And put away childish th.., p.1
And Put Away Childish Things, page 1
First published 2023 by Solaris
an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,
Riverside House, Osney Mead,
Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK
www.solarisbooks.com
ISBN: 978-1-78618-880-9
Copyright © 2023 Adrian Czajkowski
The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
eBook production
by Oxford eBooks Ltd.
www.oxford-ebooks.com
It is said that, long ago, there were many ways into the land of Underhill, but one by one they fell away. Until, search as you would, you might never find your way from the comforting world we all know into that place of magic and adventure. But for James and Jemima, fleeing from the cruel Mr Ragstaff, the entrance was just a path into the woods they had never noticed before, twisting between the gnarled old trees…
The Road to Underhill (1947),
Mary Bodie, Golden Century Press
chapter one
Breaking into television was proving unexpectedly stressful for Harry. Which seemed particularly unfair given that he was on the cusp of forty and had been working in TV for two and a half decades. He’d assumed he’d be in his stride by now, but then he’d made the mistake of swerving out of his lane and suddenly it was this invisible maze of attitude and prejudices, all of which seemed to be personified in Margot Lorne, the semi-beloved presenter of How Even Me?
Margot Lorne was not even slightly beloved of, or by, Harry. Their few days of association had kindled an intense, unspoken dislike between the two of them. By mutual and instant agreement they expressed this by being over-jolly and backslappish, all not-quite-touching hugs and kissing the air past their cheeks, each ringing with distaste for their opposite number.
Margot Lorne had gone to a mid-ranking drama school and landed some roles in The Bill and Casualty. She’d now found her comfortable rut being the pleasant, chatty face of programmes where celebrities got to bare their hearts—usually when they had a book out or a new show on or some other reason to remind the general public of their existence.
Felix ‘Harry’ Bodie, on the other hand, had gone to a different mid-ranking drama school and scored a couple of roles on Eastenders and the early run of Doctors. He’d found his feet presenting children’s programming as one of the revolving cast of hosts on the CBeebies circuit, providing filler segments between the gaily-coloured puppets and cartoon characters.
They had never even met, before Harry’s stint on Margot’s program. Possibly the problem was that, right then, Harry had a huge chip on his shoulder about anyone whose broadcasting career didn’t involve having to work with bloody kids. He had already alienated a fair number of his regular co-hosts for exactly the same reason, because they all seemed to be able to caper and gurn and get through the interminable clapping songs without wanting to drop an F-bomb in front of half a million four-to-seven year olds. Not so he.
And there was the elephant in the room, of course. His other, ersatz claim to fame, that he simultaneously insisted wasn’t important while being secretly resentful that it hadn’t somehow propelled him magically to greater heights of success. The books. Bloody Underhill.
And so, because he was in the midst of one of his sporadic attempts to break into serious drama, he’d agreed to go on How Even Me? and expose his genealogy to the glaring public spotlight that was Margot Lorne’s warm smile and gentle Scots accent. His agent reckoned it would be good PR at just the time when Harry’s resumé turned up on people’s desks. And Margot’s production company had taken him on because his genealogy included one children’s author who was at least vaguely remembered seventy years after her works first came out.
From Margot’s perspective, they were doing Harry a solid. From Harry’s perspective he was slumming it for the sake of a future career where he didn’t have to gurn or caper even a little, save in service of the serious actor’s art. By halfway through the first day of filming, taking a chainsaw to the lesser branches of Harry’s family tree, they loathed each other with a polite and icy passion.
It turned out that Harry’s maternal great-grandfather—hitherto known to the family as a respected captain of industry and Conservative MP hopeful—had been neck-deep in a stock market scandal and had actually done time At Her Majesty’s Pleasure. This was unaccountably something that had never come up at the family dinner table, and Margot’s expression of woeful sympathy had glimmered with gloating triumph. Harry spent that evening on the phone to the production company, insisting that they cut or downplay it. Hide it amongst the… except they had turned up very little else of interest in that part of the family, so the whole white collar crime angle was looking mighty attractive as a crowd-pleaser.
“It’ll be fine,” he told a succession of executives, in tones between a grovel and a growl. “We’re doing the book stuff tomorrow. Magda—Mary—Bodie, my sainted gran. Bury it behind that. And maybe, just maybe, it’ll be better than you imagine. You just wait.”
Because Gran’d had a secret.
Alright, not a secret, because she’d told it to her sole daughter, Harry’s mum. She’d told it to Harry. She’d told it to quite a lot of people at the care home and a number of medical professionals, too, but that last, drawn-out part of her life wasn’t the way Harry wanted to remember her. A non-secret, then. A non-secret about her own mother, the great-grandmother neither Harry nor anyone else in the family had ever met. The mysterious woman whose stories, back in Magda’s own childhood, had been the inspiration for the Underhill books in the first place.
“Your great-grandma,” she used to say, “was someone very special. She came to this country from somewhere where she was very important.” And she’d touch her brow in a special way, and child Harry could almost see the glint of gold and gems there.
