Striding Folly Read Free Page A

buttered crumpets. We have ample evidence that Miss Sayers herself had a passion for Bach and John Donne, and, as she liked the good things of life, no doubt she had a passion for buttered crumpets too. He drives, at fantastically high speeds, specially built Daimler sports cars, all called Mrs. Merdle. His favourite epithet for his male friends is ‘old horse’ and his rallying call, ‘Come on Steve’. He moves with ease in the highest circles throughout Europe, and English royal personages have been known to bestir themselves on his behalf. He must have moved too in the same orbit as Bertie Wooster, though he preferred the eccentric Egotist Club to the effete Drones. His man Bunter and Jeeves must have frequently met in the Upper Servants’ Club and at the various country houses where their employers were guests. But it is doubtful if either the masters or their men were ever really friends. Wimsey, who must have been older than Wooster, had seen the horrors of the First World War, and the gap between those who had and those who had not gone through that holocaust is visible even today among old men in their seventies and eighties. Bunter, although cleverer, would not have been entirely at home with Jeeves, who was no doubt bred to domestic service for as many generations as his master’s family had been born to rule him. Bunter, however, was almost certainly a first generation gentleman’s gentleman. He had been Wimsey’s batman in the war, but his beginnings, if his language is anything to go by, were very common indeed!
        Why did Miss Sayers make her hero a lord? Well, she was a middle-class lady and, like many of her generation, romantic. Somerville College produced before, during and after the First World War a large number of outwardly formidable feminists – who nevertheless brought forth many dainty volumes of verse, almost all of them inspired by one theme, the quest of the Holy Grail, King Arthur and his knights, and, as the modern young have it, ‘all that jazz’. It was probably a mistake to have placed Wimsey among the English aristocracy ‘with sixteen generations of feudal privilege’ behind him. Very few English noble families go back that far in the first creation; rebellions and monarchial head choppings have seen to that. In Scotland, as in all other matters, it is different. A lordship there can be lost in the mists of time. This constant supply of new blood is one of the reasons why the English aristocracy is as firmly entrenched today as it ever was. Miss Sayers knew that ‘everyone loves a lord’ but assumed the wrong reasons. Everyone in England loves a lord, because almost any Englishman can, if he sets his mind to it, become a lord.
        Like King Arthur, Wimsey had his knights around him. Bunter, doing all the things it was not proper for a lord to do: ticking off the servants, courting – for information purposes only – housemaids and other female denizens below stairs. Bunter the expert photographer; the follower of suspects – Wimsey was hopeless at disguises – and being nanny when sickness, accident or nightmare plagued his master. He could, when duty called, perform a vulgar comic song at a village concert. But above all, Bunter performed the impossible by staying on when his lordship married. If ever it had come to the stage where Wimsey had to chose between Bunter and Harriet Vane the balance would probably have tipped towards Harriet, so great was his passion and so rigid his ideas of gentlemanly conduct. But the marriage would have been doomed from the start, and we should have missed two of the stories in this book, The Haunted Policeman and Talboys , which show Wimsey as a married man and father, a state which he embraced rather late in life.
        Other characters appear in more than one book. There is Salcombe Hardy – the always sozzled newsman with his ‘drowned violets’ eyes. A common Fleet Street phenomenon, he does little to further the plots