Dick Turpin: The Myth of the English Highwayman by James Sharpe

One of the more colourful and easily recognised characters in history, Dick Turpin is portrayed as the greatest of the highwaymen, the gentlemen thieves of the road who preyed on the rich of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The reality, as James Sharpe illustrates in this excellent history of the man and his attendant phenomenon, is that Turpin was little more than a pock-marked thug, a common criminal who committed some pretty nasty crimes.

We meet him in the days running up to his execution in York on a chilly Saturday in April 1739. John Palmer is in York Castle, kept in a strong room awaiting trial at the assizes for horse stealing. Word is out, however, that Palmer is, in fact, the wanted outlaw Dick Turpin:

‘Since he was suspected to be Turpin’, ran another ’Letter from York’, in this instance dated 23 March, ‘the whole countrey have flock’d here to see him, and have been very liberal to him, insomuch as he has had wine constantly before him.’ The same source noted that the gaoler at York Castle ‘had made £100 by selling liquors to him and his visitors’.

It would appear from accounts of the time that drinking in prison was hardly discouraged, and although Turpin was hanged at York, things got pretty bibulous down in London as well. Bernard de Mandeville’s contemporary account of execution day shows the condemned drinking copiously before being loaded onto the tumbrel:

The prisoners themselves, on Mandeville’s account, usually took care to be as drunk as possible before leaving Newgate, but, on their way to the gallows, ‘the courage that strong liquors can give, wears off’, and the condemned find themselves in danger of becoming sober again.

Before his demise on the end of a rope, Turpin started his career as a butcher in Essex. At some point in his twenties he got mixed up with bad company and was soon running with a gang of men who would break into peoples’ houses and rob them at gunpoint. The crimes that this gang committed included rape and violent abuse of the elderly; one victim being burned on the fire in an effort to make him tell them where the loot was hidden. Hardly the actions of gentlemen thieves.

After the gang was broken by the law, Turpin escaped and turned to highway robbery. Even so, things got hot for him again and he made himself scarce, reinventing himself in Yorkshire as John Palmer. It was there that he was arrested for horse stealing in 1738. During his incarceration he wrote a letter to his brother-in-law. The letter got into the hands of someone who recognised his handwriting and the game was up.

So how come the legend? A century later, Gothic novelist William Harrison Ainsworth recreated Turpin as a dashing highwayman in his novel Rookwood, describing him as a man who:

...could sing a good song, was a choice companion, and could drink three bottles without feeling the worse for them.

He also created Turpin’s supposed flight to York in one night on Black Bess, and the legend was born. Strangely enough, the subsequent enthusiasm for highwayman coincided with the end of the practice in the country...

Nearly three hundred years after he was hanged, Turpin is ubiquitous, especially in the pub:

...there are, indeed, so many pubs alleging Turpin associations that if all their claims were true, the career of England’s most famous highwayman would have been passed in a combination of perpetual motion and a permanent alcoholic haze.

On the evidence provided in this fascinating book, we are asked in conclusion whether he really deserves his fame.

Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson

One of my favourite books, this was first lent to me in January 1994 while I was doing my A-Levels and created quite an impression on me at the time, especially in the way that the gender of Winterson’s protagonist, a vulnerable and subversive Lothario, remains undeclared throughout the novel.

The story is about a love affair, or rather the end of an affair, ended by what appears at first to be the narrator’s noble intentions but turns out to be foolish heroics. After numerous affairs in their youth, (including one with a woman who blew up men’s lavatories and another with a giant who carried his midget parents around on his shoulders), the narrator tells us that they are in a steady and unexciting relationship with a woman who works with small furry animals at London Zoo. Into this staid existence comes Louise, an Antipodean redhead, married.

Their affair is passionate and destructive. The furry animal specialist leaves, distraught. Louise’s husband Elgin gets nasty. They leave it for three days but the pressure starts to get to our narrator:

Was I in sound mind and body? I took my temperature. No. I peered at my head in the mirror. No. Better go to bed close the curtains and get out the gin bottle. That was how Louise found me at six o’clock on the evening of the third day. She had been telephoning since noon but I had been too sodden to notice.

