A Day's Pleasure and Other Tales E-Book

Nigel Heseltine

• Herausgeber: Parthian Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 347

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

'A restless shape-shifter from the mysterious Welsh Marches, Heseltine was as elusive in his idiosyncratic writing as in his extraordinary globetrotting life. It is good to have his work briefly pinned down in this groundbreaking collection for closer inspection.' – Professor M.Wynn Thomas Cariad County: a place of anarchy and farce, of the grotesque and the slapstick, of tragedy and violent comedy, where the local hunt is disrupted by a camel-riding hero, where the town hall burns down as the town cheers, a place haunted by grotesque revenants from the First World War. This is the world of Nigel Heseltine's short stories, fantastic fictions which lampoon and lament the slow decline of the once-powerful squires and landowners of mid-Wales, the very Montgomeryshire of which Heseltine (1916-1995) formed a part.

Leseprobe

Nigel Heseltine (3 July 1916 – 1995) was an author of travel books, short stories, plays, and poetry, as well as an agronomist for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Born in London in 1916, Heseltine was the son of composer Philip Heseltine, better known as Peter Warlock, and Minnie Lucy Channing, an occasional model for Augustus John, nicknamed “Puma”. He spent most of his childhood in Wales with Warlock’s mother and Welsh stepfather (Edith and Walter Buckley-Jones) at Cefynbryntalch, Montgomeryshire, and attended Shrewsbury School.

From 1937 through 1949, Heseltine’s poetry, stories and essays were published in a number of literary magazines and anthologies, including Wales, English Story, The Penguin New Writing, Modern Welsh Poetry, and The New British Poets. In 1938 Heseltine published Scarred Background, an account of his journey on foot through Albania the previous year, as well as a poetry pamphlet, Violent Rain. He married Natalia Borisovna Galitzine or Galitzina, an aristocrat in Budapest in 1938 and married four more times over the course of his life. During World War II he was in Dublin, working as a playwright and actor for the Olympia Theatre company. A collection of poems, The Four-walled Dream was published in 1941 by the Fortune Press and was followed in 1944 by some translations of Dafydd ap Gwilym’s poetry (Dafydd ap Gwilym: Selected Poems). Thirteen of his short stories were published by the Druid Press in 1946 as Tales of the Squirearchy, but a second planned collection, Tales of the Landless Gentry, was rejected by printers in 1947 on the grounds of obscenity and consequently never appeared. In the early 1950s, Heseltine was based in Rome and, in 1953, he published the novel The Mysterious Pregnancy.

After this, Heseltine largely reinvented himself as an agronomist and post-colonial development specialist, working in as many as thirty countries across Africa, South-East Asia, and the Indian and Pacific Oceans. In 1959 he published an account of crossing the Sahara on foot, From Libyan Sands to Chad, and was elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. A series of lectures Heseltine gave in the United States on African development were published in 1961 as Remaking Africa. Heseltine enjoyed a long relationship with Madagascar, and published a wide-ranging study of the island nation in 1971 (Madagascar). Heseltine fled the island during a coup in 1972. From 1974-77 Heseltine served as Governor of the Rodrigues Islands, before moving to Perth, Western Australia, in 1982. Capriol for Mother, a memoir of his father Peter Warlock, was published in 1992. Heseltine died in Perth on October 21st, 1995, aged 79

Contents

Introduction

A Day’s Pleasure

A Young Night of Love

Boring Story

Break Away If You Can

Cam-Vaughan’s Shoot

Constable’s Ruin

Data on the Squirearchy

Eve of Something Will Be Done in a Week

Flaming Tortoises

Generous Patrons

Gothic Halls

Homecoming

Lords A-Leaping

Milk of Human Kindness

Rich Relations

Skirt in Long Strips

The Lay Reader

The Life and the Burial

The Soldier’s Return

The Word Burning

Introduction

Nigel Heseltine crossed the Sahara Desert on foot (three times), trod the boards of Irish theatres such as the Abbey in Dublin, fled a coup in Madagascar and was at the heart of Welsh literary circles in the 1930s. He was hated by Dylan Thomas, employed by Idi Amin, and once used the office of the then Senator John F. Kennedy. Along with a number of short stories set in a fictive rendering of the Montgomeryshire countryside in which Heseltine grew up, he published a novel, two volumes of poetry, memoirs of travels in Albania and Africa, a study of Madagascar, and texts on post-colonial development and administration. In its globe-spanning extremity, Heseltine’s life was larger than fiction.

