The Empty Grave of Edgar Allan Poe

A LETTER FROM SUMMERFIELD

          At the outset I feel I should state that I have no interest in taking this matter any further. It would involve writing to members of the Government and the Civil Service and since the ultimate truth lies within the confines of the various Defence and ‘Intelligence’ departments, it is not a road down which I care to travel. I merely wish to make a record of a conversation I had with my late father and put just one piece of evidence into the public domain.
          When the details about Summerfield were revealed to the various branches of the media in 1997, it did not cause much of a stir. Cynics might say that the timing of the announcement was chosen to cause the minimum of embarrassment, coming a few days after the death of Princess Diana. In the grotesque aftermath of that mundane accident, when mass hysteria seemed to grip the nation, it was quite natural for the Government to take advantage of the relative blindness of the press and let slip a few of those ‘official secrets’ whose time had come to be revealed unto the people. So the story appeared on the inside pages of a few newspapers, was mentioned briefly in radio bulletins but was not deemed sufficiently important to be covered by television. The right wing press took the view that this was yet another example of British ingenuity in the face of the extreme pressures incurred in fighting an unpopular but necessary war. The left wing press, or to be more accurate, a couple of liberal, middle-of-the-road papers ran small, follow-up articles decrying the Establishment's disregard for the feelings of the bereaved, while accepting that in a time of crisis such things happen and concluding that we now live in more enlightened times. After a few days, Summerfield was forgotten again. There was much more to think about and discuss: whether the chauffeur was drunk, whether there was another car involved, whether it was all a Zionist plot. Summerfield was a thing of the past and would remain so.
          My father had seen one of the newspaper articles. One afternoon, when I had called round to mow his lawn and fix the ballcock in the water tank in the loft, he told me that he had actually written some of the letters from Summerfield. I should say at this point that, although my father was in his late-seventies and was nearing the end of his life, his mind was never affected by age. He was not senile or given to flights of fancy. He spoke often about his youth and his experiences during the war and I never doubted the truth of what he told me. So it is with Summerfield. I believed him when he started telling me the tale as he stood at the bottom of the ladder, and I accepted it as proven fact when he climbed up and, after rooting around in a few old cardboard boxes, handed me the letter which is reproduced below.
          I had heard the Summerfield item on the radio but had not given it much thought. When my father brought it up I was initially surprised. Summerfield had been a Government scheme of the First World War, but my father had served in the Second. The Summerfield Project (although I'm sure that was not its official title), was begun as an attempt to boost the morale of the British people. Or, as an effort on the part of the Government to mislead the British public into thinking that the war was not going as badly as it appeared. Dismayed by the mounting casualties and aware of the growing dissatisfaction among the ordinary people for the way the war was being handled, it was decided to ‘tinker with the figures’. An office was set aside and members of the Intelligence Corps were assigned the task of choosing which names would be published in the casualty lists and which would not. The latter would be resurrected and given a second chance of life in Summerfield.
          A simple subterfuge, a slight case of legerdemain, requiring little more than the writing of a few letters, and the end result in terms of altering the course of the war, well, how can that be measured? During a single day in the battle of the Somme, 20,000 British troops lost their lives. How long could the Government hope to sustain the passion of its people for the war effort when faced with senseless carnage on such a scale? How long before the glory of death for King and Country lost its lustre and became a hollow phrase to be mocked by poets? How long before the widows and orphans and bereaved parents took to the streets and demanded an end to the slaughter? Strong emotion was a useful tool to stir up the masses and get them to fight, but the time had come to lay it aside for a while, rather than risk it ending up in the wrong hands. It was time for cooler heads to prevail. This was simply a matter of numbers. In London, far removed from the mud and foul excrement of the trenches, wise men gathered and engaged in discourse on matters mathematical. They had no interest in the lives of men, but were fascinated by the number of their deaths. Numbers were all they knew and so they devised a scheme to press them into service.
          All the candidates for resurrection were taken from the lower orders, of course. The men (and boys) of the working class. Those who served as mere fodder for the war machine. Those with no power or means or social position. Whether they lived or died was of no importance, they were just numbers to be manipulated one way or another. The first choice among such casualties were those who were alone in the world, whose official documents contained no name of next-of-kin to be notified in the event of their death. Few and far between, but a logical place to start. Then there were the men with small families, a widowed mother, aged parents, a single sibling and so on. And so on. Care was taken to distribute this resurrectional bounty throughout the kingdom, so that neighbours would not confer and be surprised to find out that both their sons had decided to emigrate to America. There is just so much that can be ascribed to coincidence. Similarly the fresh corps of Lazarii were scattered around the globe, so that the town of Summerfield in Queensland, Australia was not suddenly endowed with a population larger than that of Sydney. There were many ‘Summerfields’ in the world, from whence the letters would arrive, explaining various reasons why that particular soldier had taken up his pack and decided not to return home but to wander off and seek a better life elsewhere. With some, a military excuse was used and then following the end of the war a further letter was sent explaining why he had decided to stay on in Australia, or wherever. Others were less imaginative, simple, brief notes about going to join the revolution in Russia, or settling down with some unidentified mademoiselle in France. It depended a lot on who was writing the letters.