And after that? Bliss, happiness, cancer.

Louise has a rare form of leukaemia. The only person who says he knows how to treat her is her estranged husband. Arguing that saving Louise’s life is more important than their love, the narrator leaves her to get help from Elgin and holes up in Yorkshire. She finds work in a local wine bar, a far cry from her life in London with Louise:

The wine bar, otherwise known as ‘A Touch of Southern Comfort’, was staging a spring festival to attract back customers whose overdrafts still hadn’t recovered from the Christmas festival. For us who worked there, this meant dressing in lime-green body stockings with a simple crown of artificial crocuses about our heads. The drinks had a spring theme: March Hare Punch, Wild Oat Sling, Blue Tit. It didn’t matter what you ordered, the ingredients were all the same apart from the liquor base. I mixed cheap cooking brandy, Japanese whisky, something that called itself gin and the occasional filthy sherry with pulp orange juice, thin cream, cubes of white sugar and various kitchen colourings. Soda water to top up and at £5.00 a couple (we only served couples at Southern Comfort) cheap at the price during Happy Hour.

The narrator spends the next months fending off the advances of Gail, the wine bar’s owner, (fifty-three and as wild as a Welshman with a leek up his arse). After a pretty alcoholic evening, Gail sets out a few home truths:

Gail was drunk. She was so drunk that when her false eyelash fell into her soup she told the waiter it was a centipede. “I got something to tell you kiddo,” she said leaning down at me the way a zookeeper drops fish at a penguin. “Want it?” There was nothing else to have. Magic Pete’s was an all-night drinking club, low on amenity, high on booze. It was Gail’s revelation or find 50p for the jukebox. I didn’t have 50p. “You made a mistake.”

Desperate, the narrator runs back to London to find Louise, but she has vanished without a trace. She never took help from Elgin; she stayed in their shared flat but is no longer there. The book ends with a return to Yorkshire and Gail, who looks like she’s moving in... And in the last few lines, something wonderful, or is just as vague as he narrator’s real identity? (Interestingly enough, the last time I read it I was much more optimistic as to the outcome.) Why is the measure of love loss?

The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing’s first novel is a short but intense story about the disintegration of a woman’s life under the unforgiving heat of the Zimbabwean sun. Covering racism in colonial Africa, the expectations of marriage and the limits that society places on women, The Grass is Singing is one of the most memorable debuts of the mid twentieth century.

Starting with the aftermath of the murder of Mary Turner by her black housekeeper, Moses, the novel looks back on the events that led to her death. Sketching out her Mary’s childhood, Lessing portrays a woman haunted by her youth and her mother’s relationship with rural poverty and her alcoholic father:

For thousands of people up and down Southern Africa the store is the background to their childhood. So many things centred around it. It brings back, for instance, memories of nights when the car, after driving endlessly through a chilly, dusty darkness, stopped unexpectedly in front of a square of light where men lounged with glasses in their hands, and one was carried out into the brilliantly-lit bar for a sip of searing liquid ‘to keep the fever away’... And later, when she grew older, the store came to have another significance: it was the place where her father brought his drink. Sometimes her mother worked herself into a passion of resentment, and walked up to the barman, complaining that she couldn’t make ends meet, while her husband squandered his salary in drink. Mary knew, even as a child, that her mother complained for the sake of making a scene and parading her sorrows: that she really enjoyed the luxury of standing there in the bar while the casual drinkers looked on, sympathetically; she enjoyed complaining in a hard sorrowful voice about her husband. “Every night he comes home from here,” she would say, “Every night! And I am expected to bring up three children on the money that is left over when he chooses to come home.” And then she would stand still, waiting for the condolences of the man who pocketed the money which was rightly hers to spend for the children. But he would say at the end, “But what can I do?” I can’t refuse to sell him drink, now can I?” And at last, having played out her scene and taken her fill of sympathy, she would walk away across the expanse of red dust to her house, holding Mary by the hand...

Her father isn’t a violent man, just a hopeless soak:

That is not to say that he drank himself into a state of brutality. He was seldom drunk as some men were, whom Mary saw outside the bar, frightening her into a real terror of the place. He drank himself every evening into a state of cheerful fuddled good humour, coming home late to a cold dinner, which he ate by himself.

