Great Uncle Ralph, a truncated arc.
1. The children of the school.
In the summer of 1916 Catherine Isobel Evans travelled onto the Continent to care for her sick brother. The family called her Kitty. She was twenty four years old and herself unwell, had been since her childhood in a big house near Newbury in Berkshire run as a private school by her parents. Her illness was of the languishing variety but she had unlanguished herself, trained as a masseuse, got herself to Victoria railway station and was now cruising ten foot above the ground through France on her way to Murren in Switzerland where Lieutenant Ralph du Boulay Evans had been interned that spring on promise of good behaviour.
The railway carriage was fitted out in blue. Blue cushions slung from tapes served as auxiliary headrests. Kitty had her back to the engine believing as she did that this was the best protection against flying smuts if the gentleman in the opposite corner should decide to air the compartment for example. At the moment he was peeling an apple with a small gilt pen-knife, allowing the uncoiling yellow tail to drop onto a napkin at his side.
There had been a chatty middle aged couple in the compartment but they had de-trained at Troyes at the end of the first day’s slow, shunting travel. They had furnished Kitty with her first real close up of foreigners for, when her family went on ski-ing holidays to the Alps, she stayed at Horris Hill (as the school was called) and, profiting by the families absence, heard herself a little better in the silence they left behind. There was only the man who looked after the woods, on guard so to speak, and his sister who brought her ingenious plates contrived of particles of the diet she was recommended, wood mushrooms and local ham, nettle soup with a flavoursome sole to follow. If she felt well enough she would practice the piano. If it was fine she would go and creep by one of the great beds plumped out with dark leaved shrubs that ran alongside the games lawn to the woods which fell down in a broken tumble to Newton Common.
Kitty believed that it was a great deal because of the woods, and the freedom they represented, that her father had taken the enormous gamble of buying the estate. He must have known that the effective and disciplined running of the school would need to be balanced by the vagaries, the indecencies even, of wild nature. Having bought the estate on borrowed money Alfred Henry Evans secured the hand of Isobel Aimée du Boulay, daughter of a house-master at Winchester public school. He built his clientele carefully and well, it was said that he refused three boys for every one he accepted, his summer tours as a first-class cricketer to the lawns of the great houses of England spread the word, the fees were lower than the norm and the masters wages higher. His model succeeded. Vigorous Evans put his young bride to the task, Isobel took care of the hotel side and the boys who cried at night. The first four years she birthed a child each autumn then she rested for four years and then squeezed out three more in the next twelve years.
Kitty was the youngest of the first batch, Ralph was a year older. Her history was simple: she had had whooping cough when she was hardly out of nappies. When she reached fourteen her mother explained several things to her about her body and told her that she had read in the Times that the bacteria that had caused her illness had just been named: bordetella pertussis. Kitty found out for herself that this animal produces what an American journalist called gunk which blocks the tiny fleshy fronds in the lungs from waving clean the air, thus her brain did not get the oxygen it needed and only weak signals could be sent to her legs and getting about became exhausting. She used crutches sometimes.
Bordetella pertussis tuss, tuss, french for cough. From an upstairs window brother Ralph watched Kitty drag herself to the woods. He had been busy classifying the oak stair treads, neat lines ruled in a notebook and a set of symbols invented according as to how they were worn and stained. He pushed a drawing pin into the tread to mark his place, turned his back on his invented task and caught up with Kitty at the edge of the wood. She heard him come up and turned her face towards him. Because her shoulders hunched a little it made the big, pale face with the downturned mouth and the shadowed eyes even bigger, her soft hair piled up a little haystacky, Ralph would say if asked to classify. He pushed the gate to the wood open and she rocked through and already it was shadier. Together they dodged and swooped the first twenty yards of low hanging branches. Then, as the light fell back the trunks got taller and the ground began to be padded with leaf mould. They paused and listened to the witterings, the too-loos and scrapings of the birds and animals that lived, or passed through, the woods. From somewhere along the drive came the axle screech of a cart.
“…Foster?”
“…no, Green”
They looked back at the house, waiting for the nose to appear of whichever delivery van it turned out to be and there, rocking into view came the white box pulled by a pair. Ralph had been right: Green with the laundry. The turnover in sheets alone was enormous, they had a hard life, wrapping the twistings and scrabblings of forty boys between the ages of nine and fourteen. Brother and sister went on further into the wood, Ralph occasionally frisking over a fallen tree trunk or skidding deliberately on a mud patch, arms flailing and a curious gluey roar from his mouth. She dragged on behind, pleased he was showing off for her.
Like most of the male members of the family that she had ever heard of he was a Winchester College boy. He was not finding it so easy on the great spreading grounds, the rooms upon rooms and the wide corridors to lead the life of a tolerated solitary as he had been able to at home. So that coming back, now, the Easter break, walking with Kitty in the woods he recovered his spirits as they say, meaning I suppose, that he successfully inhabited every tiny particle of his fleshly envelope. He would have said, much later, meditating in his prison cell at Gutersloh that he was simply not obstructing the Great Wave.
“… subtraction, not addition”
That summer Kitty had a low patch and was kept in. She listened out for the sound of her brothers footfall. Her room faced out to the lawn so that she could watch the comings and goings and the swinging shadows of the great trees. She lay barely moving, just twirling her hair with one hand while Ralph climbed in through the window wearing his turban, a cloth he wound round his head and which she knew meant he’d come from the shed where he kept his museum as the family called it. He carried her out to the hollows known as The Pits. They lay in sand worried by flies, they held hands and looked each other in the eye and held their breath until one or the other had burst or swooned.
The nature of Ralph’s mind was such that it spun spiralling up into a personal imperium and down into the bowels of a self-made hell. To his brothers and sisters viewing this process from the outside, there were sparks whenever it touched their more static interests. Although he was now past that very special age when a boys mind is taken up with collecting and classifying, he would still at times of self-interrogation go back to the shelves in the shed and worry dry reed stalks through his fingers, open a glass case and straighten butterflies on their pins. Elder brother Johnnie told me once,
“…he was seldom in time for meals. Food did not interest him; he preferred eating between meals from pockets full of dry biscuits”
When I write Johnnie told me once I use a figure of speech. I never knew Johnnie but I inherited my mother’s copy of his autobiography Heir to Adventure self-published in 1961. Ralph (or Rayph as she pronounced the name) was her favourite uncle. He became in her scanty telling one of my touchstones for believing that there might be precedents for my take on the world. Another touchstone was great uncle Luke, on the other side of the family, who cast metal objects in a tarred shed on wheels and and distilled oil from coal in the orchard of The Cedars, Tibshelf. He went through the first world war as a sapper private. Bicycling home after a shift at the family coal mine he was knocked off his bicycle by the chauffeur of a lady golfer and died shortly afterwards. And there was my mother’s brother, Ronnie, drowned in the sinking of HMS Zulu in 1942, off the African coast. Whenever my sister and I had trivial complaints my mother would turn her stern, dark face on us and say, worse things happen at sea.
Back to Ralph and Kitty:
… locals would spot Ralph during the holidays at any time of day or night striding loose-limbed with a pack on his back. He had a new interest which got him away from his family: geology. He cultivated the ability to see beneath the ground and this habit led him into realms of mental concentration he had not imagined existed before. He would set himself at the edge of Newbury for example and uncover by eye mile by mile across to Leckhampstead. Then he would walk the route and put up his tent somewhere or other at the other end and look back in the morning at the land he’d trod. Or he would wind around the more complicated foldings up towards Basildon or on from Newbury out towards Coldash where the clay bulged out like a dragon mottled with gravels, intruding on the sandy loam. Ralph discovered that he had a mind that was affected by beauty in all its forms, from the graceful swoop of the girl who brought him cheese and pickles at his lunch spot to the heavy hanging darkness of the summer storms above Maidenhead.
