 |
Scenes from the life of my grandfather, #2
Tuesday, April 5, 2005
Today the town of Chingford is the intellectual and cultural nexus of Essex, England, and All Souls’ College is the jewel in its crown, training 48,000 students in such disciplines as Following Your (Vapid) Dream, Getting Off On A Technicality and Refusing To Grieve Properly Without A Substantial Cash Award.
Things were different when, at the age of 28, my grandfather was appointed as the college’s chaplain. The main difference was that the college had not yet been set up, and wasn’t due to come into existence for another thirty years. It is famously difficult to prove a negative, and my grandfather, having accepted the appointment in good faith, spent his entire three-year term of office feverishly hunting through Chingford in hope of finding the college of which he was chaplain.
There were some comical moments, such as when he crawled into a dog kennel to find it already occupied by two rabid Rottweilers with unpleasant personalities, or when a rotting hulk he was engaged in searching was towed into the Thames Estuary and used for naval gunnery practice. Life took a less agreeable turn when the police arrested him for serial murder.
Young Anchovy was the victim of classic police reasoning. Because his daily researches had taken him into many of Chingford’s cellars, lock-up garages, disused warehouses and half-built motorway flyovers, he had discovered a stream of corpses, victims of murder, suicide or the mere cumulative effect of living in Chingford. All these he had drawn to the attention of the police – who, after three years and more than eighty cadavers, managed to come up with a theory, viz., that all had been murdered and my grandfather was the killer.
Most victims, they argued, prove to have been murdered by the person who finds the body. They had learned this from Edgar Wallace, while throwing him against a wall. My grandfather, being alone with all the deceased in various obscure locations, had had ample opportunity to kill them. And (so the theory ran) he also had a motive: wild rage against the inhabitants of Chingford for conspiring to prevent him knowing the whereabouts of All Souls’ College.
This theory had the extra attraction that if one man could be blamed for all the killings it would no longer be necessary to investigate any of them, and as several inspectors were suffering from chilblains, sprained ankles, mysterious pains in their elbows and a general reluctance to talk to people they didn’t like, it naturally appealed.
My grandfather sought the protection of his bishop. ‘Come in, come in, dear boy,’ cried that venerable cleric, leading him through the French windows and wiping red liquid off his hands on to the curtains, which he then pulled down and flung over a heap of limbs in the corner, possibly the remains of statues smashed by the Puritans. ‘All this talk of a serial killer is poppycock, I tell you…’
Scenes from my grandfather’s life #3
Previous posting | Next posting
Back to Toasty’s Futon | Back to The Toasty’s Futon Archive
Send E-Mail to:
Copyright © 2005 . All Rights Reserved