put it down to a craftsman's disdain of perfection, a humility before the absolutes of wood and metal. But something still irritated me about Thetford Jim: a talent not recognised, an ingenuousness not rewarded. A producer I knew on Radio Norfolk was non-committal, but he agreed to investigate. There was another talent night a week later at the pub in Brandon. As the teenaged impressionist gave way to a staggeringly inept magician, I saw the producer's eye list desperately in boredom. But he cheered up at ‘The Squire's Walk' and a song I'd not heard before, a plaintive and sentimental number about a village cemetery. ‘It's authentic,' he said. When I looked inquisitive, he went on: ‘You wouldn't believe the kind of thing that passes for Norfolk these days. Had a character in my office last week called Sid the Ratcatcher. You know how they get themselves up – smock, shepherd's crook – Christ knows what that's got to do with ratcatching. Sang a song about sheep dips. It turns out he's an accountant, lives near Lynn. Does the Rotary Club and the after-dinner circuit. But this one reminds me of the Singing Postman – you remember, the little chap with the glasses who used to sing about ha' you got a light boy? Do you suppose he's ever played to more than twenty people?'

Two days later I met Jim in Northwold high street with a large black labrador loping resignedly at his heel. ‘This here dog is my cousin's dog,' he explained. ‘I'm seeing to him on account of she's away.' I explained about the producer. ‘Uh ho. The radio and that. They wouldn't want me to dress up funny or nothing?' he asked tolerantly. ‘I shouldn't think so.' ‘OK,' he said, and he articulated it
ooh-kay
, with a satirical glint of the eye. ‘I reckon I'll sit myself down and do some practising.' I watched him amble away down the street, the dog dragging at his ankles, fearful of the gulf that separated us. My mother would have known how to deal with Thetford Jim; she would have drawn him out, conquered his reserve. I was simply a fantastic alien who wrote about him in newspapers and wanted to put him on the radio.

There was a Sunday afternoon show on Radio Norfolk, squeezed up between
Memories of my Golden Years
and the religious slot, called
Bandstand
. It was supposed to be live, although in fact the majority of the show went out on tape and only the announcer's feed-ins and the ‘star guest' admitted a margin of error. They had him booked in for the Sunday before Christmas – ‘Thetford Jim: the sound of Norfolk' – and a photographer came over from Diss to take his picture for the
Eastern Daily Press:
myopic, mild-eyed, gazing out from under a peaked cap he sometimes wore. I was in London, as it happened, seeing an editor or chasing a profile, but the story kept warm. On the Friday before the show someone peppered the downstairs windows of the cottage with buckshot. Puttering down the lane the next morning, Jim ran into a trip wire stretched at shoulder-height between two dead elms and broke his collar bone. Of various local informants only Mrs Nokes offered an explanation. ‘All on account of that Tracy Sutton. Just after his mother died.' The name meant nothing. ‘Only fourteen, she was. One of those ones that look seventeen. And act like it, too. Who do you blame? In they end they only gave him a suspended sentence, but Tracy's dad always swore he'd get even.'

They discharged him from hospital two days later, and I called round. The door was locked and stayed unanswered, though light burned from the upstairs shuttering. Then in the New Year, out on the bike again coming back from a job at Northwold, he careered across the road and into a file of schoolchildren. No one was badly hurt, but they kept him at Brandon police station overnight ‘for his own protection' as the desk sergeant I spoke to put it. After that he disappeared: off to the far side of the county, people said, working at Channings jam factory near King's Lynn. Mrs Nokes, who had access to this kind of information, reported that he was living in a Salvation Army hostel. The look in her eye hinted that I shouldn't visit. An elm smashed against the side of the cottage in the March gales and knocked half a wall away: no one came to repair it. And then, idling in a newsagent's queue with Mrs Nokes, I saw a vast, sandbag-shaped girl with gappy teeth and witless eyes chewing her underlip at the counter. ‘Tracy Sutton,' Mrs Nokes whispered pityingly, and I turned away, finally aware of having taken a step too far, like some startled explorer descending into that lost world beyond the mountain who glimpses a pterodactyl taking wing into the gloomy sky.

The Survivor

Dear Edith, I have a lot to thank her for. It was she, you see, who came the closest anyone ever got to unmasking this lifetime of deceit, she who wandered most nearly into the eternity of dissimulation that has been my career. Of course, there had been near misses before – a worrying moment with Fielding back in the 1740s, born of over-confidence; a slight
contretemps
in 1873. (‘Sir!' ‘Sir?' ‘Sir. Your knowledge of Mr Dickens' antecedents seems positively indecent. Perhaps you could explain how you came by it?') – there was a lot of stuff about the early days that didn't make it into Forster's
Life
, but nothing like this nothing, with such potential for damage. Looking back, with that uncanny, supernal memory I have for scene and incident, I can remember it all: Edith's tiny sitting-room in Pembridge Mansions, the usual watery tea in chipped china mugs, the customary sprinkling of young, literary sprigs – Brian Howard, my dears, up from Eton for the day. I was recounting one or two of my choicer anecdotes about Oscar to a corps of deferential listeners when our hostess gave me a shrewd look and remarked: ‘Mr Saffery. Your account of Mr Wilde's indiscretions is extraordinarily vivid. It is almost
as if you yourself were there
. There was some laughter at this, which picked up when Ronald uncoiled himself langorously from the sofa and said in that shy, stammering way of his: ‘We all know that Mr S-s-saffery is p-p-positively
protean
. A real
eminence grise
my dears.' It passed as a joke, of course – such was Firbank's paroxysm of nervous laughter that he shattered a teacup – but for once I had the ghostly feeling, like knocking heard a long way off, that exposure with all its unhappy consequences wasn't far away.

Dear Edie (I think I may call her that), Dear Ronald. They were only two stars amid a galaxy of serried acquaintance. Household names my dear, as Brian would say. Arnold and Max and Morgan. At the time – this was the early twenties – I was an aspiring man of letters going by the name of Henry Saffery (a little devilling in the
London Mercury
, a poem or two in the
Bystander
– small blooms, patiently nurtured, in any case I was winding down) and what with my war service – DSO and gammy leg – and my private income – White's, MCC, you name it I was a member – I think I can say that I didn't want for invitations. They were great days: sniffing the early morning roses at Garsington, those afternoon teas at Max Gate – one tried to draw Tom out but it never worked. Motoring down to Eton to see Aldous. I still have the correspondence: Mr Eliot's compliments, Mrs Woolf's regrets, and that bizarre epistle, signed ‘D.H.L.', entreating me to ‘look into your heart of innermost hearts, Henry, burn briefly for a moment and confess that you have always loved me'. A hundred years old maybe, and the ink is beginning to fade, yet on my timescale as recent as yesterday.