The century was looking rather hopeful. In 1910 both suffragettes and post-impressionists were on the march, flyers in their rickety kites were staying longer up in the air and there was a change of kings. Ralph applied to the military school at Woolwich, he had the idea of being a sapper, but was turned down on health grounds. He swivelled ninety degrees north west and put in to read science and mathematics at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He was successful.
One day, coming out from a visit to the museums of South Kensington: rocks and dinosaurs and steam-engines and push button models and the pendulum slung forty feet up from the roof that advanced at each swing to prove the earths rotation, Ralph mistook his turn in the subway leading to the Underground railway and came up onto a foreign pavement. It was raining, women tripped along holding their skirts a little way up from the splashes caused by the boots of men and in front of Ralph was a poster showing a wavy sun with yellow arms and the legend Theosophy Society — free lecture here tonight. He went along, he delved into their imaginary cosmic layers. He became an adept and slept with a woman called Gladys he met in the rooms who shimmered in a curtain dress of mica discs. Women active in the suffragette movement were far more likely modern studies show to join the Theosophical Society than the general run of womenfolk. This would suggest that it is difficult to separate progressive thought from unfounded belief systems. Why men should be more resistant (to both) is another question but perhaps it could be put as the case of the conservative farmer versus free-blowing grain-filled winds.
*
The gentleman in the railway carriage had finished peeling his apple and was now eating it. The napkin with the curled and trembling peel lay on the seat next to him. As though to balance his activity Kitty fished a sachet of pills out of the breast pocket of the light tan overseas tunic effected by the Military Massage Corps.
The previous spring she had learnt that Ralph had been wounded in action and taken away by Germans at Ypres and she thought straight away of going out to him rather than just sending cake and comforts. She couldn’t help feeling her own shoulder when she thought of Ralph’s wound — how awful if he couldn’t play cricket (his name had got into Wisden the cricketer’s Bible).
When he wrote to say he was to be interned in Switzerland she bent her mind to the problem. It was old Garroway who told her about the Massage Corps because Garroway’s son had passed through their hands after the retreat from Mons in fourteen. He couldn’t say enough good about them,
“… angels, miss, simply angels”
Her parents gave their permission and she went up to London. What a bustle the training had been! She learnt, at last, about the human body, she was introduced to expensive apparatus for mecanotherapie, for faradization, for galvanisation. Lodging with other young women at a house in Stockwell she shared petty domestic inconveniences she had not known before, she became expert at gas-fire toast, she proved to be a good sort.
In the spring of 1916 Miss Manley of the Society of Trained Masseuses awarded her the necessary certificate. The Society had been set up to purge the profession of unsavoury associations. Its charter made it clear: a biomechanical model of physical rehabilitation was adopted to enable masseuses to view the body as a machine rather than as a sensual being.
The man in the corner of the train compartment was fussing with his gloves. Kitty thought she ought to speak, it was what she had been trained to do.
“… you have to go forward to the men”
2. Cricket, Geology and the War.
At Pembroke College Ralph found that theosophy did not marry well with mathematics. His tutor wrote to his father after his first year and said there was no point his going on, so he switched to Natural Sciences. He had told Pembroke that he was thinking of the Army (probably for the travel) or the Imperial Forest Department of India as professions. He was thinking of losing himself in wonderful spirit laden woods and now, before his exams in 1913, he had time to ramble and collect. He borrowed a motorbike and set off north to where the inscrutable oldest rocks peeped through, driving sheep off the road, taking on porridge and whiskey and highland charmers and then south again with panniers full of rocks. His generation had been stamped in their adolescence by the story of Captain Scott and the South Pole. Every boy secretly thought he could have done those twelve extra miles to One Ton Depot. For Ralph it had been the geological specimens that most counted, the sixteen kilograms of fossilised leaf that Dr Edward Wilson had insisted be carried on their march unto death. Each fragment was neatly labelled with its provenance — a discrete pile in the tiny tent of green Willesden canvas next to the bodies of Scott, Bowers and Wilson, proof the southern continent of Gondwana was treed in Permian times.
*
Alfred Henry Evans, once the duty of writing eighty personal letters to parents had been discharged, took Ralph for a long hike in the New Forest stopping a night at an inn where they shared a room. He advised him to lodge at College for this vital final year,
“… it is not exactly that you need blinkers, but you should husband your reputation as a rocks man”
Ralph fell in with his father’s plan and found himself written down for Room 5 Staircase O of New Court. He handed in what was said to be the best geological treatise of the year and was invited to an interview with the Geological Survey of Great Britain. He lodged his bag with friends (or perhaps relations, I haven’t been able to discover) at Campden Hill Court in Kensington, scrubbed up and walked through Hyde Park to the offices of the GSGB at the Natural History Museum. They asked him about the geology of his home county, Berkshire. He knew the storybook names invented by humans to personify the vast drama of the earth’s evolution: two continents: Avalonia and Laurentia in glistening rock-studded ice robes colliding like opera stars demanding centre stage. A ridge of high ground thrown up by this frightful collision that extended from Wales all the way to Brabant in Belgium,
“… steeply dipping ordovician and silurian sediments… …it seems that the originally flat lying marine sediments were folded and faulted during the mid-devonian times”
“… very good, go on”
Hereabouts lay the mysterious Prague Basin, an archipelago of humid volcanic islands, accelerators for diversification and evolution, the very seed bed of european particularism, around which Ralph often boated in his dreams,
“… what particular features interested you in your early excursions?
“… the subtle, thin sequence of carboniferous limestone, evidence that the waters of the rheic ocean must have broken through during the late devonian”
They showed him into an ante-room with, for company, a ticking wall clock and a fly acrobating at a hot window pane. After a time of churning thoughts into which he passed cooling theosophical mantras, a clerk entered and he was invited to sign a contract. Clutching the paper he returned to his digs in the steel-frame mansion block, turreted and fretted that gloomed over the southern hump of Notting Hill.
It pleased me to find that address (given a little later to military bureaucrats) since I had been schooled on the north eastern slope of the same hump at St George’s Junior on Edge Street. A school photograph shows me solo in front of a made-up background as though at my school desk — gap toothed, hay haired and smiling carefree. We lived a mile and a half away.
From the coal mine in Derbyshire where great uncle Luke had worked came money to buy a run-down terrace house in St Ann’s Road. My father worked for a time as an operator at the continental telephone exchange (he spoke French) but he was, in fact, an artist — an abstract painter, so that from the house on the border between the sublimely decent opulence of Addison Avenue and the desperate half-legal lives of Wilsham Street radiated waves of progressive thought.
My mother, a professional viola player, put most of the bread on the table. I would linger on the four steps that led down from the front door to the noisome street watching her disappear into the night all dressed up to please concert goers. Then I would turn and go down into the basement where my back-up mother, a childless black-clad Irish labourer’s wife would put a steaming plate of meat and two veg in front of me: Mrs Slattery of blessed memory, my first Poor Clare.
Thirty five years earlier, Notting Hill will have been a happy neighbourhood for a theosophist, not far off lived the great Orage, a turbulent quasi-theosophist and editor of the The New Age, a journal that drew the strands of modernism in literature together. Many impecunious writers and artists forever unknown were secreted in the handsome houses hereabouts, beneficiaries of high-minded largesse. It was a time of particular optimism and openness after Victorian gloom. There were many keen seekers after many luminous, or at least rubbed up, truths. .
I imagine Ralph paying a call on Christian mystic Evelyn Underhill who lived at Campden Hill Square, the tall angular lady receiving him kindly, her manner a little drooping but warm. Ralph might have read her book The column of dust,
“… I was struck by the passage where you talk about, I can’t quote exactly, the insecurity of defences which protect our illusions and ward off the horror of truth. Something about the little hole in the wall of appearances which catches a glimpse of that seething pot of spiritual forces whence, now and then, a bubble rises to the surface of things”
“… yes but hearing you speak it now it rather tails off doesn’t it?”