Heseltine’s short fiction is also fascinating. This is the first time that the stories in Tales of the Squirearchy (1946) have been republished and the first time that these have been published alongside Heseltine’s uncollected stories. Cariad County, the imagined, exaggerated setting of Heseltine’s short fiction, features such surreal episodes as soldiers and medieval Welsh poets returning from the dead, a countryside hunt interrupted by the camel-riding Thwaite – a recurring character, who, in another story, takes pot-shots at competing sides of a different hunt – and fictive characters coming to life before their author’s eyes. Cariad is the site of comedy and farce, tragedy and violence; it is a Wales rendered both in realist and surrealist ways. The stories both lampoon and lament the anglicised, rural Welsh gentry from which Heseltine himself hailed, the so-called ‘Squirearchy’. Heseltine’s squires inhabit a declining and disintegrating world, the gentry class clinging desperately to their estates and titles, to their codes of behaviour and ways of life. Heseltine captures all the subtleties and oddities of this world in its dying throes. Yet, today, the globe-trotting Nigel Heseltine remains virtually unknown. Who was Nigel Heseltine?

Even the circumstances of his birth are mysterious. Heseltine was the son of the composer Peter Warlock (real name Phillip Heseltine), and Heseltine’s birth certificate states he was born in Middlesex Hospital, London, on the 3 July 1916, though Warlock only officially registered his son’s birth in January of 1930.1 Initially, baby Nigel was boarded with an Irish family (the Hallidays) in Surrey, but was then retrieved, at the age of around 15 months, by his grandparents: Walter and Edith Buckley-Jones, of Cefnbryntalch Hall, near Llandyssil, Montgomeryshire. Heseltine inherited his surname from Arnold Heseltine, Edith’s first husband, who had passed away in 1897. Edith then married Walter Buckley-Jones in 1903. The Buckley-Joneses were members of the anglicised land-owning gentry class in Wales and the magnificent surroundings, esoteric individuals, and eclectic events of this rural Welsh upbringing would go on to inform Nigel Heseltine’s anarchically comedic and often surrealist short fiction.

Heseltine was treated as ‘the Heir’ to the estate by his grandmother, who had given up on her son, Warlock, as a hopeless eccentric. Letters from Heseltine to his grandmother indicate the esteem and affection in which he held her throughout his childhood and early adulthood.2 Peter Warlock died in a gas-filled Chelsea basement in December 1930, probably by his own hand; the jury reached an open verdict, unable to decide whether the death was suicide or a tragic accident. Nigel Heseltine was just 14 years old when his father died. In his 1992 biography of Warlock, Capriol for Mother, Heseltine alleged that Bernard van Dieran, a composer and sole beneficiary of Warlock’s will, had in fact poisoned him. Despite the loss of his father at a young age, Heseltine enjoyed a luxurious upbringing of yacht holidays off the coast of Scotland, as well as private schooling, and hunting on the estate. In 1935, Heseltine was awarded a scholarship to Sandhurst, but left before being commissioned. Fearing he would turn into a version of his dissolute father, Edith Buckley-Jones managed to plant Heseltine in a ‘safe’ office job in London in 1936.

In 1938, Heseltine’s first poetry collection, the pamphlet Violent Rain, was published by the small letterpress and printers, the Latin Press. The previous year, he had travelled to Albania, toured the country on foot, contracted dysentery, and travelled through northern Italy before returning to Wales briefly to allow his grandparents to nurse him back to health. A travel memoir based on his Albanian adventures, Scarred Background: a journey through Albania, was published by the Lovat Dickson Press shortly after Violent Rain in 1938, and by August of that year, Heseltine was in Budapest, Hungary, where he married Princess Natalia Galitzine. Heseltine was not quite his debauched father, but a settled life in an office job was not what the young writer seemed to have in mind. By June 1939 he had returned to Wales, bringing his wife and baby daughter (Elizabeth) to be looked after by his grandmother. He sequestered himself in a separate part of the manor house and focused on his literary work.

In Wales, Heseltine enjoyed social and literary connections with other major Welsh writers of the time, including Lynette Roberts and Dylan Thomas. For his part, Dylan Thomas “intensely” disliked Heseltine, as he admitted to Keidrych Rhys in a June 1937 letter.3 In a letter sent to Vernon Watkins in July 1937, Thomas promised that he would “rid” Wales of Heseltine.4 Thomas wrote the letter assuming he would take over editorship of Wales in 1938; somewhat ironically, Thomas never did, but Heseltine edited a number of issues of the magazine in late 1939 – even after Thomas had demanded that Rhys cease publishing Heseltine. For his part, Heseltine included a limerick which pilloried Thomas in a November 1937 letter to Rhys, and seemed to enjoy mocking and antagonising the far more widely established writer:

A young fellow of Swansea called Tummas

creates a disturbance among us,

with a purgative pill

he produces at will

effects that are published by some ass.5

It seems that Thomas’s dislike of Heseltine was not just artistic but also personal; Thomas referred to Heseltine as “Nasty Heseltine” in a September 1938 letter to Vernon Watkins.6

