Vanikin in the Underworld

Falling Marbles Press, 2025

A rebirth from the rubbish

Disgraced, deposed, and driven to the ‘underworld’ for the crime of political incorrectness, Harry Vanikin — formerly Professor Vanikin — has not left the London housing estate in which he hides for seven years. Even going so far as to cover up his windows, the seventy-year-old Vanikin lives the life of a discarded shadow, going about the motions of something called life and only occasionally visited by his sister, his tormenting nephew, and his fellow residents of the run-down housing project they call home. From these fellows, however, from these similarly mad and equally rejected beings, the ashes begin to stir, and a ray of hope appears for the man who once said: I tried to teach my students the truth; no one told me the truth was no longer wanted.

Vanikin in the Underworld is the story of the furthest down and possible redemption of an educator who can’t escape education.

*   *   *

Eurydice trod on a serpent as she fled, and died of its bite. But Orpheus boldly descended into Hades, hoping to fetch her back…
Robert Graves, The Greek Myths

Then you are not one of us? You are well, you are but a guest here, like Odysseus in the kingdom of the shades? You are bold indeed, thus to descend into these depths peopled by the vacant and the idle dead…
Descend, Herr Settembrini? I protest. I have climbed some five thousand feet to get here…
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

Chapters

1. Inappropriate teaching methods

2. The fall of Mulciber

3. Estrella and the arriviste

4. In the TV room

5. Magda and the measuring man

6. Preparations for a royal visit

7. Queen and consort

8. I am everywhere else

9. Breakfast of champions

10. Time and the maiden

11. The wonders of the invisible world

12. The life and times of Jimmy-Shawn Pallis

13. School for vandals

14. Measure for measure

15. The follies of Pygmalion

16. In the antechamber

17. Europa after the rain

18. Dinner with Estrella

19. Of first and last editions

20. Let the games begin

21. Entry of the gladiators

22. Term time

23. A new printing

24. The book of the dead

25. The dinner party

1. Inappropriate teaching methods

I dreamed last night I was being measured up for my burial suit. The odd thing was that I was still alive. That’s right. Some mincing little chaffinch with a tape-measure round his neck was feeling me up, chalking outlines on butcher paper, cocking his birdy head to one side while he looked at my scrawny 70-year-old old frame, and all to the end of making a suit to grace Harry Vanikin’s coffin, his lying in state. He didn’t say anything, but I knew. That’s one of the things about dreams that sets them apart from the waking life; however strange or other they might be, you always know what’s going on.

I say I had the dream last night but I meant when I was last asleep. The windows here are blacked out by big theatre curtains. It could be day or night. There used to be tiny ragged holes in the fabric, wounds from a moth invasion, and the daylight would announce itself through these tiny spaces, making it look like a knackered old planetarium. That’s what the ancient astronomers thought stars were, light getting in through a bloody great dome a few hundred miles above the earth. How do we know they were wrong? Everything else in the modern world is built on lies, why not the stars too? Make it all up, fabricate, weave and spin. I stuck black gaffer tape on the holes and now it’s as black in here as a crow’s heart.

I used to burn candles but I set fire to one of the walls and now the boy refuses to buy me any. So I switch on the electric light, the 40-watt bulb suddenly spewing out its pale yellow effusion. Not pale enough for Vanikin. I asked the boy if the shop did 20-watt bulbs, 10. Can you get a 1-watt bulb? Could you see by its light? Perhaps I should learn to feel my way around this haunted palace, like a blind man. Once, when the boy was sick, Estrella did my shopping and brought me back a light bulb that looked like it had been a prop in a Russian science fiction movie of the 1960s. Estrella, tall and gangling, with an anachronistic flapper’s face tending to the lengthy. The bulb was sculpted glass tubing and Estrella said it was energy efficient. Like all young people now, she is the conscience for an entire planet. When she had gone, I broke the monstrosity with the ball-peen hammer to see what was inside and waited for the boy to get well and buy me a proper bulb.

At the moment the boy is well. He rarely gets ill, but he is on the right side of puberty, untroubled by the itches and drives that arrive when poisonous hormones leak into the childish glands. He is, however, prey to the natural maladies of the young. I don’t know what time it is; watches and clocks simply sneer at you concerning your own mortality. When the boy comes I know it is morning. He is a part of the overworld and he has a mother to keep him on the temporal straight and narrow. His mother is called Manda. Not Amanda. Just Manda. I saw her once, peering in at my humble dwelling like a medieval courtesan gazing in wonder into a turf-cutter’s hovel. She lives with the boy in one of the other rooms. The boy has a similarly mutated modern name, but to me he is just the boy, a beacon of innocence in a world as rank as month-old cheese in a long-broken refrigerator.

