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My Bones and My Flute

E-BookEPUB0 - No protectionE-Book
206 Seiten
Englisch
Peepal Tree Presserschienen am01.03.2022
A haunting ghost story by the 'first West Indian novelist', Edgar Mittelholzer. Only when he is on board the steamer halfway to their remote destination up river in Guyana does Milton Woodsley realise that there is more to Henry Nevinson's invitation to spend time with his family in their jungle cottage. Milton, an artist, thinks he has been invited to do some paintings for Nevinson, a rich businessman, and possibly be thrust into the company of their daughter, Jessie. But when the Nevinsons mention a flute player that no one else can hear, Woodsley begins to glean that there is more to their stay. Told in Woodsley's sceptical, self-mocking and good-humoured voice, the tension rises as the cottagers' sanity and lives are threatened by psychic manifestations whose source they must discover before it overwhelms them. Mittelholzer subtitled his 1955 novel 'A Ghost Story in the Old-fashioned Manner', and there is more than a hint of tongue-in-cheek in this thoroughly entertaining work, though it rises to a pitch of genuine terror and has serious things to say about the need to exorcise the crimes of slavery that still echo into the present in the relationship between the light-brown, upper-class Nevinsons and their black servant, Rayburn. Amongst the barks of baboons, rustles of hidden creatures in the remote Berbice forests, Mittelholzer creates a brilliantly atmospheric setting for his characters and their terrified discovery that this is not a place where they can be at home. Edgar Mittelholzer was born in British Guiana in 1909. He wrote more than twenty novels. He eventually settled in England, where he lived until his death in 1965, a suicide predicted in several of his novels.

Edgar Mittelholzer was born in British Guiana in 1909. He wrote more than twenty novels. He eventually settled in England, where he lived until his death in 1965, a suicide predicted in several of his novels. He began writing in 1929 and despite constant rejection letters persisted with his writing. In 1937 he self-published Creole Chips and sold it from door to door. By 1938 he had completed Corentyne Thunder, though it was not published until 1941 because of the intervention of the war. In 1941 he left Guyana for Trinidad where he served in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve. In 1948 he left for England with the manuscript of A Morning at The Office, which was published in 1950. Between 1951 and 1965 he had published a further twenty-one novels and two works of non-fiction, including his autobiographical, A Swarthy Boy. Apart from three years in Barbados, he lived for the rest of his life in England.mehr
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KlappentextA haunting ghost story by the 'first West Indian novelist', Edgar Mittelholzer. Only when he is on board the steamer halfway to their remote destination up river in Guyana does Milton Woodsley realise that there is more to Henry Nevinson's invitation to spend time with his family in their jungle cottage. Milton, an artist, thinks he has been invited to do some paintings for Nevinson, a rich businessman, and possibly be thrust into the company of their daughter, Jessie. But when the Nevinsons mention a flute player that no one else can hear, Woodsley begins to glean that there is more to their stay. Told in Woodsley's sceptical, self-mocking and good-humoured voice, the tension rises as the cottagers' sanity and lives are threatened by psychic manifestations whose source they must discover before it overwhelms them. Mittelholzer subtitled his 1955 novel 'A Ghost Story in the Old-fashioned Manner', and there is more than a hint of tongue-in-cheek in this thoroughly entertaining work, though it rises to a pitch of genuine terror and has serious things to say about the need to exorcise the crimes of slavery that still echo into the present in the relationship between the light-brown, upper-class Nevinsons and their black servant, Rayburn. Amongst the barks of baboons, rustles of hidden creatures in the remote Berbice forests, Mittelholzer creates a brilliantly atmospheric setting for his characters and their terrified discovery that this is not a place where they can be at home. Edgar Mittelholzer was born in British Guiana in 1909. He wrote more than twenty novels. He eventually settled in England, where he lived until his death in 1965, a suicide predicted in several of his novels.

