The Sacred Combe by Simon Barnes

Author:Simon Barnes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

62

Are there Werewolves Still for Tea?

Paradise can exist in time as well as space and in both cases, of course, it is largely imaginary. The Golden Age is a moving fixture in human consciousness: always about one and a half ages before our own. The years before the First World War are regarded as an idyll: a time of privileged perfection. This was also - after Eve’s proffering of the apple to Adam - one of the greatest look-behindjer moments in all history. Rupert Brooke, scribbling homesick lines in a German café and, in the second verse, not troubling to hide his antipathy for the German Jews drinking beer at a nearby table - no one quotes that bit for some reason - summed up forever our notion of the Edwardian idyll in the poem’s concluding couplet:

Stands the church clock at ten to three?

And is there honey still for tea?

Time itself has stopped. Nothing will ever change. We are locked in an endless era of peace and prosperity with a comfortable unassuming dominance over the entire world. And we 21st century humans can look back in glorious vicarious nostalgia and savour the fact that this paradise was built on the slopes of Vesuvius. The writer who best captures these times is Saki, pen name of H. H. Munro, who died in the First World War; his last words were: “Put that bloody cigarette out.” Before the war he was the great narrator of Edwardian drawing-rooms. His best stories are fantasies of the wild world’s invasion of this false paradise, hinting at the real passions and horrors that lurk in every human breast and are all the more vivid for their backdrop of chintz, cucumber sandwiches and visits from the vicar. My favourite tale is Gabriel-Ernest. It tells of how the highly respectable Van Cheele finds a naked boy sunning himself in the woods. “At night I hunt on four feet,” says the boy. Van Cheele tells him to leave - so next day the boy then turns up, just as naked, in Van Cheele’s house. Miss Van Cheele, the owner’s aunt, takes pity on him and gives him the name of Gabriel-Ernest. “Clothed, clean and groomed, the boy lost none of his uncanniness.” The pet spaniel bolts, and lurks shivering outside the house. Meanwhile the aunt arranges for Gabriel-Ernest to help out with the little children at the Sunday school tea while Van Cheele visits an artist friend who had seen something odd in the woods: a boy, naked in the setting sun. The sun disappeared: “And at the same moment an astounding thing happened – the boy vanished too!” What, asks Van Cheele? Altogether? “No; that is the dreadful part of it… on the open hillside where the boy had been standing a second ago, stood a large…”

But come. Read the rest for yourself, in Saki’s own words. Just Google Gabriel-Ernest. But before you do so, let’s savour that moment when Van Cheele finds the boy in the morning-room.

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