Indeed, some of Thomas’s dislike seems to stem from a short story Heseltine submitted to Wales in 1937, ‘The Drunk’. Thomas was virulent in his criticism of the story, describing it as

so worthless from every aspect, so transparently an adolescent fake without either the excuse of adolescence or the intelligence to be even moderately, accomplished charlatanism, that it doesn’t matter at all. It can’t matter, because it isn’t there; there’s nothing there except the knock-kneed and bilious shadow of weak bad-taste indifferently cultivated.7

No story titled ‘The Drunk’ ever appeared in Wales and no story of that name appears among the tales Heseltine completed for his two intended collections. By way of contrast with Thomas, Glyn Jones, another key figure in Wales’s success and an accomplished short story writer himself, told Rhys (twice) he would “certainly” print ‘The Drunk’.8 ‘The Drunk’ may be an early version of a Heseltine story published in Tales of the Squirearchy and included in this edition, ‘Constable’s Ruin’. In it, a drunken poet with “swollen lips”, who is “acclaimed in the USA and abuses his own kind”, roams Cariad County’s “Port Harlot” on a night out with the recurring character Thwaite and a policeman. The poet frequently slurs his speech, admits to having “a pot-belly” which is “full o’ beer”, and is dressed “like a Bangor student”. Quite what Heseltine thought Thomas’s connection with Bangor was is unclear, but, if this is a portrait of Thomas – and it seems likely, given Heseltine’s limerick about a young fellow called “Tummas” – then it is not a flattering one. It may well have been the root of Thomas’s intense hatred of Heseltine, yet Keidrych Rhys – and other Welsh writers, like Glyn Jones – clearly saw some promise in the young writer. As noted, Rhys entrusted Wales’s editorial duties to Heseltine for a brief period and Rhys’s independent press, the Druid Press, would publish Heseltine’s Tales of the Squirearchy in 1946, the same year in which they also published the debut poetry collection of another young Welsh writer charting the decline and difficulties of the Welsh countryside (albeit the decline of the working class), R.S. Thomas’s The Stones of the Field.

Following the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Heseltine signed up with the RAF. However, after a final visit to Keidrych Rhys and Lynette Roberts in their Carmarthenshire home in December 1939, Heseltine next appeared in Dublin, in the 1940s. Here, Heseltine studied medicine (supposedly) at Trinity College, published translations of Dafydd ap Gwilym’s poems with the help of the noted Irish writer Frank O’Connor’s Cuala Press, contributed articles and reviews to major Irish journals of the day, such as Envoyand The Bell, and adopted the name ‘Michael Walsh’. Under that pseudonym, Heseltine co-founded a theatre company with Shelagh Richards, called Richards-Walsh Productions, and wrote, produced and performed in productions across the Olympia, Gate, and Abbey Theatres. Heseltine enjoyed social and cultural connections with major figures in Dublin; including major playwrights such as Sean O’Casey and even the well-known novelist Erskine Childers, who would one day become the fourth President of Ireland. Considerable mystery surrounds Heseltine’s time in Dublin, though he may have worked as a British spy and, at some point, he married for the second time. In 1946, following the deaths of his grandparents, he returned to Wales to sell the estate of Cefnbryntalch. In the same year Keidrych Rhys’s Druid Press published his short story collection Tales of the Squirearchy, but his second collection, ‘Tales of the Landless Gentry’, was rejected by the printers (The Cambrian News) on the grounds of obscenity. Following this, Heseltine left Wales. With the exception of his 1953 novel The Mysterious Pregnancy, Heseltine would not publish any further creative writing. He wrote several unpublished novels over the course of his life and revised the tales that comprised ‘Landless Gentry’ shortly before his death in Perth, Australia, in 1995.

Following his departure from Wales Heseltine travelled extensively throughout Europe, before joining the Food and Agriculture Organisation at the United Nations in 1951. He was subsequently involved in development projects in at least thirty different countries across Africa and South East Asia. In 1959, Heseltine published his second travel memoir, From Libyan Sands to Chad, an account of his third crossing of the Sahara Desert, and in April of that year, was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. In the following year, 1960, Heseltine delivered lectures on African development under the auspices of the African-American Institute in universities across the United States, apparently at the invitation of then Senator John F. Kennedy, whose office in Congress Heseltine was allowed to use. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Heseltine continued working across Africa, including a brief stint as a technical adviser to Idi Amin, though Heseltine was mostly based in Madagascar (where he married for the third time, this time the daughter of a Madagascan chieftain). Heseltine published a far-ranging study of Madagascar (Madagascar, 1971), the dust-jacket of which describes him as an Irish citizen (contributing to his reputation as an international man of mystery), a graduate of both Dublin University and the London School of Economics, advisor to the Madagascar Plan Commission, “occasional adviser to the Mauritius Government”, a former “Under-Secretary in charge of Development Planning in Zambia” and, from 1968 onwards, “economic adviser to the President of Madagascar”. Even this brief summary is testament to Heseltine’s impressive array of occupations and accomplishments.

