Black'erchief Dick

by Margery Allingham

Margery Allingham, whom the writer first met at the early age of two, comes of literary stock. Her grandparents were publishers in the days before the big combinations made an independent weekly paper a hopeless hazard. Her parents are journalists and writers of fiction. The business aspects of literature, the philosophy of art, and the technical problems of serial fiction have been commonplaces of the domestic atmosphere which the future novelist breathed during her childhood. It was as natural for Margery to sit down and “write a story” as for a shopkeeper’s child to play at keeping a shop. It was inevitable also that she should start a magazine. I remember it well. It was called The Wag-tail, and the founder was about eight years old. I was foreign correspondent, a rank imposed because of my being on a ship and so bringing news of distant shores. Margery herself, however, was mainly responsible for the publication. It was written in a penny exercise book, and editorial, short-story, serial, answers to correspondents and advertisements were entirely by the founder. Our collaboration on this long-defunct organ laid the foundation of an enduring friendship. When she was eleven, Margery was graciously pleased to accept the dedication of one of my novels, in the spirit in which it was offered. It was a gesture neither of condescension nor of derision, but rather a sincere and, let us hope, successful attempt on the part of a man a good way up the hill to give a friendly and affectionate signal to a child already breasting the lower reaches.

And as the years followed one another in that peculiar progression which is neither arithmetical nor geometrical, but rather telescopic, whereby the young close up upon us and make us uneasily aware of our own slothful deficiencies, it became increasingly evident that in spite of the secret discouragement of wise parents, who did their best to hold themselves up as Awful Warnings, Margery Allingham would sooner or later express herself in one of the arts. Which art she would choose seemed equally certain until the family circle learned that she proposed to “go in” for elocution.

The present writer, hearing of this in foreign parts, was at first nonplussed. With the lack of intelligence that seems to distinguish so many grown-up males, he feared there would be “dirty work at the cross-roads” when his lady friend discovered the real nature of a theatrical career. He might have saved himself the trouble. The lady friend, gleefully reporting progress, was evidently too preoccupied with the spectacle of grown-ups in action to bother about the future at all. She regarded elocution as a means rather than an end. It was perfectly natural for her, when she failed to find pieces suitable for recitation, to write them herself. It was a simple step, it appears, when the class at the Polytechnic sought for a play in which to reveal their virtuosity to friends and parents, for Margery Allingham to write that play, to stage-manage it, to design the costumes, and to assume the principal rôle herself. It was, in short, the little old Wag-tail magazine upon a somewhat larger scale. One might be pardoned for supposing that the advice of a large and talented family circle would be invoked on behalf of a favourite daughter. On the contrary, they are pictured in many letters as standing around in helpless admiration while a seventeen-year-old maiden carries through her plans with the precision of an experienced and ruthless impresario. The play, a blank-verse tragedy entitled “Dido, Queen of Carthage”, is rehearsed and ultimately performed with such astonishing success that additional performances have to be scheduled and the public permitted to pay for admission.

All this, even though it included illustrated interviews in the London press, was regarded by the chief protagonist as the inept reaction of grown-ups to a very ordinary achievement of modern youth. For it should be borne in mind that modern youth, while it is not particularly impressed with the performances or the philosophies of the preceding generation, is perfectly willing to abide by the rules of the economic game. The activities enumerated above were by no means the spectacular antics of a pampered parasite. Money was being earned in a highly diverting fashion. It appears that not only are films adapted from books, but books and stories are redistilled back from the films. Should money be necessary for scenery or costumes, it was Margery Allingham’s habit to witness a few pictures, transmute them into fiction and send them to the weekly journals that publish such stories. The picture evoked by a series of engaging letters written over the past three years is that of a shrewd and competent being from another world struggling with the stupidities and prejudices of a crowd of tottering half-wits upon the verge of dissolution. Youth seems to be having a tough time of it in England, as well as in America. There is nothing new about this, according to our novelist. “The modern girl is simply Miss 1840 without her petticoats,” is her definition, based on an attentive study of Jane Austen’s heroines. The trouble lies, not with youth, but with middle age, whose intellect tends to ossify more rapidly than of yore. It is an interesting theory, though evidently not designed to placate either publishers or the writers of introductions.