As an adult, Mary moves to the city and shies away from marriage but when she overhears people gossiping about her at a party she impulsively ties the knot with an indebted and incompetent farmer, Richard. Inheriting her mother’s misery, she festers with resentment, trapped in a loveless marriage. The heat and the lack of money slowly grind her spirit, although it is her attitude to the native workers that finally dooms her.

A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby

Further afield this week to one of the best loved pieces of travel writing from the last century, Eric Newby’s account of his desperately unprepared trek through the wildest corner of Afghanistan and an almost suicidal attempt on the peak of Mir Samir.

After travelling overland to Kabul from the UK (an adventure in itself) Newby and his travelling companion Hugh Carless arrive in the Afghan capital feeling badly acclimatised and out of shape. In an effort to get a head for the mountains they decide to climb Legation Hill outside the city the next morning.

Above the compound there is a small hill, perhaps a thousand feet high, up which young secretaries pelt in gym shoes after a heavy night. This is Legation Hill. In the early morning we set out to scale it, laden with heavy boots and all the impedimenta of our assumed trade... It took us twenty-five minutes to reach the top. “Archie used to do it in ten,” said Hugh, as panting and feeling sick, we sprawled on the summit, pretending to admire the extensive view of the suburbs of Kabul spread out below us. “He must be a superman.” “Not at all. He had to leave the Foreign Service because he drank too much.”

Hiring three Tajik guides, they set off for the Hindu Kush, ostensibly to climb Mir Samir at the top of the Panjshir Valley. However, after this ends in failure below the summit, they press on into the forbidding valleys of Nuristan, the wildest and remotest part of Afghanistan.

Only converted to Islam in the last years of the 19th Century, Nuristan, formerly Kafiristan, enjoyed a healthy viticulture. Unfortunately, they also robbed and murdered travellers from other parts of the country and were slowly being tooled up by the Russians in a bloody side chapter of the Great Game.

In 1895 the happy existence of the Kafirs as robbers, murderers of Muslims, drinkers of prodigious quantities of wine, keepers of slaves, worshippers of Imra the Creator, Moni the Prophet, Gish the War God and the whole Kafir pantheon with its sixteen principal deities, came to an end...

By the time Newby and his team have arrived in the valleys, the area is dry, but the older men recall the times before Abdur Rahman set out on jehad from Kabul to crush the Kafirs:

“We used to make wine and hunt bear. There was much killing in those days and I was a great swimmer but I do not remember that time with much pleasure. No there is no longer any wine made,” he said rather wistfully. The coming of Islam to Kafiristan seemed to have had the same deadly effect as Knox and the Reformation on Scotland.

Newby describes the magnificent scenery in loving detail and along with his self-deprecating sense of humour it is one of the great pleasures of this book. That said, despite the rugged beauty of Nuristan, Newby can’t help but feel that with the re-introduction of wine making the place would have been a paradise.

There’s obviously something about the mountains that gives him a thirst. On his way back, footsore and dehydrated all he can think about is the contents of a glass:

I dreamt of all the cool drinks I had ever had in my life. The ginger beer I had drunk as a child; foaming lager; draught Worthington; Muscadet kept in a stream until I was ready for it; pints of Pimms, buckets of ice...

Despite the hardships, Newby managed to write up his experiences into a classic of travel literature, the story of two men who set off to visit the Ramgul Katirs in Nuristan for no other reason than to satisfy their curiosity.

The Last Weekend by Blake Morrison

I got passed a review copy of this claustrophobic thriller a few months ago but only got around to reading it recently. An ultimately sinister take on the weekend in the country theme, The Last Weekend is a brilliant piece of writing.

Ian Goade and his wife Em are invited to stay for the summer bank holiday weekend with old university friends Ollie and Daisy. Narrating the story, Ian is quick to point out that Ollie and Daisy are a ‘golden couple’, both successful and rich, while it soon becomes apparent that Ian and Em are far from either.

