WJ Burley

Wycliffe and the Case of the Disappearing Author
by Andrew Darling

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

At some point in the late nineteen seventies, Burley's thoughts turned to the notion of an historical novel based in Cornwall. This was perhaps inevitable; his library at home contained many studies of Cornish history, and he was an enthusiastic student of the story of the land of his fathers There was ample material to inspire his creative imagination, and to provide the factual support it needed to convert a raw idea into a sustainable plot.

His first idea was for a novel spanning the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a kind of family saga with the Peninsular War at its heart. He envisaged a long narrative in which an old family servant, perhaps a footman or a gamekeeper, regaled the young son of the house with tales of his experiences with the Duke of Wellington's Army against Napoleon's troops in Spain and Portugal.

The story would be set in two peninsulas - Iberia and Cornwall. Quite apart from the fictional connection provided by the wartime recollections of the servant, there was in fact, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a physical link between the two peninsulas, which Burley intended to weave into the tale ... the Falmouth Packets.

The Packets were established in 1688 with the object of carrying the Royal Mail between England and Spain. Over the succeeding century and a half, the service grew into a complex and remarkable shipping enterprise. By 1847, the packets were sailing half way around the world, linking the Old World with the New. From the west of Cornwall, the ships delivered the mail not only to Iberia and the Mediterranean, but to the West Indies and all the major ports of the eastern seaboard of America, from Halifax in the north to Buenos Aires in the south.

Burley researched the history of the packet service, and of his own home town, drawing up detailed notes on the routes taken by the ships, the size of the fleet, and the nature of life in Falmouth at the turn of the nineteenth century. He was similarly thorough in his work on the Peninsular War. He studied Wellington's campaign tactics, in particular the events surrounding the Battle of Salamanca, which was to be one of the central experiences of his fictional soldier's history.

Once he had completed his background reading, he was ready to begin writing, and he prepared himself by mapping out some of the episodes he intended to incoporate in the plot - "The cottage of a very poor woman, 'victim of the surgeon's knife'; "young boy's trip to France as a stowaway on a smuggling run"; and "experience of a wreck".

But for unexplained reasons, the project came to nothing. His enthusiasm for, and his immersion in, the story, plainly evident from the copious amount of material he wrote out by hand in his notebook, suddenly evaporated.

But if Burley decided against this particular story, it was not because he had lost interest in an historical novel. Almost immediately he began work on a second idea, and this time he saw the project through to its conclusion. The result, Charles and Elizabeth , published by Gollancz in 1979, was his most ambitious work to date, and is in very many ways one of his best.

Promoted by Gollancz as "a distinctly Gothic novel of suspense", Charles and Elizabeth is a story of incest, insanity, reincarnation, love and death set in Victorian Cornwall. Although it owes its origins to (and borrows a couple of ideas from) a contemporary novel from another Cornish author - House on the Strand , by Daphne du Maurier - it is a remarkably inventive flight of imagination, a portrait painted in colours which are vivid, yet used with a restraint and a lightness of touch quite unlike du Maurier's frequently lurid strokes.

Brian Kenyon, the central character in the story, is a schoolteacher in Truro. On a visit to the village of St Martin-in-Powder, overlooking Veryan Bay, he stumbles upon Tregear, a half-ruined and deserted manor house which stands in an extensive park reaching down to the sea. In the mid nineteenth century, the house was home to the Bottrell family - Joseph, a successful banker in Truro, Mary, his mentally unstable wife, and his children, Charles and Elizabeth.

Without warning, on this first visit to the house, Kenyon is transported back one hundred and twenty years, to the eighteen fifties. He observes Charles and Elizabeth playing as children in the grounds of the house. They are oblivious to his presence.

Kenyon is so astounded by this experience (and who would not be?) that he decides to return to the house as soon as possible to see if it might be repeated. He obtains the keys to the estate and within a few days he is back. His encounter with the family of Joseph Bottrell occurs again . and again and again. As he is drawn into the tangled, incestuous web of relationships in Tregear House, he comes to realise that he is the alter ego of Charles. His interest in the family becomes an obsession. He drops out of his job, abandons the woman with whom he has begun an affair, and equipped with a camp bed and a butane stove he installs himself in Tregear to await developments.

It is not a long wait - the pace of this novel is swift. Over the ensuing days, Kenyon and Charles Bottrell become inextricably entwined; Kenyon assumes the physical body of Bottrell on his "trips" back to the nineteenth century. As Bottrell he seduces the housemaid Mary Kenyon - the incident which leads to the birth of his own great-great grandfather. He experiences Bottrell's growing sexual desire for his sister Elizabeth, and his despair when she becomes betrothed to a hated first cousin; and in one of the culminating episodes of the story, he consummates the incestuous love affair with Elizabeth, on the eve of her wedding.

