Sunset at Blandings (23 page)

There
were deer in the park in the two earliest Blandings books. But we think that
the problems of fencing, ha-has, winter feeding and (whisper it) poaching
decided Lord Emsworth to let the herd (Japanese and Sika) run down, and to give
the remainder to a not-too-neighbourly landowner he met at one of those Loyal
Sons of Shropshire dinners. It was quite a business rounding the deer up and
carting them. Shropshire has wild deer these days the way East Anglia has
coypus, and direct descendants of escapees from the Blandings herds are
sometimes seen in the West and East Woods and in the copse north of the stables
(1 4N) . Nobody molests them, though McAllister would like to. He curses them
when they get into his gardens, and the foresters don’t like the way they eat
the bark off young trees.

In
Heavy
Weather,
at the end of Chapter 6, we read: ‘Sir Gregory Parsloe hurried
from the room, baying on the scent like one of his own hounds’. Can this mean
anything but that Sir Gregory is the local Master of Foxhounds? Whether or no,
Lord Emsworth has the living of Much Matchingham in his gift (end of ‘Company
for Gertrude’ in
Blandings Castle).
Is it conceivable that Matchingham
Hall is on the Blandings estate and that the hated Sir Gregory, M.F.H., is one
of Lord Emsworth’s tenants, but claiming the right to hunt his landlord’s land?
There is mercifully little about blood sports in the Blandings books, though we
know Gally kept his gun at the castle
(Summer Lightning),
Lord Emsworth
has a pistol with ammunition
(Something Fresh)
and Colonel Wedge comes
to the castle with his service revolver ready for use
(Full Moon)
. Add
to these young George and his airgun, and it still doesn’t make a bloodthirsty
household.

You can
see horses in that paddock (7U) . I doubt if they are hunters. There is better
evidence for them than for the supernumerary pigs. Hugo Carmody rode, in his
secretarial days at the castle
(Summer Lightning).
You see cows in a far
field (16, 17K). Those provide milk for the castle and would sometimes, when
their grazing is changed, use the cow-byre (10V) where, on the afternoon of the
Bank Holiday binge, Lord Emsworth found his little slum-child girl friend. And
you can see (5P) the house in Blandings Parva, with the garden at the front,
where that girl had quelled the aggressive dog, and brother Ern had bitten
Constance in the leg. Just where the girl was when she copped McAllister with a
stone is not utterly clear.

Where
are the boundaries of Blandings set? Of what noble species are those huge ducks
on the Blandings Parva pond (1 Q)? Under which of the gravestones in Blandings
Parva churchyard (2N) are Lord Emsworth’s parents, and his late wife for that
matter, buried? We assume that it is to Blandings Parva that they went to
church (the only such occasion specified) in
Something Fresh,
though
then they had staying in the house party one bishop and several of the minor
clergy. Who is living at Sunnybrae cottage (6G) now? Galahad put one of his
Pelican Club friends into it, but the man got scared of the country noises and
went back to London. Into which window of the castle does Jeff climb in this
book, to meet the startled Claude Duff? Where is the little dell near the small
spinney in which Baxter’s parked caravan invited pig-stealers plus pig
(Summer
Lightning)?
Who has left that gate open (18L)? And are those (2G) boys from
Shrews-bury sculling for home?

These
are good questions. Where we have tried to answer others, we claim no
originality of interpretations. What we do claim is that we have done a good
deal of homework. Whether we have got the answers which would have pleased
Teacher, we can never know, since he is no longer at his desk.

THE TRAINS

BETWEEN
PADDINGTON

AND MARKET BLANDINGS

FROM my earliest readings
in Wodehouse I had had a suspicious eye on the trains that connected Paddington
and Market Blandings. I thought the author was inventing train-times as the
mood took him, hardly looking back to earlier chapters of a book, let alone to
earlier books. I doubted whether any of his train-times would square with the
Bradshaws
or
ABCs
of the publication dates of the books in which they
occurred.

Not
that I would hold it against him if that’s the way he was doing it. But I
wanted to see, and particularly to see if train-times provided any evidence of
where in Shropshire Blandings Castle might be. There are, or there were in the
days of the 1953
Encyclopaedia Britannica
(Sarsaparilla to Sorcery),
1,346.6 square miles of Shropshire. Perhaps the railway evidence in the books
might help us to put the mythical Blandings on a real map.

No
scholar, as far as I know, had collected all the railway references and laid
them out for inspection. So, since this last chronicle of Blandings adds one
last train to the time-table, I have brought them all together. It was not
difficult, only laborious. But interpreting the references was beyond me. I
could see no pattern, if any existed, in the times and speeds. I could see one
obvious anomaly. In
Leave it to Psmith,
Psmith says it’s roughly a
four-hour journey either way. But, elsewhere in the same book, the narrative
says that the 1250 from Paddington arrived at Market Blandings ‘about 3 o’clock’
(1500). My guess is now that that ‘3’ was originally a misprint for ‘5’ and has
persisted uncorrected through half a century of editions. Otherwise we have a
train, not even called an express, doing the four-hour journey in 2 hours 10 minutes.

Besides,
as recently as 1969, when Wodehouse was eighty-seven, he said to Peter Lewis of
the
Daily Mail,
at the end of an interview at his Long Island home, ‘By
the way, about how long does it take now from Paddington to Shropshire? About
four hours? Good, I always made it about four hours.