The house has yet to come to life, so it must be early in the morning. The boy used to chatter away of his adventures in the overworld, and would give away clues as to the season. I forbade him ever to speak of it again. I carry enough of the infection from outside and I am here for the cure, to take the waters. Winter or summer, equinox or solstice; these climatic mood swings no longer concern me.

No. That’s a lie too far. You will become used to my lies, my swingeing embellishments and outright deceptions, but let’s not run before we can walk, or walk before we can crawl, or crawl before we have oozed from our mother’s great tented bellies. Of course I know the seasons even here, down here in the underworld. It is summer now. There is no need for the convection heater and the caretaker of the building in which I live has turned off the central heating. The caretaker is a man called Craig McCerrow and is one of the most frightening of God’s creations. God, or whoever runs this spiteful orb. But it is summer now.

Summer too when I first descended from the glare, down into the bowels searching for no Eurydice but the truth, or at least a truth. Supposing truth to be a woman, wrote Nietzsche, who slept with one woman in his life, who gave him syphilis, which drove him mad and left him in the Jena asylum for eleven years. Beware truth. Summer when I came here, seven summers ago, and in that seven years I have left this room for a period in excess of 24 hours once and once only. Of which more later.

Inappropriate teaching methods drove me here, or led me here (the distinction is a part of the purpose of my visit), and I have to say that is pretty rich coming from the gauleiters of the overworld. I taught inappropriately? In a world where pinheaded advertising executives spend Third-World-economy-sized amounts selling children plastic and rubber shoes endorsed by multi-millionaire hoodlums who made their own fortunes braying about violent sex acts and ballistic weapons, my teaching methods were inappropriate? In a world in which banks deemed too big to fail are paid to survive by money taken from the pockets of toilet cleaners and nurses before awarding their incompetent executives yearly bonuses outstripping the amount those same cleaners and nurses would need to live for as long as a dozen Roman empires to earn, my teaching methods were inappropriate? In a world in which women can become men and men women on the state’s ticket, children can view buggery at any hour of the day or night, screaming dervishes knife octogenarians as they queue for the bus, actors are asked about the world economy, simpering and large-breasted women lie about the weather to make themselves a fortune, shallow graves dot woodlands when men are done with their entertainments and no one is allowed to use the word ‘spastic’ even though it comes from the ancient Greek ‘spasmos’ which, meaning as it does ‘to tremble violently’, adequately describes the condition it used to stand for, and my teaching methods were inappropriate?

‘Mr Vanikin?’

Outside the door, the boy is here. I shuffle to the door and release the latch, tacky with age, and open the door an eye’s width, checking that this is not that dreadful sprite Adam, with his abilities, his mimicry and othernesses. It is not. It is the boy. I retreat back to the safety of my geriatric sofa, my large bald flannel dressing-gown’s train following like a sick dog.

The boy is about twelve but already tall. Christ knows what there is in food nowadays, but it’s not just the post-war boons I remember, iron and calcium and phosphates. Nowadays the junk they shovel down must be crammed with alchemised plant food, kerosene, plutonium. The boy is tall but not independent of limb like Estrella. He already has co-ordination and grace, a larval godling. His mop of curly hair falls over one hazel eye. He would have gone down handsomely in the Athenian square, fawned over by a gaggle of Socrates’ loquacious bum-chums.

Don’t worry; little boys are not what the young people call ‘my thing’. Christ alive, what do you do if you find out it is your thing? Lars, the middle-aged Danish laboratory worker who sometimes sits with me and brings me newspaper snippets from the world of men, like a paunchy Scandinavian Mercury, tells me there has been a spate of arrests of ‘celebrities’ over child abuse back in the days when men were all wearing Neanderthal sideburns and velvet jackets with landing-strip lapels. What actually happens on the day you discover that little girls – or little boys – are your thing? You are sitting on the tube train opposite a cherub. The swinging legs, the flash of tiny knicker cloth, the empathic pull in the sinews of the unruly member… Jesus, do you make straight for the nearest hospital, the nearest cop shop, or do you embrace your new vocation and head for darker infernal regions? Or are we, to use another phrase beloved of today’s academic grubs and pupae, just ‘ethnocentric’ about all this? African tribes and their child brides. Nine-year-old Aisha shepherded into a tent to meet the patiently waiting Mohammed.

The boy has come into the room and is standing tapping at his ever-present mobile telephone, the portal to elsewhere beloved of all modern youth.

‘What do you need today, Mr Vanikin?’

‘Um, the usual really’.

I hand him my list, a pathetic inventory in a crabbed hand. Harry Vanikin’s needs, strip-lit libations. The boy looks down at the meagre collection of items and pries loose the twenty-pound note carefully stapled to the torn strip of copier paper. He says,

‘Craig says the water’s got to go off today for two hours. Shall I fill the kettle right up?’

