Sunset at Blandings by P. G. Wodehouse
We have made a brave start. It is up to others, now, to find a more workable plan for rooms, terraces and Shropshire sunshine. Wodehouse has left it to us, his followers and fans, to map it all out if we wish and as we wish, and to make it work as close to his clues as possible. Where it does work, it works like a charm. Where it doesn’t, it’s artistic licence on his side and a problem on ours, to be settled as best suits the probabilities. That Amber Drawing Room, for example. It was first mentioned in the short story ‘The Go-Getter’, first published in 1931, and it was specified as having french windows. After the great dog-fight, the Rev. Beefy Bingham’s Bottles v. Lady Alcester’s airedale, Beefy had ‘thrown Bottles out of the window’ — a thing he would never have done, even to someone else’s dog, if the room had been upstairs. But in Galahad at Blandings Huxley Wikworth and Lord Emsworth, separately, sneaked away from tea in the Amber Drawing Room and went downstairs to the hall and the open air. In A Pelican at Blandings (1969), the Amber Drawing Room is safely back on the ground floor, and that’s where we have placed it. There is another drawing-room on the first floor. There may be more than one. It was out of an upstairs drawing-room window that Connie Keeble’s necklace dropped to Eve’s feet on the terrace in Leave it to Psmith.
The Empress of Blandings is twice brought (or pushed or pulled) into the castle. The first time (Uncle Fred in the Springtime) she goes through french windows into the Garden Suite, to be lodged in the bathroom there. So the Garden Suite is on the ground floor. The Duke of Dunstable is its resident guest. The second time that the Empress makes her entrance, in Full Moon, Galahad is in the Garden Suite and she goes in at the french windows again and—quite a long journey as pigs go—up the main stairs to Veronica’s bedroom, the Red Room. Wodehouse says there that the Red Room is ‘on the second floor’, which is American for ‘first floor’ (the floor above the ground floor) . When the Duke of Dunstable is in the Garden Suite we are told that the morning sunlight shines into his bedroom. These are the sorts of snippets of evidence on which our artist has worked.
Morning sun comes from the east, so the Garden Suite is situated that end of the castle. And it is ‘on the right side of a passage going off the hall’. It is confusing that, though there is a Blue Room bedroom upstairs, the bedroom of the Garden Suite is called the Blue Room. And there is a bedroom upstairs called the Garden Room.
The Picture Gallery and Portrait Gallery are a problem too. In Heavy Weather there is a space upstairs referred to as ‘the combination drawing-room and picture gallery in which Blandings Castle was wont to assemble before the evening meal’. But a mere fifteen pages later Lady Julia steps out of this room through its french windows to cool off on the terrace. Surely the great hail of the castle rises at least two floors to its ceiling, if not higher, to a skylight in the roof. We have put the Picture Gallery on the first floor, round the well of the hall. There are certainly portraits elsewhere than in this gallery. When Lord Emsworth, in Something Fresh, comes down the stairs and fires six shots from his revolver into the hall, his sixth shot hits a life-size picture of his maternal grandmother in the face (which looks like George Robey’s) and improves it out of all knowledge. That portrait must have been hanging in the hall. It is possible that there are two galleries, as we have them, the picture gallery and the portrait gallery. In which, then, did the Duke of Dunstable hang his nude in A Pelican at Blandings? There is no doubt that it was upstairs. In which gallery would the portrait of the Empress be now if his sisters have not forced Lord Emsworth to keep it to himself in his study?
We confess to uneasiness about the design of the stairway down into the hail. Does it go straight up to the first-floor Portrait Gallery, or, as our artist has limned it, right and left at a half-landing? If we are wrong, and if it is the former, it makes much better sense of that cascade of bodies, the Duke of Dunstable’s and Johnny Halliday’s, in Galahad at Blandings. Halliday had been pushed on the first-floor landing by the mysterious (and largely unexplained) Howard Chesney, and he had fallen onto the Duke in front of him, so that they had both crashed down the slippery slope. It was a rather desperate ploy to get (a) the Duke bedroom-bound with a twisted ankle, threatening to sue his host and (b) Halliday rendered unconscious. Not for the first time in a Wodehouse story is a hero rendered unconscious so that the angry heroine shall suddenly come over all motherly, forgive him his sins and kiss him better. Here Linda Gilpin, hitherto furious that her beloved Johnny had, as a barrister doing his duty by his client, torn her, and her testimony, to pieces in the witness box and made her look a prize fool, sees him unconscious and is soon showering kisses on his upturned, though senseless, face.