Three ideas are explored in Charles and Elizabeth : a study of upper middle class life in nineteenth century Cornwall; the thin dividing line between inquiry and obsession; and incest. Of the three, incest is arguably the most striking theme. In addition to the central relationship between brother and sister, there is also Mary Bottrell's consuming jealousy of her daughter, a symptom of a burning sexual desire for her son, which undoubtedly contributes to her mental illness, and which ultimately destroys her.

Since it is difficult, if not impossible, to write about incest without writing about sex, Charles and Elizabeth is the most sexually explicit of all Burley's books. This is not to say that it is in any sense pornographic - the episodes describing physical contact between mother and son, and brother and sister, are handled in the mature and restrained language which characterises the entire novel. This is Charles watching his sister, naked, on a beach:

She is beautiful beyond my imagining. I would give my life to trace with my finger the profile of her breasts.

Judging by his published work, Burley was not entirely comfortable when he was required to write about sex, but he avoided the trap into which such apprehension sometimes catapults novelists, who seem to screw their eyes tightly shut and gallop through the offending material, only to finish with prose which is fit for little more than the Bad Sex awards...

Behind the invention of Charles Bottrell, and underpinning the development of his character and of the plot in general, lay Burley's usual thorough research. He read widely on the Romantics, those free-thinking spirits to whom incest was not a completely taboo concept, and in particular he looked to the life of Byron, whose incestuous affair with his own half sister caused much scandal in polite society. Sitting at his desk overlooking the sand-dunes in Holywell Bay, he delved into the poet's works, and studied what Bertrand Russell had to say about him in his History of Western Philosophy:

He loved Augusta [his sister] genuinely because she was of his blood - of the Ishmaelite race of the Byrons - and also, more simply, because she had an elder sister's kindly care for his daily welfare. But this was not all that she had to offer him. Through her simplicity and her obliging good nature, she became the means of providing him with the most delicious self-congratulatory remorse.

It is no coincidence that Byron is Charles Bottrell's favourite poet, or that two lines from The Corsair constitute one of the relatively few literary allusions in this book.

Another nineteenth century writer is summoned to the pages of Charles and Elizabeth to illuminate the secondary theme of obsession: Robert Louis Stevenson. Burley quotes at length from Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to show how Brian Kenyon has allowed the events at Tregear House to alter his life and turn him from an easy-going schoolteacher into a semi-deranged obsessive:

I thought of Stevenson's Dr Jekyll. There were parallels but there were also significant differences. In the beginning Dr Jekyll had deliberately contrived and was able to control his transformations into Mr Hyde, whereas I had never considered the possibility of making excursions into the past and had no idea why they occurred. As Dr Jekyll lost control the transformation occurred more frequently and lasted longer; something of the sort seemed to be happening to me, but I had by no means reached a point at which my personality seemed to be threatened - though I could see the possibility. Of course I had, or seemed to have, an escape route not open to Jekyll - I could simply stay away from Tregear.

Kenyon is, of course, wrong. He can no more stay away from Tregear than he can fly to the moon, and this self delusion is seen by those of his friends and colleagues with whom he is still in contact as a symptom of mental illness. But Kenyon is able to convince himself that he is no schizophrenic, that he is not suffering from hallucinatory tendencies, by constant references to the facts about the Bottrell family which he has only pieced together from authenticated sources after he has experienced them first for himself in his time travel.

Furthermore, the reincarnation of Charles Bottrell is tested by an expert in hypnosis and regression, an Indian mystic by the name of Gupta, who takes Kenyon back through his subconscious mind to the nineteenth century - first in front of an audience at a public demonstration held, for reasons which are not explained, in the village of Feock (the home of Burley's son, Alan), and later in Gupta's consulting rooms in Truro. Burley based his description of the process of hypnosis and regression on the work of the British hypnotist Arnold Bloxham, whose experiments with Jane Evans were featured in a documentary programme on BBC television, and later set out in a book by the programme's producer, Jeffrey Iverson.

Jane Evans was regressed to six different past lives, and for at least three of them, sufficient corroborating evidence could be found for the existence of the historical character to suggest that coincidence would not be a likely explanation. A particularly remarkable example of one of her former lives was that of Rebecca, a victim of the anti-Jewish pogrom in York in the twelfth century. Under hypnosis, she gave a detailed account of being trapped in the crypt of a small church just outside the city gates as a murderous mob approached.

In other sessions, Jane gave details of her life in York prior to the atrocity, naming many places and individuals whose identity could be verified. A key aspect of her testimony was the church in which she claimed to have died. Professor Barrie Dobson, a professor at York University and an authority on Jewish history of the time, was called in to listen to the tapes. Dobson thought that, of all the surviving churches in York, only one fitted Rebecca's description. Unfortunately, the church did not have a crypt.

