In Retreat

By WILLIAM GOLDING

TN 1942, Mr. Raleigh Trevelyan was exploring the loft of the Essex house where he lived in Great Canfield. The place had been noticed as the village of Jimmy Mason the hermit, who had lived for part of his life in the same house. Mr. Trevelyan discovered Jimmy's diary in the loft, and when he opened it, he got a lurid glimpse of life.

If I should be poisbned at last, and this book

is found, it will explain everything. What bad fellows Tommy took up with, and encouraged him to poison his father and now trying to poison me.

In fact, Mr. Trevelyan found himself observ- ing Cold Comfort Farm from ground level. Father Mason had been a soldier of the Queen, a martinet and a sadist. His attentions to Tommy and Jimmy from childhood onwards were hideously rigorous. Their mother drifts through the story, a sort of dumb, Essex ghost. Even while they were all living together, Jimmy had begun the process of withdrawal. He could not eat with the others. He constructed a hut near the hedge and spent most of his time in it. When his father died, money got scarce and they had to sell the house and buy another patch of land. Land is a recurrent theme in this book. The family were kept together in mutual hatred and suspicion, because they owned four acres and had nowhere else to go. Finally there was only Jimmy and Tommy—Tommy acting as guard at the gate, while Jimmy lived like a badger by the side of the river and hidden in a wood. He made himself another hut, and surrounded it with fortifications. People said he had been crossed in love; but he lived his badger-life for fifty years and died so.

The diary dates from the beginning of with- drawal just after his father died. It is misspelt, ungrammatical and fragmentary but it puts us right among the people who lived at Great Can- field during the turn of the century. Jimmy read omens, brooded on the imminent death of his enemies, and had a timid passion for little girls. He spied on them through the hedge, wooed them with presents hung at the gate, but never dared to speak. All this, he recorded.

And must have been nearly half past 10 before left things on rail. 3 eggs and 2 apples. Had not gone 5 minutes when dog bark so at gate. Then open door to ease dog. It come in directly. But could see somebody like Ednere [Edna] standing in road at front. Shut door; 5 minutes after went o-ut and found gate open with things gone and letter hung on fir tree.

Last 2 days hottest of all.

Jimmy had a number of these little friends. One guesses at the whispered, darkling, one- sided conversations through the hedge. Some of the girls were intrigued, some liked him; but they all liked his presents.

Things put on rail at 9. Gone at half past. Gate left open and empty basket hung on fir tree —the same basket she put potatoes in last March. Was a letter inside basket. Said wanted lOs to buy a cloak for winter. Said the man about the wood was only her cousin Jack. She only went round the wood with him to pick nuts. She would be sure to come on Monday for the money.

As the months passed and they found this ineffectual suitor was harmless, they accorded him eunuch-privileges.

*A HERMIT Dismoseo. By Raleigh Trevelyan. (Longmans, 30s.) Lillie got up and lay across Boy's legs, and did ask him such questions. She said, °Do 111t want me?' She asked Boy that twice— Then Lillie said, 'Let's go down chest.' IVY went down and could hear them talking 1 little. Then they left off and all was still fof three-quarters of an hour. Both came out directly and pick apples UP. Then Lillie said, 'Albert, don't you tell old Anga,ls, what we done down chest just now.' Boy di° not answer as his sister was coming close.

There were no such romps in the hay NI' Jimmy. All he could dare and get were lhe scanty, bought whispers through the hedge.

Fanny came onto grass. Look cross pond and said goodbye several times. So good did sea. She wispered goodbye 3 or 4 times.

& stop a little.

We glimpse Jimmy struggling with jealousy.

A little past 2 o'clock Ednere gone by up hill with can as for milk. Was coming back in less than an hour. But she was riding in a fi!il" monger's cart, with a young fellow, laughing and going on with him just the same as did with the boy that came to Merit's 2 years agts the end of last July. She was packed in the cart so close to man among fish hampers, laughl and talking and holding her hat to keep WI" from blowing off. The name on the cart WO Woodley of Dunmow.

A fish cart never seen this way before— Mr. Trevelyan tracked these girls down and found out what had happened to them. FannY, for example, who was born to enjoy herself and was crazy about men, may now be examined as an adult in a studio photograph. Her face is strong and animal, with a mouth like the pit of hell. When Jimmy had lived alone long enough to hit the headlines, it was Fanny who was built up as his Beatrice. Mr. Trevelyan found among Jimmy's papers a letter from her, written befog she went to London.

My dear, I hope you did understand what I said tonight, and if you do not give me a watch and chain xxxx there will never be a Miss Fanny if you do not give me a watch and chain xxxx and I shall never be Miss Fanny if ynn do not give me a watch and chain. I do so much like a watch and I do so much like a chain. I will never be a Miss Fanny if you do not give me a watch and chain. And you might give me a little box and a lock and key to keep nil' money in when I go. You must put it on the gate tomorrow night at ten.