“… do you know that saying of Nietzsche where he says we have art so that we may not perish from truth. I’m wondering whether he means that in order to accept truth it has to be wrapped aesthetically or whether, like you, he is saying that an artificial shield has to be built between our perceptions and reality”
“… yes, that is a nice distinction Ralph, now, tell me about your rocks”
His companions at Campden Hill Court were congenial, his duties at the Survey interesting and his attendance at the meetings of the Theosophical Society were regular. He still hadn’t quite got his bearings with women, he was liable to be upset, curious animal they would say about him. Around the lecture rooms were many if into whose dark holes he fell he might never surface, struggle though he might. His standby pastime was rather cricket, all the family played and though Ralph was not as gifted as Johnnie he had played thrice for the University. It was said of him that,
“… he has a good knowledge of making the ball do something in the air and is therefore a promising though not very robust bowler”
Brother Johnnie got him in to the Free Foresters, a gentlemen’s cricket club, a home for people of conventional views of the dullest kind — when applications to join came in from the Indian Army the Secretary wrote,
“… saw several candidates. While it is true to say that they were without exception good enough cricketers, not all came up to the fairly exacting social standards expected”
Ralph used a trick of seeing around and beyond people who grovelled about on the lower slopes of consciousness. He was picked by the Foresters to play on the eighth of June 1914 against the University he had left the year before. In the first innings Ralph was out for six runs and got one wicket, in the second innings he scored five and no wicket. Cambridge won the match. In Bosnia that weekend the young men who would assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie Chotek were parked with sympathisers at Sarejevo toying with their bombs. They had crossed over from Serbia, winked at by the border guards.
Ralph had not had much time for a brilliant London life, by the end of July he sensed the coming of the wave of horror about to soak his generation. On the second of September he enlisted as a private in the 9th Battalion, London Regiment. Lines of socks hung suspended in one of the livery company halls. He went with new found pals to the Gaiety. Though he might be privately critical of the tailoring and manners of the rankers he responded in a straightforward way to the vitality which animated their often undernourished carcasses. Gym and bully-beef would set that right. .
By the end of October, just as he was beginning to find a common tongue with his brother rankers, a hook caught him up: they had found him out after all, he was to be made into an officer in the 3rd Battalion Kings Shropshire Light Infantry.
His examining officer Lieutenant Colonel Dickins minuted:
… played cricket for Cambridge University as a bowler in the year 1913: he is strong and healthy & although he is 3/4" under Chest Measurement (standard) I advise his being accepted as a 2nd Lieut…
WAR DIARY 3rd Battalion KSLI:
9 am. 20 December Winchester. The battalion left Winchester for Southampton by march route and embarked on S.S. Maidan same night…
All over England between August 1914 and November 1918 men left or were pulled from their ordinary occupations and fitted out in khaki. It was the common experience out of whose lengthy shadow we, children of the nineteen-fifties, staggered into the harsh brilliance of the fledgling cybernetic age. My generation should thank the whizz-bangs which did not pulverise an ancestor, in order that we have our being. Sometimes it was a near run thing — my father scrambled ashore at Dieppe in August 1942 and was lucky to be captured not killed. His father Oscar, fully and usefully occupied as a general practitioner in the first war, was in a sticky position since he had, though born in Scotland, a German name. My father was christened Hildesheim. The name, ascribed when Jews were compelled to adopt surnames in the early nineteenth century was tactfully Anglicised.
My other grandfather Frederick Paul David (who married Ralph’s sister Winifred) did not go over to Flanders. It was said that it was because he was a clergyman with a family but I think it just as likely that it was because it was known his mother was German born. There is a hint of this in a letter he sends to his great friend “the Jacker” Horace Jackson, a fellow teacher.
… a heavy policeman has just walked in to report a “great beam of light right up in the hair”! — this from library window. I should be imprisoned this time without the option of a fine, those blighters the City Fathers are dying to have a dig at me”
He was described at the time he became a Winchester College house master as,
“… a good scholar, a keen rifleman and an earnest clergyman, with a fine voice and a considerable knowledge of music”
David had a passion for maps, he was a ski-ing pioneer with every possible necessity crammed into the pockets of his knapsack, he loved to make lists and paper schemes. He filched a revolver from the Winchester Cadet Corps Armoury to give to Ralph’s brother Johnnie just before he went “over there”. He had run the Corps since the Boer War and according to Johnnie he would have made an excellent company commander.
When I was shown in to goggle at Grandfather David at the end of his life he was blind and depressed. On a side table was his allowed medicine, a glass of whisky. His father, priest-vicar of Exeter Cathedral, was a Welshman from Laugharne and something of the Celt is in this remembrance of Frederick David,
“… used to turn his chair into a bardic throne and enthral his younger colleagues with tales of the past”
From that side too will have come the glooms, or glums he was later subject to. In Heir to Adventure Johnnie, a gentleman, loyally makes the clergyman cum family case for his brother in law staying back in 1914 and yet, and yet, he finishes with a paragraph that suggests his brother-in-law could have thrown caution to the winds and joined up if he had had a more devil may care nature. I think there is gentle reproof there.
blessing a submarine in the second war.
Ralph Du Boulay Evans “came out” (as they said then) as a second lieutenant attached to the 2nd battalion, 80 Brigade 27 Division. He may have wondered at the class based sleight of hand that had turned him into a soldier with the care of troops, many of them older than himself. When he studied a map, he felt their eyes on him since the basis of their confidence in an officer was: can he read a map? From there it was a short step to: where will he lead them? He traced the trivial elevation of the land that ran behind the town of Ypres from Messines in the south to Passchendaele in the north, the uplands upon which, he was told, the Germans had dug in. He gave himself up as soon as he could to geology,
“… gentle bumps”
He reminded himself, looking out at the miserably poor relief, that the Ypresian age was identified for Belgian geologist Dumont by the presence of Hantkenina in the fossil record, a tiny molluscular grub. And here they were now, shell-backs and old sweats and dug-outs and shy young boys dressed up as officers, tiny grey-white-pinkish grubs living in the man-made mad mad mud. All winter he observed that hereabouts the most valuable liquid resource, blood, was allowed to run to waste. Then spring came and his schooled eye mapped drainage.
Ralph’s battalion stayed in and about Polygon Wood for most of April. Times were panicky. Gas was used. The French colonials didn’t stand. . On the twenty fifth, less one platoon who stayed to guard the guns, they marched from Bellewarde Wood to Vellorenhoek and spent the day digging trenches. In the evening, about eight o’clock, orders came to win back a trench at Broedesiude lost by the East Surreys on the twenty fourth.
… it was decided that 2 Platoons from Z Coy would make the assault. They went over at about midnight and immediately met strong resistance and were driven back, all officers became casualties with three killed and one wounded…
Captain Bryant led the attack. He was seen by his men, at whose head he charged, to reach the parapet, and to be wounded by a hand grenade. He was reported missing, (he died of heart failure following the amputation of his right arm at a German Casualty Clearing post). Killed directly in the rush forward was Second Lieutenant Anthony Cyprian Prosper Biddle-Cope, half American, born in Italy aged twenty five and Charles Robert Blackett Son of the Rev. and Mrs. W.R. Blackett, of Smethcote Rectory, near Shrewsbury aged twenty and of course, a number of men in the ranks.
“… only a dress rehearsal”
Towards three in the morning another attack went in led by Ralph, seconds before the raid was launched his commanding officer Captain Pound had been incapacitated by a shell. The trench they were to attack was one hundred and fifty yards away. Silly moonlight played about the field. Ralph pressed forward bent nearly double with a strange notion of chasing a bullet, for wasn’t the mudball spinning to the east one degree in four minutes and so he reasoned German bullets were slower given that their trenches were receding in front of British fire whilst British troops were advancing to meet German bullets. What had Einstein said the other day?
