I might have been around
twelve when I first read one of the stories, ‘The Golden Journey’
in a bedroom that my brother and I shared on our annual pilgrimage
to Auckland, where we spent a week with our father, the only one time
we saw him from one year to the next.
My tremulous assumption is that the story was in Lilliput, a monthly
magazine of humour, short stories and the arts that I would have thought
of too dubious a reputation for my grandparents’ upright bearing.
The pages were small format newsprint, the type not razor sharp and
I vaguely suspect that there were fairly daring, but blurry, photographs
of female nudes.
For a young, insecure, and bullied boy ‘The Saint’ had
some aspirational qualities that are more than adequately described.
He was always pleasantly imperturbable, a tall lean figure, sinewy
and debonair, who could be found poised with the insolently vivid
grace at some point in the story. He had a quick smile that could
be cynical and sad and mocking at the same time, but despite the boyishness
there were “deep etched lines of many dangerous years”.
He had eyes that could “open suddenly, very clear and blue and
reckless like sapphires with steel rapier points behind them”.
Wow!
Definitely a step up from William Brown, the eternally scruffy school
boy creation of Richmal Crompton.
Notwithstanding that The Saint had to be of an uncertain age, but
definitely much older than I was, identification with the charming
hero was not too difficult.
His attitudes were either delightfully charming or quite patronising
of the always beautiful women who featured in every story. They were
certainly similar values to the age I lived in then. I, not knowing
any better, thought them ideal. By today’s standards he might
be just a tad misogynistic.
But he was always ethical if not entirely moral, a defender of the
rights of the legally disempowered and disadvantaged. He took apt
revenge against evil and mendacity. He wasn’t violent, cruel
or racist like James Bond or Bulldog Drummond. He was pretty cool
in the days when probably for a lot of people recovering from the
war ‘cool’ with a bit of larcenous wealth was a good escape.
And he never got caught, the schoolboy’s ultimate dream.
Anyway ‘The Golden Journey’ starts ....
“Probably if Belinda Deanne hadn’t been born with such
liquid brown eyes, such a small straight nose, such a delicious mouth,
and such a delightful chin, she would never have been spoiled. And
if she hadn’t been spoiled, Simon Templar would never have felt
called upon to interfere.”
The basis of the story is that young Belinda, being a stuck-up little
socialite, has refused to go on a camping trip with her fiancée
in the wilds of Germany. The Saint, having been party to their conversation,
steals her handbag with all her papers knowing that as he is the only
person she knows in Munich, she will have to turn to him for help.
Being a cunning bastard he has notified all the authorities that she
is a suspicious person and therefore the normal channels of help will
not be actually helpful at all. Quite the contrary in fact. Clever!
The Saint says that as he is going tramping from Lenggries to Innsbruck
and has limited funds, and therefore can’t provide any direct
assistance, the only thing she can do is accompany him.
Well fill my bum with icing and call me biscuit but she eventually
falls for the whole concept, loving the outdoors, notwithstanding
that this is after some serious resistance and hatred. Even compelling
The Saint to smack her bottom at one stage. But she deserved it. Really.
Then, at the end, after finding that she can easily walk twenty miles
a day, sleep rough and eat peasant food she meets up with her boyfriend
again in Innsbruck and discovers that he has found that he doesn’t
like tramping after all. A not unexpected irony, especially as The
Saint living up to his name hasn’t even tried to sleep with
her.
Will she then go on to Italy with The saint and get waylaid? We never
find out.
But after nearly sixty years I had remembered the plot outline and
two distinct details. The first concerns scrambled eggs.
“You have to remember that scrambled eggs go on cooking itself
after you take it off the fire, so if you try to finish them in the
pan they’re hard and crumby when you serve them. Take them off
while they still look half raw and they end up just fine and juicy.”
Well almost.
The second is and encounter with a band of twenty young people with
whom the greeting ‘Gruss Gott!’ is exchanged. They were
Wandervogel, young people who had given up the industrialised world
to become like gypsies, singing for money, and working in the fields
and making things to sell. They are happy, saying that they have the
world to live and are free like the birds.
The point which remained with me is that the world of mannered cities
is far away from the natural world. The Saint, whom we thought a creature
of artifice and social dalliance was anchored in a better, saner,
reality.
The Saint may be trivial in terms of literature but he did have some
good lessons. |
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