Edgar Mittelholzer was born in British Guiana in 1909. He wrote more than twenty novels. He eventually settled in England, where he lived until his death in 1965, a suicide predicted in several of his novels. He began writing in 1929 and despite constant rejection letters persisted with his writing. In 1937 he self-published Creole Chips and sold it from door to door. By 1938 he had completed Corentyne Thunder, though it was not published until 1941 because of the intervention of the war. In 1941 he left Guyana for Trinidad where he served in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve. In 1948 he left for England with the manuscript of A Morning at The Office, which was published in 1950. Between 1951 and 1965 he had published a further twenty-one novels and two works of non-fiction, including his autobiographical, A Swarthy Boy. Apart from three years in Barbados, he lived for the rest of his life in England.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781845235482
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format Hinweis0 - No protection
FormatE101
Erscheinungsjahr2022
Erscheinungsdatum01.03.2022
ReiheCaribbean Modern Classics
Seiten206 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse2192 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.14509869
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe



1

We must have been well over half-way to our destination when I received the first hint that there might be some other reason behind Mr. Nevinson´s invitation to me to spend time with him and his family up the Berbice. When the steamer left New Amsterdam the ostensible understanding was that I had been commissioned by Mr. Nevinson´s firm, the Berbice Timber and Balata Company, to paint some pictures depicting jungle scenes which, if satisfactory, would adorn the walls of their head office. That Mr. Nevinson could have had any other motive in wanting to have me accompany him and his wife and daughter into the interior had never for an instant occurred to me - nor, as I realized afterwards, to his wife. His daughter, Jessie, however, seemed to have suspected something; indeed, it is through her, as you will see, that I got this first inkling that things were not what they appeared to be.

At the time of these events - the early nineteen-thirties- the steamer made the trip up the Berbice River only once a week. It left New Amsterdam, the little town at the mouth of the river, every Wednesday morning, arrived at Paradise, the terminus, a hundred and ten miles up, any time between seven and half past seven in the evening, setting out on the return trip for New Amsterdam on the following morning. This meant that once you missed this Thursday morning opportunity you were committed irrevocably to jungle life for at least one full week. Knowing the Nevinsons as I did, however, I had no qualms about this fortnight we had planned to pass at Goed de Vries where the Berbice Timber and Balata Company have their up-river station. The cottage in which we were going to stay would be well-furnished and equipped - of this I had not the slightest doubt - and there would be no effort spared to make me comfortable.

Like myself, Mr. Nevinson comes of an old coloured family. We can both trace our ancestors back to the late eighteenth century, at which time the Nevinsons and the Woodsleys had not yet acquired the strain of negro slave blood that runs in them today. While I myself am of an olive tint, Mr. Nevinson is almost as fair in complexion as a pure white. His father, who was slightly darker, was the managing director of the Hardware Arcade in New Amsterdam, and had twice been Mayor of the town, and his grandfather was the Reverend Mr. Rawle Nevinson, an Anglican priest well known in Berbice for his good work among the lower river districts and for the church he erected at Huisten Rust on the Canje Creek.

Mr. Ralph Nevinson, like his father and grandfather before him, is a cultured man, and so is his wife who is a Groode, another well-known coloured family of Berbice. Mr. Nevinson´s hobby is the collecting of anything relating to the early history of the colony, and as a boy I used to be fascinated with his private museum of relics, Indian and Dutch.

Normally, I think I should have expired from sheer astonishment had the Berbice Timber and Balata Company offered me a commission to paint some pictures for their office, but it was Mr. Nevinson, their managing director, who had put the proposition to me, and that made all the difference. For though he had spent all of his forty-seven years in New Amsterdam (forgetting the two years during the First Great War when he was with the West Indian Regiment in Egypt and Palestine), Mr. Nevinson was no small-town philistine who treated artists with a simpering patronage. In him I knew I had one who genuinely wished me well in my career as an artist. At the time of this narrative my own people had long since given up hope of seeing me settled in a good, steady job as an accountant or a Customs officer. After leaving school, I had been put to work as a sales assistant in the Hardware Arcade, Mr. Jack Nevinson, a brother of Mr. Ralph Nevinson, and my father having, between themselves, engineered this. After three months in the gloom of nail barrels and shelves of hinges and hasps and staples, I had been summoned upstairs by Mr. Jack Nevinson, and with much finger-tapping and avuncular smiling on the part of that gentleman, informed that an opening had been found for me in the office. I would begin as a junior clerk, and Mr. Jack Nevinson had no doubt that it would only be a matter of time before I rose to a high position in the firm.

Unfortunately, high positions, whether in well-established and illustrious firms or in colonial society, have never quickened my heartbeats. So I thanked Mr. Jack Nevinson and told him I was sorry but that I did not want an office job. I wanted to be a painter. I need not bother to describe the expression on his face as I left his screened-off sanctum and threaded my way between the desks of the outer office toward the stairway.

From that day I was regarded by the respectable people of New Amsterdam as an eccentric crank who would get nowhere in life . I became renowned for the bad company I kept; I talked philosophy in barbers´ shops with bus drivers and stevedores and porters - people far beneath me in class; I was a disgrace to my family.