Ollie resurrects a bet between the two men, made twenty years previously in which they play the best of three sports, the winner taking an insanely large amount of money from the other. Ian wins the first game, but unperturbed, Ollie takes everyone out for supper at the local fish restaurant close to the Norfolk cottage they’ve rented. He shows off, buying expensive wine:

...Ollie ordered a second bottle – a Chateau La Perle Blanche 1976. “When people talk bollocks about the greenhouse effect, I remember that summer,” he said, “The heatwave lasted six weeks...” “Steady with the drink,” Daisy said, as Ollie topped us up. “You’re driving.” “I’ll be fine,” Ollie said, laughing her off, “They haven’t introduced the breathalyser around here.”

But there’s a reason for his extravagance: Ollie has been diagnosed with a brain tumour and is convinced he’s dying. At least, that’s what Ian says, but as the story progresses, it becomes more and more difficult to work out whether Ian is delusional, or just not telling the truth. His alcoholic intake isn’t helping matters. Despite his protestations that he’s sober, they’re all knocking it back a fair bit:

On the dining table, there were five empty bottles, (one champagne, two reds and two whites), as well as two more in the living room. I found a cardboard box in the cupboard under the stairs and filled it as quietly as I could, adding an empty gin bottle (Ollie and I had been drinking G&Ts before supper) to fill the last space.

The dynamic is further upset by the arrival of Daisy’s artist friend Milo and his two daughters, pushing Ian into further misanthropy. Suspicious of Daisy’s feelings for Milo, he does something utterly unspeakable, before poisoning Ollie’s mind with suspicion. Over a twenty year old Glenmorangie, tanged with bitterness, he accuses them of having an affair. Ollie gets ridiculously drunk over supper, making snide comments at Milo and topping up everyone’s glasses:

I put my hand over the glass as Ollie tried to pour me a dessert wine but consented to the red. He filled his own glass at the same time, then half emptied it in one swig. Marooned at the head of the table, he looked lost...

When Ollie makes a bet with Milo that he can’t draw a good likeness of anyone with a pencil and paper and isn’t a real artist, Ian concludes that alcohol had mugged him and scarpered with his brains. It’s time for Ollie to go to bed:

Smiling and nodding, he grabbed the edge of the table with both hands, a manoeuvre that pivoted him into a standing position but also jerked the table. Several glasses tipped over. The wobble sent him lurching backwards but he steadied himself on the wall behind and, with great deliberation, like someone avoiding stepping on cracks, he made his way across the room and down the corridor.

Oh well, there’s still one more day of the bank holiday to come, and one more contest yet to play. Surely things can’t get any worse than they are already?

Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome

I remember reading, or at least starting to read, Jerome K. Jerome’s classic on idling about on the river when I was fourteen or thereabouts. A while back anyway. It’s certainly been nice to reacquaint myself with the text; Jerome is a joy to read at whatever age.

The plot, so much as there is one, involves J and his friends George and Harris (and Montmorency the dog) taking a fortnight off work so that they can boat up the river Thames from Kingston to Oxford. The following series of episodes see them amble upstream at a leisurely pace, bumping into fellow rivers users and reminiscing on journeys past while suffering inedible food and uncomfortable nights sleep on the floor of the boat.

The packing seems to go well enough though:

George suggested meat and fruit pies, cold meat, tomatoes, fruit, and green stuff. For drink, we took some wonderful sticky concoction of Harris's, which you mixed with water and called lemonade, plenty of tea, and a bottle of whisky, in case, as George said, we got upset. It seemed to me that George harped too much on the getting-upset idea. It seemed to me the wrong spirit to go about the trip in. But I'm glad we took the whisky. We didn't take beer or wine. They are a mistake up the river. They make you feel sleepy and heavy. A glass in the evening when you are doing a mooch round the town and looking at the girls is all right enough; but don't drink when the sun is blazing down on your head, and you've got hard work to do.