Where in all his theosophy could he find comfort for the dreadful loud minutes he spent about the headwaters of that trivial stream, the Zonebeeke, his men in the open potted like rabbits, squealing and squiggling down. At length Ralph scrambled onto the messy rubble at the base of the German forward defences. He looked back, they haven’t come up and then he saw the humps on the ground that sloped down clear to the trench they had come from. He pushed himself up against the wall of earth, hoping yet dreading to see a man to kill, there’s one, huge and grim five yards off, he’s not looking, oh, he’s turned. Ralph fired and missed. The grey giant raised a rifle above the trench lip and fired unseeing, and he missed. Ralph bobbed up for another go and BANG there was a blow from behind. He lost consciousness and slid back. The Germans, satisfied that they had repelled the attack began to bring up the rations and prepare an early breakfast. As they sat down to their feast they heard groaning, annoying when you are eating, they sent the boy to look.
“… oh, so you are alive are you? Hang on and we’ll haul you in”
It was strange to be handled by them — at any moment he expected to meet Herrenhofer who had gone straight back home from the Geological Survey to join up. He was put on a cart, it turned out the trench they had attacked was not isolated as had been supposed by the Staff but was linked by a communication trench to rear support. It was for this reason that the attacks of the last two days had been repulsed.
Fifteen kilometres bumping back to Roulers. The wounded and the dead offloaded all in a lump at the Kriegs Lazarette. Ralph lay on his stretcher waiting for attention, his German was rudimentary, what he called travellers tongue, enough to get about. He thought poor Bryant might be there but didn’t see him. If he moved his head it hurt his neck but he did move it just enough to see if any other khaki tunics were in sight but around him was all …feldgrau. There he had the word, he could pick up war German now. Towards the evening of the next day they packed him off onto a train which steamed slowly east all night and in the morning they stretchered him into a convent cum hospital somewhere (he thought later) near Aachen. Wimples dipped and fluttered, he heard the German language spoke by women and was eased. Surgically he was a challenge, he knew the raptures of ether thirty two times. The report read: bullet wound right arm compound fracture humerus. Gunshot just below shoulder from behind. Great damage is evident to bone and softer parts.
*
Kitty woke, a side to side jolting, the train had entered Mürrenbahn. A curve of dark roof slid overhead, a trail of greenish-white globes led to the barrier where a little man held up a wand with a disc with the words PALACE HOTEL. He had been warned to look for a lady who had difficulty walking and there she was, shuffling rather, ahead of a porter carrying her trunk on his back,
“… mademoiselle Evans?”
“…oui”
He helped her into a small-wheeled dark panelled one horse carriage. When Gustav’s manager had told him, the year before, that the Palace was to be handed over for interned officers he wondered what was in it for him. He had been occupied mostly with the outside affairs of the hotel, wood chopping, small repairs and the plumbing for the hot-house. The manager asked him to put in a clock golf course on one of the lawns.
Of course, English guests were not unusual, for although the Palace had never been fashionable, word of mouth amongst a certain layer of English society had kept it busy as the ski-ing craze took hold. Large families of hobbledehoys of both sexes and all ages would rent half a floor and get on with breaking limbs or, flushed with steam from the most efficient bathrooms frolic about in a state of half undress until it was time for the next feed.
This Miss Evans looked to Gustav more a case for the hydro at nearby Interlaken where cripples were expressly catered for but, catching his look, she turned her shadowed eyes on him and asked in reasonable French if he knew her brother. Oh yes, he said, he knew Lieutenant Evans, he messed with Dingwall and Stout. Kitty repeated the names as though it mattered and looked ahead over the vigorous nodding head of the horse as it attacked the long slope up to the hotel. The graceful curves of their lower branches of dark pines saluted their passage, a crop of monkey-like children, shaven headed, heavy booted, sat on a wall. She lost Gustav somewhere in his foreign tongue and began to wonder how much she should tip him or whether Ralph might look after that. She realised then that Gustav was saying how Ralph had not come to the station because he was having an argument with the printer of BIM.
“… BIM?”
“…their little magazine madam”
Ralph had been pleased that the name of the magazine (British Interned at Murren) should have a slightly vorticist flavour, not quite BLAST but nearly and BIM, yes it was affectionate as though a dog’s name, a muted version of those awful BLAMS and BANGS the men were so grateful to be free of. He had told Gustav that Kitty wouldn’t mind that he didn’t meet her and indeed she didn’t. It pleased her immensely to think that Ralph was busy, how strange to be cooped up for years in idleness and yet, she, having seen many mangled men in her training with Miss Manley and reading the names of boys from the school gone for good was glad he had (the words were difficult) got out of it. And suddenly as they turned into the driveway there he was, lounging easily on the stone balustrade by the steps up to the Palace entrance. He sprang down and came to the carriage and handed her down.
“… Kitty, what fun. Will you rest”
“… I think I ought to move a bit, I’ve been sitting so long, I’ll forget how”
“… did you have much trouble?”
“… not at all, it was thrilling”
Of course, they would go on as before. Ralph took her arm and they slipped through the dining hall, down a staircase and across a small yard to a shed smelling of new tar-paper to find Mme Verrier of the Swiss Red Cross. Ralph said he’d wait outside and have a smoke if she didn’t mind, she’d dropped him a tin of Players straight away.
Gustav went on with Kitty’s trunk across to the annexe where wives and relatives were installed. He thought the atmosphere unhealthy. Scattered about the public rooms the ladies sewed or played cards when they weren’t with their menfolk, who sometimes weren’t up to company. His manager had reminded him,
“… always remember Gustav that these gentlemen are only here because their wounds make it impossible for them to fight”
Pussy Maddox came up to him just as he had his foot on the first step of the stairs to the upper floors, the trunk still balanced across his shoulders. She was one of the few to have fluent French,
“… oh Gustav, I’m so glad to have caught you”
He wasn’t going to stand there with that weight on him, he began to tread up the stairs with Pussy trailing him.
“… someone’s been into our room and fiddled with the heating and now it doesn’t work as it should”
They had reached the landing and Gustav put Kitty’s trunk down, from here it should slide on the boards.
“… yes ma’am we always do that at this time of year, in a day or so it will correct itself”
Pussy wondered whether the lady in the other bed who had pushed her to see Gustav would accept the answer. Of course, in England they wouldn’t have minded but here the cold was foreign and they had been spoilt by a week of continental cast iron warmth.
(the reader may be surprised by these backstairs happenings, I was myself and recognised, regretfully, that here was the catch in the brain that could have led to fiction if I’d stayed with Gustav)
Kitty’s interview with Mme Verrier was satisfactory: she would be allowed to work with the men which meant that she could stay longer than the usual ten days. They agreed that she would take her meals out.
“… are there any other English masseuses working?”
“… no my child but there is a bevy of Irish nurses if you need help lifting or turning”
Kitty asked if there was any electrical apparatus. Rather like frog legs in biology classes, the men’s limbs could be artificially stimulated and their sleepy nerves encouraged to take up their duties again. She had been in two minds to bring out the box with her.
“… yes, there is a Bristow coil over at the other rank’s hutments”
The two women reached a comfortable understanding about the limits of their separate responsibilities. They left the hut together and Kitty presented her brother. Mme Verrier looked keenly at him to see if he had caught that particular blight of prison life, that inner shadow, which even the lesser constraint of internment could not alter. Kitty felt her weakness welling up at last, she turned to Ralph,
“… I think I might lie down, can you point out where I’m meant to be?”
“… yes, I’m allowed there believe it or not, it’s not far”
“… thank you so much madame, your advice has been so helpful”
And on the way, taking an arm after some bother about how to put their two strongest sides together he began to tell her all about it. She was tired, but he made her see it all,
“… I was made prisoner by, I think, Saxon troops. They treated me well and dressed my wounds at once. There was some argument as to whether I was fit enough to go directly to Germany, won by those who wanted to treat me further in the hospital first. I was there about a week, getting used to the idea of being a prisoner. They sent off a bunch of us mixed up with their own chaps on a Red Cross train and I found myself at Paderborn at the Reserve Lazarett Franciskanerkloster.
