Authors: Geoffrey Household
The High Place
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Geoffrey Household
For Ilona, my love
1
O
F ALL THAT I LEARNED FROM THAT UNCOMPROMISING
prophet, Anton Tabas, the tenet which seems to me most true and least acceptable
is that no man can obtain absolution from any but himself. Therefore when the tumult was over and the action irrevocable and I had struck down what most I loved, I did not go to him for comfort. I
knew too well that, though he might send another to his priest, to me he would say that my conscience must sit in judgment on itself.
That is the reason for this very personal narrative. My signed statement I might almost call it—except that it will be obvious to any curious policemen that I have disguised all details
which might lead to the violent or the legal punishment of others. No, I will be my own policeman and my own probation officer. I desire that I, the Eric Amberson who begins this story, shall live
again the hope, the high adventure and the misery, and so, rebuilding through sentence and paragraph the rhythm of his self-esteem, recover—well, not the Eric Amberson that was, but at least
a companion whom he can observe with tolerance across the dinner-table of his soul.
Many a way have I tried that might lead into my story. There are models enough, for it is the fashion of our wretched century to confess, and God knows I could race with any other renegade which
of us should eat dirt the faster. But I do not want to tell my spirit what it should feel. I want to ask it. Neutrality, not abasement, is my object. That being so—and I am determined that it
shall be so—I will give the reasons for my departure from England to Syria, and present a farce before the tragedy.
For three generations the Ambersons have been land agents and auctioneers in the remotest little market town of Devon. My grandfather and my father were each of them magistrates for the last
thirty years of their lives, and mayors of the town at decent intervals. In 1939 I too was appointed a Justice of the Peace, but this voluntary service to society, by now almost hereditary, gave
way to another, and the amateur magistrate became an amateur infantry subaltern learning his job in the trampled dust beside the Suez Canal.
In the autumn of 1945, when I returned to Devon and the business, I was not at all sure that I wished to remain an active partner. I found in myself a distaste for that extreme commercial
acumen which a country dealer must enjoy, and for which indeed he is respected. My grandfather had been called the sharpest honest man in Devon; it would have been untrue to call him the most
honest sharper, but the distinction is slight.
Though I was reluctant to fill my office chair, I was not allowed to have any hesitation at all about resuming my seat upon the bench. As a comparatively idle man in his late thirties, resident
in the town itself and easily accessible, my duty was made very clear to me by my colleagues. One of them was deaf; one of them was old; and one was a very busy farmer.
Thus the case of The House that Jack Built—as the newspapers inevitably called it—was mine without any interference, and I never attempted to shuffle off my responsibility.
Jack Yealm was fisherman, sawyer, amateur engineer and landowner. The land he owned was little more than a strip of mud and shale on the banks of a small tidal creek, but, what with his slipway,
his quay of loose stone, his tons of gravel and seaweed and good earth rammed down behind solid piles, it had all the appearance of solid ground. A stream which once had entered the green-tufted
creek four hundred yards above his house had been dammed, tapped, and harnessed to a secondhand mill-wheel which drove his saw.
Yealm had two sons. Both had returned to civil life—one because he had left his foot in the driving seat of a Sherman, the other after long service in the Navy. Before the war they
occupied a pair of adjoining cottages, bought with old Yealm’s savings and conveniently placed just off the main street of the town. During the war these cottages had been requisitioned by
the Admiralty—which was fair enough, for the young Yealm wives had gone to an aircraft factory and left them empty—and after the war the Admiralty had passed them to the Ministry of
Fuel by one of those little coups of bureaucratic chicanery, without any reference to the local and more humane authorities.
I needn’t go into all the resettlement problems of the Yealm sons. They had two wives and five young children in a total of four rooms in other people’s houses. Nothing else, said
our Superintendent of Police, protected by his official dead-pan from any suspicion of irony, nothing else was known against them.
Now old Jack Yealm had a vague idea of the Housing Acts, and he knew very well that he was not allowed to use materials that were in short supply, or to employ builders; but he didn’t
know—and how, brought up in liberal England, should he?—that he couldn’t build a house on his own land with his own and his sons’ hands.