He’s a good boy. If the child is father to the man then the world has a treat coming its undeserving way. The boy will not grow up to be Craig, crackling with malice, finding his way into a job with people, I’m certain, because people are his sport. The water is always having to go off, the lights go out, the heating fade to tepid, so that gangs of mythical ‘workmen’ can tinker and prise. The block is like some great sick mastodon tended by pygmy veterinarians.

The boy has gone, striding down to Ahmed’s shop, and I am alone, or as alone as I can be. Vanikin in the underworld. Where were we? Ah, yes. Inappropriate teaching methods. I suppose it could have been worse. Socrates got the hemlock, Bruno, Wycliff and Savonarola the stake and the fire, looking down and hoping the breeze was ministering to the flames. The university simply made no fuss and paid me my pension before laying me off. Estrella tells me my book is no longer to be found in the library reference system. My book. So much to tell.

Another day in my circle. I rip off a puckered square of kitchen roll and evacuate my nose into it before looking down to view the outcome, a Kandinsky miniature in grey, green and red. My stomach, that aged coil of plumbing, is making small spiral noises, like tiny springs emerging from a captor mattress, and I must prepare porridge.

In the ‘kitchen’ – the square boarded off by prefabricated and hastily painted and wonky boards – I line up oats, salt, milk, a cup of water and sugar on the ugly Formica surface. I turn the hob to three. Hob; Anglo-Saxon word for the devil. Now, a circle of fire. Everything is present everywhere else; the human task is to sort it into piles that make sense.

I make porridge exactly the same way my father did, the big bearded man who was as good to me as he knew how to be. Porridge must not be a swimming gruel, but neither must it be industrial adhesive. It should exist betwixt and between the two extremes, like we poor ape-angels. As I carry the bowl back into the central space and the retired sofa, I realise I must not have slept at all well.

2. The fall of Mulciber

Just as every version of the underworld has its guardian or attendant devil, infernal factotum or dog of three heads, so too Europa House has Craig McCerrow. There he is now, shirtlessly grappling with some ancient lead fixture in the sweltering boiler room deep in the basement. His upper body is a patchwork quilt of tattoos, some professionally applied and some of more home-made provenance. They record past dalliances, the names of Craig’s awful sociopathic children, tribal affiliations in the world of association football, nationalistic aspiration, and mythical creatures, zombie overlords and full-breasted, broadsword-wielding vixens. Craig’s mental life is correspondingly crammed and chaotic, but he is grateful for the job of resident caretaker at Europa House.

Indeed, the job was a godsend. Craig had had quite enough of his regular employment as doorman of various risk-laden speakeasies across the city. He had been stabbed and shanked, shivved and striped too many times to justify the money and drugs he received in payment for plying his precarious trade, and the caretaker’s role allowed him to exercise power without the accompanying perils of the order of clientele to which he had become used. His biography presented here is a composite work, for which I must note the reportage of residents Lars, Declan, Ricky Rick and Mrs. Podolski, who together form a sort of BBC World Service concerning the happenings at Europa House.

I dread Craig. On the few occasions he had been inside my cubicle here at the House I had cringed in the corner while he attended to trip switch or faulty tap, and he seemed exactly what he was, a dreadful man in a city of dreadful men. There is an order of being which seems to take place, to take its place, in a parallel dimension to that in which we, the weak and frail and fallible, live and breathe and have our being. To see Craig McCerrow, his sleeveless shirt showing enough of the hinterland of his squamously illustrated body to indicate his likely passage through life thus far, is to see a type of hell.

Now, he has simply turned off the water to the entire block to attend to some dysfunction in the ancient plumbing. Alerted by the boy, I have filled saucepans and the kettle and the old tin pail for my ablutions. Two hours was mentioned, but Craig keeps to no earthly temporal calibration. Once he turned off the electricity for an afternoon but was persuaded by one of his appalling coterie of friends to go on a three-day drink and drug field exercise, and Europa House remained plunged in darkness for the duration.

As I accept that it is the morning, I must prepare for my day. I heat water in my kettle, testing the great orange gas container with the ball-peen hammer to see how much remains. We are all of us hooked up to these containers, and Craig replaces them for a stipendiary fee when they expire. There is no working gas supply system at Europa House, a fact which exercises the gangling Estrella. She, like most of her generation, is well versed on her rights, and claims that the contraptions which Craig has rigged up in each of our battery cells (the original house has been divided and divided again to provide more hutches for the inhabitants) contravene various Health and Safety commandments. I wouldn’t know about that, although I do know that the last representative from the council to visit Europa House was so menaced by Craig that he had to take a month’s sick leave from his place of work. That awful hobgoblin Bertie Spedding told me that. Bertie Spedding, the Mercury of bad news and sniffer of ill winds.