The first one-man show I held was a depressing failure. But on the third day Mr. Ralph Nevinson dropped in and not only congratulated me but bought two pictures. He spoke to me not as the son of a family with which his own family had been friendly for decades, but as one man of the world to another. He made me feel that he and I were equals in a knowledge of humanity. He did not try to recall the days when I used to play with his children in his big Queenstown residence; the good-uncle-to-small-boy patronage in his manner had vanished; he seemed to consider me seriously as a grown-up person, and no fool, either. He invited me to come and see him any time I liked, and added that his bookshelves were always at my disposal.

That was how the friendship began between us - or perhaps I should say acquaintanceship, for no real intimacy ever developed between us. I have never been able to rid myself of a certain awe and respect for people appreciably older than myself, and the great disparity in our ages produced within me a rigid reserve which debarred that camaraderie I might have experienced with a person of my own years. Added to this, too, I was forever conscious that his wife and children considered me a ridiculous figure and something of a social outcast (I had never been very chummy with Jessie and Fred; Ronald, the eldest, used to be my play-companion, but he was in Georgetown now, having been manoeuvred a year before into the Civil Service as a clerk in the Treasury).

Despite my aggressive airs, and a decided pomposity of manner, and the contempt I was forever expressing for the middle-class philistines of New Amsterdam, as I called them, I was extremely sensitive, and so much dreaded the scorn and ridicule of Mrs. Nevinson and Jessie and Fred that my visits to their home were extremely infrequent.

Whenever I did call to see Mr. Nevinson, however, the occasion never failed to prove satisfying and enjoyable. Apart from art and philosophy and human beings, we discussed the early history of British Guiana, a subject of which Mr. Nevinson was passionately fond and on which he would readily have gone on talking all night until daybreak (with sundry delvings now and then into old books and letters and manuscripts) had I chosen not to take my departure at a discreet hour. He saw that the subject interested me intensely too, and this must have helped in great measure to strengthen his attachment to me, especially as in a town like New Amsterdam he would have had to do quite a lot of searching to discover another fellow-enthusiast in such matters as slave uprisings in the eighteenth century and the doings of the old Dutch settlers.

It was one morning, ten days before we set out for Goed de Vries, that he telephoned our home and asked me whether I could drop round that evening to see him. There was something important he wanted to discuss with me, he said. Something I´m sure you´ll be interested in, too, he added. It´s just in your line.

That was the evening on which he put the proposition to me. He sat in his favourite easy chair, behind him a glass case containing Dutch and Indian relics. He was a man of medium height, thickset and with the suggestion of a paunch. His close-cut, rather bristly dark hair was thinning on top and was touched with grey, though in this soft pink light the grey was not obvious. He had a long head, and features that betrayed no trace whatever of the negroid; it was a fine head and one that I had often wanted to do, though, up to now, I had not had the temerity to ask him to pose for me.

His grave grey-brown eyes regarded me with an affectionate humour as he said: I can see you´re curious, my boy. Well, I won´t keep you waiting His voice was deep and quiet, and went well, I thought, with the old-book scent of this study and the restful gloom that always lurked in the spaces between these dark mahogany bookcases with their rows of volumes and stacks of yellowed manuscripts and the relics that occupied some shelves - old Dutch jars and Indian goblets and pots and balata ornaments, chunks of masonry from ruined Dutch forts, daggers, and an eighteenth-century horse-pistol, the dented silver flagon reputed to have been the property of Laurens Storm van´s Gravesande, the Directeur-General of Demerary and Essequibo in the middle eighteenth century.

In this study, with whose atmosphere I had...

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Autor

Edgar Mittelholzer was born in British Guiana in 1909. He wrote more than twenty novels. He eventually settled in England, where he lived until his death in 1965, a suicide predicted in several of his novels.He began writing in 1929 and despite constant rejection letters persisted with his writing. In 1937 he self-published Creole Chips and sold it from door to door. By 1938 he had completed Corentyne Thunder, though it was not published until 1941 because of the intervention of the war. In 1941 he left Guyana for Trinidad where he served in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve. In 1948 he left for England with the manuscript of A Morning at The Office, which was published in 1950. Between 1951 and 1965 he had published a further twenty-one novels and two works of non-fiction, including his autobiographical, A Swarthy Boy. Apart from three years in Barbados, he lived for the rest of his life in England.