To come to grips with the question of the origin of this particular novel, however, is a delicate matter. We find ourselves on enchanted ground. When a young lady of eighteen writes a novel in four months and calmly asserts that the story came to her out of the air, as it were, communicated by so-called automatic writing, the average grown-up hesitates. He has a foolish predilection for sober realities, and is reluctant to admit familiar spirits, as it were, to the family circle. Modern youth, dragging her family after her, calls up the ghosts of departed rapscallions, witches, and serving-wenches, and forthwith sits down to fashion a stirring tale.

The novel, then, is a story within a story. The latter has for me a peculiar fascination. Knowing the characters who sat round that table in the house on Mersea Island, knowing the Island itself and the surrounding fenland, I wanted to write a story about them. I have repressed this desire, contenting myself with recounting to occasional groups of friends the amazing facts. Now that the novel has been written, and published in England and America by people who know little and care nothing about its origins, judging it merely as a piece of fiction commercially available, the opportunity arrives to reveal briefly the unusual circumstances out of which the tale was born.

That part of England called East Anglia has preserved through many centuries the salient features of the landscape. As Charles Dickens said of the French-Flemish country, it is neither bold nor diversified, being in fact a sort of continuation of that country on the other side of the shallow and recent North Sea. And indeed what Dickens went on to say of his Flemish-French country, that it was three parts Flemish and one part French, might be paraphrased for East Anglia as three parts English and one part Low Country, or three parts land and one part water. The shores emerge imperceptibly from the gray waste of the North Sea, with stretches of low-tide mud that shine with a metallic lustre beyond the dunes. The sea is loth to retreat, winding in and out among the fields, so that one is startled, driving along the road from Colchester towards Mersea, to see a huge brown wherry aground behind the dikes, many miles from the sea-lanes outside. And from Canvey Island, which is fairly in the Thames Estuary below Tilbury, to Aldeburgh, on the Suffolk Coast, the sea interpenetrates the land so deeply and with so many loops and backwaters, that the whole coast, to high tide, is compacted of lonely islands, with here and there a house and the square tower of an ancient little Saxon church showing above some weather-worn trees on the landward side. Bleak and perishing cold in the winter, there is a quiet loveliness in the summers there appealing strongly to unfashionable folk who seek the elemental sanctuaries of remote harbours and salt winds driving the thick white clouds athwart a sky of palest azure.

In such surroundings and with a practicable house for sleep, you come close to England. In such surroundings, on a fare of beef and cheese and beer, an English family might conceivably become so homogeneously identified with the spirit of the place that they could move at will up and down the centuries, assuming the thoughts and memories of any disembodied intelligences still anchored to their earthly haunts. So at least it emerges, reading the sober evidence before us, as those four set it down, signing it with their several names and styles, and asserting their right as truthful subjects to be believed.

And what they say is this: In August, 1920, being in their cottage on Mersea Island, on an evening that had turned to rain, the time hung heavily and it was suggested they pass an hour with the glass. The ordinary materials were soon provided, being no more than the alphabet on paper slips, arranged in a circle on the table with a common tumbler, from which ale is drunk in those parts, inverted in the middle. Nothing remained save to select some feasible subject.

One lay to their hand. While none of the company had practised the historical method in their fictions, since they lacked the special knowledge of bygone ways and speech such work demands, they had often discussed a legend persisting in the island, that a near-by tavern, long since destroyed, had been the scene of a tragedy. Old people in the village said they had seen the ghost, which haunted a house known as The Myth. “Let us,” said someone, “call up the landlord of the Ship Inn. Perhaps,” they added amidst some laughter, “he will reply.”