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REPORT 19  OCTOBER 2004

The aftermath was very Irish . . .

My intention with these “Reports” was to produce them at regular intervals early each month but I realize, of course, that life isn’t like that. Some months there is really nothing worth reporting, then as the David Hare play puts it “Stuff Happens”. (Saw the Hare play at the National and thought it beautifully staged and acted but a bit liked watching Newsnight without Jeremy Paxman. Felt I’d seen/heard most of it before.)

Anyway stuff has happened quite apart from a terrific time in the Royal Archives researching Princess Margaret which I’ll have lots more to say about in coming months.

The first item is that Rolf Stricker who runs Back-In-Print Books tells me that he has just done a new deal which involves an even more cutting-edge printing machine and virtually instant distribution in the United States. Until now anyone in the States wanting books from Rolf has had to place an order in the UK but now ANY American bookshop should be able to get copies within days rather than weeks and there are no shipping charges. BIP currently do the first six of my Bognor mysteries and when Penny Byrne aka Mrs. Heald has proof-read the remaining four titles all ten will be available. You can find out more from the web-site which is www.backinprint.co.uk and you can e-mail them at info@backinprint.co.uk

Rolf also publishes my brilliant friends Simon Brett and Wendy Perriam. I think someone enterprising should invite the three of us on a speaking tour of some kind. It would be great fun all round. I promise.

The second item of stuff is that I’ve just received the Folio Society’s Anthology of Christmas Crime Stories which is terrific and not just because it includes my Operation Christmas along with offerings from Conan Doyle, Christie, Allingham as well as living contemporaries such as Sara Paretsky and P.D.James. I’m certainly in exalted company, sandwiched between Stanley Ellin and Ngaio Marsh. As always with Folio productions it’s beautifully produced (Printed on “Gorgeous Wove Paper” by Cambridge University Press and illustrated by Michael Foreman). The problem with the Folio is that you have to become a member to get the books. (Folio Society)

The final bit of stuff is a bit more glum. An old friend of mine died. We were at school together. We hadn’t really kept in touch and like most of us he hadn’t really ‘done enough’ to merit a published obituary in a national paper or magazine. (I do increasingly hate the notion of “celebrity” and “achievement” ) Anyway I thought I’d write him up for the school old boys’ publication and then I thought what is a web-site for if not to post items such as this. I’m not sure whether Pete would thank me for it but our mutual friend David Durell has read it and approves, so here is my small tribute to Pete Mungall. RIP.

“Pete Mungall died on August 22nd. The news came as a shock because I had had a letter from him not long before in which he had announced breezily that he was off on a bicycling tour of the West of Ireland. The writing seemed firm and the sentiments robust with no suggestion that death was just round the corner.

Pete and I shared a study in Lyon House during the late fifties and early sixties and I think we would both have described ourselves as friends. I hadn’t seen him for the best part of forty years until I was made President of the O.S. Society and thought I’d use this unexpected elevation as a pretext for tracking down one or two people whose memories I treasured but with whom I’d lost touch.

Pete was one of them and another was David Durell. They both turned up at Sherborne on O.S. Day and we had a drink in the Cross Keys before spending much of the rest of the day wandering round old haunts and reminiscing. What was particularly curious was that David and I seemed more or less recognizable to each other but Pete seemed, to both of us, to have turned into someone completely different.

This was partly a question of age, shape and turn-out. At school Pete had been a trim, neatly dressed conventional figure who boxed for the school and bowled for the House Cricket XI which David captained. (He complained, only half-humorously at our re-union, that David had always taken him off after a couple of overs just as he was hitting his rhythm). In his late fifties Pete had become – no point in being polite – a bit of a shambles. He had put on a lot of weight, his shirt-tail was flapping outside his trousers in a way which would once have constituted a beatable offence, and he was carrying the sort of canvas knapsack which I used to associate with those brown-overalled ‘Happy harries’ who did odd jobs around the Courts.

Most extraordinarily he carried with him a stack of every ‘Blue Book’ from our time at school. These, together with several notebooks were secured by elastic bands and were an absolute mass of annotations and jottings. Whenever David or I said something like “I wonder what happened to Todhunter” or “Do you remember Mervyn Wheatley?”, Pete would immediately turn up the reference in one of his little books and give us chapter and verse. He had become a sort of Old Shirburnian Memory Man.I felt as if he had stepped out of a novel by Evelyn Waugh or Anthony Powell.

Afterwards David and I compared notes. Neither of us remembered Pete being like that. At school he had seemed absolutely middle-of-the-road conventional. Agreeable, bright, he had not, as expected gone to university because I think, his father died young and money ran short so he became articled to a firm of solicitors. He had been a lawyer all his life. His great passion was rock-climbing and he became secretary of the Cromlech Climbing Club. After spending most of his working career with two practices he worked in retirement for a series of councils in different, often rather remote, parts of Britain. I got these very bare facts from his elder brother who now lives in Geneva. The two, eight years apart, had, in effect, drifted apart and were not in touch. Pete told us as much when we met. It seemed, somehow, characteristic.

The three of us kept in fairly desultory touch afterwards. Pete wrote me longish letters in a clear brisk legal hand. In particular there was a letter mourning Derek Jarrett, the much loved Sherborne history master who died earlier this year. Then I had the note in which he said that he was planning to bicycle round the West of Ireland with a younger woman friend and that the two of them were hoping to call on David Durell and his wife who had settled somewhere improbable called Ballincarringa. I exchanged notes with David about the visit and while he was very much looking forward to it, he did seem a bit concerned about how exactly to describe the later Pete to his wife. In some unfathomable way he perplexed us. 

And then I heard that he was dead. John Harden, Secretary of the O.S. spotted a brief note in the deaths column of the Telegraph. Naturally I phoned David at once. He confirmed the sad news. Apparently Pete had sent a postcard from Killarney on 14th August. In it he said that he and Bernadette were hoping to reach David’s ‘in five or six days’. David said how nice and they must come to supper and stay. David and his wife waited and waited and no-one came. Eventually Bernadette phoned and left a message saying that Pete had died in his sleep in a hostel in Kenmare. The aftermath was very Irish for it turned out that the husband of the proprietor of the place in which they were staying was the local undertaker. Poor Pete was not only dead but buried a day later and he lies now in the cemetery far from home in the little town in the West of Ireland near the mountains he had come to love...  I presume he suffered a heart attack. 

I wish I could write something more knowledgeable but the truth is that he was someone I once thought I knew quite intimately but whom I turned out really hardly to have known at all. Maybe that’s true of most of our friends. I liked him very much at school and I liked him as much when we met again, regretted the lost years and wondered what had really happened.

I thought I’d like to share his loss in the hope that it may stir memories in others. I don’t like to think of him dying and lying so far away. David and I agree that some day before too long “We’ll hold a little wake for Pete even if it’s only raising a glass or two in his memory”.

Tim Heald

Report Number 19    OCTOBER 2004