In the midst of a Communist coup in 1972, Heseltine barely escaped Madagascar with his life. He did rescue his personal poetry collection, and the majority of his father’s notebooks and papers, which he donated to the British Library in 1973. They form the most important Peter Warlock collection in the world. Heseltine later moved to Australia, where he spent the remainder of his life and married for (apparently, at least) the fifth time. Heseltine never really retired, working for the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, delivering lectures, dipping into local politics, revising his 1940s short fiction, and publishing a memoir of his father’s life, Capriol for Mother, in 1992. Heseltine delivered a lecture on his father in Wales in 1994, and professed a desire to return to Wales and keep working, though he died in Perth in 1995 at the age of 79.

It is perhaps unsurprising, given the nature of his life and his professed desire to return to Wales, that exile and return are prominent themes in Heseltine’s writing. The final story in Tales of the Squireachy and the shortest in the collection, ‘The Soldier’s Return’, is also the most realist of the collection, and is directly concerned with the idea of the return home. Elizabeth, a young woman, sits with Mrs. Vaughan-Thomas, waiting to meet Rhys, a young man who has been away at war. Hal, the older brother of Rhys and, it is implied, Elizabeth’s husband, has died. In “some other room” in the house, a third, youngest son, Owen, who “has pictures of Communist Russia all over his walls”, is playing “dreadful revolutionary songs” on the piano; these are later mocked by Mrs. Vaughan-Thomas as being an expression of “bim bam bim bam, workers unite!”, situating the story in the turbulent politics of the 1930s. While Owen plays the piano, the family’s maids “tread on their tired servant’s feet” in the carpeted passages; Heseltine ironically juxtaposes the privileged young squire playing communist anthems with the laborious “to and fro” of the lower-class servants. Despite this clear class imbalance, the servants are “so glad” that Rhys is returning home; the servants are “devoted to him”, suggests Mrs. Vaughan-Thomas, while they dislike Owen’s “familiar manners”. Heseltine allows his readers to view the complex class dynamics of this gentry household with an insider’s eye.

As well as establishing the privilege of this household, Heseltine also situates the story within the traumatised inter-war years, specifically, the late nineteen-thirties. Elizabeth suggests to Mrs. Vaughan-Thomas that Owen will “grow out of” toying with revolutionary music and communist politics, yet “the old woman” (as Mrs. Vaughan-Thomas is repeatedly called) responds “Rhys didn’t grow out of it… Going off to fight in someone else’s war. That had nothing to do with him: (What has Spain to do with us?)”. It is never clear how Hal died, but it seems that Rhys is returning to Wales having volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Hal’s absence and Rhys’s return point to a decidedly feminine household, as does the description of servants as “maids”. There are no husbands or fathers in this household, only maids, young sons, wounded veterans and widows. What masculinity exists is damaged or immature.

Rhys’s return is a violent interruption rather than a heart-warming reunion and his first words set the tone: “Stop that bloody row!” he shouts, presumably at Owen’s piano-playing. Rhys is described immediately by the narrator as “lame”; he looks at the floor as he walks, and is “not like he was before”. His family are horrified when they see he has lost a leg:

“Yes!” he shouted, “My bloody wooden leg! Thirty pounds of real wood,” and he slapped it so that they all looked in horror at his leg and the wooden sound that came out of it. […]

His leg creaked as he sat down and he looked from one to another of them.

“Stare at the bloody thing! Go on, look!” he pulled up his trouser leg and showed an inch of it.

Owen looked away.

In his anger, Rhys flaunts his missing leg at his family. The revelation is phrased in almost obscene terms, with Rhys’s physical trauma a source of shock for the assembled household. There is an unsettling focus on not only the physical cost of war, but also on the psychological burdens faced by the returning soldier:

His mother began to talk quickly about the people she knew, and local happenings; anything so long as it was to talk, to fill in, to cover up […] Rhys didn’t hear a word, no one expected him to.

In this story, exile is not enforced, but voluntary: Rhys chooses to fight in a war which his mother believes has nothing to do with them.

This soldier’s return is traumatic not just for the physically and psychologically scarred soldier, it is also traumatic for Elizabeth, who seeks a replacement for Hal; for Owen, whose implied romanticism of the Spanish left’s struggle against Franco is shattered by the reality of his returning brother; and for Rhys’s mother, who desperately attempts “to fill in, to cover up” the physical and mental wounds Rhys returns with. The essentially feminine household struggles to contain Rhys and Rhys is ill at ease with domesticity. He refuses his mother’s offer of tea and briskly demands whisky; she pours out “a finger holding the bottle and the glass high, like medicine”, as if the alcohol may cure Rhys. Rhys pours himself “half a glass” and drinks it neat, before Mrs Vaughan-Thomas attempts to elide this trauma by discussing the events in the local area; but Rhys “didn’t hear a word; no-one expected him to.” The soldier’s return is left unsettlingly incomplete, with Rhys physically present but mentally and emotionally absent.

