Class wars in Doyle

AS I start this post, I notice that the photo accompanying the one about +Kevin's consecration has vanished. I hope it's a temporary affliction - Flickr has been a tad flaky these last couple of days. Today, however, I am considering a much more resilient medium - my mother's ancient copy of Conan Doyle's The White Company. If you're not familiar with this mediaeval story, take a look at the chapter headings and you'll get a flavour of the tone of this, the original story about Sir Nigel Loring to which Sir Nigel was a prequel. (Did they talk of prequels in the late eighteenth century? I think not)

The left-hand page bears this dedication: To the hope of the future, the reunion of the English-speaking races, this little chronicle of our common ancestry is inscribed.
South Norwood, September 29, 1891.

This last information, incidentally, is particularly interesting to me now because of the fact that members of the greater Blethers clan now live in South Norwood; I try to picture Conan Doyle among the older houses there, perhaps using the same railway station that we frequent on our visits.
I'm not going to tell the story. You can buy it on Amazon if you're interested. And I've already gone on about how I read this stuff before I was ten, no doubt becoming in the process the finicky dinosaur I now seem to be. But what struck me most powerfully in this latest reading of it was the dreadful injustice of the class system of the time - the lordship of the Norman rulers, the haughty king who didn't deign to speak English, the automatic assumption that the squire of gentle birth would ultimately earn his spurs and his knighthood while the brave archer who saved everyone's bacon time and time again would marry the innkeeper woman who had looked after his feather bed and stagger about in his old age (about 50) and chase the pretty girls while the aged Lord Chandos would ride to battle in his late 60s and die gloriously.

Even worse was my realisation that in my childhood I accepted this hook, line and habergeon (go on - look it up). When the Jacks, the poverty-stricken country French, storm the castle of Villefranche in an episode that I used to be too scared to read in bed at night, they are described as bestial and sub-human, and their assault on our noble heroes seems shocking and an affront to the natural order of things. But did I notice, all these years ago, how Doyle sets the framework for the episode? The wife of the Seneschal of Villefranche describes how ugly the people are, how she "cannot bear it" and so "my trusty Raoul goes ever before me with a cudgel to drive them from my path" - to which her chaplain murmurs "Yet they have souls, fair lady, they have souls!" He is quickly slapped down, because the Seneschal has heard "that you have said to them that their souls are as good as ours". It were better, he goes on, if the priest were to stick to saying Mass.

I fear that as a nine-year-old I probably skipped through this bit to get to the awful moment when the body of the squire is dangled outside his friend's window in the dark. But I'm really glad I've re-read it, seen more of what was implied, realised that it's not just a tale of derring-do. I probably won't read it again.

Life, as they say, is too short.

An old friend rediscovered

Have you ever spent years, on and off, looking for something, becoming convinced that a malevolent guest has nicked it, or that you somehow never had it in your house in the first place, and then discovered it lurking in plain view on the bookshelf where it ought to have been all along? No. Must just be me then. The book in the picture has eluded me for ages, and now there it lies. And why would you care, do I hear you ask? Therein lies my tale - or part of it anyway.

I grew up reading this book, this very edition. It's old (published in 1937), the cloth and card cover is frayed and faded, the pages yellowing at the edges. It has a Glasgow Corporation Education Department stamp in it, but I never took it from a school - it must have been one of the many books brought home by my father to meet my insatiable demands for reading material in the days when I was always ill (and therefore stuck in bed) and devoured print voraciously. My most vivid memory is of lying propped up on one arm in bed in the tiny maid's room where I used to sleep (see post about winter, below) early on a Sunday morning, reading this and eating Pontefract Cakes. (I know - liquorice before breakfast. But it pins it down as a Sunday, for I was only allowed to buy sweets on a Saturday) The room in which I was reading means I was not yet 10 years old, for we moved house when I was 10.

So here I am, reading Conan Doyle's Sir Nigel and its prequel, The White Company (set in the period after Sir Nigel but written first) not once, but several times, in my childhood. My relatively early childhood - probably eight at the first reading. I remember that I found Sir Nigel an easier read, but that may have been the size of the print - my copy of The White Company belonged to my mother, and was printed in 1930. But having just found it, I'm reading Sir Nigel again - and marvelling. For a start, I realise how much historical knowledge I picked up from these books - and the reader isn't spared the details, or the long description, or the mediaeval ballad sung by the hero. But the main boggle is reserved for the language. Here's a wee sample:

"I am no subject of yours, proud Abbot!" he cried at last. "My house has ever been vavasor to the king. I deny the power of you and your court to lay sentence upon me. Punish these your own monks, who whimper at your frown, but do not dare to lay your hand upon him who fears you not, for he is a free man, and the peer of any save only the king himself."

No wonder I grew up with a grasp of English that I never found in my pupils. "These your own monks"! Wow! And the complexity of the syntax - and I never questioned, never faltered, for I was caught up in the story and had already fallen for Nigel - and I'm only on page 54. And randomly, from page 307, I find the sentence: "Then it was he that I heard behind us". Not much chance of mixing up subjects and objects and the anomaly of the verb "to be" after that lot, was there?

I could go on, but life calls. I must just point out that what sent me looking for this was a summer holiday in the early '90s, in Benodet on the coast of Brittany. A wet day sent us driving inland in search of the sun. We found it - in Josselin. And the name tweaked at my memory, and sent me to the Michelin guide. Sure enough, the monument to the Bataille des Trentes - if you've looked up the first link, to Wikipedia, you'll find out about this - was close by. Actually it took some finding, being stuck between two bits of motorway down a narrow lane, but it was there, and I had never really known it was real. We looked, we came home, and I went hunting the book. I couldn't find it. I don't know why or how it has returned to my shelves, but I am glad to see it.

Right glad, in fact - the language is getting to me.