I couldn’t talk to anyone, I asked to be put with English officers and they sent me to the Priester Seminar but then in August the place filled up with German wounded and we prisoners were sent back to the Franciskanerkloster. A French Captain and I were the only officers. The doctor, a doctor Goldberg was most unpleasant, rough and smelling of liquor. The men said he was often drunk and I saw his offhand treatment of them…”
The sudden influx of unhappiness must have disturbed Dr Goldberg’s provincial certainties. Many civilian doctors were thrown into the deep end of modern suffering. The military doctors were often hide-bound, believing for example that,
“… the passage through the air of the bullet will render it sterile”
This may well have been true but impacting on the man the bullets nose would tuck into his flesh the dirt each man was habitually cloaked in.
“… yes, Ralph, you wrote to us about him, a most uncomplimentary letter”
“… well, of course I knew they would read it, they had promised I would be exchanged to England, I was upset about that and anxious to cause them trouble. They laid a charge against me and eventually I was given five months imprisonment. They decided to put my arm right first and I was treated by Dr Landsbek at the Bruderhaus Hospital, monks you know, and honestly Kitty we were treated as well as we might have been in England. Great relief, light, airy wards, that sort of thing, began a bit of yoga to amuse the monks. Eventually I got bored and asked to be sent to a camp, they chose Gutersloh while the paperwork for my imprisonment came through, then they sent me under close guard to Wesel, more commonly known as Friedrichsfeld. Here we are Kitty, this is your new home, I’ll finish the story later”
Kitty’s quarters were modest but clean, there was a lot of plain scrubbed wood. Someone was banging about in the next room but she made straight for the bed and laid down. After a moment she got herself up and drew the curtains against the light. She took off her heavy travelling suit and made herself comfortable again on the bed. The banging stopped. She drifted into sleep.
It was at Wesel, Ralph told her later, that he found the conditions he needed to ascend several steps of the Sacred Chain. Normally the prisoners were confined in pairs in attic bedrooms at the top of great gloomy sheds but since there was an odd number Ralph volunteered to be on his own. The triangular space with its woody smell and its small, greenish, roof light was his to conjure about him, a solid robe in which to travel inside of himself,
“… we were allowed out for half an hour morning and afternoon. Rules about parcels and letters were the same as in the camps. The food was better than all of my jails except for that at the Bruderhaus. Von Koolwig the commandant was rather rude on the exterior not helped by his primitive English but in fact underneath was quite reasonable and logical in his response to our suggestions. The cross he had to bear was the high-tempered, obstinate French”
Ralph’s elder brother Johnnie, who had become a flyer or more exactly an airborne artillery spotter, was plucked out of the air above the Somme and put into the bag as they say on the sixteenth of July, the same day that Ralph finished his prison sentence and was moved to the officer’s camp at Crefield.
“… at Crefield the mental conditions of the officers in the camp impressed me as very bad, though all were making great efforts to fight against the depression by various forms of work and games and theatrical entertainments, for all of which the commandant was very easy. The Liquor supplied to the officers was undoubtedly of a very poor quality indeed and didn’t help their morale. Of course I had come out of my rather special training at Wesel, very few of the officers were capable of taking on that sort of mental discipline, they wandered around in oversize jackets and homemade slippers, fiddling at this, fiddling at that”
Then came the visit by the Swiss Medical Commission and a move to Constance with its lovely lake, the twittering French of the waitresses, the postcard December snow.
“… for some reason they sent some of us back to Vohrenbach, some administrative convenience but worrying nonetheless. Then, just before Christmas they distributed cards to most of us to say we had been passed for internment as unable to fight. And that was that”
The Palace Hotel and Murren: back to English public school jovialities. Ralph’s companions were all, give or take a few facial re-configurations, lucky men. They had escaped a war which would flow on to catch most of their friends. Somewhere there was Arnold Lunn with whom the Evans family had skied before the war and Jo Ackerley, the dog loving literary critic. Ralph’s view of his fellows was supported by a report by Lieutenant-Colonel Picot CBE:
… the fundamental causes acting on Prisoners of War are loss of liberty the herding together of large numbers, the unknown duration of captivity. They suffer from want of space, the impossibility of isolating themselves from their fellows, the constant expectation in which they live whilst awaiting letters or parcels, and the ever recurrent disappointments connected therewith and all these sufferings are accentuated by that important factor, ignorance of the duration of captivity…
… activities are a release from all these sufferings, which are aggravated by the memories of horrors lived through, apprehensions regarding the future, and nostalgia for country and relatives. Schools, theatrical performances, and concerts are organised; but gradually the exterior world effaces itself and disappears, and the prisoners live in a shadow land, without colour or life. Sensations are blunted, and give place to apathy, and the events of the war are followed with a mediocre interest…
… first of all, an exaggerated irritability manifests itself, and the least opposition becomes insupportable. Quarrels are frequent. Then intellectual concentration becomes difficult, and such as renders close attention to a few pages of a book impossible. In such cases the prisoner often deliberately gives up his promenades, and prefers to remain quiescent. A phenomenon of constant occurrence is the loss of memory, and inability to recall names of persons or of localities, specially those connected with memories anterior to the war…
… amongst the intellectuals, an excessive impressionability manifests itself. Despite themselves, they misinterpret a gesture, a play of feature, a tone of voice, a silence even. Sometimes a certain misanthropy has been noticed amongst the Interned, which tends to a desire for that solitude of which they have been so long deprived. One of them explained this by saying,
“ … it is not a dislike of our fellows, but simply the absence of all pleasure, and perhaps a sentiment of discomfort at finding oneself amongst people whose condition is other than our own.”
Ralph gave himself over to communal life. He took over from Lieutenant Hubbs as the editor of BIM. He admitted that compared with the magazine published by the French it was rather a poor effort. He spent as much time ski-ing as his shoulder would allow. Then he got the letter from home saying Kitty was coming over. Some of the officers already enjoyed wives in lodgings. The bachelors rather began to stand out, some of them claimed their dogs from home — the French were sticky but the kindly Swiss let them through.
Kitty bore her work well during the months she spent as a masseuse. One of the men whose wounds had left him vulnerable and angry called her the lady with the limp, his room mates gently shushed him. In the evenings she played the piano in the recreation hall, syncopated by the clicking of ping-pong.
Then, right at the end, there was a surprise: brother Johnnie had escaped into Switzerland from the prison for hard cases, Fort 9 at Ingolstadt. A dinner was organised at the Palace Hotel in his honour. They were together, the three of them: Ralph with his smashed up arm, Johnnie gaunt and worn and Kitty beginning to fade. Johnnie was placed next to the senior officer Colonel W.E. Gordon V.C. whom he had last seen taking over trenches feverishly dug around Le Cateau in August nineteen fourteen,
“… did you ever find your stick, Colonel?”
*
The war ended and the men, roughly packaged, were gathered from their continental laagers into trains and sent back over the grey sea to their island home. The day after Ralph landed he was examined at the Prince of Wales’ Hospital for Officers. They recorded that he was twenty seven years old and that he had served his country four years and three months. They found a gun shot wound, a compound fracture of the upper arm. The wound was described by Captain T.G.Wakeling of the Royal Army Medical Corps as,
“… a large, irregular contracted scar over the occipital groove. Shoulder movement very restricted in all directions and functions of arm much impaired. And you say you managed to ski?”
It was a more than usually sober Christmas at Horris Hill. Kitty had taken to her bed as soon as she had got back from Switzerland and the doctors reported that she was overdone. Her mother had had to cope with wartime shortages of supplies along with the emotional burden of boys who lost brothers, uncles, fathers. Around and about raged the Spanish Flu. Johnnie couldn’t get Ralph out for the Boxing Day shoot,
“… the farmers will be disappointed if you don’t show”
“… bugger the farmers Johnnie”
“… can’t you do it for the old man?”