And Jerome is certainly in good company. Harris, certainly, knows how to sniff out a pub wherever he is. In fact, Harris has something of a reputation in this line:

I wonder now, supposing Harris, say, turned over a new leaf, and became a great and good man, and got to be Prime Minister, and died, if they would put up signs over the public-houses that he had patronised: "Harris had a glass of bitter in this house;" "Harris had two of Scotch cold here in the summer of `88;" "Harris was chucked from here in December, 1886." No, there would be too many of them! It would be the houses that he had never entered that would become famous. "Only house in South London that Harris never had a drink in!" The people would flock to it to see what could have been the matter with it.

Among his musings on history, other people and life on the river, J notes, after a good lunch, on the peculiarities of the human body, namely the control that our stomachs have over our brains:

It is very strange, this domination of our intellect by our digestive organs... after brandy, taken in sufficient quantity, it says, "Now, come, fool, grin and tumble, that your fellow-men may laugh - drivel in folly, and splutter in senseless sounds, and show what a helpless ninny is poor man whose wit and will are drowned, like kittens, side by side, in half an inch of alcohol."

Still, that would never happen to any of these stout fellows. Especially not Harris, left alone on the boat with the dog and the bottle of whiskey while J and George go off to the nearby village for supper. When they finally get back, Harris is behaving oddly:

There was an unaccountable strangeness about Harris. It was something more than mere ordinary tiredness. He pulled the boat against a part of the bank from which it was quite impossible for us to get into it, and immediately went to sleep... Oh, how delightful it was to be safe in the boat, after our trials and fears! We ate a hearty supper, George and I, and we should have had some toddy after it, if we could have found the whisky, but we could not. We examined Harris as to what he had done with it; but he did not seem to know what we meant by "whisky," or what we were talking about at all. Montmorency looked as if he knew something, but said nothing.

And so the book potters on, as the three slowly make their way to Oxford. Then in the pouring rain, they start to row back downriver. By the time they get to Pangbourne, the novelty of the trip has well and truly worn off. They leave the boat at a boathouse and hot foot it to the fleshpots of London the next time. Why, they are even back in time to stop at a capital little out-of-the-way restaurant... where you can get one of the best-cooked and cheapest little French dinners or suppers that I know of, with an excellent bottle of Beaune, for three-and-six...

Tropic of Ruislip by Leslie Thomas

One of the side-effects of writing a novel set in the 1970s is the occasional digression into material published at the time with an eye to catching the decade’s zeitgeist. I have previously found myself dissecting Tom Sharpe’s Wilt and recently dug out this novel from around the same period. The historical insight has been considerable. As has the growing conviction that the past really is another country...

More a loose set of vignettes than a structured novel, focused on a set of young families and their infidelities, snobberies and prejudices, Tropic of Ruislip follows the lives and loves of the better-heeled sort in Plummers Park, a new, flat-roofed executive estate outside Watford, on the right side of the Bakerloo Line.

The social highlight of the estate seems to be to a party at someone else’s house, where they get drunk and dance mournfully to Frank Sinatra. A bash at the Minnings’ involves the usual fumblings with other people’s spouses when Sinatra’s Songs for Swinging Lovers is put onto the record player, and everyone is getting tight:

People were bending this way and that, rolling and staggering too, with the dubious red and white wine that the Minnings provided, plus a bottle of scotch passed secretly around after being burgled from a locked cupboard.

Still, the evening isn’t without event. Susie Minning’s errant husband Doug appears with his West Indian girlfriend and her mates and the two groups eye each other suspiciously across the lounge carpet. It takes intervention from the Minnings’ revolting offspring to thaw things out when they appear with a tray of glasses:

...the little Minnings children appeared, charmingly bearing trays of small glasses filled with green liquid. “My God, they’ve found the crème de menthe,” shouted someone, and hands, black and white, came from all sides to grab the glasses, some to be sipped, but some, in that charged and alcoholic atmosphere, to be brazenly swallowed at a gulp. Screams and cries and bubbles followed immediately. People staggered for the kitchen, the bathroom and the toilet, or made for the open air, while clouds of bubbles great and small bounced and danced and squirted about the room. “Don’t drink it!” screamed Susie. “The little bastards! It’s Fairy Liquid!”

Finishing this book, I thought to myself that they don’t write fiction like this anymore. I can’t say that’s entirely a bad thing either.