Jabberwock

Dedalus Ireland

Dara Kavanagh is a writer, academic, translator and poet. A native of Dublin, he spent more than a decade working in Africa, Australia and Latin America before returning to settle in Ireland. He has written several books and poetry collections.

He is the author of two novels published by Dedalus: Prague 1938 (2021) and Jabberwock (2023).

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First published by Dedalus in 2023

Jabberwock copyright © Dara Kavanagh 2023

The right of Dara Kavanagh to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Elcograf S.p.A.

Typeset by Marie Lane

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Bletchley, Æthelred 2nd Lord — Home Secretary (1935–38), son of Æthelred 1st Lord Bletchley who founded the Semantics branch of CID.

Bracken, Brendan — Wartime Minister of Information and First Lord of the Admiralty.

Chandler, Charlie — Hackett’s ‘Handler’ in the Eirish Department of Foreign Affairs.

Chapman, Seumas — Eirish Cultural Attaché to the Court of St James.

Clarke, William — Member of the notorious ‘G’ Division of the Dubilin Metropolitan Police. One of the ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocryphal’.

Doolittle, Seymour — Professor of Applied Linguistics at Keys College Oxenford who oversaw the publication of the Oxenford Engelish Dictionary.

Fleming, Aloysius — Army veteran, inmate of Swift’s Institution for the Insane at the same time as Ignatius Hackett. Another of the ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocryphal’.

Fraiser, Duncan — Deputy Chief Inspector of the Semantics branch of the CID.

Hastings, Harold — The Royal Academy of Letters’ Decommissioner of the Otiose.

McCann, Malachi, Mc — Student at University College Dubilin at the same time as Ignatius Hackett, member of both the Dubilin Cervantes Society and Ouroboros Society.

McTurcaill, Turlough — Royal Academy of Letters’ Commissioner of Words.

Mulcahy, Edmond — Printer, and member of both the Eirish Citizen Army and the Ouroboros Brotherhood. One of the ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocryphal’.

O’Brien — Hereditary Title of the Director of the Royal Academy of Letters.

Quibble, Cecil — Chief Inspector of the Semantics branch of the CID.

Sangster, Agatha — Double agent. One of the ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocryphal’.

Smyllie, Robert Maire — RM or Bertie, legendary editor of The Eirish Times.

Von Beruf, Graf Ernst — Prussian Count instrumental in the programmes to develop both the

and its feared successor, the

.

Contents

Preface

Volume One The Gathering Storm

Chapter The First

Chapter The Second

Chapter The Third

Chapter The Fourth

Chapter The Fifth

Chapter The Sixth

Chapter The Seventh

Chapter The Eighth

Chapter The Ninth

Volume Two The Empire Strikes Back

Chapter The First

Chapter The Second

Chapter The Third

Chapter The Fourth

Chapter The Fifth

Chapter The Sixth

Chapter The Seventh

Chapter The Eighth

Chapter The Ninth

Chapter The Tenth

Chapter The Eleventh

Chapter The Twelfth

Chapter The Thirteenth

Chapter The Fourteenth

Chapter The Fifteenth

Volume Three The Dark Continent

Chapter The First

Chapter The Second

Chapter The Third

Chapter The Fourth

Chapter The Fifth

Chapter The Sixth

Chapter The Seventh

Chapter The Eighth

Appendix

In the darkest hour of the Emergency,¹ at a time when U-boats moved like predatory fish beneath the grey Atlantic and the skies over Dover’s chalk cliffs were daily scored with the vapour trails of dogfights, a trawler was bobbling some twenty nautical miles off Penzaunce. She was gaily decked­out; her provenance, the port of Waterfjord in the Eirish Free State. A huge tricolour painted on either flank proclaimed her neutrality. All the same, were a periscope to draw close enough, and there’s more than a suggestion that one did, it might have picked out a flippant Jolly Roger frabbling above the cabin.