Alfred Henry Evans had taken a hard pull with the war, he was getting on and felt it, the one bright spot had been the birth of three sons to his cherished daughter Winifred. Bright and restless as a teenager she had caught the eye of the young master at Winchester, Frederick David, who had introduced the family to skiing. They married when she was just nineteen. Unlike her mother who produced a child each year Winifred had to coax Frederick a little and her first three sons were born at two year intervals. And, like her mother and perhaps as a result of the great blunder of the War her next child and only daughter (my mother) arrived after a gap of five years.
The Christmas house party dispersed, only to be called back in February since Kitty, weakened, died. (she may have been caught by an unexpected reflux of the Spanish Flu). Her mother said,
“… she’s been nothing but a shadow since she came back”
After Kitty’s death Ralph hid behind paper work to do with his war wound and demobilisation. In March he was informed that he had been promoted Captain and retired through incapacity from service, he went to South Kensington and reported for duty at the Survey.
“… we’re all topsy-turvy at the moment, we’ll write when we need you in the office”
In April they did write with a rather curious, but to Ralph tempting, proposition. It would get him out of dank, dreary, war-wrought England. Johnnie, acting as his attorney, wrote to the War Office at the end of May pleading for his wound pension to be paid forthwith without further medical:
… at the present moment he is in Mesopotamia as far as I know. Current address c/o Eastern Bank Bagdhad…
3. New Worlds.
Qatar, a peninsular jutting up into the Persian Gulf whose pearls and fishing economy was displaced by black gold in the nineteen thirties and who got independence from British hand-holding in the nineteen seventies, pursues that form of modernism based around immigrant workers, shopping malls and high-end tourism against a background of Islamic rigour.
Somehow Whitehall left jumble at Qatar. These colonial scraps were archived and with the rush of black gold scrupulously catalogued and in the bloom of the digital age made available at Qatar Digital Library. I was able to remotely turn the pages of Geological Report (Mesopotamia) and, tingling, discover the initials R. Du B. Evans: great-uncle Ralph’s work preserved.
Before 1914, British and German companies had negotiated joint participation in the Turkish Petroleum Company which held oil prospecting rights in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). The war ended that partnership. There was now a three way tug of interests: Britain, France and, coming up fast — America. The Government Geological survey sent Ralph — send your best man — out to Mesopotamia to go through captured German maps and make a rapid survey for oil under cover of the Anglo-Saxon Oil Company, represented by Ralph’s survey partner Alfred Noble. The avowed object was not the commercial but the military use of oil. Ralph was put into a complicated three-way game between the Government, the War Office and the oil interests:
… from Secretary of State to Civil Commissioner, Baghdad, 21th December 1919. Your telegram of 29th October, №12948. Oil. See my telegram of 10th November. You should permit no development other than that necessitated by immediate military requirements, and no investigation unless initiated on behalf of administration for ascertainment of natural resources. In latter case please avoid publicity, and employ official experts as far as possible…
While on the one hand he had been demobilised, the quaint note about the use of uniform on his demobilisation certificate — only permitted to wear uniform when attending ceremonials and entertainments of a military nature — was brushed aside by needs of state: Anglo-Saxon’s geologists were retained by the military and their work paid for by British military funds. As his brother put it in his letter to the pension office:
… as the expedition with which he went appears to have been despatched under Government protection and as he, although demobilised, was officially told to go in uniform, it will perhaps be considered that he is more or less on active service…
At Baghdad the two men were kitted out. It was still usual then for people to know how to sit on a horse and comfortably employ them as a means of locomotion. Behind the two white men a trail of tiny donkeys carried their camp. The Army had marked in red the areas where Kurds were liable to be troublesome. Noble and Evans started at Qaiyarah in June and then moved down between Hillah and Hit in the Euphrates Valley — (the home of kings, muttered Ralph), for the high summer months.
Noble sent back a letter:
… TO THE ACTING CIVIL COMMISSIONER, MESOPOTAMIA.
Dear Sir,
I enclose herewith a copy of Preliminary Geological Notes on the Jabal Hamrin. I am unable to give a copy of the section at present, but will do so as soon as my outfit for making prints arrives from India. The General Map sent with the report was a tracing of part of the Army map, scale 4 miles=1 inch.
I would suggest that this report is not printed, as it is not the result of careful work, being merely a general impression of the Jabal Hamrin. Later work may cause us to alter our views on the structure completely.
I am, Sir, .
Yours faithfully,
A. H. NOBLE,
Representing Sir John Cowans
By September the two surveyors were tracking down the right bank of the Tigris into Baiji and Mosul. There is a gap in the record here, perhaps they took some leave in Baghdad? Or perhaps they were held back by indications that Whitehall was becoming anxious about the Americans. On the twenty fifth of September Foreign Secretary Curzon writes to the Secretary of State for India Montagu under the name of a humble servant:
… the experts of the Anglo-Saxon petroleum company have been in Mesopotamia for a considerable period and were engaged on work there for the military authorities which is now terminated. His Lordship is therefore of opinion that the withdrawal of these experts does not afford sufficient justification for approaching the United States Government at so late a date with a view to secure the recall of the agents of the Standard Oil Company…
The British Government suspected the Americans of inciting the Kurds to rebellion through the agency of Standard Oil. In 1921 the Royal Air Force bombed the tribes just to be sure, comforted by the The British 1914 Manual of Military Law:
… the rules of war applied only to conflict between civilised nations.They do not apply in wars with uncivilised States and tribes…
Despite the assertion by Whitehall cited above that their work was terminated Evans and Noble were put back into the field in December as the report signed by Ralph shows:
… Khabura and Dohuki are at the southern end of the Amadia Pass, about thirty five miles north of Mosul. The following notes were made in the course of an examination of the commercial possibilities of the bitumen and building-stone of the Tigris valley, on behalf of the Military Authorities. Work was much interfered with by rain and owing to the late Kurdish disturbances examination of the Zakho valley was confined to a very rapid visit to the nearest oil-wells and observation through field-glasses from the top of the hills to the south of the village…
In January they based themselves on the town of Sulailaniyah:
… field work was carried out partly by means of car and partly by horse. The area covered by the report is approximately from a few miles to the west of the high range of hills, called the Sagirma Dhagh which forms the western limit of the Qarah Dag district from the neighbourhood of Chamchaminal in the north to the AqSu River in the south, to about fifteen miles east of the town of Sulaimaniyah. Work further to the east was impossible owing to deep snow. Rain, snow and mist hampered our work considerably at times. Our particular thanks are due to Major Soane, Principal Officer at Sulaimaniyah for much kind assistance, hospitality and valuable information…
They were in Arbil for much of March and April and then moved on to Afar Jabal. Ralph found the geology fascinating and realised that old Grosskopf the German surveyor whose maps they examined had done little real prospecting but merely tabulated surface resources:
… Grosskopf made a short report on the Zakhoo oil-wells for the Turks. He made no attempt to work out the structure of the district…
Ralph got down to it:
… geological indicator formations occur in two areas about 100 yards apart along an E-W line at the top of a low ridge of hills composed of sandstones and marls of the Upper Pars. The first area is large (reckoned by Grosskopf at 120 acres) and is covered with asphalt, much of which has flowed down into two little subsidiary valleys.
Five seepages are worked. At two of them the oil is scooped off the surface of small pools, which yield about one Kerosene oil tin every 24 hours. Of the other three, one has been dug down to 4 metres and the other two to 20 metres in depth and the oil is raised by hand-winch: 12–17 tins per 24 hours are obtained by this method from each. The third of these dug wells is situated in the second seepage area,which is of less extent than the first.