My water ready in the singing kettle, I fill the basin, select a flannel (one of two, royal blue and washing-machine grey) and begin to soap and valet the various cracks and orifices of my awful old body. The body, writes Plato. A shadow which keeps us company. I can’t have a bath because the bath has a crack in it like lightning-split timber. It also has about a hundredweight of academic papers, newspapers, notepads dense with my scrawl, coverless books. Research, you see, for my next book, the follow up to my university-banned and universally unread debut. More later.

With my cleansed frame snugly inside my billowing dressing gown once more, I sit and read, transported to wherever today’s book (the first of many) will take me. Reading is life to me, the phrases, ideas, concepts, new words and formulations all pouring into the old Vanikin head like wine into a cracked gourd. I would rather be a notepad for the sayings of great men, writes the pugnacious Julius Caesar, than be a great man myself. Some time later, I rest my book on the frayed elbow of the sofa’s arm-rest as I hear the light tappity-tap on my door which announces the arrival of Lars and the news.

Lars is a bald and shiny-domed Dane who was once a laboratory assistant before retirement drew him to the dubious environs of Europa House. He eschewed a return to the Norse land of his fathers on the grounds that it was now overrun by Mohammedans to an extent that not even the sleeping Holger Danske (the giant but currently comatose defender of the Danish people) could ever counter. He and I sit washed by my pale bulb, and Lars will tell me of affairs in the wider world, carefully préçising the main currents of activity before expanding on one or two stories which have caught the attention of his enquiring Scandinavian mind, and dutifully omitting to tell me the date.

Lars sits in my guest’s chair, a sort of faux Regency throne with elegantly curved dark wood legs and the look of a creature with nocturnal habits all its own. Tufts of old horse-hair from a nag long dead protrude at intervals.

Lars speaks perfect English, retaining the slightly clipped tunefulness of his native land. His round-up of current affairs confirms the movements we all know to be taking place outside the ramparts of Europa House, as the world outside marches slowly but resolutely towards a second dark age, a sort of anti-Enlightenment. Money is still acting like an insane woman in the market square, all matted hair and flung excrement. Politicians still parade and speechify, like street vendors in the last minutes of Pompeii. The young still rule the streets while the old stay indoors praying to gods who are themselves frightened. Motor cars still tear around culling the population, television still holds a nation in its mesmeric grip, and it has not rained for eleven days in a row. I make tea.

Lars and I sip at our hot brew as the amiable Dane begins a circumspect tour of what counts these days for news. News. The media. These old shades are part of the reason I fell from the heavenly ramparts of academia and landed here. I think of Milton’s Mulciber in Paradise Lost, one of Satan’s angels pushed (by Michael, if memory is a good and faithful servant) over heaven’s battlements to fall to earth in a leafy forest, a descent which took a full day.

We are fallen too. Crashing to earth where we sit huddled in a damp, loamy forest to be told tales by various spirits of the wood who do not have our well-being in mind. Inappropriate teaching methods. I tried to teach my students the truth; no one had told me that the truth was no longer wanted. Think of Orwell, lanky, pencil-moustachioed, public-school George with his fags and his TB. In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. Vanikin the revolutionary, Vanikin in a beret, bearded and chomping a cigar. I told them that Media Studies, the degree for which so many of them clamoured like ducklings at the water’s edge, was a waste of time. Media studies was what you did in your own time. Media studies was just reading the papers and watching television. University education should be more than a breakfast-time habit tenured. Inappropriate teaching methods.

Lars is summing up the state of world affairs. But we all know where the world is heading. It’s heading here, to join exiled Vanikin in the underworld. The world outside my retired theatre curtains was a rickety pier full of whizzing circus rides with the nuts and bolts all loosened and the lights off when I last trod the boards. I tremble to think what it has become since I groped my way below stairs, but I suspect that if I were to re-emerge from my dank and Gyprocced chrysalis this very day, I would not walk out into a second Renaissance.

It’s consciousness, you see. Nietzsche called the brain our last and least developed organ, and he was right, poor mad syphilitic old Friedrich. Giving consciousness to homo sapiens was like giving the Large Hadron Collider (and there Lars did hold my attention) to a saloon bar full of association football aficionados. There was the Renaissance, of course, but it was hardly general issue. A Milanese peasant born the day Fra Angelico was born and breathing his final rasping breath, a rare octogenarian, the day Uccello passed away would in all probability have lived his entire span without setting eyes on a framed painting. A frame was what you grew your turnips in. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, modernism; these were mostly things that happened to other folk, the folk on the hill. The majority of the world’s population went on much as before while Michelangelo was creating his wonders, dirt under the nails and trying not to get killed by their neighbours. My tea is cold, and Lars has finished his report.