This very brief story achieves its dispiriting and discomfiting tone by creating an abrupt turn. By beginning with Owen’s anarchic, almost comedic “bim-bam” of leftist anthems and the anxious, yet joyous anticipation of Rhys’s return, the story suggests a romanticisation of conflict. The title, the soldier’s return, is, on the surface, seemingly unproblematic in its promise of a return to domesticity. Elizabeth, who has never met Rhys, implicitly views Rhys as a replacement for her lost husband, Hal: “Elizabeth said he [Rhys] would probably find some girl, and marry her”. Again, there is the subtle suggestion of a settled future for Rhys and Elizabeth. Yet, the combination of anger, frustration and silence that comprise the returned Rhys suggest not just an ambivalence towards war, but an uncompromising disgust – embodied in the heavily disaffected Rhys – towards the glorification of conflict suggested by Owen’s music at the start.

The brief story also hints towards the decline of the anglicised gentry. They only have maids left to serve in the household; the oldest son, Hal, is dead; the next eldest traumatised and wounded, and Owen is both young and perhaps improper (his “familiar manners” with the servants imply as much). In this short, subtle story, Heseltine captures the intricacies of his landed background. Indeed, elements of Heseltine’s life bubble beneath the surface of this tale. The repeated descriptions of the “old woman” as the mother of the household bring to mind Heseltine’s formidable grandmother, the only motherly figure in his life. Heseltine, like his father, did not actively serve in any conflicts. In his editorial to issue 10 of Wales (published in October 1939) Heseltine describes war as “the catastrophe which has been our nightmare since we first heard from our fathers and elder brothers of what war is”; war, in Heseltine’s lifetime, was handed from one generation to the next, the past an inescapable reality in the present. As the Second World War breaks out, Heseltine uses the editorial to reinforce this sense of collective responsibility, concluding that fascism (at home and abroad) “is what we shall have to fight if we are to live.” And yet, Heseltine spent the war years in the Irish Free State, a neutral nation. As ‘The Soldier’s Return’ testifies, war and its after-effects seemed unavoidable – even in the fading opulence of Cefnbryntalch – but the scepticism and disgust expressed in this story are, perhaps, indicative of a man who wished to escape the seemingly inescapable.

Heseltine’s Cariad County is repeatedly marked by the memory of war. In ‘Data on the Squirearchy’, for example, a war memorial is the most significant landmark of the village. It is situated in the centre of the village, is home to the village clock and is mentioned several times in the story. With “carved names representing bones and unlived lives”, next to which “young men meet, and whistle and talk about girls”, it is also seemingly the place around which the village’s masculinity is centred: the girls, we are told, “have their conversations too, elsewhere”. In the same story, an “ex-soldier” who lost his hand at Gallipoli and who “would never have any children” looks after a young boy, Thwaite (a recurring character in Heseltine’s stories). Mr. Thwaite, the young Thwaite’s father, has “a hole in his head and he limps”, both disfigurements a result of the Great War. This same soldier appears in ‘The Life and the Burial’, in the shape of “a lame man trepanned from the war of ’14.” During the course of a drinks party, this ‘lame man’ is continually referred to in disfigured, alienating terms: “no man is normal with a hole in his head”, the ‘lame man’ has a “battered spine” and a “plate under” his “black velvet cap”. As in ‘Data on the Squirearchy’, this old soldier is Thwaite’s father, though by the time of ‘The Life and the Burial’ Thwaite is now a young man.

For Thwaite, the gentry garden-party that forms the initial setting of the latter story is a matter of “endurance”; by extension, so too is the upper-middle-class lifestyle Thwaite and the gentry experience. If the codes of behaviour that underpinned the Welsh gentry are subtly explored in ‘The Soldier’s Return’, then in ‘The Life and the Burial’ they are more openly mocked. Indeed, the mixture of the surreal, mockery, humour, social and sexual tensions are recurring tropes throughout Heseltine’s fiction. The seemingly dim-witted Miss Menzies, subject to Thwaite’s near-predatory attraction, “thought as she should think”. She thinks as a good gentry girl should and, given her description as “bone-faced”, Miss Menzies is seemingly not capable of much thought at all. Thwaite’s pursuit of Miss Menzies is couched in surreal, grotesque terms, another favoured technique of Heseltine’s: Thwaite (imaginatively) “slipped the skin from her and looked at her organs”. The fading glory of the gentry is more prominent, with the unnamed hostess and her cousin, Cam-Vaughan, bickering over the mortgage. The “long unpaid” mortgage demonstrates the financially precarious nature of this gentry household, while the fact it is a “family matter” – with Cam-Vaughan chasing payments his cousin cannot afford – suggests the gentry’s decline is also cannibalistic. Cam-Vaughan’s covetous nature is present time and again across the stories and is effectively a universal condition of the squirearchy. Cam-Vaughan’s dismissal of the Welsh-speaking Mr. Bach (“It is rot”, Cam-Vaughan says of the Welsh language) also indicates the superficiality of the anglicised gentry, who care not for the language and culture of the declining world they rule. Ironically, the Welsh-speaking Mr. Bach is a parson for the Anglican Church in Wales, pointing to the reach of anglicised institutions.