The worked oil is a very dark brown in colour, rather fluid of specific gravity ‘960 (approx.). It smells slightly of hydrogen sulphide but has no sulphur water with it and no sulphur deposits or springs were seen in the neighbourhood. Within ten yards of the wells producing fluid oil there is another seepage forming a small pool about a yard across of black viscous tarry oil. Forty-eight tins full of the oil are daily brought down on the backs of donkeys to a very primitive refinery in the town. Out of every 14 tins of oil distilled, 8 tins of distillate are obtained in three grades: 1st grade 3 tins used in lamps. 2nd grade used for greasing axles of arabanas (closed carts drawn by horses or mules). 3 grade ditto.
By the late spring of 1920 Ralph was through with Mesopotamia. He shipped back to Marseilles where there were still tall, three-masted sailing ships roped to the quaysides. After some twisting and turning through the smells and sights of the Vieux Port Ralph found a small bow-fronted establishment run by a man called Evgeny whom he’d known in theosophy circles in London. Shadowy behind glass were esoteric pamphlets. Sitting in a high backed cowl-like wicker chair on the pavement, untidy trousers spread, heavy sandals, was Evgeny,
“… are you here for cricket?”
They laughed together and the man twisted round and called out,
“… Doreen bring a chair out”
He turned to Ralph,
“… you remember her of course”
Ralph didn’t have time to reply because Doreen appeared, a cloak thrown over a loose pyjama suit. He rose and they embraced in the continental fashion, he smelt again her wispy and now grey-streaked hair. Evgeny and Doreen had gone back from London to Russia to inject theosophy but the revolution overtook them and, making no headway with the commissars, they prudently retreated along with a jumble of dukes and princes and generals and riffraff to the south of France.
Ralph mumbled something briefly about his war. He felt there was something queasy about the atmosphere that made him stiffen his neck. He had seen too many broken people in the camps, he didn’t need any more inharmony even if it was served up and disguised with such charm by Evgeny and his English companion. In any case, Evgeny was a firm believer in Atlantis, a belief too far for a geologist, though Ralph thought there might be traces of mesolithic peoples, sure enough, in the muds of the Dogger Bank. The next day, leaving some money in an envelope on the bed, he bade them farewell and took the train to Paris,. For the Channel hop he booked a seat in an aeroplane and when he got back to Horris Hill he started to give his elder brother a chunk of flying jargon. Johnnie broke in impatiently,
“… yes, but what about your bloody maps — is there oil?”
“… well, it is quite likely, but no one can tell until borings have been put down extensively. Only two men have the right to express an opinion”
“… who are these two?”
“… myself and my partner, for we are the only two oil geologists who have ever been there — and I wrote the report”
With the expedition to Mesopotamia firmly inscribed on his curriculum vitae Ralph could shrug off his khaki for good (though he kept the belt) and spend some money on clothes. A letter came to Campden Hill Court, he was being fished for by Royal Dutch Shell who owned Anglo-Saxon. They were combing out dead wood (it was evident that many duds had found refuge in their office during the war). One of the questions at the interview was do you know how the word shell got into our name? Ralph thought about the scallop — had it been found petrified in oil layers? Nothing came up,
“… I’m sorry, you’ve got me there”
“… alright, how do you see yourself in five years time?”
Within Shell, Anglo-Saxon became responsible for everything to do with the transportation of oil, pipelines, railcars, ships, storage. Ralph had to survey and inspect the underlying geology wherever Shell felt the need for surface facilities,
“… we are not fond of earthquakes”
Those sudden shrugs of the earth’s crust, the collision of subterranean plates, the plumes of fire — the life-history of the globe storming around its molten iron centre became Ralph’s constant companions. This intimacy with terrestrial disturbance and discontinuity made a one with Ralph’s developing instinct for ethereal space. His thoughts rushed out from the trembling earth into the great silences of space and only, he imagined, when they had re-bounded and returned from the edge of the universe could he call them valid.
In December 1921 he was packed off to Trinidad, he packed butterfly nets with his geologists kit. Production had begun at an American backed competitor: Trinidad Leaseholds Ltd.’s Cat Cracker Unit at Pointe-a-Pierre. Shell had bought out the majority of another home grown company United British Oilfields Trinidad Limited (UBOT). Ralph reported that,
… the high-pressure sands found in the Point Fortin and Parrylands fields present considerable technical difficulties to normal exploitation.
The butterflies Ralph collected on that trip (see Matthew J.W. Cock) were first netted on Chancellor Road, Port of Spain, and then onwards through the suburbs above town whose fulsome, perfumed hedges were home to many a specimen he’d never seen. After a dull company Christmas at Port of Spain he went over to Point Fortin and began a circuit up Dunmore Hill and down the Claro Forest and a swim at Mayaro Bay. Shell telegraphed him to go over to Costa Rica to have a sniff. The Sinclair Oil Company of New York had been operating there. Ralph convinced Shell of the lack of commercial-character deposits in that damnable sugar-maddened spot (thirty years later Shell was back with a vengeance).
In June 1922 Ralph arrived back at Plymouth in time to join the family on holiday at Prussia Cove in Cornwall. Apart from an occasional lop-sidedness in his gestures you wouldn’t know he’d done his shoulder in and few were the fingers that stroked the scar.
Just over a year later Ralph shipped out to Curacao, the island refinery for Venezuelan oil. The horizon was all squat cylindrical tanks, boats laden with vegetables from the mainland bobbed at the quayside market where Dutch was the master language. His companion is recorded on the ship’s passenger manifest as A.R. Heyboer, a Dutchman who had worked as a mechanical engineer for Shell in the Dutch East Indies. If this was a first meeting for the two men it may have born fruit because on his last voyage five years later Ralph’s place of residence is given as Den Haag.
Ralph was out in the New World this time nearly two years. Butterflies locate the man: Lake Maracaibo, Maracaibo City and Campo Castillo, followed by a spell at Willemstad and then back to Mene Grande on the east side of Lake Maracaibo. In November 1925 he hopped over to Barbados and booked passage back to England. They welcomed the globe-trotter that Christmas at Horris Hill though new neighbours thought he must be foreign with that hat. He now had a careless ease about him, he was at peace with the world. Meditation was a daily practice, an hour, sometimes longer,
“… the truth is Johnnie, the less I care about my business concerns, the better they seem to go”
They invited him down to the office in London, he was shown departments that he had only hazily known and yet, surprisingly, some of the young men there behind their desks or rummaging in plan chests, seemed to know of him. He was given a new title: Petroleum Engineer (and a raise) that better described his functions. He had a bit of a tussle but finally they agreed he could base himself at the Dutch office.
Den Haag in the mid to late nineteen-twenties was a curious mixture of provincial Dutchness and wild cultural experiments. The Groote Dada-Avond advertised an evening entertainment in 1923 starring Kurt Schwitters and Theo Van Doesburg:
… at the Diligentia Saturday, Feb 3 due to the extraordinarily interest. grand dada evening reserve places, urgently recommended. Diplomas not valid.
Naturally the theosophists were present, many of the Dutch artists and architects had paddled in the shallower waters of Rudolph Steiner’s colour theory. Theo Van Doesburg went on to be a founder member of the art movement De Stijl with Mondrian whom theosophists always claimed as one of their own. To my great regret there seem to be no trace of Ralph in the modern Dutch theosophy society records. His Den Haag years rest his own.
In December 1928 Ralph shipped across the Atlantic to New York. He had some business down in California, possible he met up with a geologist called Ralph Arnold who part-owned an oil company down there since Arnold had been out in Mesopotamia on behalf of the Standard Oil Company at the same time as Ralph. Whatever Ralph was doing down around Hollywood was punctuated in the nicest possible way for a geologist — there was a small earthquake in the middle of July. Arnold gave a statement to the Press:
“… the quake was due to a slip along the southern base of the Whittier-East Puente Hills, a minor fault line”
With a Hollywood resident called R.T.Watkins, Ralph travelled north by car the night of twenty seventh July. I have not been able to find out the purpose of their journey. They had been driving for a couple of hours rather fast when Watkins, blinded by headlights failed to see the feeble rear lights of a tank trailer belonging to the Sterling Trucking Company of Bakersfield grinding up Wheeler’s Ridge. Their car shoved under the back of the heavy trailer. Watkins stepped out of the wreck but Ralph, badly injured, died in the ambulance on the way to hospital. Watkins was arrested an hour later having got a lift south with a passing motorist but released when a witness came forward to say that he had waited until medical care arrived to take Mr Evans away. A headline in the Fresno Morning Republican of thirty first July 1929 ran: FREED DRIVER OF DEATH CAR.