It would have been difficult, if not impossible, for the Duke and Johnny Halliday to have bounced together over a half-landing and continued their precipitation into the hall. But can you position the pillar in the gallery near which the efficient Baxter kept his nightly watch (Something Fresh) if the stairs are a single plane from hall to gallery? If we have got it wrong, perhaps under a singleplane stairway is the recess where the telephone extension is and where Lord Emsworth keeps the hats that he doesn’t want his sisters to give away to jumble sales.
The two ultimate challenges to our path-finding abilities inside the castle and out are in the story ‘The Crime Wave at Blandings’ (Lord Emsworth and Others) and in the novel Pigs Have Wings. In ‘The Crime Wave ‘from what windows, at what ranges, with what type of airgun were those shots fired at Rupert Baxter those several times? And where exactly was Baxter (a) when picking up that cigarette end and (b) when astride his motor-bike? And where was Beach the butler when Constance Keeble missed a sitter in his direction? Where was the shrubbery in which Jane was crying her eyes out when she saw Lord Emsworth take his shot from the Library window? Where was the seat on which Baxter was sitting when he heard the confession to the crime? Some of your shrubberies and terraces, and the seat itself, must be imagined, we think, behind walls that cut off the view — for instance, the shrubbery in which Jane was crying must have been behind that ruined curtain wall of the old keep, just west of the solitary West Tower (17R).
And, next test: from Pigs Have Wings plot on the map, ours or your own, the hitherings and thitherings in the thefts and counter-thefts of pigs between their own sties, alien sties, Sunnybrae and shrubberies. That’s a real twister.
On our own map, the cottage (29N) in what is probably called the East Wood is where McAllister, the head gardener, lives and where Aggie Donaldson was staying when she ensnared the heart of lucky young Freddie. You can bet that in his little patch of home garden McAllister grows prize hollyhocks and roses at Lord Emsworth in the way those two Norfolk squires, Lord Bromborough and Sir Preston Potter, Bart., grew moustaches at each other in the Mulliner story ‘Buried Treasure’. It was in those water-meadows (15Y) that Lord Emsworth spotted Freddie and Aggie canoodling. It was in the park under those trees (23, 24U) that, in Service with a Smile, the Church lads pitched their tents and George, Lord Emsworth’s grandson, photographed grandpa cutting the little perishers’ guy ropes at dawn. It was thereabouts, too, that the tenants came for the Bank Holiday binge (‘Lord Emsworth and the Girl-Friend’ in Blandings Castle). The tea-tent, in which Lord Emsworth’s top hat was sent flying by a crusty roll and his stiff collar wilted, was pitched there, too, to achieve furnace heat under the blazing afternoon sun.
It was to that bathing hut, which Galahad calls ‘bath house’ (19U), that the Rev. ‘Beefy’ Bingham dragged the unconscious ninth earl out of the lake. Under the alias of ‘Popjoy’ (the usual reason — to be near the girl he loved, who had been brought to the castle to keep her away from him) he had surprised his host while bathing. Lord Emsworth had gone for an early morning swim to cool his throbbing ankle, twisted in a fall caused by this clumsy ‘Popjoy’ man. ‘Popjoy’ had recommended an embrocation for the ankle, and it proved to be a liniment for horses, not humans. Result: a night of agony and a dawn trip to the lake. So cooling and therapeutic to the ankle were its w
If you can’t quite see the hammock for which Galahad and his sister Florence compete in this novel, it’s hidden between the two cedars (25R) . It’s a long earshot to the stables and garages whence, in A Pelican at Blandings, Galahad could hear the harmonica-playing of Voules the chauffeur. But perhaps Voules was a noisy executant and probably he had the breeze behind him. You can see the pond in the kitchen garden (23N) which apparently Galahad as a boy couldn’t. He fell into it and, according to one of his sisters, the pity of it was that he was ever pulled out by that gardener. Beyond (24K), is the Empress’s new sty, within squeal of the cottage of her caretaker and caterer (26L). And you will notice that, in the paddock where she is housed, there are two other fatties, white this time. It has long saddened us that Wodehouse, beyond mentioning piggeries once (in the plural), never specified that the Empress had any companionship of her own kind. Our sentimental artist has added a couple and thus trebled the pig-man’s work for him.