          Those with an emotional commitment, those who felt some sympathy with their readers, would spend hours on a single letter, trying to describe the sights and sounds of the particular Summerfield that their Lazarus was destined for. Those with a natural literary skill would employ their gifts for comic dialogue or character development to bring their Lazarus alive. Others, with no particular talent, would treat the whole thing as a tedious exercise and would scribble a few lines detailing little more than place of embarkation and final destination. In retrospect, perhaps these were the most effective letters of all, since at some time the correspondence had to be closed and what better way than a curt statement, which by its very brevity implied that the recipient would never hear any more from that source. Some members of the officer class (or so my father was told), were so antipathetic to the whole idea that they insisted on scrawling hardly legible notes, printed in capital letters, complete with misspellings and bad grammar, because this was the natural style of the illiterate working class.
          The Summerfield Project did not end with the cessation of hostilities in 1918, it was allowed to wind down at its own pace. In the same way that the Post Office now deals with letters to Santa Claus or Sherlock Holmes, the letters to Summerfield were simply re-routed to a small office just off Trafalgar Square. Here, the deception was continued. As all successful deceptions must be. The original raison d’être for Summerfield no longer applied, there was no more war, no more casualty figures to be doctored, no new dead men to be revived. However, letters were still being sent to ‘Summerfield’ from thousands of garrulous relatives of the erstwhile Lazarii. It was inconvenient, but the Intelligence Service had to continue to send replies and let the project fade away into silence. A couple of decades later, when England was at war with Germany again, the number of letters trickling into the Summerfield office was negligible and the job of answering them was deemed the work of one man. And for five months in 1942, that man was my father.
          Prior to the war he had been at the English College in Rome, training to be a priest. He was fluent in Italian and had a working knowledge of German and so after his induction into the army and his basic training, he was assigned to the Intelligence Corps. While waiting for a posting which would make more use of his linguistic skills, he was sent to the little office overlooked by the crippled sailor and found himself in sole charge of the Summerfield project.
          “It was ridiculous, sitting there reading these letters from Uncle Frank and Cousin Charlie, then trying think of something to write back. Couldn’t see any point to it myself, but you did what you were told. They gave me some instructions. If they started asking whether they could come for a visit, you had to come up with an excuse why that was impossible. If they wanted photographs you told them you couldn’t afford a camera. Obvious things like that. The officer who explained it all to me, bit of a Terry-Thomas type he was, said I shouldn’t get too carried away. He reckoned that was why the thing was still going. Back in the Thirties a few literary types had been recruited by mistake and they’d encouraged people to keep on writing. Arthur Machen was one of them, and Auden and John Williams. He kept going on about that bloody Arthur Machen and his tricks. He obviously thought they should just close it all down and have done.”
          My dad was explaining all this to me as I was wrestling with a recalcitrant ballcock, so I wasn’t giving him my full attention.
          “What you’ve got to remember is that it wasn’t like now, back then. You didn’t get on a plane and go to Florida for your holidays. You were lucky if you could afford a week in Blackpool. When they began the thing nobody had telephones, and the people they were dealing with had no money, so if you said your brother’s gone off to America you might as well just say he’d gone to the moon. There was no way they were ever going to see them again.”
          By now my dad was up in the loft with me, firking among the piles of cardboard boxes.
          “There was this one woman who wrote regularly every month. She thought she’d still got a brother called Tom out in Australia. She obviously liked writing. Went into great detail about the goings on in her village. She lived up in Yorkshire. I mean most of the things I got were just ‘how’s things?’, ‘d’you know there’s a war on?’, stuff like that. But this Yorkshire woman was a bit different. I’ll show you if I can find it.”
          I finally managed to get the old ballcock off and started fitting the new one.
          “Here it is,” said my dad, dragging a tin box from beneath the cardboard mountain. “I thought at first she was just having me on. Then I began to wonder about it. In the end I took it home with me, which I know I shouldn’t have done, but it bothered me a bit. I wanted to mull it over. The thing is, she was writing to me once a month and I was replying once a month. I remember my last letter to her. It was all about kangaroos and how they kept worrying the sheep. So either she’d twigged or else it was some other bugger playing games. I mean, I don’t know how many men had worked in that office over the years. Maybe one of them kept a note of the addresses and decided to have a bit of fun. That was probably it. Anyway, see what you think.” And he handed me a letter.

