The Crime of Huey Dunstan by James Mcneish Read Free Book Online

never heard about, like Darwin and Galsworthy and Karl Marx. I read short-story writers—John Masefield and Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield. And some poetry. But I found poetry difficult, and still do. Hubert Fox was my mentor, an inspiration really. He it was (was it? or was it the chief petty officer?) who gave me the cardinal advice—“Never volunteer, never get separated from your gear, and always do a piddle when you can.” Certainly it was Hubert Fox who at the end of the war when I was demobbed urged me to enrol at university. “There’s a bursary waiting for chaps like you,” he said. “Take it.” But I questioned this. I couldn’t imagine being entitled to a grant as of right. I insisted on going before a selection board in order to qualify. Even so, I nearly didn’t make it. I was working in the Juvenile Court at Stratford-atte-Bow in the east end of London as an office boy, and my section head objected. He said to me, “Who will sweep the streets if you go to university?” He thought I was being a clever shins. But I come from a background where nothing is achieved without overcoming some difficulty. Obstacles were built in. It was like my youth-entry training on the path to becoming an officer. I didn’t fit the pattern. One of the examiners whose arms were tired from all the gold braid he had to wear said to me, “What would they say if you appeared walking down your street looking like one of us?”I replied, “They would say, sir, with respect, ‘Bloody good luck to you!’”
    Anyway I ignored my section head and enrolled in the London School of Economics as a mature ex-Services student, and got a certificate, and as a result I fetched up in Cornford New Zealand.
    You must forgive me talking about myself. I don’t often get the chance, but it so happens the Year of the Monkey is here. I was born in the Year of the Monkey, or so I was told by one of my aunts. Surely a chap can talk about himself in his own year?
    To amplify my aunt’s statement, which I don’t fully understand: when my parents died, my brother and I divided up the inheritance. There was the furniture and there was a miniature in brass of three monkeys that had belonged to my mother—“Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil”. My brother Tom said to me, “You don’t want the furniture, do you?” Tom wanted to give it to someone he knew in need. “Of course not,” I said. So I got the monkeys. It was my sole inheritance.
    I have always had trouble with language. At university I had to listen to lectures that seemed to go on for hours, interminably, and then try to convert my thoughts into the written word for the weekly essay. I couldn’t do it. I sweated. I agonised. Then I remembered my mentor in the Navy, Hubert Fox, telling me it had taken him three weeks to write his first book review. He talked about his “intolerable wrestle with words and language” (I think it was aquote from T.S.Eliot). So I persisted. It used to take me six and a half hours to write a single page of foolscap. I still don’t write easily, my thoughts get in the way. Hubert Fox was one of the fighting Foxes in the Quaker tradition. He was a Quaker from Devon.
    After I qualified from the LSE with a certificate in Social Sciences I became a probation officer in London. But the pay was so poor I couldn’t afford to buy books. By now I was reading so much in the literature of novels and poetry, I needed books even more than I needed fresh air. I had discovered that even the literature of fiction and fantasy, for all its polly-wolly-steeplejack words that needed a ladder to be negotiated, could be a source of conjecture and enlightenment about human behaviour. I sent off applications for positions in Canada, Hong Kong, South Africa, India, Australia, and accidentally landed an interview in London which led to a job in New Zealand instead. In Cornford New Zealand, on my probation officer’s salary at the age of twenty-seven, I could afford to