Typical of these stories, in ‘The Life and the Burial’ the relationship between the past and the present is unsettled, with the past impinging on the present in numerous ways. One elderly guest, Mrs. Golos-Williams, reminisces about the Edwardian era of “dragoons” and “frilly parasols”. Set against this nostalgia is the lame man, a haunting and destabilising presence who brings the trauma of the trenches into the comfortable garden-party. Both characters create the sense that the gentry are of another world; one which has entered an irrevocable decline but which still lingers on, attempting to defy or ignore the violence, crises and passage of time which have afflicted the wider world. As with Rhys Vaughan-Thomas, it is the figure of the returned soldier that disassembles the gentry’s pretences.

The lame man dies in the seat of his car as he attempts to leave the party, and there is, in the narrative voice, an element of scepticism towards conventional, Christian attitudes to death:

The lame man is in Church and is prayed for, he will make journeys on the shoulders of other men before he is committed to what Mr.Bach will call ‘rest’ in the trench in the earth which will bring about the collapse of his wooden coffin and the decay and the absorption of the flesh of his body.

The tone in which Mr. Bach’s notion of Christian ‘rest’ is described implies disbelief, and the narrator is in no way uncertain about the grotesque fate of the corpse. The funeral congregation is comprised of the gentry establishment: the “Lord Lieutenant, Chief Constable, High Sheriff and Sheriff, the Archdeacon, a baronet, two knights, many gentlemen entitled to bear coat armour, and their wives” are in attendance (note the gender imbalance in this hierarchy). Among these are Mrs. Golos-Williams, who remarks “how dreadful” it is for the unnamed hostess that the lame man died at her party, and thinks chiefly that the death is punishment for Thwaite’s immoral behaviour. Cam-Vaughan, busies himself scrawling “figures” in his prayer-book, presumably tabulating the debts owed by his cousin. Thwaite himself is drunk on brandy, and attempts to flirt with a “pretty cousin” despite the occasion. The superficial, amoral nature of the gentry is paralleled by “the empty box” and the “hollow sound” of the coffin, as well as the nihilistic language of the funeral service, as Mr. Bach says: “That which is empty shall remain empty.” The grief of the good and great is meaningless and their presence at the funeral is for appearances’ sake only.

The grave is referred to as “the trench in the earth”, this physical rupture in the landscape a deliberate reminder of the lame man’s war-time past, as well as the ways in which that past remains present. The lame man returns from beyond the grave, interrupting and haunting the establishment mourners. This return is not some kind of hallucination on the part of Thwaite, but rather a supernatural event which the entire funeral audience witnesses:

The lame man came to the edge of the grave and threw in a wreath of grass bearing on the label “An empty box,” in his own handwriting. And many people saw him, and they went very white and said nothing.

Eventually the lame man leaves, “away up the hill and disappeared as the dead should”. Stylistically distinct from ‘The Soldier’s Return’, yet still exploring conditions of return and exile, the ending of ‘The Life and the Burial’ is a surreal episode which, along with other stories collected in this volume, marks Heseltine as a contemporary of other experimental Welsh writers, such as Dylan Thomas and Glyn Jones. Such visions of death and resurrection recur across Welsh modernist writing, as M. Wynn Thomas has suggested.9 The revenant is a figure with roots in anxiety, as Thomas argues, and I would suggest that Heseltine’s lame man is a literary embodiment of the psychologically and physically scarred soldiers that returned from wars throughout Heseltine’s lifetime. In this sense, it is the surreal manifestation of the tensions and anxieties embodied in the similarly “lame” Rhys Vaughan-Thomas: not just the recurring trauma of war, but the increasingly fraught and uncertain circumstances of the squirearchy, as well as their own moral failings.