I bid Lars a fond farewell in his native Danish. Farvel. It more or less exhausts my knowledge of that jolly-sounding language, and sounds to me like a minor character from a Dickens novel. Little Farvel. Dickens, with his mad hair and social conscience. I feel vaguely unclean after being sprayed with the ordure of the outside world, and I head for my bath tub. I retrieve something soothing and recline on the buggered sofa, wondering who the house will throw at me next.

Europa House was built at the start of the 1960s, and so has no exterior charm and resembles a hybrid of an East German tax office and a giant lock-up by a ring road. As mentioned, the original spacious apartments have been cordoned and sub-divided and partitioned to produce the current human hen-house, and I am merely one lonely occupant among many. A surprising proportion of the inhabitants are, by any reasonable usage of the phrase, clinically insane (I am one), but there are gems amid the chaos. Part sanctuary for the disenfranchised, part asylum, part dormitory, part ghost train, Europa House has been my abode these seven years since my public disgrace and defenestration. After the fall, this is my pandemonium.

No one came to see me as I cleared my office at the university. To associate with Vanikin was to be on McCarthy’s black list, in the FBI’s little black book, marked down for a Leninist show trial. I had become toxic, a pariah or pharmakos or scapegoat. And so for seven years I have wandered in the desert of myself, apart from the ways of men…

A small drum-roll at my hollow door. The boy has returned with my provisions. I trust him with my pension, giving him a small stipendiary consideration of which I suspect Manda would not approve. All modern mothers believe that all elderly men are sexual predators with their offspring squarely in the crosshairs. The danger, however, lurks elsewhere. Mentally and intellectually, the peril starts when teacher arrives with her curriculum of anti-life skills. Outside the school gates, meanwhile, the drug dealers lurk.

The boy, as always, leaves two gossamer-thin carrier bags outside my warped front door, and I retrieve them like a laboratory rat snatching at a food pellet.

Tinned fruit, tinned meat, cordial, tea, milk, biscuits, porridge oats. Ahmed’s prices are reasonable, and I have purchased enough to keep a sub-Saharan family for most of a week. I have modest requirements; such is the life of the fallen angel, the outcast scowling back at the city of the sun, the civitas solis.

“Raw with newness.” That’s a phrase from the most famous book by the great English writer Rosemary Sutcliff (1920-92). She’s describing Hadrian’s Wall, the giant Roman fortification completed in about 130 A.D., nearly two thousand years ago. That’s what the book, The Eagle of the Ninth (1954), allows both children and adults to do: fly back through the centuries to a world where Hadrian’s Wall is new and Celtic Britain part-conquered by Imperial Rome. Sutcliff had a very powerful pair of what another great English writer, Lytton Strachey, once called “the wings of Historic Imagination.” And she was a winged wordsmith in more ways than one, skilled at breathing life into what Homer called ἔπεα πτερόεντα, epea pteroenta, “winged words” that could fly without limit through space and time.

Tamed wolves and honey cakes

Her words had wings because she had wings. Sutcliff could fly back into the past of the British Isles with the speed and strength of an eagle. Once she was there, she could transform into another kind of bird. She was a literary hummingbird too, darting and dipping and hovering, able to examine people and clothing, buildings and weapons in minute detail and from every angle. And then, with the magic of words, she could make her readers see those details too: the brand of Mithraic initiation between the brows of a Roman officer; the wind-and-water-like whorls decorating a Celtic shield; the crumbling red sandstone of an abandoned fort in the northern wilds.

Winged in a wheelchair: Rosemary Sutcliff and her most famous book

But sight isn’t the only sense she can evoke with surety and skill. When you read Sutcliff, you hear, smell, touch and taste the past centuries of Britain too. You hear “the bright notes of a struck harp” in the Saxon town she brought to life in The Lantern Bearers (1959). You smell “roasting meat, and seaweed, and dung” there. You touch the fur of a tamed wolf in Eagle of the Ninth and taste “honey cakes” cooked by a slave called Sassticca (sic). The past lives for all of the senses in Sutcliff’s books. And so does the present. She could evoke what has been lost for millennia and also what is still here, because she knew and loved Britain’s wildlife and wildflowers, streams and stones, light and landscape. She could give life to foxes and ferns and rivers and rain and everything else that came before and lived on after the Romans. Here is the Roman protagonist of Eagle of the Ninth experiencing two thousand years ago in the far north what some of us still experience today:

Marcus sat with his hands locked round his updrawn knees and stared out over the firth. The sun was hot on the nape of his neck, scorching his shoulders through the cloth of his tunic. … He heard the bees zooming among the bell-heather of the clearing, smelled the warm aromatic scents of the birch-woods overlaying the cold saltiness of the sea; singled out one among the wheeling gulls and watched it until it became lost in a flickering cloud of sun-touched wings. (The Eagle of the Ninth, chapter 12)

That’s an example of how Sutcliff had learned from one of her own literary heroes. As a child, she had praised Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) to her mother, saying that “other people write about things from the outside in, but Kipling writes about them from the inside out.” Sutcliff too wrote from the inside out, allowing her readers to experience the world of her characters with all the senses. And with all the emotions and intellect. In her books, Sutcliff is always contrasting and connecting the human world and the world of nature, just as she’s always contrasting and connecting civilization and barbarism. There are two young men at the heart of Eagle of the Ninth, a Roman called Marcus and a Celt called Esca. They become friends across the gulfs of culture and experience that separate them. Again and again, there’s contrast and connection. First Esca is slave to Marcus, then he’s freed by Marcus. First the two of them live on Roman territory to the south, then they pass beyond the raw newness of Hadrian’s Wall and enter the barbarian north:

[T]hey rode together in companionable silence, their horses’ unshod hooves almost soundless on the rough turf. No roads in the wilderness and no shoe-smiths either. The country south of the Wall had been wild and solitary enough, but the land through which they rode that day seemed to hold no living thing save the roe-deer and the mountain fox; and though only the man-made wall shut it off from the south, the hills here seemed more desolate and the distances darker.

It was almost like seeing a friendly face in a crowd of strangers when, long after noon, they came dipping down over a shoulder of the high moors into a narrow glen through which a thread of white water purled down over shelving stones, where the rowan trees were in flower, filling the warm air with the scent of honey. (The Eagle of the Ninth, chapter 11)

That’s another good example of Sutcliff’s literary skill and powers of evocation, of the contrasts she could draw and the connections she should make. A change in landscape is like a friendly face, familiar amid forbidding wilderness. But Marcus and Esca had known the wild even while they lived in a Roman town far to the south. They need to test the loyalty of a wolf they’ve tamed in cubhood, so they release him to explore a forest, then wait to see if he returns:

In their silence, the wild had drawn close in to the two in the vantage point. Presently a red glint slipping through the uncurling bracken and young foxgloves at the lower end of the clearing told them where a vixen passed. She paused an instant in full view, her pointed muzzle raised, the sun shining with almost metallic lustre on her coat; then she turned in among the trees. And watching the russet glint of her flicker out of sight, Marcus found himself thinking of Cottia. (The Eagle of the Ninth, chapter 9)

Cottia is a Celtic girl with red hair; Marcus is a dark-haired Roman forced out of military service by a wounded thigh. They both live in Britain, but Cottia is like the native fox, Marcus is a foreigner, an outsider to the Celts. But he’s learned to speak Celtic just as Cottia has learned to speak Latin. And she’s an outsider in a Roman town. Sutcliff is always contrasting separate worlds and always exploring the ways in which they meet and mingle: the wild and the human; the barbaric and the civilized; the Celtic and the Roman. Her own name captures those contrasts and comminglings. Like her books, it embraces complexities of culture, language and religion. The name of the herb rosemary is ultimately from the pagan Latin ros marinus, meaning “sea-dew.” But it’s become assimilated to the name of Mary, mother of God in Christianity. Sutcliff is an Anglo-Saxon name from the great northern county of Yorkshire. It literally means “south cliff,” with assimilation of -th to the following consonant. And the “u” represents an older pronunciation, before the Great Vowel Shift that converted monophthongal oo into diphthongal ow in words like “south” and “mouth” and “drought.”

That took place after 1350. Except that it didn’t in some parts of northern Britain. You can still hear the ancient pure vowel in Scottish cities like Glasgow and English cities like Newcastle, where those words are “sooth,” “mooth,” “drooth.” And some Scots still pronounce the fricative consonant of gh, preserved in modern spelling but long vanished from the mouths of most speakers of English. The British Isles are rich and complex in all manner of ways: landscape and history, language and culture, flora and fauna. These green islands have been washed over by repeated waves of invasion, have retained the past here, mutated the past there, lost the past elsewhere. Rosemary Sutcliff was a winged wordsmith who could bring all of that richness and complexity to life with the magic of simple black marks on plain white paper.

