Little Worlds
Have you read a book called The Sittaford Mystery, by Agatha Christie? It’s a standalone novel,
not one of the Poirot or Marple series. It is a murder mystery, the plot is an
intriguing one, and the solution to the mystery, while banal, makes perfect
sense. But its real attraction is the setting. It is midwinter in a little
settlement of half a dozen or so houses on Dartmoor, the snow is coming and the
place will soon be completely isolated. A gathering of neighbours messing about
with a Ouija board receive a message that a friend in Exhampton, the nearest
town, is dead. There are no telephones in Sittaford, and Major Burnaby decides
to brave the oncoming snow to walk the six miles over moorland to check up on
his friend.
The book isn’t Aggie’s best, but the first few pages,
introducing this little world of Sittaford, up on the moor and separated by the
weather from civilisation, are very intriguing. The reader is hooked in
minutes.
I have pretensions to being well read, but that is what they
are: pretensions. I like fiction, whether literary or lowbrow, which gives the
reader a little world in which to live. I think I may have mentioned before the
comforting thrill of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and the world of Victorian
and Edwardian London, hansom cabs rattling through the fog, the game’s afoot.
Probably a very big world in reality, but a cosy little one to the reader.
You might argue that all fiction provides such a little
world. I would respond that some does so more effectively than others.
Writers for children are arguably more aware of the
importance of the little world. I remember the weird and wonderful village of
Nutwood, where Rupert Bear and his pals lived, every character a different
animal, dressed up in archaic human clothes, like Larkin’s ‘fools in old-style
hats and coats’. Other characters of pure fantasy regularly featured, imps,
magicians, a ‘merboy’, and so on, but Nutwood was still a fully fledged
environment in which the reader could take refuge.
The Guardian columnist, Lucy Mangan, once wrote a glowing piece
on the Milly-Molly-Mandy books, by Joyce Lankester Brisley, about a little girl
in an idealised village in rural England. These were books for young children,
so it was in remarkably few words in relatively large print that the author
successfully conjured the little world. I remember reading one of them in
primary school, and noting with pleasure the pictorial maps of the village in
the endpapers of the book.
I loved the Just William books as a child. I was always glad
to get away to his genteel English village, with its vicar, its local
millionaire (Mr Bott with his intolerable spoilt daughter Violet Elizabeth),
the old barn which was the headquarters of William and his three pals, and the
cottage on the outskirts of the village where the eccentric artist Archie
lived. The fact that William’s household had servants, and that the village was
as far away as it could be from the little coalmining town of Cowdenbeath where
I lived, made not a whit of difference.
In adulthood, some of the most skilfully evoked worlds are
in crime fiction. I have already held forth on Colin Watson’s Flaxborough
novels, set in a fictitious and rather rough-and-ready Lincolnshire town. The
characters are like regulars in your local pub, albeit with a touch of the
grotesque added. With terrific skill and economy of words, Andrea Camilleri
summons up the environment of medium-sized-town Sicily in the Inspector
Montalbano novels. The merry band of idiosyncratic detectives, the malapropian
officer who mans the telephone and gets every caller’s name wrong, the hero and
his long-distance partner, become old friends within the first two books you
read. You can almost taste the delicious seafood which Salvo Montalbano gorges
in overblown and solitary lunches at Enzo’s trattoria, walk with him to the
flat rock by the sea to digest it all, and sit smoking with him and looking at
the same crab scuttling about the rock pools…
A more highbrow little world is provided by Anthony Trollope
in his Barsetshire novels, particularly the cathedral close of Barchester and
its squabbling inhabitants. Some of these were brilliantly adapted by the BBC,
but the books allow you to have your own picture of the place and its people.
Realms of gold.
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This reminds me that I live in a small world here in our
street in Cambridge, which I would immortalise in prose if I had the ability. I
have become particularly aware of it, strangely, on Wednesday nights when I put
the bin out. All is dark and quiet in the street, but I see the neighbours’
bins standing sentry outside their gates, Mary and Colin’s, across the road,
further up Anne and Geoff’s, Jim and Claire’s, and so on. This is probably the
only place I have lived in my adult life where I feel I belong.
Our house has a pleasant whitewashed appearance, with a
pointed front gable, and a bit of mock-Tudor stuff on the first floor. It used
to have climbing roses up the front wall, but we managed to kill them when we
put the block paving in. When I lived a couple of miles away in Chesterton, I
would sometimes see it out of the corner of my eye as I drove past on the
adjacent main road, and think, I wonder who is the ostentatious lout who lives
there? Then one day there was a For Sale board…
My old pal Kevin Connelly, following my regaling him with
some anecdote of our life in Cambridge, remarked that he felt that he had had a
deprived adulthood, not living in a town with Parkruns, settings of CP Snow
novels, the philosopher Wittgenstein’s grave, and so on. Further, he didn’t
have a local pub full of idiosyncratic characters, including a chimney sweep
who used to be a civil service mandarin and whose wife made him sleep in the
shed when he was drunk.
Speaking of Wittgenstein, around ten years ago there was a
news report that people were leaving pork pies on the great philosopher’s
grave. Around then, when Kevin and Barbara were visiting for the weekend, Kevin
and I decided to make a pilgrimage. I had mistakenly thought that the grave was
in St Giles’ churchyard a quarter of a mile from our house. When we got there,
we found a sign on the church noticeboard, observing that many visitors made
the same mistake, and informing us that the grave was to be found a mile or so
up the Huntingdon Road in the Ascension Parish Burial Ground, formerly the
Churchyard of St Giles and St Peter. As we made our way up the Huntingdon Road,
Kevin remarked that in fact it seemed more fitting to have to go a longer walk
for the pilgrimage. It felt more like a mission.
‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘Frodo and Sam, off to Mordor.’
We had a pint in The Grapes on the way back. Bonus.
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To come back to these literary little worlds, one might
argue that this is escapism. The most pernicious aspect of this accusation is
that it is true. But look at the news on the telly. War in Ukraine, the rich
getting richer and the poor getting poorer, the climate and the environment,
the possibility of another winter spike of COVID. By heaven, we have plenty to
escape from.
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