If a clandestine rendezvous did occur it was short-lived. Already, from North-Northeast and East-Southeast, two of His Majesty’s corvettes were bearing down on her. For the

was no innocent fishing-boat. What happened next has been a matter of debate ever since, but this much is beyond dispute. Had her nefarious cargo been landed and distributed as planned, the

might have proved every bit as fromulous to His Majesty’s Empire as all the bombs of all the Dorniers and Heinkels then being mustered throughout Occupied Europe. That she wasn’t, and that her story is so little known, shall be the subject of these pages.

1  A period of shortages and travel restrictions occasioned by Neville Chamberlain’s infamous declaration of war on Germany on the morning of September 3rd 1939.

in which our hero endeavours to evade his landlord, fails in this, and is handed an official summons

To begin with, Hackett may not have been Hackett. He may have been Rooney. But that’s another story. Our story begins in the year of the Abdication Crisis.² It is a pivotal year in the history of the European continent, and one moreover that finds our hero at a low ebb, shundling out of a dive off Lower Dorset St in order to give the landlord, Needles Nugent, the slip. A native of Cavan, Manus Nugent was scant of height, scanter of breath, and scantest of all of respect for his tenants — oh, a nice collection of scapegraces and ne’er-do-wells. That one of them had once enjoyed a reputation as a newspaper columnist was a matter of the utmost indifference to his calculus. Mr Ignatius Hackett was thirteen pounds ten and six behind in his rent, so he was, and pounds, shillings and pence were the Holy Trinity of the Nugent creed.

Hackett shundled out the door, gazed myopically up and down the street, then gravitated down a side-alley in the general direction of the river Liffey. From his shambling gait, which like his politics was left-leaning, it was apparent that he had no particular destination in mind, or if he had, no particular hour at which he was appointed to arrive there. He was as short of prospects as he was long in the tooth, that was the long and the short of it. The one concession to directing his perambulation was to periodically correct the innate tendency to drift to the left occasioned by having, since birth, a slightly shorter left leg, or slightly longer right one, depending on how you looked at it. The effect of this effort was to impart onto the rhythm of his movement a secondary motion comparable to the epicycles with which Charles Boyle, 4th Earl of Orrery, had modified the circular motion of the planets.

That morning, Hackett had nothing on his mind. It is a phrase that needs to be clarified. Now as is well documented, during an idle patch in the Thirty Years War, a notorious cardsharp named René had tried to demonstrate the correlation between being and thinking by plotting modes of being (‘ ’) on a horizontal axis and of thinking (‘ ’) on a vertical axis — as for instance ‘ ’ vs ‘

’, and then joining the dots. By extrapolating backwards, he came to the startling conclusion that it was impossible to think of nothing. Although the corresponding graph has arguably had a more far-reaching effect on coordinate geometry than on either philosophy or psychology, in the field of affective psychotherapy the maxim ‘

’ is to this day referred to as the Cartesian Proposition. Be that as it may, what Ignatius Hackett was engaged upon was not thinking of nothing, but rather thinking about nothing.

In particular, he was considering whether the nothing that poetry makes happen is the same nothing as the nothing that philosophy makes happen. For each had its own claims. He was distracted momentarily by the old story of the bishop in the brothel who, when asked whether he’d like his ‘lady companion’ to appear in lace lingerie, replied ‘Nothing would please me better.’ Now, was that an example of a poetic nothing, or a philosophical? Or both? Or neither? Were there other kinds of nothing? Were there, in fact, as many categories of nothing as there were categories of thing? Hackett was getting nowhere, but if he was, at least he was getting nowhere fast. By the time he’d reached the Ne Plus Ultra of Parnell’s monument,³ nothing could have been farther from his mind.

From his earliest childhood, Ignatius Hackett was possessed of what is termed a mentality:⁴ one that, rather than sticking to the task or text in hand, is perpetually racing down a labyrinth of bye-ways and footnotes in pursuit of imaginary mice. If it wasn’t the problem of nothing that his thoughts were stalking, it was the old chestnut of the chicken and the egg; and if not that, the conundrum of the tortoise and the hare; or of the polygamist from St Ives; or of the Copenhagen Interpretation; or of Zeno’s Paradox; or that of the Cretan Liars; or the poser of the Prussian philosopher’s attempt to navigate the bridges of Königsburg. This last was a childhood favourite his father, Walter, had framed thus: "Can you cross all seven bridges without crossing any bridge twice? — I Kant." Before his breakdown words themselves had been the favourite quarry of his errant thoughts. But these days he was nervous of words.

