How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup by J.L. Carr
"It was very enjoyable while it lasted. But afterwards, as always happens with me, I felt sad."
How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup by J.L. Carr (London Magazine Editions, 1975)
I'm hoping to write something longer about this book, and hopefully exchange that something longer for money, so this post is really just a couple of minor asides. Obviously if nobody wants to give me that money then it'll end up here eventually, so that’s a bit of narrative tension to keep us going. In the meantime…
First, I've been trying to think of a better name for this Substack. I don't actively dislike the current name but it is a bit clunky and it's definitely a placeholder. I had been considering Mrkgnao!, complete with exclamation mark, which is one of the cat noises from Ulysses. It would look funny arriving in an inbox.
But on page 11 of How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers…, I found another candidate. Our narrator, a Mr Gidner, is living "an unmarried life in lodgings in deep country" following some some trouble at theological college. "People don't know about rural England," he says:
Mud, fog, dripping trees, blackness, floods, mighty rushing winds under doors that don't fit, damp hassocks, sticking organ keys, stone floors and that dreadful smell of decay.
It's quite a list: as he goes along the poor denizens of the countryside are chased out of God's miserable outdoors, only to find no relief in God's miserable house. Carr's biographer places this novel "somewhere out in the flat Northern hinterland," but I'm not sure that's quite right; not least because Gidner, on the way to Leeds for an away game, notes that he's "never been up north before. It began at Sheffield…"
I'm locating this novel somewhere in The Fens, that damp sweep around the Wash that incorporates bits of Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire. Some of that probably counts as the north, from the south; most as the south from the north. The important thing for the novel's purposes is that it's flat, it's wet, it comprises miles and miles of small squishy villages and market towns and vegetables, and it's a part of the country that the other parts of the country rarely think about. Most of the characters in this novel are trying, in one way or another, to forget, or to be forgotten.
I've got family in Grantham, Lincolnshire, just west of the fenlands - hello! - and I lived there briefly when I was younger. Maybe more on this in the bigger piece, if it gets written. But while St Wulfram's certainly isn't the worst offender on this particular score, being a grand old place with certain standards to maintain, I nevertheless think that Damp Hassocks is both a good name in general - fun to say, sounds like it should be obscene even though it isn't - and particularly for a blog about novels. Tired objects through which we approach something numinous; hopefully, faithfully, habitually. A bit of a stretch, maybe.
Secondly, consider this description of Corporal, an old soldier who takes care of odd jobs around the football club.
So long as you gave him only one item at a time and allowed not the slightest alternative or diversion, he was quite sensible and useful when it came to cleaning out toilets or mending nets. His drawback was in oral communication, because his memory-filling mechanism was scrambled in the Western Desert, and this took the unusual symptom of answering not your question but the last enquirer's, and though the British Legion had paid for him to be looked at by no end of specialists, no one could cure it.
As the FA Cup run unfolds, and the pressure from the outside world gets intolerable, Gidner decides to put Corporal on the phones. "If the person on the end of the telephone asked, 'Can we have world rights on The Sid Swift Story?' he got the answer to, 'Will your club sponsor our bedtime drink?' Thus, even the simplest enquiry consumed very satisfactory telephone time as the caller sparred and probed, trying to work out if it was Corporal or himself that was mad."
This novel was written in 1974 and published the following year. The Two Ronnies didn't get around to their version of the gag until 1980. And look, there's "hassocks" again. It is a good word. Hassocks. Hassocks. Damp. Hassocks. Let's give it a go, from our next entry onwards.