Ivy House,
Askrigg,
Yorkshire,
England.

23rd. May, 1942.

Dear Tom,

          It was lovely to hear from you again. Two letters in one week, I’m going to be hard pushed to keep up! I’m not sure whether I should include news of the war, ‘loose lips sink ships’ and all that, but anyway we are so isolated here that it rarely impinges. I feel my life should now be full of excitement and yet it carries on much as before. Mr. Dockett was taken ill last week and had to go to the hospital, so I spent my evenings sitting with his wife and trying to take her mind off it. A very boring life, you must admit, and so different to your own.
          The kangaroos must be a tremendous nuisance. Can’t you just shoot them? What does kangaroo meat taste like? I presume it’s close to venison.
          I must admit I was a bit bothered by your second letter. Is everything all right? You seemed worried about something, and I did not understand your concern about the ‘endless mouldering time’. Is that right? I had a bit of difficulty deciphering some of your handwriting. You seemed very agitated. Is it the war? I’m sure you’ll be quite safe out in Australia.
          Or are you fretting over the problems you’re having with the farm? I asked Fred Helmsley about your ‘sucking machines’ but he didn’t know what I was talking about. Then again, Fred’s a bit old-fashioned when it comes to his farming methods, so it’s not surprising really. He hasn’t even got a tractor and still uses old Bob to pull the plough.
          By the way, I fully appreciate your fears about being watched all the time. I have similar feelings. Between Herr Hitler’s spies and all the new regulations from our own government, it does seem that our lives are no longer our own. I expressed the same sentiment to Mrs. Dockett and she agreed with me entirely. Although her mind is beginning to go and I’m sure I could tell her I saw a flying pig and she’d tell me she’d seen one too.
          What are the ‘twisted lands’? Is this an aboriginal expression? From your previous letters I get the impression that they are similar to Red Indians, with their own religion and ways of doing things. Do they really smoke peace pipes and say, “White man speak with forked tongue”?
          Speaking of which, I can only say that I’m glad we don’t have snakes in Yorkshire like the ones which you describe. At least, I presume they’re snakes, you didn’t actually say, but what else could they be? They sound perfectly horrible. And are they really that big? I’m sure that must be one time when you  do get a little homesick, when they ‘come crawling in the dark’. And to think I got all in a tizzy the other week, when little Jimmy Willshaw told everyone he’d been bitten by an adder, and then it turned out to be just a grass snake.
          Anyway, I must leave it there. I have to go and see Mrs. Dockett again this evening. Please write again soon. I look forward to your letters so much.

All the best,

Betty

          Maybe it was just another of Arthur Machen’s tricks, like the Angels of Mons. Or maybe Betty had finally realised there was something fishy about Summerfield. It would not be surprising after a few letters from my father. His knowledge of the flora, fauna and native customs of Australia was severely limited. If only her brother had been relocated to America then the secret would have been safe, given my father’s love of films. Then again, Tom’s sheep would have probably ended up worrying about cowboys and gangsters. Of course there is the other explanation. The real reason why my father purloined the letter, although he made no mention of it. And neither did I.
          I handed it back to him and finished tightening the nut on the ballcock.
          “I would’ve put it back, but that night I got a message at my digs to report to Ettington Park first thing in the morning. I’d been transferred. I held onto the letter in case questions were ever asked, but nobody bothered. So, what d’you think?”
          “I think somebody was having you on,” I said and left it at that. I collected up my tools, my dad put the letter back in the tin box and returned it to its hiding place, then we went downstairs.
          My father said one last thing about Summerfield, as we sat in his living room, drinking tea. He said that all the names of all the dead soldiers sent to Summerfield should be reinstated. Should be carved on the relevant war memorials around the country; added to the plaques in the parish churches. I do not regard this with the reverence of a dying wish. My father still had a few months left to live and it was mentioned more in passing, as part of the conversation. After he died, while we were sorting out his things and preparing the house to be sold, I cleared out the loft and found the tin box and the Summerfield letter. It lay on top of a pile of letters from my mother which she had sent to the Ettington P.O.W. camp where my father remained stationed for the rest of the war, acting as translator for the prisoners.
          He often spoke of Ettington Park and his adventures there. But he only mentioned Summerfield that one time when I was mending the ballcock in the water tank in the loft. So it could not have been that important to him. If, on his deathbed, he had whispered ‘Summerfield’ in that brief instant when, after weeks of morphine-induced hallucinations, the curtains seemed to part and his eyes shone with a clear light and I beheld the fear within them, then it would be different. As it is, I feel there would be no point in trying to find Betty after all these years, she must be dead by now. And I will not be mounting any campaign to bring extra employment to the stonemasons of the land. No, as I said at the start, I do not intend to take this matter any further. Sometimes things are best swept under the carpet. And the dead should be left in peace.