Six months later, Dobson wrote to Iverson, the producer, with an extraordinary piece of news. A workman engaged in the renovation of the church had accidentally broken into what looked like a crypt beneath the chancel. It was blocked up again before archaeologists could examine it. But the workman had seen round stone arches and vaults, indicating the Norman or Romanesque period of building, that is, before 1190 rather than after. More recently still, the discovery of re-used Roman and Anglo-Saxon masonry below floor-level in St Mary's Castlegate makes it absolutely certain that there was a church on the site in Rebecca's time.

Thus it can be seen that Burley's invention of Kenyon and his remarkable experiences is founded on something which is at least possible, and documented. In this respect, as in numerous others, Charles and Elizabeth differs from du Maurier's House on the Strand , in which the principal character was able to travel through time despite the fact that he had no family connection with those he was revisiting, and in which there was no suggestion of regression to a previous existence. Iverson's account of Bloxham's work was of enormous help to Burley, who used the book as his principal source material for Dr Gupta's techniques.

There is much in Charles and Elizabeth to qualify the book as one of the author's best novels, yet it is one of his least known creations. One reason for its lack of popularity may well be its superficial similarity to The House on the Strand .

Du Maurier's penultimate novel was published by Gollancz in 1969, and enjoyed critical esteem and commercial success. One of its readers was John Burley, long a du Maurier fan, who thoroughly relished this tale of time travel between the twentieth and fourteenth centuries in the village of Tywardreath (literally 'the house on the seashore'). Its carefully researched period detail, and its portrait of a central character who allows an obsession with the past to influence, and ultimately to devastate, his present are both striking and fundamental features of Charles and Elizabeth . Burley's book though is a much darker creation, and although most fans of du Maurier would not agree, it is also much better written.

The House on the Strand is a book in which faces brighten visibly, plans have cold water thrown upon them, and hair, when unruly, is a mat. The wind is encountered nearly blowing people off their feet, there is often a sense of foreboding, ships are to be found at the mercy of the wind and the tide, and boatmen bend to the oars, while around them, seagulls always scream. It is notable for its liberal use of clichés and its reliance on lumpen dialogue which du Maurier uses as a tool for imparting information to the reader, and which thus becomes unrecognisable as a faithful representation of human speech. The characters in the twentieth century dimension of the novel speak as if they had learnt their words from a Mills and Boon bodice ripper; those in the fourteenth century are forever telling each other things which they must already know.

"It surprises me that Otto Bodrugan dares show his face," said his friend. "Not two years since he fought for Lancaster against the King. They say he was in London when the mob dragged Bishop Stapledon through the streets." "He was not," replied Roger. "He was with many hundreds of the Queen's party up at Wallingford."

By contrast, Burley manages for the most part to avoid the pitfall of using the dialogue of his nineteenth century characters to impart information to the reader in the cumbersome manner employed by du Maurier. The one principal exception, the more objectionable for being out of stride with the rest of the book, occurs when Joseph Bottrell announces that he has to go to London on business for his bank.

Elizabeth said, 'Shall you cross the new bridge over the Tamar, papa?'

Joseph smiled. 'I certainly hope so, Elizabeth. Unless Mr Brunel has left out a few nuts and bolts so that we fall into the river.' Elizabeth chuckled and her mother stared.

Florence said, 'The new bridge will be a great convenience to travellers.'

'Yes indeed. I hope to be in London within ten hours of leaving Truro, whereas in my father's time, indeed in my own youth, it was a journey of four or even five days.'

This exchange, surely a most unlikely one to occur over a family lunch, is clearly intended to fix the narrative in a context of common twentieth century historical knowledge (most people, certainly all who know Cornwall, will at some time in their lives have crossed the Tamar either on Brunel's Royal Albert Bridge, or the adjacent road bridge).

Unlike du Maurier, Burley did not use a readily identifiable location for the principal scene of the story. It is true that some of the action takes place in Truro, and these episodes are all superbly drawn (informed by the extensive research the author conducted when writing his History of Truro two years earlier). But beyond placing Tregear in the general area of Veryan Bay, Burley does not specify its location.

Du Maurier, on the other hand, makes a point of using real locations and real, historically verifiable, characters. The house where the action begins was the house in which she lived at the time of writing. She not only names the villages and hamlets, but even the individual farms, all still to be seen on the Ordnance Survey maps. She clearly wanted her readers to be able to identify totally with her creation.