Return, exile and home are not just present in Heseltine’s war-stories. Heseltine’s sole published novel, The Mysterious Pregnancy, revolves around a cast of émigré English, Welsh, Irish and American characters in mid-20th century Paris. The primary protagonist of the novel, Lu Rienzi, is pregnant as the result of an affair, and has fled to Paris to escape her husband and to search for the father of her child. Over the course of her time in Paris, Rienzi meets other exiled figures, like Sara Blake, a young Irishwoman engaged in a pre-marital love affair; Sara in turn meets Owen Blayney, an older man who grew up, like Heseltine, in rural Wales. Blayney describes his childhood home as “an old red brick house on a hill near a river, with an oak wood on three sides of it, and rookery. You can hear the rooks cawing home in the evening”. Even this description plays with the idea of the return home, “cawing home” a pun on ‘coming home’. Blayney’s red brick childhood home is certainly a fictional rendering of Cefnbryntalch Hall, the opulent, though declining, rural Welsh estate in which Heseltine grew up. By 1953, the year in which The Mysterious Pregnancy was published, Heseltine had been away from Wales for over a decade, and had sold his childhood home in 1946. The pain of Blayney’s exile may reflect some of Heseltine’s feelings at this time: “What did rooks cawing home mean, when they covered a whole lost country of love and promise; what the red house, but a betrayed face, a childhood, manhood betrayed”. While Blayney’s painful past is firmly located, he now lives in a “rootless present”, the condition of aged emigrant bestowing upon him a sense of exile. Wales, or the Montgomeryshire estate of Heseltine’s childhood at least, are a “whole lost country of love and promise”. Heseltine’s single published novel may, on the surface, appear to have little to do with the short fiction collected in this volume, yet Owen Blayney’s moving tribute to rural Wales seems redolent of a man who, for all the distance of space and time, has never moved on from that “old red brick house on a hill”.

The sense of a declining, disintegrating rural Welsh past is most strongly captured in ‘Homecoming’. The story reads as a longer, more detailed exploration of the regrets and longing articulated by Owen Blayney, as Idris Brain returns from America to a Welsh countryside where “everything is small and falling to bits”. Like Heseltine’s and Blayney’s childhood homes, Idris Brains’ home is surrounded by rooks: “The rooks stayed. They cawed round the house, built their nests, did a shillingsworth of damage and eighteenpennorth of good, as ever”. The ‘squirearchy’ at the heart of Heseltine’s short fiction are now all dead or dying, as Brain notes: “And Lord Jones, too, another loss for Wales: another madman the less for poor old Wales”. The setting is the same Cariad County as many of Heseltine’s stories; the narrator another prodigal son, returning to a crumbling estate his family have since sold, to a Wales which is now empty: “No one seems to live here at all […] No one in the fields moved about the fields. No dogs barked, no hens crowed nor crows cawed.” As with Blayney, painful but endearing childhood memories mark Brain’s line of thought: “on my heart lay the ache of dear childhood lost.” ‘Homecoming’ is the imagined version of the return to Wales Heseltine desired throughout his life, with his “inheritance fastened to [him] like a chain, pulling [him] back from across the world”.

Letters in the National Library of Wales suggest that ‘Homecoming’ was potentially one of Heseltine’s earliest stories and that Keidrych Rhys considered some version of the story for publication in his independent magazine Wales in 1937.10 From his early adulthood, as he first began to rove the world – first London, then Albania, then beyond – it seems Heseltine was attuned to conditions of exile and return. Beyond this, though, Heseltine was particularly attuned to the codes-of-conduct and failings of his gentry world, as well as the wider traumas of the modern era. Heseltine depicts and constructs his squirearchy with an insider’s eye and from first-hand experience of its dying days. The results are stories that are both playful and precise, which range from anarchically humorous to starkly surreal to subtle and fine-drawn, even mournful, in the world they capture and construct.

At the heart of this work is Cefnbryntalch, Heseltine’s Welsh home; the home he grew up in among dogs and hunts; the home he returned to in times of trouble; the home in which he edited a radical, independent Welsh magazine; the home he brilliantly rendered, time and again, as Cariad County. It’s fitting, then, that it’s an independent Welsh publisher, Parthian, who, much like Druid Press before them, are giving Heseltine an outlet; a return; a homecoming.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Stories

Nigel Heseltine, Tales of the Squirearchy (Carmarthen: Druid Press, 1946) [includes ‘Cam-Vaughan’s Shoot’, ‘The Life and the Burial’, ‘Eve of Something Will Be Done In A Week’, ‘Milk of Human Kindness’, ‘Data on the Squirearchy’, ‘Gothic Halls’, ‘Boring Story’, ‘Skirt in Long Strips’, ‘The Word Burning’, ‘Lords A-Leaping’, ‘Rich Relations’, ‘Constable’s Ruin’, ‘The Soldier’s Return]

‘The Lay Reader’, Wales No. 8/9, August 1939.

‘Flaming Tortoises’, Wales vol 24, Winter 1946.

‘Break Away If You Can’, The Penguin New Writing 28, Summer 1946.

‘Homecoming’, Celtic Story 1, ed. Aled Vaughan (Pendulum Publications, 1946).

‘A Day’s Pleasure’, The Penguin New Writing 32, 1947.