Like many a man of letters — and in his heyday Hackett could’ve walked into the office of any editor in the country and commanded nine column inches — the parlous proximity to words had been his downfall. Some seven years before, around the time when panic shook the financial world, the intrepid columnist began to display many of the symptoms of early-onset dysphasia. When he first heard the diagnosis, he was at a loss for words. A psychoanalyst specialising in the condition warned him, ‘If the condition develops into anacoulothon … well, you see what I mean.’ He did, and it didn’t. Not immediately. But before another year was out, the dysphasia was complicated by secondary aporia, side by side with peritaxis. One morning, a colleague was dumbfounded to discover Hackett sitting at his desk entirely unable to speak or type. Not long after that, our hero spent an unspecified number of undignified months in the incomparable care of Swift’s Institution for the Insane.⁵

Long months had passed since that dark time. Still, no more did the journalist risk inventing anagrams or constructing etymologies, no more did he assay the maze of the cryptic crossword, and if he invariably scanned the headlines of the newspaper vendors as he passed them by, it was merely to stay abreast of current affairs in this most fromulous of times. The one verbal weakness to which he was still prone was involuntary inappropriate wordplay. For Hackett had inherited from his beloved father that debilitating condition known as ,⁶ a verbal manifestation of the gag-reflex. However, these days he generally succeeded in internalising the incessant procession of puns that cavorted before his eyes.

By this juncture, Hackett was in the shadow of the monument to the Admirable Nelson known to generations of Dubiliners as ‘the Pillar’. His father had oft remarked how all along O’Connell St, every one of the statues gazes wistfully toward the Southside, and it was to the Southside that the former columnist was, as though by one of Mr Newton’s universal laws, gravitating. The point was, Nugent was too tight-fisted a tyke to venture much onto the more salubrious bank of the Liffey for fear of spending a farthing more on any item than could be got for less in the vicinity of Dorset St, Lower. With Needles Nugent, no quarter was asked and none given.

For a while Hackett dawdled, listening to the clang and clamour, the music of cow-bell and slow glissando of the electric trams as they glided their heft through the heart of the Hibernian Metropolis. He gazed myopically at the portico of the General Post Office and, as is natural, he thought briefly of his glory days. For it was at this very spot that, two decades since, his journalistic career had had its unlikely baptism. If there was one thing that Hackett had been celebrated for down the years, it was for his uncanny knack of being in the right place at the right time. As though prompted by muscle-memory, his fingers remembered fondly the keys of his Underwood typewriter, and it was not unnatural that from there his reverie moved to the three brass balls hanging over the pawnshop on nearby Marlboro St.⁷ In hock signo.

It was too painful to think of the typewriter gathering dust on a pawnshop shelf, and futile to think of the shop itself as a possible palliative to his present penury. For pretty much the entirety of Hackett’s earthly estate was residing in one pawnshop or another. This inventory extended as far as his spectacles, which explained the myopia blurring the august pillars of the GPO. Could he chance redeeming them so he could spend the day in the reading room of the National Library on Kildare St? His fingers made an inventory of his pockets. He had, by this blind reckoning, seven pence ha’penny, scarcely the wherewithal to keep body and soul together for that day much less redeem his glasses.

As was his wont in passing the newspaper vendors that adorn the capital’s busy thoroughfare, Hackett pushed index fingers and thumbs together to fashion a pinhole, and through this tremulous lens of air he perused the headlines. Swimming into focus were the words MAYHEM IN MEDWAY and ANOTHER VERBAL OUTRAGE ROCKS UK ESTABLISHMENT. Though he’d been avoiding the living room where, of an evening, Needles Nugent would treat his paying tenants to a quarter-hour of the Marconi wireless, he was aware of the rash of counterfeit terms that were lately being passed off in the Home Counties — so-called, he mused, because these were the counties identified in the Tudor Walters report as suitable for the building of homes.