Of course, when Jimmy acquired his mild celebrity, she sold her story to the papers. BM the villagers always said it was Susie, not FannY, whom Jimmy wanted.

The rest of the village comes out pretty badly in the diary.

—The postman had said that Bacon had killed himself by drink. Young Bacon was as bad; the Parson had been obliged to turn him away from the Sacrament. They had to lock all the drink up at the Griffin, else if young Bacon got at it he would kill himself in a few days.

May 31st Friday. This morning T. said J. Sweeting had been found with his throat cut. Burial Monday.

These comments and episodes give a balanced picture of the village life—for we hear what Mr. Trevelyan discovered when he climbed one or two family trees where the Sukebind was ablowing.

With other witnesses I found myself in the quicksands when I tried to probe the secrets of their own parentage. 'You sec, my father and she had the same mother,' someone said to me

about a native of Puttock's End whom I had always supposed to have been his mother. 'Then she was your aunt?' I asked. 'I suppose she was in a way, but my fathers name being Y—, I've always called myself Y—; ain't I right? Someone lived with her; you see, he was her father and my father like.'

even Jimmy's suspicions about poison were t_1(3I altogether foolish. He was certain he only the death by detecting the taste of poison in ic ne Pie his mother made him. When he gave the :est of the pie to his spaniel it lay down and died. IS it any wonder then that Jimmy chose to with- draw from contact with his neighbours unless they Were harmless and attractive little girls? !*. Trevelyan consulted psychologists, psy- chiatrists graphologists, astrologists and sPiritualists in an effort to get an answer to the .riddle of Jimmy's nature. Jimmy was neither 110Inosexual nor schizophrene. He wasn't very intelligent; but then he wasn't anything much— tot anything that a biographer can put his finger Ott if he sticks rigidly to the acceptable evidence. :te seems to have been unable to reason, had 'fiat helplessness in the face of related facts Which is characteristic of some mental illnesses ?.r. extreme old age. But this should have made min able to accept the world as a small child accepts it, rather than run away. The diary, after 4i;l' Only throws light on two or three years, and these were the years when he was in his prime. "r that time we know he nursed savage sus- 1),,icions against his brother, against Bloodhound Sutton and Boy Jessking. But they were not e years of his final retreat, they were years of gradual withdrawal, preparatory to it. He was a Man torn by all kinds of suspicions and desires, !Tievances, hatreds—a man driven to despera- 'len by the money worries he was not clever enough to forget or overcome. Then he withdrew into absolute seclusion. Jimmy was not a man with literary aspirations. The diary had started as a record of Tommy's attempts to murder him. As the suspicions died, the diary died also, and after the storms and timid pleasures of the diary he was silent for fifty years where no biographer however well-intentioned can get at him. How far-off the riotous emotions of the early years must have seemed !

And for the rest? We know that Jimmy ex- perienced some kind of religious convulsion in his youth. There is even the record of a religious experience in his diary,

—Went to bed at half past 11. and had not lain many minutes before felt something so strange come down from heaven It seemed as if come so many times and would never go away. How bad it made me feel. I cried and prayed to God. Directly it went I felt no more.

It could never be anything evil, but good as one of the angels of God.

An account of some obscure mystical experi- ence, says Mr Trevelyan, or a dream, or a naïve description of a purely physical function? Desperately fair, judicious and scholarly, he is unable to make up his mind. Among the -ologists he consulted, the theologian is absent. He would have told Mr. Trevelyan that Jimmy's descrip- tion contains what may have been the key to his whole life, the hallmark of an effective mysti- cal experience.

After the diary, the silence. We hear the beginnings of legentl, and would like to believe them; believe that this strange. tormented crea- ture found what he was looking for, or had it left on his doorstep for the asking. The Rector of Great Canfield knew him. 'He was a gentle, lov- able old man, so shy he could hardly bear to look at other people. He kept bees, grew his few plants, and read his bible. That was his whole life.' When he was in his eighties and very frail. Jimmy even accepted a modified form of contact with the outside world. An elderly, and, one suspects, insalubrious lady 'did' for him. 'He was very religious,' she said, 'and could pray lovely.' An unnamed man claims to have climbed a tree and seen Jimmy praying on his knees among the bee- hives, with the bees crawling over his coat and face.

Mr. Trevelyan has written a meticulous and absorbing book. Yet as we follow the track of the people Jimmy knew in his youth, the question comes very much into focus as to whether their choice and what they made of it in later life was really more sensible, more intelligent than his. Their photographs and their descriptions do not inspire one with love for the world Jimmy left. If there is a mystery about Jimmy, it is a mystery common to all hermits who have left the world in response to a call it cannot understand. In the end we begin to feel ashamed of having read his poor diary, that rump of his long life. We know what songs the Sirens sang to him; but not the one he sang unto the Lord. It is better to think of him as the Rector saw him : a frail, lovable old man, kneeling among his bees.