Among the myriad untidinesses of his foreshore there was no shortage of material. He reminded me of one of those maiden ladies who have never in a long life thrown away a stick of furniture or
an old dress, and still possess, intact though unrecognizable, every object they have ever acquired. His attic was the space above high-water mark, and his junk was all that had floated or
been dragged into his creek to die—or rather, to wait in suspended animation until resurrected by Jack for some new and wholly unsuspected life.
The house that Jack built was a mighty good house, though you had to look at it twice to see that house it was. It might have been a sail loft, or a shed for the proper exhibiting of a whale. It
sank completely and satisfactorily into its background, as a natural part of the foreshore. That, I think, was the reason why it escaped so long the eye of the inspector. Indeed he came upon it by
the merest accident, while reconnoitring the creek for some other damned inspector who wanted a permit to build a concrete villa there.
So Jack and his sons came up before the beaks. It was obvious that they were considered to have committed a very serious crime against their country’s bureaucracy, for the court was solemn
with inspectors and local government officials, all of them watching each other, like a bunch of puritans at a prayer meeting, in the hope that one of the brethren should fail to show a proper
zeal. They were bringing a test case with all the menace of Whitehall solidly behind them. That was what made me angry. They put me in the position of a State Prosecutor, whereas my duty was to
preserve the King’s Peace by showing mercy—if they deserved any—to my fellow citizens.
The Yealms could only plead guilty; they hadn’t obtained a single one of the twenty permits that were necessary before they could even begin to clear the building site. Yet it was plain to
me—at least I thought it was—that Parliament in its wisdom had never intended the Acts to apply to such a case. I said so. I fined the defendants 7s. 6d. each, and told them with
reasonable severity that they were not to do another hour’s work on the house until they had obtained a sheaf of permits to cover the use of the labour and materials that they were not
going to use. My colleagues on the bench concurred; they were the deaf and the old, and they had not the faintest notion what the case was about. My clerk, of course, protested—but he had a
marked sense of mischief, bless him, and his grin took all the formality out of his warning.
The Rural District Council chuckled and did nothing—after all, they were both lazy and my neighbours—but the Ministry appealed. Their reputation for incorruptible inhumanity was
threatened, and it was their duty as democrats to see that the minority was oppressed for the sake of the majority. Jack Yealm and his sons were fined two hundred pounds, and Eric Amberson, J.P.,
was removed from the bench. The majesty of the proceeding was imposing. I was lucky, I gathered, not to find myself in the Tower. And it wasn’t a fuss about nothing. As a Justice of the Peace
I had refused to administer an Act of Parliament. When I let off the Yealms with their derisory 7s. 6d. apiece, I hadn’t seen the constitutional implications. I had made myself one with the
procession of Barons and Bishops and plain revolutionaries who had defied Parliament down the ages. I had even, as a Sunday paper unctuously exploded, defied the King.
That was what hurt me. I had a shocking bad press. I was accused of making a futile gesture against socialism. I was even called an irresponsible fascist. It occurred to no one that the Acts
against which I had protested were passed by the National Government and not the Socialists; nor had I said anything against the Acts themselves—which were obviously necessary—only
against the rigidity of their administration.
No, it was not removal from the bench which distressed me; it was the fact that my people, my English, thought the removal right and proper. I realized that I had become a foreigner, for one of
their sufferings I had never shared. During the six years of my service abroad they had tolerated, for the sake of their collective conscience, a gradual disciplining of their civil life; and there
was no one to mark the change so keenly as we, the startled army exiles. The turbulent islander had become a grey, obedient citizen so imperceptibly—since the puritan half of him was thinking
only in terms of self-abnegation—that he did not know a revolution had passed over him. Only the planners and the politicians knew, and they, whatever their party, were united in their
determination that obedient he should remain.
I could not face the sadness of it, the weary submission of so great and so deservedly victorious a people. I wasn’t ashamed. I knew that I had been right and the government wrong; but my
impotence as an individual was driven into my soul, affecting me as if it had been sexual impotence. I saw myself condemned, if I remained in England, to a futile lifetime of impatience.
I sold my partnership. I collected some agencies for tools, fertilizers and agricultural machinery, and settled myself and my small capital on the Syrian shore.