As his thoughts wandered, his perception became aware that a figure had been watching him. Or not watching him. For it was a casualty of the Great War, dark glasses and white cane, a tray of sundry items dangling from the neck. Beret and greatcoat, and across his chest the rainbow ribbons of campaign medals, a language beyond Hackett’s ken, even if his myopia could bring them to focus. Now, there was nothing at all unusual in seeing a war cripple begging. Mustard gas alone had resulted in a veritable legion of seasoned veterans. What made Hackett uneasy was that the previous day but one, he’d bumped into one outside the doss-house off Dorset St., upsetting the tray of lucifers. That was unlucky. And as Hackett was of a superstitious bent, a bad feeling had dogged him all that day. He shivered at the memory. Nothing for it, then. Hackett resumed his slow perambulation southward.

He was rounding the railings of Trinity College when a felicitous thought struck him. The last time he’d spent the day in the National Library’s reading room, hadn’t the Chief Librarian told him that Trinity College had plans out to tender to build a Berkeley Library. Which is to say, a class of library named for Bishop Berkeley of Cloyne, who posited the principle ‘esse est percipi’, viz., to be is to be perceived.⁸ It made perfect sense. The college was surrounded on all sides by a teeming capital. Space was at a premium. To conceive and construct a library which only took up space when it was being perceived was a capital idea. The word from America was they’d gone for broke and constructed an entire University on the Berkeley principle. The problem of course was how to measure the amount of space that one had saved. Because it was plain as the nose on your face that any attempt to measure the absence of the library would ipso facto cancel out that absence. Hadn’t the old song about the arrival of a mere nightingale re-conjuring Berkeley Square suggested as much? The Bursar of Trinity College had offered a reward of a hundred guineas to anyone who could crack that particular chestnut.

Hackett would have been gripped by the conundrum had the Bursar offered the meanest reward. That said, the prospect of recovering his goods and chattels, not least the precious Underwood, from out of hock and of being shot of Needles Nugent for time eternal had his thoughts chasing in a dozen directions at once. For hours, he’d discussed the problem with the Chief Librarian of the National Library, a Mr Best whom everyone referred to as Second Best to distinguish him from his younger brother, the Mr Best who’d ‘walked in’ during the celebrated debate on whether Hamlet was the ghost of his own father at a time when Lyster was Chief Librarian. Now, Second Best was celebrated for his dry sense of humour, as evidenced in his retort, ‘I can tell you one thing, we already have some class of a Berkeley Library operating here, for if any of your University College students are in, the minute you take your eye off of a book, it’s gone’. The felicitous comment came back to Hackett now as he dawdled by the main gate at College Green.

Like many a precocious child, Hackett had been fascinated by Bishop Berkeley’s proposition. In those long gone days, the most direct way to test the hypothesis seemed to the boy to be to turn around really fast to see if he could momentarily catch the absence of what would almost instantaneously be there. Almost instantaneously, the child considered, since light had a finite speed. He’d never succeeded, but then absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, that too was an axiom. Perhaps it was worth a go now? Hackett pivorted in the general direction of Grafton St, clamped his eyes shut by way of preparation, then spun round and snapped them open. There was the city before his eyes, there the great half­round of the old Parliament, and there, under the portico and bobbling toward him, the unmistakable bowler atop the figure of Needles Nugent.

Seeing the bowler bobbing through the meagre crowd and bearing down on him with determination, Hackett’s instinct was to make a bolt — in the figurative rather than metallurgic sense. He had neither the desire nor the wherewithal to deal with Needles Nugent. But where to make a bolt for? Hackett was tall enough of stature to look to the four points of the compass without his view being obstructed, but short enough of sight that the game was scarcely worth the candle. However, it did yield an immediate solution. The porter’s gate to Trinity College stood ajar, and so he darted through the passageway and out onto the cobbled quadrangle just as the first falsetto cry of ‘Hackett! Hackett!’ overtook him. Without looking rearwards he made for the campanile where he veered right (as you look at it, left from its perspective) and shundled down along the side of the Long Room.