Miniatures, not megalomania

But she was “winged” in two ways. To be winged can mean to possess and use wings or to be wounded in the wings, unable to fly. Both senses applied to Rosemary Sutcliff. She could vividly evoke the violent deeds of a cavalry charge or the valiant daring of chariot-racing in her writing, but she was in fact a cripple who was unable to ride or run or even leave the confines of a wheelchair. In early childhood she had been struck by Still’s disease or systemic-onset juvenile idiopathic arthritis, as modern medicine calls it. That’s an ugly collocation for an ugly condition that condemns its victims to chronic pain and confinement. I can still remember the shock I felt when I first saw that photograph of the adult Sutcliff in a wheelchair (see above). Her arms are stubbed by Still’s, her hands seem almost useless, and one shoulder is much smaller than the other. It seemed obscene that such a lively and light-winged writer should be trapped in such a pitiful and powerless body. But Sutcliff is smiling in the photograph. Her spirit is unbowed and she knows she has wings.

Nietzsche says “Nein!” to Marx

I’m reminded of Friedrich Nietzsche, another great White writer whose literary wings carried him to great heights and across vast distances, despite chronic illness and bodily infirmity. But Nietzsche had huge flaws and succumbed to megalomania and madness. Sutcliff never did. She isn’t just smiling in her photograph: she looks sensible. As she began her adult life, Sutcliff didn’t begin feeding megalomania but dedicated herself to miniatures. Like Beatrix Potter (1866–1943), another great English children’s writer, she first worked as an artist before she turned to literature. She was an only child like Potter too and like Potter she never had children of her own.

That must have been part of why both women chose to write for the children of others, conjuring the joys and wonders, the sorrows and sadness, of the world for boys and girls they would never meet. Potter is far more famous today, thanks in part to the way she combined words and images and to her more obvious humour. But I think Sutcliff was the better and more subtle writer. There’s an acute intelligence and insight in her books that most young readers will fully appreciate only when they return to the books as adults.

Autographic Eagle

It’s often disappointing to return to a childhood favorite like that. But not when the book is by Rosemary Sutcliff. She doesn’t condescend to her readers or try to soften the sorrow and suffering of the world. Unlike the past she conjured so well, sorrow and suffering were things she knew in the flesh. I didn’t know about her illness when I read her as a child; re-reading her as an adult, I can see the autobiography in her stories. There are constant themes of health shattered and hopes dashed, then of rehabilitation and happiness restored by hard work and unshaken will. In Eagle of the Ninth, her young protagonist Marcus looks forward to a long career in the legions, but is invalided out of his first command after being seriously wounded in a battle with rebellious Celtic tribesmen. He has to overcome pain and endure operations without anaesthetic before he’s able to ride a horse and seek adventure again. There’s autobiography and wish-fulfilment there. And there’s autobiographic symbolism in the quest that Marcus undertakes after his recovery. Sutcliff describes the genesis of the book like this in her foreword:

Sometime about the year 117 A.D., the Ninth Legion, which was stationed at Eburacum where York now stands, marched north to deal with a rising among the Caledonian tribes, and was never heard of again.

During the excavations at Silchester nearly eighteen hundred years later, there was dug up under the green fields which now cover the pavements of Calleva Atrebatum [Calleva of the Atrebates], a wingless Roman Eagle, a cast of which can be seen to this day in Reading Museum. Different people have had different ideas as to how it came to be there, but no one knows, just as no one knows what happened to the Ninth Legion after it marched into the northern mists.

It is from these two mysteries, brought together, that I have made the story of ‘The Eagle of the Ninth’. (The Eagle of the Ninth, foreword)

And the story is that a rumour comes to the civilized south telling of a Roman eagle honoured in the rites of a remote Celtic tribe beyond Hadrian’s wall. Invalided out of service and uncertain about his future when he hears the rumor, Marcus guesses that it was inspired by the lost eagle of his father’s old legion, now preserved and honored by the tribe that wiped out the Ninth Hispana. So he goes in quest of the eagle with his freed slave Esca, hoping to return to civilization with it and enable the legion to be reformed. He’s half successful, retrieving the eagle but unable to reform the legion. The eagle has lost its wings, after all. It can no longer fly. It’s aquila non alata, a wingless eagle. There’s important — and autobiographic — symbolism there that Sutcliff would pursue in two sequels, The Silver Branch (1957) and The Lantern Bearers (1959), the latter of which won the Carnegie Medal for children’s fiction.

From Greek to Latin to Saxon

In The Lantern Bearers, there’s a Roman soldier who doesn’t befriend a slave but actually becomes a slave himself. He’s captured by some of the Saxon raiders tearing at the dying remnants of Roman Britain in the fifth century. The soldier is dark-headed Aquila, meaning Eagle, and he owes his life to a dolphin tattoo that he bears on one shoulder. The tattoo catches the eye of a golden-haired young Saxon, whose raiding party need a new oarsman. And so they enslave Aquila rather than kill him, taking him away to servitude far from home. He introduces his new masters to old Homer, when they belatedly find a scroll in one of their items of loot, a “bronze box beautifully and curiously enriched with blue and green enamels.” The scroll is a Latin translation of the ninth book of the Odyssey. After he persuades them not to burn it as mysterious and perhaps maleficent magic, Aquila translates the scroll again, turning it into the new tongue he’s learnt living amongst them.