And Magda had something of a Slavic feel to it, obviously. And ‘Bodie’ wasn’t necessarily their original surname. And, well, Harry wasn’t actually saying that he was the rightful Tsar of all the Russias, but he had wondered… Not enough to actually put the legwork into investigating, admittedly, but why would he need to, when he had the whole research team of How Even Me? to do it for him? Even if that team was mostly a harassed-looking office junior called Mei. Which unfortunate piece of nomenclature led to endless ‘How even Mei?’ jokes from the rest of the crew. Mei was the only person on set who disliked every other human being involved even more than Harry.
Ever the consummate professional, Margot’s greeting on the second day was an actor’s masterclass in ‘How to sparkle for the camera while showing your colleague just how much you dislike him.’ At least today they were dealing with the good stuff. In their hearty air-kissing was the understanding that they would both mine today for whatever they could get out of it and then never have to see one another again.
They were in the Oxford Story Museum for the shooting. How Even Me? preferred to film in the attics of their guests’ grand houses where they could pretend to unearth dusty old photographs of sainted ancestors undergoing privation or doing praiseworthy things. Harry’s two-room flat was unaccountably missing an attic, because the house had gone with Lisa—along with most of the money—during the divorce. However, the museum still had a wall panel about the Underhill books as one of its permanent exhibits, and probably the whole thing got waved through as mutual good PR that didn’t have to impact on anyone’s balance sheet too much.
They positioned him in front of the display. There were a couple of first editions, the once-bright covers faded, plus some stills from that 1973 animation and a creepy little puppet from the Polish stop-motion of ’87 which still figured in Harry’s nightmares. With that as a backdrop, they did the preliminaries, the little interview sections where he reminisced fondly about Granny Magda, or Mary as her pen name had been. He even went so far as to mention the secret, those little hints she’d dropped about the provenance of her own mother. And he wasn’t really expecting Margot to play God Save the Tsar and then crown him, but it was nice to have the whiff of it hanging in the air. And he relaxed and let his guard down, and then they brought out the box.
“Harry,” Margot said. And he’d wanted them to call him Felix. He wanted to start calling himself Felix, instead of the godawful clownish Harry, that non-name he’d taken on and which he was thoroughly sick of. But he was Harry Bodie to the world, and to Equity, and his agent reckoned it was still more help than harm when it came to names to conjure with. “Harry,” Margot said, “what would you say if I told you that we’d been able to track down some real information about your great-grandmother. Far more than Mary ever told you?”
And, the bitch, she was doing her excited voice, as she did in every show where the guest’s past held a cornucopia of riches rather than hardship and grief. And he should have thought that they could easily re-shoot her part later, if she wanted to give it the opposite spin. That the Margot Lorne speaking to him then and there ne
And they had a box there, an old metal chest that eagle-eyed afficionados of How Even Me? might have recognised as turning up in a number of mid-list celebrity attics, because the show got sloppy with re-using its props.
Because they wanted the true and honest reaction, they passed it into his hungry hands for him to open. They’d arranged the papers inside quite carefully, so that their narrative was laid out step by step. The admission notice, the treatment reports, the doctor’s notes, the birth certificate. Filming as Harry’s excited sounds of discovery ground down to something bleak and sad.
The London County Asylum was stamped on half the pages. That was where his great-grandmother had turned up, apparently. January 8th 1916, which he reckoned was a time when the asylums were doing a booming trade, so small wonder the paperwork looked rushed. Admission of a pregnant woman answering to the name of Devaty Svoboda, initially speaking no English, though she appeared to have picked it up quickly enough. No clue as to where she’d come from, but the country had a lot on its mind right then. And incurably deranged, as the spiky handwriting of one professional had it. Possessed of such detailed and elaborate delusions that the specialist had insisted she be kept in residence for study.
She claimed to be the Queen of Fairyland, said the notes.
Her daughter had been taken from her, obviously. Named Magda, at her insistence. Permitted to visit by the unusually lenient foster family, and the indulgent alienist who’d sat in on their encounters. Listened to the increasingly lurid fantasies she’d spun for the kid. Honestly, for a destitute pregnant woman beset by incurable delusions, great-granma had fallen on her feet. She’d died in the institution in 1930, the records said, of pneumonia.
And Harry did his best, and probably he could have turned the whole thing into a career exercise whereby he used the heartstrings of the audience as bootstraps for his upcoming career. But in that instant, wrong-footed as he was, he was just so painfully aware that Margot Lorne and her entire crew were laughing at him. That they’d all taken a profound dislike to him from the first moment he turned up, on the not-unreasonable basis that he had made himself profoundly dislikeable. And so his reaction was less noble sorrow and more peevish anger that his goddamn great-grandmother hadn’t been anything more useful to him, and the cameras were rolling all the time.