Why was Burley so anxious to conceal such information from his readers? Only in the last ten years or so of his working life did he allow himself to become specific, and even then he was careful to maintain circumspection and anonymity. It seems likely that he was forever hyperconscious of the threat, real or imagined, of an action for defamation if he made his locations too identifiable. Did this fear date from the advice he received from a lawyer at the time of writing Salubrious Place? In a letter to his old friend Frank Turk, he remembered "writing a book which I wanted to base on the Scillies but I was warned by their solicitor that it would be risky to make any island, family, or institution, identifiable, and so I sacrificed most of my 'feeling' for the place and produced a milk and water version (as when Virginia Woolf transported Godrevy, and St Ives with it, to the Orkneys or somewhere.)" This fear, or at any rate constant awareness, was certainly something with which he lived throughout his life, referring to it on many occasions. In one radio interview, he admitted: "Although you choose a location you don't get the topography dead right, and I usually put a note in the front of the novel saying that people who live in the area will realise that the topography is different and this is because one doesn't want anyone to identify themselves with unpleasant people in the book."

In fact, with this book as with many of his others featuring "disguised" locations, it is not difficult to establish with confidence the place which the author had in mind when he sat down at his typewriter. St Martin in Powder is in all probability St Michael Caerhays, and Tregear is Caerhayes Castle, the former home of the Trevanion family, and a house much favoured as a location by Winston Graham in some of his Poldark novels. As Kenyon tells his teaching colleague when she inquires about its whereabouts: 'It's not far from Carhays; the next cove'. Although Caerhayes was built around the end of the eighteenth century, and Burley's fictional Tregear dates from 1700, there is little doubt that this is the location, if not the building, he described.

As to the Bottrells, Burley gives the family a lineage back to William de Botreaux, the authentic feudal baron whose name lives on in the fishing village of Boscastle, on the North Cornwall coast. It was evidently a name which appealed to Burley; he reused it twelve years later, bestowing it on the aristocratic family who became entangled with Chief Superintendent Wycliffe when they were unlucky enough to find a dead flautist in a cottage on their estate.

Although the central character of Charles and Elizabeth is a teacher, Burley does not devote much of the book to the school environment or its social mileu; and his customary nod to his background and interest in natural history and zoology is also much less marked than usual. The Bottrells' family medical adviser is a certain Dr Borlase, who shares his name with the enthusiastic eighteenth century scholar whose Natural History of Cornwall is one of the most celebrated of all Cornish studies; and the last surviving member of the extended Bottrell family spends his time examining the insects of the Helford river. Otherwise, the novel is uncharacteristically devoid of references and anecdotes derived from the two principal sources of Burley's personal experience.

Indeed, the whole book is very much a one-off. "It is a straw in the wind," he told one newspaper. "I am curious to learn the public's reaction. It's something quite different to anything I've written before."

THE CORNWALL OF CHARLES AND ELIZABETH

VERYAN BAY The village of St Martin-in-Powder is a mile and a half inland from Veryan Bay, and Tregear lies between it and the sea. I left the Mini parked by the churchyard wall and set off down a narrow lane which, because of the elms arching over it, was more like a tunnel. The hedges were mossy, sprouting young ferns and clumps of primroses.

FEOCK Feock is a little place on the Fal south of Truro where yachtsmen congregate; a haven for those who have done well enough out of the rat-race to afford the luxury of being disgusted with it.

TRURO It was as I was crossing Boscawen Street that the change took place; the lights suddenly dimmed and for an instant I thought that there had been a power failure. Then I realised that what light there was came from gas lamps with flickering bat's wing burners which did no more than create a small island of light round each lamp post. I turned up King Street, past a row of small shops, each with its gas jet or oil lamp burning inside.

A scurry of rain sweeps down the street and it is bitterly cold. I turn up the collar of my ulster and hurry into High Cross where my father's carriage is waiting outside the bank.

'If you have, on occasion, a compelling need, you can with some confidence visit a house in Goodwives Lane, run by a Mrs Kilthorpe; she is discreet, and her girls are . her girls are clean and in every way satisfactory.' (Goodwives Lane, which is now called Moresk Road, led at right angles from Pydar Street to the old ford at Moresk mill or Truro Vean. The name is a remarkable instance of a corrupted word. In the eighteenth century it appears as Goody Lane, in 1570 as Goodye, and in 1537 as Stret-kedy. Thus the Cornish word Kery became corrupted into Good Wives.) Charles Henderson, Truro Streets, in Essays in Cornish History

At the top of Pydar Street I turn off toward Kenwyn and then down the hill to the stream. I follow the stream as far up as Idless, cross over and return by a footpath along the leat to Moresk Mill on the outskirts of the town. The walk has taken me longer than I had supposed, for it is already dusk. I arrive at the foot of Goodwives Lane; the narrow, steeply sloping street is deserted.

HELFORD The little village fringes a creek and consists of no more than fifty houses. There were several boats moored off and others were stranded on the shingle for it was low tide. Slow moving men in polo-necked jerseys were working on some of them. Most of the houses were no more than cottages but they had large gardens which looked almost tropical with echiums, door-mat palms and yuccas mixed in with the azaleas and camellias.

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