New Year’s Day with Mrs Bradley

Hangman’s Curfew by Gladys Mitchell

published 1941

 

“It was New Year’s Day, at half-past two in the morning. The moon shone on snow, and the three pine trees at the end of the garden sparkled with the glitter of a fairy pantomime,” Gillian, after some scratchings-out, had committed poetically to paper. Mrs. Bradley, seated in a deck-chair in her garden at Wandles Parva, grinned and read on.

Well that’s nice. Though this is by no means a seasonal book – the action takes place over a long period of time, something Mitchell was prone to, you do wonder what everyone is doing the whole time. But anyway, it seemed like a good New Year’s Day choice. The picture shows a gamekeeper (probably) in an Irish scene, from the National Library of Ireland. There is a gamekeeper (probably) who plays some role here…  ‘he was lounging, gun on arm, like a gamekeeper on a stage, or in a novel of the ’nineties.’

Hangman’s Curfew: so first of all, no idea at all what the title means, it is never explained, and doesn’t seem to be a phrase in any other context.

The plot as it first plays out is surprisingly sensible and linear. The young Gillian above is heart-broken. She is the granddaughter of a friend of series sleuth Mrs Bradley, (‘an old woman who looked like a witch and behaved like a lunatic’), and Mrs B knows exactly what she must do to recover:

Mrs. Bradley, grinning snake-like upon the guest, paid the broken heart sympathetic tribute. She ordered the patient a week’s complete rest, the latest books to read, and a Chinese jacket of surpassing beauty to wear during the all-too-short and charmingly interesting mornings. These were spent in her room. The cure included the most luxurious food, and, on the fifteenth day, when convalescence appeared to be imminent, a visit from a very expensive hairdresser.

Once out of this phase, she goes away on a hiking holiday in Northumberland. She has a significant encounter:

She stepped along briskly, still finding the wind very cold. Suddenly she heard, behind her, the sound of footsteps, a confident, masculine stride, on the hard, bare path. She could not forbear to glance behind her. Not more than thirty yards in the rear was a young man in shorts and a lumber-jacket. He carried an ashplant with which he was whacking at the heather.

He tells her a strange story – old man in a country house, surrounded by grasping relations, concerns over the will, suspicious ‘stomach upsets’. A case for Mrs Bradley? Yes of course, but is there another layer to this story?

On we go, and the story is readable enough and intriguing. And then (in my important view) it goes completely off the rails, with a complete change of location, a particularly strange impersonation, and chapters of a cipher based on the Oxford Book of Ballads. Pages, and numbers, and initials. And then a completely different version of the cipher. Well I think so, I’d really lost interest in and patience with that particular line. And I possess a copy of this book, so might have been seen as having an advantage.

 

Mrs B has to find a location. And she does. I’m  not sure if any readers care about the ballads…

However, you do learn something about music halls:

“Do people often come and make these rather odd requests at the box-office?”

“We get all sorts. A man wanted to book three seats for self and two chimps the other day. In fact, he did book them. Then the management threw out the chimps.”

“Indeed?”

“Not ’arf. Then the man went, too, and claimed his money back.”

“He got it?”

“No. Nobody getting thrown out of a music ’all gets their money back. One of the Queensberry rules, that is. You’d have no check on anybody’s behaviour, you see, and behaviour’s everythink in a music ’all, especially in the first ’ouse, which is what it was.”

 

 

With some judicial skimming it is a good read, just not one of her very best.

 

YOUNG HIKERS IN YORKSHIRE: THE WORK OF THE YOUTH HOSTEL ASSOCIATION IN WARTIME, MALHAM, YORKSHIRE, ENGLAND, UK, 1944 | Imperial War Museums (iwm.org.uk)

 

Lady in Chinese Silk Jacket by Bernhard Gutmann.