Here, he was surprised to find a small crowd had gathered in a semi-circle about the great wooden doors of the ancient library. Taking advantage of his height to peer over the heads as he passed, he found the centre of interest was a garmungling carpenter in a cloth cap, elbows poking from ill-fitting overalls. Sundry tools lay idle on the cobbles before him: awl, saw, plane, riddle, but without a clew. The tools of the trade, then, though the riddle was a puzzle. He was whistling a lively tune while marking off yard-lengths by eye on a wimbling plank with a flat blue pencil he kept betimes behind one protuberant ear, betimes behind the other. A dusting of sawdust over the cobbles suggested he had at an earlier time been engaged in more strumulous work. Hackett listened. ‘ ,’ chirped the chippy.

Recognising the tune to be Lilliburlero, a jingle popular with both sides during the Williamite War, Hackett started and stopped. That a tradesman should be whistling Lilliburlero was not in itself surprising. It had become a signature tune with Alexandra Palace, always provided you could find the World Service on your wireless. The jingle intrigued Hackett as it seemed to simultaneously invite and evade interpretation: There was an old prophecy found in a bog / Lilliburlero bullen a la / The country’d be ruled by an ass and a dog /Lilliburlero bullen a la … though why it fascinated the British Broadcasting Corporation was anyone’s guess. What arrested him now was that Lilliburlero, a great favourite of his sometime acquaintance Malachi McCann who would whistle it between a gap in his incisors, was inexorably associated in his mind with that red-letter day at the GPO when his journalistic career had unexpectedly taken wing.

Distracted by the tune and the memory, Hackett forgot what it was that had impelled him to enter the interior quads of the Protestant bastion, and was rudely reminded when he felt his elbow peremptorily clamped. ‘Hackett,’ rasped a voice, sharp as a needle, ‘I’ve been searching high and low for you so I have.’

‘Do you tell me so,’ said Hackett, attempting vainly to extract his elbow from the vicelike grip.

‘Aye. I do,’ Nugent wheezed. Hackett’s swallow was dry as the sawdust sprinkled over the cobbles. Never mind the magnitude of the sum he was in arrears, the more immediate prospect of losing the meagre pile of coppers in his pocket, and with it any chance of slaking his thirst, had quite dried his saliva.

‘I do tell you so. All morning I’ve been trying to find you, sir.’ Nugent’s ‘you, sir’ had the knack of negating such respect as the appellation should have occasioned. It did not bode well for what was to follow. ‘And do you know why I’ve wasted my morning thus, sir? Will I tell you?’

‘I feel sure, Mr Nugent, you’re about to.’

‘Is that so? Is it now? Well, I’ll tell you, Masther Hackett. It’s because a summons arrived for you, sir, so it did. By messenger boy. And I had to give that wee gasoon 3d, so I did. A sum I may add to what you already owe.’ At these words, the addressee felt an envelope thrust into his hand. ‘I’ve served it now so I have,’ continued the little man, ‘there’s no-one can accuse Manus Nugent of shirking his duty.’ And with that he marched peremptorily onward, his now contented bowler bobbing across the bowling green until it had swum out of the blurred field of Hackett’s vision.

Alone once more, Hackett chanced a glance in the direction of the item that had been thrust into his fist. At once his heart sank. The manila envelope was stamped with the official blazon of the Eirish Free State. Even through his myopia, he could see it was the backward harp of officialdom and not the fabled Guinness harp of which, following a protracted copyright lawsuit which Hackett himself as a young journalist had covered, it is the mirror image. For one in Hackett’s straightened circumstances, the reversed harp was ever the harbinger of bad news.