They’re captivated by Homer’s winged words, flown from Greek to Latin to Saxon. A “fierce old warrior” feels kinship with the warrior-sailor Odysseus and tells Aquila: “Speak me more words of this seafarer who felt even as I did when I was young and followed the whale’s road.” Sutcliff is contrasting and commingling again: a literate Roman and illiterate Saxons; a southern story that delights a northern audience. But even as she’s celebrating the power of her own storytelling craft, she’s celebrating the magic of the written word. Homer was millennia dead even in Aquila’s day and he too had lived in a world without writing. But when his winged words were set down on papyrus, they became what the Roman poet Horace called aere perennius, “more lasting than bronze.” And as writing they would fly further than blind Homer — or many sighted Homers — could ever have dreamed.

Cut off, not connected

Homer’s words flew to Rosemary Sutcliff among countless others. They inspired her to create winged words of her own. Now Sutcliff herself is dead, following her heroes Homer and Kipling into whatever awaits us beyond Ianuae Mortis, the Gates of Death. But, like theirs, her winged words are still flying. And they’ll continue to take flight within the brain of whoever takes up one of her books. It’s just today that her words don’t fly as often as they should. For decades, her books have been connecting White British children with their ancestry and their history. But modern leftists want White British children to be cut off, not connected. Sutcliff is no longer a fashionable writer and leftists see her power to conjure the past for White British children as a danger, not a delight. After all, increasing numbers of children in Britain are neither White nor British. Leftists don’t value the past for its power to enrich and enlighten the present.

Alien faces, alien races: Rosemary Sutcliff was not writing for non-British children like these (leftist propaganda at the British National Health Service or NHS)

No, they value it for its power to breed either shame or resentment. Leftists want White children to feel shame about British history and non-White children to feel resentment. That aids the leftist project to destroy the West and rule the ruins. The wonderful books of Rosemary Sutcliff don’t aid that project, which is why her words are taking wing in the brains of fewer and fewer children. Yes, she was “disabled” but she didn’t center her identity on her misfortune. She didn’t distill bitterness and envy from her suffering or try to instill them in her readers. Sickness and suffering are often present in her stories, but they’re there to be transcended by her heroes and heroines.

“All along the boughs”

Mostly her heroes, because Sutcliff didn’t center her identity on her sex either. Something else that makes her books wholly unsuitable in leftist eyes is that she didn’t hate men or seek to subvert masculinity. Worse still, she didn’t hate Whites or Western civilization. Darting and dipping and hovering like a hummingbird, she saw and described civilization and barbarism from all sides, good and bad, beautiful and ugly. Modern leftist education rejects her because her sympathies were too wide and her subtleties too skilful. And because her history was rooted in reality, not based on bollocks. Her books don’t support the absurdities of what I call Black Bullshit Month, which pretends that the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus (145-211 AD) was Black because he was born in northern Africa. Indeed, Black Bullshit Month pretends that Severus was both Black and British, because he lived in Britain for a time.

When Rosemary Sutcliff died in 1992, that kind of nonsense hadn’t conquered British education and children’s literature wasn’t devoted to the worship of darkness in all senses — not the darkness of non-White migrants or the darkness of perverted ideologies. Sutcliff didn’t create Somali heroes or celebrate transgenderism. She didn’t pour poison into children’s brains. No, she conjured beauty and understanding in their brains instead. But she certainly knew darkness and evil. The stale pale males in her books experience suffering, cruelty and loss, then overcome all three in both body and spirit. And when their bright world is overwhelmed by the dark, they know that the dark will not reign for ever. That’s the central message of books like The Lantern Bearers. Roman Aquila is a soldier who became a slave then a soldier again, an eagle who’s winged, wingless, then winged again. And this is what the reader sees through his eyes in the closing words of the book:

He looked up at the old damson tree, and saw the three stars of Orion’s belt tangled in the snowy branches. Someone, maybe Ness [his Celtic wife], had hung out a lantern in the colonnade, and in the star-light and the faint and far-most fringe of the lantern glow it was as though the damson tree had burst into blossom; fragile, triumphant blossom all along the boughs.

Further reading

• Rosemary Sutcliff, the official website

• Celebration of Sutcliff at the Critic, which calls her a “writer of genius, capable of conveying the feelings and lives of those who lived in the distant past”