There were deer in the park in the two earliest Blandings books. But we think that the problems of fencing, ha-has, winter feeding and (whisper it) poaching decided Lord Emsworth to let the herd (Japanese and Sika) run down, and to give the remainder to a not-too-neighbourly landowner he met at one of those Loyal Sons of Shropshire dinners. It was quite a business rounding the deer up and carting them. Shropshire has wild deer these days the way East Anglia has coypus, and direct descendants of escapees from the Blandings herds are sometimes seen in the West and East Woods and in the copse north of the stables (1 4N) . Nobody molests them, though McAllister would like to. He curses them when they get into his gardens, and the foresters don’t like the way they eat the bark off young trees.
In Heavy Weather, at the end of Chapter 6, we read: ‘Sir Gregory Parsloe hurried from the room, baying on the scent like one of his own hounds’. Can this mean anything but that Sir Gregory is the local Master of Foxhounds? Whether or no, Lord Emsworth has the living of Much Matchingham in his gift (end of ‘Company for Gertrude’ in Blandings Castle). Is it conceivable that Matchingham Hall is on the Blandings estate and that the hated Sir Gregory, M.F.H., is one of Lord Emsworth’s tenants, but claiming the right to hunt his landlord’s land? There is mercifully little about blood sports in the Blandings books, though we know Gally kept his gun at the castle (Summer Lightning), Lord Emsworth has a pistol with ammunition (Something Fresh) and Colonel Wedge comes to the castle with his service revolver ready for use (Full Moon) . Add to these young George and his airgun, and it still doesn’t make a bloodthirsty household.
You can see horses in that paddock (7U) . I doubt if they are hunters. There is better evidence for them than for the supernumerary pigs. Hugo Carmody rode, in his secretarial days at the castle (Summer Lightning). You see cows in a far field (16, 17K). Those provide milk for the castle and would sometimes, when their grazing is changed, use the cow-byre (10V) where, on the afternoon of the Bank Holiday binge, Lord Emsworth found his little slum-child girl friend. And you can see (5P) the house in Blandings Parva, with the garden at the front, where that girl had quelled the aggressive dog, and brother Ern had bitten Constance in the leg. Just where the girl was when she copped McAllister with a stone is not utterly clear.
Where are the boundaries of Blandings set? Of what noble species are those huge ducks on the Blandings Parva pond (1 Q)? Under which of the gravestones in Blandings Parva churchyard (2N) are Lord Emsworth’s parents, and his late wife for that matter, buried? We assume that it is to Blandings Parva that they went to church (the only such occasion specified) in Something Fresh, though then they had staying in the house party one bishop and several of the minor clergy. Who is living at Sunnybrae cottage (6G) now? Galahad put one of his Pelican Club friends into it, but the man got scared of the country noises and went back to London. Into which window of the castle does Jeff climb in this book, to meet the startled Claude Duff? Where is the little dell near the small spinney in which Baxter’s parked caravan invited pig-stealers plus pig (Summer Lightning)? Who has left that gate open (18L)? And are those (2G) boys from Shrews-bury sculling for home?
These are good questions. Where we have tried to answer others, we claim no originality of interpretations. What we do claim is that we have done a good deal of homework. Whether we have got the answers which would have pleased Teacher, we can never know, since he is no longer at his desk.