From the figurative sawdust he’d swallowed, Hackett’s throat had acquired the parched consistency of sandpaper. The one consolation to which he clung was that the meagre coppers in his pocket remained untouched. Following the promptings of Casey, the people’s poet, for there could be little doubt that this was a time of trouble and lousy strife, he ran quickly through the picture-book of his imagination the colourful signage of some half-dozen public houses that were within emergency walking distance of where he now stood. By old habit, without, as it were, making any conscious decision either way, he made for .⁹

The choice of bar was a curious one, and is a good indication of the state of consternation into which the summons had cast our hero. Ever since his breakdown, which is to say over a period of seven years, he had been giving any establishment frequented by the demimonde of journalists and literati —

— a wide berth. To imagine this was a matter of hurt pride, for the former columnist was evidently not half the figure he’d once cut, is to misunderstand the man. Put simply, words and their parlous proximity had been the root cause of his illness. Formerly, he’d been addicted to words. And so, like any recovering addict, hard though it was, Hackett avoided any company and locale that would be the occasion of tickling his addiction. Why then, was he an occasional visitor to the National Library? Partly, this was to stay warm, to have an interior seat that cost not a farthing; partly in order to have congress with the knowledgeable Second Best; partly to play out with said Best the chess-games of the incontestable Capablanca, who had been unexpectedly beaten by the unassailable Alekhine, who in turn had been surprisingly outplayed by the matchless Euwe; and partly to consult such publications as dealt with conundrums of a mathematical nature. He made an allowance for articles on Physics which, with Rutherford, he considered the king of the sciences; Rutherford, whose observation upon receiving the Nobel Prize that all science is either physics or stamp collecting endeared him neither to chemists nor philatelists.

Hackett soon found himself in the mahogulous interior of the , and as the fella said, no-one as surprised as himself to find himself there. Instinctively, he made for the stool that had once been synonymous with the columnist of yore. But for the fact that the curate was a young gasún of scarcely one-and-twenty, he’d surely have remarked upon the remarkable return.

Hackett was in such a somnambulistic state that he failed entirely to clock the round glasses on the round face that was broadly beaming in his direction until the words boomed out, with just a trace of Glaswegian colouring the Sligo accent.

‘Cometh the hour and cometh the man!’

At that instant Hackett was startled out of a seven year trance. He looked myopically at the Cheshire grin floating atop a poncho and said, simply, ‘Smyllie.’

2  From the Latin ab-dicare, to ‘declare with a parting gesture’. In December 1936 Edward VIII abdicated the throne in favour of his brother Albert, Duke of Yorvik, so as to marry an American heiress. There is considerable debate as to why he did so. Sikorski’s proposition that Bishop Blunt of Bradford may have threatened to expose his identity as a German mole has been generally discredited.

3  The Latin legend is a reminder the obelisk was originally intended as a traffic bollard to mark the apex of Sackville St., which it was said would thereby become Europe’s widest cul de sac.

4  Named for a fabled white cat who stalked the marginalia of Eirish medieval manuscripts.

5  The madhouse was a legacy to the Eirish people from the author of Gulliver’s Travels. A dedicatory plaque above the main entrance reads: ‘He gave the little Wealth he had / To build a House for Fools and Mad. / And shew’d by one Satyric Touch, / No Nation needed it so much.’ Though no Hibernophile, Swift won lasting renown in his native land for his contention that held the Engelish to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth. So distraught was the Dean to have been posted to Eirland that, to take his mind off the exile, he designed a mechanical device for dressing the bishop. It was a coping mechanism.

6  A condition first identified by the Austrian neurosurgeon Otfried Förster, who coined the term in a dig at his colleague Franz Witzel. Förster had suggested for one of Witzel’s patients that trepanation might relieve the pressure on her frontal lobes contributory to the pathological condition, to which Witzel had replied: ‘ , she needs trepanation like she needs a hole in ze head!’

7  Named for the Duke of Marlboro (1650–1722), the illustrious ancestor of Winston Churchill (q.v.) who made his vast fortune importing tobacco.

8  Walter Hackett had told young Ignatius that, when asked by a sceptical Dr Johnson if he could thereby explain his own existence, the Bishop replied ‘As God is my witness.’

