Macmillan and Company, 1955, 316 p.

While this is a very well written account of the life of the narrator, Arthur’s, lifelong friend, Antony Scaw, the years have not been kind to its culmination.

Antony was one of those types who are, if not entirely self-absorbed, at least disinterested in the wider world. In Antony’s case even to the extent of not noting the sensitivities of the rest of his family in not speaking of their brother Jack, killed in the Great War.

The early chapters relate life in Antony’s home Ripstead, where his mother finds him difficult to understand. But Arthur is accepted as almost part of the family in part due to his friendship with Antony. The pair endured Wincaster, a minor public school, together before entering adult life after the war

Antony married a woman named Olivia, but they soon grew apart and she began going around with one Reggie Duggan. The group in whose circles he moved could not comprehend his attitude in allowing Olivia to behave as she wished but Antony was of the belief that it was not his business to dictate how other people lived. Later, long after the catastrophic end of his wife’s affair, Antony mentions to Arthur their “‘predecessors who refused to take the omnipotent “They” of life quite seriously’” and had suffered for it.

By this time Antony’s painting had made him moderately successful and after the Second World War he had moved to Long Baddeley, where he lived with a housekeeper Mrs Potter – who gets squiffy now and again – and a ten-year-old girl, Pippa, whose parents had abandoned her.

Local widow Sally Greenway takes a fancy to Antony but he is not interested and Sally’s attachment sours to disillusion and suspicion, suspicion which she fosters with the authorities and bolsters with her questioning of Pippa on taking her out for the day.

It is, of course, the paintings of Pippa which Antony has made, of Pippa unclothed, which become the most damning evidence against him.

Narrator Arthur is convinced of Antony’s innocent intent and the reader has to take that, Pippa’s attitude to him and Antony’s denials of impropriety at face value but at the same time must think a line has not only been crossed but been travelled far beyond. The tragedy unfolds as it must, all the circumstances of Antony’s home life and the prurience of police and court officials pointing only one way.

Despite Fall of Man being at heart a plea for the understanding, even tolerance, of non-conformity (Antony’s actions in the book did not harm anyone, least of all Pippa, it was the initial court proceedings which did that to her) it is more than likely that had Croft-Cooke been around to consider such a plot in the present day he would not have written it nor, if he had, found a publisher for it.

Pedant’s corner:- a missing comma before a piece of direct speech (x 2,) “a character in a wideawake hat with a tawny beard” (a little clumsy. How can a hat have a beard?) hu-ha (nowadays spelled ‘hoo-hah’,) wistaria (wisteria,) “for politeness’ sake” (to avoid that annoying apostrophe use ‘for the sake of politeness’.)

W H Allen, 1973, 188 p.

Rupert Croft-Cooke, a prolific author in the immediate post-Second World War era, has been all but forgotten by the wider world in more recent years and his books are not easy to come by. He was though the favourite author of my dear friend Eric Brown (whose loss earlier this year I still have not come to terms with) and if not for his enthusiastic advocacy for Rupert, as Eric always called him, I might not have picked this up. As it was I was vaguely under the impression it would be a novel.

On starting to read it I discovered it was one of no less than twenty-one books of memoir (now classified under the general heading of The Sensual World) which had appeared by this edition’s publication date of 1973. Six more were to follow. The Dogs of Peace is the fifteenth in the series and relates to Croft-Cooke’s life in the aftermath of the Second World War. Not that knowledge of the earlier books is necessary in order to enjoy this one. Croft-Cooke’s writing is pellucid and entertaining and the book presents a picture of that lost world which is at once recognisable yet shadowy.

At times it is a catalogue of names of the literary great and good (and sometimes not so good) of the time. Croft-Cooke’s connection with the publishing world – not least his book reviewing for the weekly illustrated Sketch (he delightfully quotes one of his summings-up as “The whole story is milk-and-Waughter”) – means he was familiar with all the literary names we still recognise – and quite a few we don’t. Or at least I didn’t. He was a great admirer of the now also all but forgotten Oliver Onions whose work I have at least sampled.

