At the time of this story some nonsense of this sort was again at large in the community, particularly among the younger people and among the idler older women who liked to have something weird or shocking to gossip about. A large number of letters (so large as to suggest a concocted campaign, though this was never proved) were received by the Ennistone Gazette suggesting that the Bath Institute should be thoroughly shaken up and hustled into the contemporary world. The suggestions were various but similar in tone: the Institute should be renamed (this prompted many facetious proposals), it should be open till midnight, alcohol should be served, there should be regular dancing on the Promenade. One letter signed by some ‘bright young things’, even suggested that a Casino should be established. (One of the signatories was young Gregory Osmore; this caused some distress to his parents.) These letters were not really very shocking, and a number of people, some of them Friends (Quakers), tried to ‘take over’ the ‘outbreak’ by saying that it was indeed not absurd to suggest that the Institute should become a big ‘money-spinner’ for the town and thus help to provide better housing for our poorer citizens. A left-wing group on the Town Council took the occasion to demand changes in the way the Institute was administered. This too was perfectly sensible. However, various less sensible folk chose to see these discussions as symptoms of some local upheaval, and seemed intent on spreading a sort of self-conscious excitement and anticipation of scandals. A group of the ‘bright young things’ before mentioned were discovered to be planning a production of Gideon Parke’s masque The Triumph of Aphrodite in a new and more daring version, which had been unearthed by a solemn scholar, a visitor to the town, who had been delving in the archives. The scholar (called Hector Gaines) was at first dismayed and later flattered at being taken up by our jeunesse dorée. He was rumoured to have found a lot of pornographic lines which had been deleted by a nineteenth-century editor.
In February of the year of this tale (not long before George McCaffrey’s ‘accident’) an elderly man called William Eastcote, a most respected citizen and pillar of the Friends’ Meeting House, a non-drinking, bridge-playing intimate of Percy Bowcock, saw an unidentified flying object, a large luminous tilted saucer, hanging motionless over the Common, quite low down. No one else witnessed this phenomenon; but a week later several young people, including Greg Osmore and Andrew Blackett, returning from a concert at the Hall, saw something similar rather farther off, and there was one more dubious sighting after that. This was of course a popular topic (with all of us, I must confess) and there were plenty of theorists to link the saucer with the Ennistone Ring by various familiar sorts of wild speculation. Here indeed was a genuine portent, a veridical harbinger of the onset of a ‘funny time’. Another portent followed of which I was myself a witness. Lud’s Rill, the ‘Little Teaser’, the modest hot jet in Diana’s Garden, suddenly became more animated and began sending up great spurts of boiling water to a height of some twenty (when I saw it) or even thirty feet. Some people who were nearby when the jet suddenly first erupted were quite seriously scalded. The garden was then closed. The spring continued to perform for about three weeks and then stopped of its own accord. The garden remained closed for some time and was then reopened after the introduction below ground of some grand new ‘valve’ which, we are assured, would preclude any repetition of such exuberance. There was disappointment and general annoyance at what was felt to be an unjustified interference with a marvel of nature. Most of us would gladly have surrendered the garden to the whims of the scalding jet.
An account of all this nonsense is not irrelevant to our story, since it was in the first or anticipatory stage of this unhealthy mood that George McCaffrey’s ‘exploit’ occurred, and at another time it might have attracted less notice. The incident with the Roman glass, which had happened over a year earlier and which had led, though because of bureaucratic delays not at once, to his dismissal, had caused less of a stir at the time, partly of course because few people in Ennistone cared deeply about Roman glass, but also because the psychological climate was then less highly charged. As it was, it came later to be regarded as highly significant, and added a new dimension to George’s already considerable reputation or ‘myth’. Past happenings, including the Roman glass, were recalled and refurbished. Better read citizens instanced similar times in Ennistone’s history, as in the case of the man who thought he was Christ, when some violent action (in that case a murder quite unconnected with the poor fellow’s delusion) heralded a period of upheaval. It was interesting that almost everyone, at once and on no evidence, took it for granted that George had driven the car into the canal on purpose, though opinions differed about whether or not he had intended to kill his wife. Serious citizens and prudes who did not care for this kind of irresponsible speculation said that all this showed was how glamorous a thoroughly nasty man can seem to be. Others, however much they disapproved, saw George in a different light. It would be an exaggeration to say that almost every man in Ennistone envied George’s liberation from morals and almost every woman believed she could save him from himself, but it is an exaggeration worth recording. However, I anticipate. All I want to add here is that George’s ‘accident’ was, for whatever reason, taken by the serious-minded as an example of how pure disorder at one level can cause a fall of moral barriers at another.
As there are quite a large number of McCaffreys in the story that follows, I might, before concluding these introductory remarks, give a brief account of the family. The McCaffreys, as I have already mentioned, were originally commercially minded Quakers. (The name of course is Scottish, but no connection north of the border remains on record.) George’s great-great-grandfather, William McCaffrey, had inherited money and some sort of leather business from his father, who was said to be a saddler. William built up a flourishing leather trade and founded a glove and shoe manufactory which he passed on to his son Albert, and which Albert passed on, in a less flourishing condition, to his son Gerald who was George’s grandfather. George’s father, Alan McCaffrey, was not interested in the business and Gerald sold it in due course to the Newbolds, an Anglican family associated with St Paul’s Church, Victoria Park. (The glove factory still exists partly under their management.) In his later years Gerald McCaffrey left his wife and went to live with a Danish mistress in Copenhagen where he was said to have ‘gambled away the family fortune’. He seems in fact to have left Alan reasonably well off, though there were some who said darkly that Alan had inherited more than money from his father, meaning that he inherited a rather unsatisfactory temperament. (The word usually employed was ‘raffish’.) Alan became a doctor, reputed to be a good one, and served in a medical capacity in the Second World War. When still fairly young he married Alexandra Stillowen, whose family, also Ennistonians, were Methodists, formerly involved in trade (connected with the defunct Tweed Mill) but now professional people of various kinds. Alan was clever and handsome, and Alexandra was a high-spirited beauty, and the marriage gave general satisfaction, to which predictions that she would ‘rue the day’ also contributed. The old McCaffrey house in the Crescent had by now been sold to the Burdett family, and the happy pair moved into Alexandra’s father’s house, Belmont, which her father, a successful lawyer who had moved to London, had only intermittently occupied. In due course two sons were born, first George, then Brian. It also appeared in due course that the gloomy prophets were right. Alan was restless, said to be interested in other women, though without producing any very palpable scandal. Alexandra was said to be concealing her unhappiness. However, Belmont life went on, and the two boys continued to grow up into and indeed out of their teens before anything decisive occurred. Theories differ about exactly how and when the marriage finally broke down, and how this related in time to the advent of Fiona Gates. In fact, to do Alan and Fiona justice, it was fairly clear that Alan and Alexandra were already alienated from each other by the time Fiona appeared on the scene, and divorce proceedings had been talked of, perhaps instituted. Again, the Fiona Gates story is told in several different versions - of which I give the one which I credit most myself.