Worse than that, if even possible, was the next two months of him calling the production company with threats, and then having his agent call them with the same threats phrased in more professionally appropriate language, and then having some lawyers call them with different threats that cost Harry rather more money than he’d have preferred to spend and got him precisely nowhere. He’d signed a contract before going on the show and nowhere in that contract did the words ‘power of veto’ appear, and so they were damn well going to use what they’d got. And at last, just as he was doing his bit in the CBeebies 2019 Christmas panto, the show was broadcast and it all became public knowledge.
Enough interest was generated by the clashing wheels of ‘Children's TV presenter’ and ‘madness in the family’ for him to become a cause célèbre in the worst way. A little digging by responsible journalists turned up his own string of therapists, and the failed marriage, and the couple of years when his drinking had got seriously out of hand. It hadn’t taken a great deal of glue to stick these together into the picture of a man with his own issues, inherited or otherwise. And then, given that it was the start of 2020 and people were beginning to get twitchy about this new virus, the news cycle moved on.
His agent, Steve, was pessimistic over the phone. “I hate to say it, but… it’s the queen of fairyland bit. People are funny about mental health, aren’t they? Doesn’t exactly jibe with ‘serious proper actor.’ Unless you fancy milking it?”
Play up the sorrow and the woe about poor great-granma. Ostentatiously do a charity gig for an appropriately themed good cause. The sort of thing that Felix ‘Harry’ Bodie, hungry would-be grown-up actor, would do. Except Harry had, by then, watched his own lamentable performance on How Even Me? approximately nine thousand times and had come to the conclusion that Felix ‘Harry’ Bodie was a bit of a shit, and that his great-grandmother had genuinely been hard done by. He discovered, to his surprise, that he didn’t have the heart to turn his family sorrows into a career mill after all. The thought of the bedridden old woman insisting she was Queen of Nowhere to the daughter she hadn’t been able to keep… It turned out there were actually depths he wasn’t willing to plumb.
“Felix, mate, you’re not exactly helping me here,” said Steve, and Felix said rather sharply that he’d thought it was the agent’s job to help him, and that was another bridge half-burned.
And there were looks from his colleagues at the BBC, and on the street as well. When the occasional kid wanted a photo, he could read any kind of pity or lip-curling disdain he wanted into the expressions of the adults. It was as though a brush had reached out a century through time and tarred him with mental instability. He’s the one with the madwoman in his family. Is he dangerous, do you think? Should he even be as close to our children as on the other side of the TV screen?
He started drinking again. Or drinking more, because despite all the professional advice he’d never been able to go dry. Not in entertainment, where everyone was positively pickling themselves the moment they turned the cameras off. He was definitely drunk when he came back to his flat in the small hours one night in February, after the world had mostly forgotten about him again. He was drunk when he dropped his keys in the rosebush-snarled patch of garden out front and ended up on his hands and knees, muttering to himself as he tried to find them. It hadn’t been a good night. The pub had been mostly empty, his fellow TV types crying off because of the growing aversion to crowds and public spaces. He’d downed four solitary pints and then swung by the off licence so he could take the festivities home with him. He felt he was watching his career and life fall apart in slow motion, and every time he had a chance to reverse the course, somehow he did exactly the opposite. Which left him cursing God, the Devil and several named production executives as he fumbled for his lost keys in the near pitch dark and skewered himself on rose thorns.
“Here,” said someone, and abruptly the missing items were dangling before his face. He staggered upright, snatching them from the air on the second try, feeling their inarguable cold metal edges pressing into his palm. Crusted with soil from the garden, as though they’d been unearthed from a grave.
“What? Right. Thanks,” he blurted out and then looked at the someone and sobered up pretty much immediately.
Not literally, of course, biochemistry working as it does, but a savage cocktail of other hormones overrode the worst of the drink because something in him was screaming fight or flight! and, being a sedentary middle-aged TV presenter, he just froze up and did neither.
Tall. Freakishly tall. Although as Harry was only five foot eight maybe just ‘very tall.’ Wearing a long coat, like a flasher. Standing weirdly, every part of him held wrong. The legs as though the man was right on the balls of his feet, and then those feet were stretched too long. Sour reek of spoilt milk. Aquiline face with a briar-patch beard and sunken eyes. Filthy, ancient, like a vagrant. Like an icon of a saint unearthed from a dig site. Looked at one way, exactly the sort of disturbed homeless man Harry would cross the street to avoid. Looked at another, an ancient king.
The horns. They were ridged like a ram’s, curving back into rook’s nest hair. The roots of them, growing from his temples, were unmissable.
“Harry Bodie,” said the thing. Said the delusion, incipient madness, drink-born hallucination. And “No!” shrieked Harry Bodie, dashing for the door. Fumbling the newly reclaimed keys in the lock, waiting for the long, bony hand on his shoulder. Slamming the door behind him loud enough to wake everyone in the building. Trying the door three times to reassure himself it had locked. Not looking out there. Not glancing back as he thundered up the stairs. Not giving himself a moment’s thought. And the window of his flat only faced an alley, and he didn’t look out of it anyway.