4. Postscript
The Sun and its cluster of planets circulates and moves at immense speed around the centre of a rotating spiral of space matter. The speed of time is the movement of the earth through space some say. You can look back and show where the Earth has been so and so many years ago. Everyone has their ride on the bus for so long, or so far, and the Sun had watched the earth go round its back thirty eight times during Ralph’s life. As the earth processed around the Sun, as day flicked to night and back, Ralph skittered about on (and in his imagination beneath) the surface of good old battered Earth. He dodged about in temperate greenery, in godforsaken muds, in the stripped down desert, in tropical swamplands and finished in dreamland California.
Johnnie’s book tells us that Ralph practised meditation. It may be that his interest in theosophy was a frame for what I am tempted to call a more down to earth yogic practice. C.W. Leadbeater, a close associate of theosophy leader Annie Besant wrote:
… let a man choose a certain time every day — a time when he can rely upon being quiet and undisturbed, though preferably in the daytime rather than at night — and set himself at that time to keep his mind for a few minutes entirely free from all earthly thoughts of any kind whatever and, when that is achieved, to direct the whole force of his being towards the highest spiritual ideal that he happens to know. He will find that to gain such perfect control of thought is enormously more difficult than he supposes, but when he attains it, it cannot but be in every way most beneficial to him, and as he grows more and more able to elevate and concentrate his thought, he may gradually find that new worlds are opening before his sight.
Leadbeater was a man of powerful imagination. He was known to encourage boys to masturbate as a way of clearing their minds before meditation. The society, nervous for its reputation, disowned him. After a couple of years Besant got him back in. In 1909 Leadbeater encountered fourteen-year-old Jiddu Krishnamurti on the beach next to Theosophical Society buildings at Adyar in the Bay of Bengal. Very much in the Tibetan tradition of discovering a Dalai Lama, Leadbeater believed Krishnamurti to be the herald of the sixth age prophesied by theosophy’s founder Madame Blavatsky. He named him Alcyone and wrote a chronicle serialised in The Theosophical Path giving information on his thirty past lives, in eleven of which Alcyone was female.
In 1915 Leadbeater moved to Australia. The land of kangaroos and didgeridoos was surprisingly kind to oddity. He established an esoteric centre, The Mount, at Sydney and was discovered and made a bishop by James Ingal Wedgewood, the inventor of the Liberal Catholic Church. Wedgewood was a man who straddled theosophy, recondite Christianity and Co-masonry (into which women were admitted). He admitted that he was dominated by two drives: his need for sexual activity with males and his lusting after spiritual bliss. He found priestly garb practical for both. Popular prejudice has often conflated speculative thinking with ungrounded sexuality and in this it may not be far wrong since damnèd fantasies often spit out insights.
In the mazy hazy nineteen twenties the sea track from India to Australia brought out Edith Lutyens, daughter of Dheli’s Imperial architect, her mother Emily a theosophist. They homed in on Leadbeater and Edith took up Krishnamurti as a subject for a biography (she also wrote popular romances for Mills and Boon). She married London furrier J.L.Links and on their honeymoon in Venice she read her way into the life of art critic John Ruskin. She is remembered for her biography of Ruskin in which she asserted that he could not consummate his marriage since he was repelled by his wife’s pubic hair. In 1956 J.L. Links published The Book of Fur and with that curious factoid this wikipedia theosophy sub-trail ends.
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Earth is known as the blue planet for the oceans. As the solid part of the surface glides away from the Sun human occupation shows up as a skein of lights, electricity sprinkled into a connecting web. There are still some dark places: the African and Australian interiors, the Central Asian plains, Tibet and North East China. Theosophists said they got their doctrine from Tibet, from hidden unwashed masters of time and space, cruising in deep rancid butter-fed trance in icy grottes:
… at a certain spot not to be mentioned to outsiders, there is a chasm spanned by a frail bridge of woven grasses and with a raging torrent beneath. The bravest member of your Alpine clubs would scarcely dare to venture the passage, for it hangs like a spider’s web and seems to be rotten and impassable. Yet it is not; and he who dares the trial and succeeds — as he will if it is right that he should be permitted — comes into a gorge of surpassing beauty of scenery.
Blavatsky’s doctrine is in the tradition of now listen, once upon a time… there lived a race composed of pure spirit who dwelled in the Imperishable Sacred land. They were succeeded by the Hyperboreans who had their abode in Arctic regions. The third race lived on the continent of Lemuria, known todays as Australia. Then came an intervention from outer space which gave bodies to earth people, distinguishing the sexes and populating Atlantis. Blavatsky claimed that Atlantans mated with what she called she-animals thus engendering chimpanzees.
She gives a moral twist at the end of her fable: the Atlantans were decadent and abused their knowledge, causing Atlantis to sink beneath the sea. Blavatsky believed she lived in the time of the fifth race, the Aryan, which would be replaced by the sixth upon the arrival of a Mahayana Bhuddist Messiah. His arrival would trigger the arrival of the seventh and final race after which life would withdraw from earth.
In the way that it combined a science-fiction sensibility with a rigorous dogma, theosophy reminds me of Scientology. I remember glassy eyed friends taken by it, I recall being invited to take a test in a shabby temporary office off Oxford Street. People unfitted for the general hierarchy making up their own. There is the literary, Borgian strain as well: theosophists at the higher grades are said to have access to the Akashic record:
… like an immense photographic film, registering all the desires and earth experiences of our planet. Those who perceive it will see pictured thereon: The life experiences of every human being since time began, the reactions to experience of the entire animal kingdom, the aggregation of the thought-forms of a karmic nature (based on desire) of every human unit throughout time. Only a trained occultist can distinguish between actual experience and those astral pictures created by imagination and keen desire.
Very little of this is seen if you read their journal (edited in America) for September 1914. Most of the seventy pages are taken up by an article titled Re-incarnation and Christianity in which sources for a belief in the souls pre-existence are examined. The flavour of the rest follows from the titles: Plotinus — the neo-platobnist in modern christianity, Plant hunting in China, Recollections of a trip round the world.
You might think that the journal is being wilfully blind in the face of Flanders, the tail article A retrospect and some consideration of present duties gives no hint of bloody fields. You have to wait until the November issue for The Horrors of War by Katherine Copeland, an Englishwoman:
… there is a peculiar strain and expectancy in the very air, as though nature herself was shocked at the pictures of humanity thrown upon the screen of time by the old world’s foremost nations. Men and women feel an inner tremor of impending danger, just as domestic animals often apprehend coming disaster and seek means of escape. The shuddering roar of the guns from regular scheduled target practice along the coast of late, has made our homes and our hearts alike vibrate unpleasantly to this symbolic message, voicing the spirit of destruction which shatters a nation’s hearth-stones and undermines all natural relations of life.
If Ralph slid from geology into theosophy it could have been because they both treat of levels or layers. But there is a difference. The cosmic system of belief invented by Mme Blavatsky projected a stable chart of states of being, by which adepts could measure their progress. Geological levels, or layers are disrupted, twisted, inverted by huge natural forces acting over time. The human composition, in its development is closer to the geological than the theosophical.
Sources.
Heir to Adventure A.J.Evans, privately printed 1961
War Office Records
Winchester College Library
The Free Foresters 1856–2006, privately printed 500 copies at Dragon Print Centre 2006