Around this time Rupert inadvisedly launched a lawsuit against the publisher Hutchinson who had delayed publication of one of his books beyond the stipulated time frame in order to queer the pitch for the release of a later Croft-Cooke book due to appear from a different publisher. Rupert’s experience of the legal system is much as you would expect. An oddity I noticed was that he employed the word practicants rather than practitioners for its habituees.

The war had changed a lot in the country. Rupert reminisces about the circus troupe he had toured the country with in the thirties and spent quite some time trying to reconnect with a gypsy he had also travelled with in those days but was met with a high degree of suspicion.

He represents people’s attitudes towards the government as being resentful, saying the populace believed that government ineptitude denied them the fruits of victory. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him (and, by extension, them) that the all but bankruptcy the UK endured as a result of the war might have had something to do with it. And of course, never having been occupied, the UK did not benefit from the Marshall Plan. Nevertheless the relative prosperity he noticed in his journey to France was striking. (I have to add that a similar difference exists today. I have only just returned from a fortnight in the Netherlands and the contrast with run-down Britain was stark. The road surfaces and signage were superb, the trains clean and on time and the supermarkets pristine and well-stocked.) Government ineptitude – not to say callousness – has certainly denied Britain any fruits at all in recent years.

Perhaps Rupert was a Tory, though. How else to explain his barbs directed at the Festival of Britain? He berates it in the book not just once but twice. He also contrasts the post-war Police with earlier incarnations, “it is generally recognised that between 1945 and 1960 much of the English police force was at its lowest a blackmailing, thieving, bullying lot of wastrels serving for the sake of the perks and exploiting the reputation for honesty and good nature which their predecessors had guarded ever since the days of the ‘peelers’.” Things haven’t moved on much since then. Perhaps they’re even worse.

Though never directly acknowledged (Rupert of course lived most of his life at a time when acting on such impulses was illegal and the habit of concealment can be difficult to break) his homosexuality can be adduced from a passage or two.

Overall this is an interesting and illuminating account of those mid-twentieth century years.

Sensitivity warning. Contains the word negro.

Pedant’s corner:- “parking metres” (meters,) “Micky Mouse” (Mickey) “Orson Welles’ acting” (Welles’s.)

The Book Society, 1969, 208p

Aside:- It’s not often I particularly remember where I actually bought a book but Croft-Cooke had been recommended to both me and the good lady so when she alighted on this one in a great second-hand book and antique shop we stumbled on in Saffron Walden on our October trip it was a must.

On his uppers in Paris and with no previous experience of anything much at all John Scout writes, with the aid of his otherwise reticent girlfriend (who forces him to sleep with a sheet between them,) a novel called The Strip Teas for French pornographic publisher Klick. This is taken up as a ground-breaking work by a reputable English publisher who changes its title to Grand Climacteric and the author’s name to Jakki Trover. This gives Croft-Cooke the opportunity to satirise the publishing industry in all its aspects from agents through publishers to book reviewers and authors keen to raise their profiles as well as other topics including the law and prudishness.

The tone is that of the comic novel, no really serious points are made, but Wolf From The Door is very readable, though slight. Most of the story is carried via dialogue, though, and I found the consequent lack of description of surroundings irritating – as was Scout’s naivety.

The chapter titles are all listed at the beginning and refer to the process whereby a book comes into being, The Book, The Agent, The Contract, The Publisher, The Proofs etc. so it’s not a spoiler to say that Grand Climacteric becomes subject to a prosecution for obscenity. Scout, who always knew The Strip Teas/Grand Climacteric was rubbish, writes a completely conventional novel for his next effort.

Wolf From The Door was published in the 1960s. Perhaps things were better in those days as I only noticed three or four typos, a strike rate modern books in general far outdo. One particularly felicitous example was where Scout “threw his coat onto a char.” Another occurred in the “reproduction” of the advert for the English book where “Trover”‘s novel is given second billing to another from the same publisher but its title is spelled Grand Climateric. I thought this was going to be used as an example of where publishers fail to do the best by their authors but none of the characters comment on it so it must be a genuine typo and not intentional by Croft-Cooke.

I am left wondering how typical of Croft-Cooke’s prodigious output Wolf From The Door is.