‘A Young Night of Love’ in English Stories Eighth Series ed Woodrow Wyatt, 1948.

‘Generous Patrons’ in English Stories Ninth Series ed Woodrow Wyatt, 1949.

Other works by Nigel Heseltine

Violent Rain (London: The Latin Press, 1938)

Scarred Background: a journey through Albania (London: Dickson & Lowell, 1938)

The Four-walled Dream (London: Fortune Press, 1941)

Dafydd ap Gwilym: Selected Poems (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1944)

The Mysterious Pregnancy (London: Gollancz, 1953)

From Libyan Sands to Chad: an account of the author’s third journey across the Sahara Desert (London: Museum Press, 1959)

Remaking Africa (London: Museum Press, 1961)

Madagascar (London: Pall Mall Press, 1971)

Capriol for Mother: A memoir of Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock) (London: Thames, 1992)

THANKS & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Rhian Davies, Tony Brown, Tomos Owen, and M. Wynn Thomas for their support and guidance on all things Heseltine over several years.

Excerpts from Glyn Jones’ letter to Keidrych Rhys (September 1937, NLW MSS 22744D) are reproduced with permission from Literature Wales and the National Library of Wales.

The epigraph on the following page is taken from a letter Heseltine wrote to John Cowper Powys, which is held in the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth (Nigel Heseltine to John Cowper Powys, 7 August 1947, NLW MS 21873C). This is reproduced with permission from the National Library of Wales.

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1 Rhian Davies, “Scarred Background: Nigel Heseltine (1916-1995), A Biographical Introduction and a Bibliography”, Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays 11 (2006-2007).

2 Letters from Nigel Heseltine to Edith Buckley-Jones are held in the British Library: see HESELTINE PAPERS. Correspondence and papers of Philip Arnold Heseltine (the composer ‘Peter Warlock’, b.1894, d.1930) and related papers of his mother, Edith Buckley Jones née Covernton, widow of Arnold Heseltine; A. Correspondence: 57958-57964.

3 Dylan Thomas to Keidrych Rhys, June 1937, The Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas Volume 1: 1931-1939 edited by Paul Ferris (London: Weidenfield & Nicholson, 2017), pp. 289-290.

4 Dylan Thomas to Vernon Watkins, 15 July 1937, Collected Letters, p. 294.

5 Nigel Heseltine to Keidrych Rhys, 12 November 1937, NLW MSS 22744D – ‘Wales Papers’, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth.

6 Dylan Thomas to Vernon Watkins, 1 September 1939, Collected Letters, pp. 456-457.

7 Dylan Thomas to Keidrych Rhys, June 1937, Collected Letters, p. 289.

8 Glyn Jones to Keidrych Rhys, September 1937, NLW MSS 22744D – ‘Wales Papers’, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. In a second letter later the same month, Glyn Jones reiterates that he would publish ‘The Drunk’, telling Rhys “I don’t think I’m wrong about the story.”

9 M. Wynn Thomas, In the Shadow of the Pulpit: Literature and Nonconformist Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010).

10 Keidrych Rhys to Glyn Jones, 14 March 1936, Glyn Jones Papers A12/16, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth.

“I believe that somewhere there is always the link by which one may be drawn into living communication with readers. I think that if a work has true and sincere power, it will come out, even as these qualities come out in people.”

– Nigel Heseltine

A Day’s Pleasure

Tempers cooled suddenly, but rose again and burst like the pomegranates on the wallpaper, scattering the seeds of dispute about the house. We were going on a day’s pleasure, the house was too full, my mother was bilious, the car would not start for my father but roared for a moment in the yard, then spluttered and stopped.

There were already in the house, my uncle by marriage, ex-Governor of Bintang, and all his family who had returned from that island to find houses were not to be got for the mere clapping of hands and calling “boy.” Yet still letters came in at every breakfast from those others who wanted to come to our house. Uncle Percy wanted to come, being home from Burma, to do some fishing, and Uncle Brit. Therefore, when the cousins were down late to breakfast in our cold climate, the letters were handed round and my mother said:

“Percy can’t come, Watkin, and certainly not Brit!”

“The old fellow wants to see about his fishing at Glanavon,” my father said.

“He can stay at the public there!” Though we were miles from Glanavon.

A camp bed had been put where there was never a camp bed before, in an attic full of chests of drawers, burst screens and a knitting-machine, for the nurse, who, I was told in the kitchen, did not like her room at all.

I knew from the closeness of my mother’s eyes together (they had moved a good half-inch in the night) that she had a bilious attack, but she ran harder than ever up and down the stairs, clattering her keys and calling out to the maids to see that they were running too. As my father would often tell us, she never spared herself.

“Oh bother!” I heard her say as she turned a corner. My two cousins and I were stationed in the hall, having been got ready well before anyone else, since my mother had said we would start on our pleasure at eleven sharp and it was now half-past.