THE TRAINS
BETWEEN PADDINGTON
AND MARKET BLANDINGS
FROM my earliest readings in Wodehouse I had had a suspicious eye on the trains that connected Paddington and Market Blandings. I thought the author was inventing train-times as the mood took him, hardly looking back to earlier chapters of a book, let alone to earlier books. I doubted whether any of his train-times would square with the Bradshaws or ABCs of the publication dates of the books in which they occurred.
Not that I would hold it against him if that’s the way he was doing it. But I wanted to see, and particularly to see if train-times provided any evidence of where in Shropshire Blandings Castle might be. There are, or there were in the days of the 1953 Encyclopaedia Britannica (Sarsaparilla to Sorcery), 1,346.6 square miles of Shropshire. Perhaps the railway evidence in the books might help us to put the mythical Blandings on a real map.
No scholar, as far as I know, had collected all the railway references and laid them out for inspection. So, since this last chronicle of Blandings adds one last train to the time-table, I have brought them all together. It was not difficult, only laborious. But interpreting the references was beyond me. I could see no pattern, if any existed, in the times and speeds. I could see one obvious anomaly. In Leave it to Psmith, Psmith says it’s roughly a four-hour journey either way. But, elsewhere in the same book, the narrative says that the 1250 from Paddington arrived at Market Blandings ‘about 3 o’clock’ (1500). My guess is now that that ‘3’ was originally a misprint for ‘5’ and has persisted uncorrected through half a century of editions. Otherwise we have a train, not even called an express, doing the four-hour journey in 2 hours 10 minutes.
Besides, as recently as 1969, when Wodehouse was eighty-seven, he said to Peter Lewis of the Daily Mail, at the end of an interview at his Long Island home, ‘By the way, about how long does it take now from Paddington to Shropshire? About four hours? Good, I always made it about four hours.
To avoid the bother of a.m. and p.m., I have translated all train times to the Continental clock. And I have added the publication dates of the books from which I combed my references. It looked professional and it might provide clues. And I have included the ‘stops at —’ and ‘first stop —’ details as given in the texts. We get them only four times, always on trains from Paddington. And in three cases out of the four they have a purpose.
I can see no point in Freddie Threepwood adding ‘first stop Swindon’ in relating to Bill Lister that the girl of his (Bill’s) heart has been sent to Blandings on the 1242 (Full Moon) . But with the 1615 express, the addition of ‘first stop Swindon’ in Something Fresh is a plant. Ashe Marson and Joan Valentine are travelling to Blandings together, he to be valet to an American millionaire, she to be lady’s maid to the millionaire’s daughter. There is a litt
And when, in ‘Pig Hoo-o-o-o-ey!’ in Blandings Castle, the 1400, ‘best train of the day’, stops at Swindon, it is with a jolt just sufficient to wake Lord Emsworth up and make him realize that he has already forgotten the master hog-call that might make his beloved Empress start eating again.
The third purposeful stop is the ‘first stop Oxford’ for the 1445 express in Uncle Fred in the Springtime. Lord Ickenham, king of impostors, is gaily travelling towards Blandings Castle in the guise of Sir Roderick Glossop, the loony-doctor. With him is Polly Pott, in the guise of his secretary. And his quaking nephew Pongo is with them in the guise of Sir Roderick’s nephew. So far, so snug in a first-class compartment. But then the Efficient Baxter is seen getting into the train at Paddington, and he starts by being suspicious of the whole party. But worse, much worse, is to come just as the train is pulling out. The real Sir Roderick himself gets on. This really is a facer for Uncle Fred. Lord Emsworth had told him that, pursuant to his sister’s commands (it was she who was worried about the Duke of Dunstable being potty), he had gone to London to make the acquaintance of the great alienist and persuade him to come to Blandings to vet the Duke. But, Lord Emsworth said, he had discovered that Sir Roderick was the grown-up version of the horrid little boy they had called ‘Pimples’ at school. Sir Roderick, thus addressed by Lord Emsworth today, had refused the invitation to Blandings. That then enabled Lord Ickenham to set up his three aliases and his triple storming of the castle: on Lord Emsworth’s behalf, and to help a couple of young couples find happiness. ‘Help is what I like to be of,’ says Lord Ickenham.