To
avoid the bother of a.m. and p.m., I have translated all train times to the
Continental clock. And I have added the publication dates of the books from
which I combed my references. It looked professional and it might provide
clues. And I have included the ‘stops at —’ and ‘first stop —’ details as given
in the texts. We get them only four times, always on trains from Paddington.
And in three cases out of the four they have a purpose.

I can
see no point in Freddie Threepwood adding ‘first stop Swindon’ in relating to
Bill Lister that the girl of his (Bill’s) heart has been sent to Blandings on
the 1242
(Full Moon)
. But with the 1615 express, the addition of ‘first
stop Swindon’ in
Something Fresh
is a plant. Ashe Marson and Joan
Valentine are travelling to Blandings together, he to be valet to an American
millionaire, she to be lady’s maid to the millionaire’s daughter. There is a
little job of retrieving for the millionaire the priceless scarab that Lord
Emsworth has forgetfully pocketed and then assumed to be a most generous gift.
And the millionaire will pay handsomely for it to be returned for him. Since
both Ashe and Joan are out for the reward, Joan wouldn’t mind if Ashe were
eliminated from competing. So, between Paddington and ‘first stop Swindon’, she
tells him grisly tales of the hardships and snubs that lesser servants have to
suffer below stairs. Having frightened him, she says ‘Wouldn’t you now like to
get off at Swindon and go home?’

And
when, in ‘Pig Hoo-o-o-o-ey!’ in
Blandings Castle,
the 1400, ‘best train
of the day’, stops at Swindon, it is with a jolt just sufficient to wake Lord
Emsworth up and make him realize that he has already forgotten the master
hog-call that might make his beloved Empress start eating again.

The
third purposeful stop is the ‘first stop Oxford’ for the 1445 express in
Uncle
Fred in the Springtime.
Lord Ickenham, king of impostors, is gaily
travelling towards Blandings Castle in the guise of Sir Roderick Glossop, the
loony-doctor. With him is Polly Pott, in the guise of his secretary. And his
quaking nephew Pongo is with them in the guise of Sir Roderick’s nephew. So
far, so snug in a first-class compartment. But then the Efficient Baxter is
seen getting into the train at Paddington, and he starts by being suspicious of
the whole party. But worse, much worse, is to come just as the train is pulling
out. The real Sir Roderick himself gets on. This really is a facer for Uncle
Fred. Lord Emsworth had told him that, pursuant to his sister’s commands (it
was she who was worried about the Duke of Dunstable being potty), he had gone
to London to make the acquaintance of the great alienist and persuade him to
come to Blandings to vet the Duke. But, Lord Emsworth said, he had discovered
that Sir Roderick was the grown-up version of the horrid little boy they had
called ‘Pimples’ at school. Sir Roderick, thus addressed by Lord Emsworth
today, had refused the invitation to Blandings. That then enabled Lord Ickenham
to set up his three aliases and his triple storming of the castle: on Lord
Emsworth’s behalf, and to help a couple of young couples find happiness. ‘Help
is what I like to be of,’ says Lord Ickenham.

And
here was Sir Roderick Glossop, in person, getting on to the train at
Paddington, having changed his mind. Lord Ickenham needed that stop at Oxford
badly. It gave him time to talk Sir Roderick into believing that the patient he
had been so hurriedly sent for to inspect had turned the corner and needed no
immediate attention: so Sir Roderick could go back to his busy practice,
stepping off at Oxford and catching whoknowswhat train home to London.

Finally,
if train times helped to give Market Blandings a position on the map of
Shropshire, we might decide which way the Vale of Blandings went. We put the
castle at the end. For how many miles does the Vale stretch? Is Market
Blandings short of, or beyond Shrews-bury, its nearest reasonable-sized shopping
town? Do you turn left or right for Shrewsbury when you come out of the castle
drive on to the main road?

I
decided to ask the help of a friend of mine who had been a
Bradshaw
expert
at his (and my) preparatory school, long before he joined British Railways as a
career. This was the evidence I supplied:

Trains from Paddington to Market
Blandings

0830
express
(Sunset at Blandings
1977).
The train that arrives at 1610
(Service with a Smile
1961).

1118
(A Pelican at Blandings
1969).

1145
(Service with a Smile
1961).

1242
‘first stop Swindon’ arrives ‘shortly
before 1700
(Full Moon
1947).

1250
arrives about 1500—i.e. about 2 hours 10
minutes ? this a misprint
(Leave it to Psmith
1923).

1400
‘best train of the day’. Stops at
Swindon
(Blandings  Castle
1935).

1423
(A Pelican at Blandings
1969).

1445 express. First stop
Oxford
(Uncle
Fred in the Spring time
1939).

1515
(Blandings Castle
1935).

1615 express. Stops at
Swindon
(Something
Fresh
1915). An express that arrives c. 2105. Restaurant car   
(Leave it
to Psmith
1923 and
Uncle Fred in the Spring time
1939).

1705 ‘there is nothing between
the 1400 and
this’
(Blandings Castle
1935).

Trains from Market Blandings to
Paddington

0820
‘arrives about noon’
(Uncle Fred in
the Springtime
1939).

0825
(Uncle Fred in the Springtime
1939).

0850 arrives about
midday
(Leave it to
Psmith
1923).

1035
(Service with a Smile
1961).

1050
(Something Fresh
1915).

1115
(Hot Water
1932).

1240 arrives shortly before 1700
(Full
Moon
1947).

1400
(Blandings Castle
1935
and
Uncle Fred in the Springtime
1939).