9  A bar on Dubilin’s Fleet St perennially popular among journalists, poets and delusionals. In the Roque map (1777) the bar’s title is placed in inverted commas, suggesting an ironic appellation.

pertaining to a famous parley in the , and a most curious chess-game

The round man in the poncho presiding over the inner parlour of the was, of course, R. M. Smyllie, a figure who, as he needs no introduction, shall receive none. Asked for a job description, the legendary editor liked to reply To cut a long story short. Hackett’s attention was called back to the young curate, who had set a pint of plain porter before him and was waiting for something to happen in consequence of the action. With a start, three things came to him: that he had absentmindedly ordered the beverage; that a pint of plain cost 10d; and that his portable goods came to the derisory sum of seven pence ha’penny. It was not the first time his absentmindedness had landed him in a pickle. While his thoughts scattered in chase of imaginary mice to find a phrase adequate to the situation, his fingers counted and recounted the grubby coppers in his pocket. The problem was, even had he recognised the former journalist, the curate could scarcely have allowed him the missing tuppence ha’penny on tick, his credit was so shot by this juncture.

The hiatus at the counter had begun to attract the attention of the sundry customers scattered about the bar at the periphery of Hackett’s myopia. With a magisterial nod toward the curate, R. M. Smyllie dispelled any possibility of monetary embarrassment. He allowed the impecunious customer to nod his gratitude and take the edge off his thirst, then, ‘I take it, Mr Hackett,’ his voice boomed out, and it was unclear whether it was the once celebrated name that had captured the attention of the bar or the decibel volume, ‘that you’re abreast of the spate of lexical crimes currently assailing the hereditary foe?’

Now, as Hackett’s old college friend McCann would have put it, he was and he wasn’t. In the course of his daily peregrinations about the capital, one eye, albeit blurred by myopia, always alighted hungrily upon the headlines hawked by the newspaper vendors. There were also the bulletins gleaned, albeit muffled through the floorboards of his room, from the Marconi wireless in the living room of the doss­house, though Needles Nugent was too tight-fisted to allow the set to be switched on for more than a paltry quarter hour of an evening. So that Hackett was only dimly aware of the series of verbal outrages that had begun to discombobulate the Home Counties. So he made an equivocal gesture to intimate the degree to which he was and he wasn’t.

‘I see,’ nodded the editor, ‘I see.’ So seeing and so saying, he drew from a stack of newspapers beside him the nethermost and, frabbling it in such a way that a single article was foremost, he passed it along the counter to Hackett. The latter, who had as the attentive reader knows pawned his glasses, made a show of pattling the full array of his pockets before, irrigating the sentence with a watery smile, he declared, ‘I appear to have left my digs without my spectacles.’

‘No matter,’ said the Sligo Scotsman, ‘no matter.’ He proffered his hand to a bespectacled acolyte sitting nearby. ‘Mr Wood. If you would?’ Mr Wood would, and his glasses were passed along to the down-at-heel columnist. They were not of perfect focal length, nevertheless, as Hackett held them before his eyes, the typeface, the article, indeed the entire counter swam into view. So too the barman and the mirror behind him. And that was crucial for what was to follow.

Hackett unfrabbled the newspaper — it was a copy of the Logdon Gravitas already two days old — and perused the article that had been circumscribed in red ink. ‘BEDLAM IN BOTOLPH’S’ ran the headline. A cursory glance told him it dealt with another of the spate of lexical outrages then afflicting the south-eastern corner of the neighbouring isle. Such snippets as he’d gleaned from the communal Marconi had tended to be anecdotal, not to say comical, and gave no intimation there may have been a manxome counterfeit cell at work bent on the disarticulation of the United Kingdom. But if no lesser a figure than R. M. Smyllie was taking an interest …

Now, it chanced that in a corner of the there was a chess-game proceeding, and Hackett being an aficionado of the game and ever afflicted with a mentality, his concentration flitted between the article in his hands, the chess-game in the mirror, the commentary of the Sligo Scotsman to his side and the unopened summons in his pocket. This wasn’t merely whimsy. The fact was, ever since his time as an asylum inmate, Hackett had become more than circumspect when it came to printed matter. However, for convenience, the article is presented in its entirety, without diversion, distraction or interpolation, herewith:

BEDLAM IN BOTOLPH’S

The congregation of St Botolph’s in Chat’em was in for something of a surprise last Sunday when Dr Martin Coyne, Bisharp of Rockchester, took to the pulpit. No sooner had his Grace begun to deliver a sermon on the evils of calumny than heads began to turn, one to another, in bemusement. For the learned Bisharp kept