Charles Phillip Havelock, III

A few afternoons ago I stopped off in a second hand bookshop on a street in Norwich called Elm Hill. It’s an attractive cobbled street full of pleasant-looking but ultimately banal antique shops, but wedged between them is a shop specialising in board games and trading cards and this second hand bookshop, called The Dormouse. I rummaged around through the local interest books but didn’t find much worth picking up, all odes to small yachts and tabulated ferry information, and as far as I could see there wasn’t much in the whole shop that really intrigued me, aside from the owner. His name was David Simmonds, and on seeing my dismay at the quality of his stock he told me his name and said straight away that I could call him either David Simmonds or Mr Simmonds. He was one of those kinds of people, and he wore yellow corduroy trousers and deep brown brogues.

We chatted briefly about the kind of thing I might be looking for, but I struggled to explain my plans to write a novel called “Meet Fuckface”, which would be enshrouded in the historical mysteries of petty crimes, the East Anglian witchcraft trials and the early railway network. He nodded disinterestedly while manually cataloguing a huge box of musty-smelling books which he had told me had come from a local house clearance. I smiled politely and went to leave, but David Simmonds halted me with a barked exclamation. When I turned back to face him he was grinning unusually, which made me feel quite uncomfortable, and instead of speaking in methods in keeping with consensual politeness he simply thrust a battered leather case towards me, gesturing for me to look inside. I did as he said.

It was full of papers, masses of them, reams and reams of yellowed, faded, crumpled documents pertaining to all manner of things. There seemed to be a healthy mixture of personal correspondence, essays, official documents, philosophical ramblings and even some photographs. I automatically picked out what looked like a comparatively recent copy (of the short version) of a far older birth certificate, which was sitting at the top of the pile. It belonged to someone called Charles Phillip Havelock III, born in Norwich in 1887.



Among some of the old photographs was one of a gentleman, scrawled on the back of which in almost unreadable ink were the letters CPH III – Charles Phillip Havelock, I’d guess, the same man.



One other thing immediately caught my attention, an onionskin document of several pages containing faint – at times illegible – type-written words aligned in a visual presentation suggestive of poetry, the piece emerging from the title “The Day of The Sandwich” in what at first glance appeared to be composed in a quite irregular form. It was an incredible title, and made me instantly curious and excited in equal measure. I noticed that the pages had all been torn off at the bottom end. The rip still looked fresh like a recent murder.

While I had been looking at the documents, David Simmonds had edged out from behind the counter and was now standing right next to me. Before I could continue with the poem he had touched my shoulder gently and I jumped violently from my state of enraptured concentration, dropping all of the papers at my feet. I bent down to pick them up, apologising stupidly, but he was already scuttling about on the floor as though genuinely enjoying himself.

“You like these documents?” he asked. “You want them?”

I laughed defensively. “I can’t afford them,” I said, and tapped my pocket. Its emptiness echoed around the silence of the bookshelves.

“How much have you got?” he asked. He had shuffled the papers back into some kind of order and was forcing them back into the case. I took out my wallet and looked inside it. There was a five pound note stuck defiantly between cards.

“Only five pounds,” I said, sure that it wouldn’t be enough for the entire personal history of an individual, the feelings that he had committed to paper in a desperate attempt to somehow remain in the physical world he had left behind, as a bizarre education for the future generations of Norwich. It was like peering into the diary of this man Havelock, or the brain itself. With paper he had enmeshed himself with the history of the world, had left his imprint in the future. Surely five pounds couldn’t buy that?

“That’s okay,” said David Simmonds. I didn’t really want to spend the five pounds because I had been saving it for food, but I was intrigued by the documents, and by the thoughts of this Havelock, who looked out from his photograph as though inviting me to receive the answer to a question I hadn’t yet thought to ask. It was the same voyeuristic urge that made you guiltily read other people’s postcards, even if you knew neither the writer nor the recipient. I had given him the five pounds before I knew what was happening and was on my way home to look through the documents.

Nothing could have prepared me for what I started reading that afternoon, the scope and the implications of the theories that Havelock had spent a lifetime outlining and methodically logging. From my preliminary readings (including some vivid correspondence between Havelock - who seemed to favour the moniker 'Pippin' - and a number of psychiatrists), it appeared as though he had suffered from varying psychotic symptoms throughout his life, from which consequently developed three primary, deep-rooted obsessions that eventually engulfed his personality in their persistent recurrence. These three, in short, as so far discovered, and thus with no claim to obsessive exclusivity in the thoughts of Havelock, can be briefly listed as follows:

1.Sandwiches – the foodstuff comprising leavened bread slices and their composite interior fillings.
2.The mandrake – a purported duck-like creature, consistent with the physical characteristics of the common mallard but with legs of an entirely disproportionate length.
3.(Largely compulsive) Acts of – often inappropriate – sexual intercourse or contact.

Although I am yet to have read the full extent of the documents of the man in my possession, it is clear that his obsessions were developed under a ferocious intellect with a stringent attention to detail. Whilst in no position, currently, to objectify the veracity of his more seemingly outlandish reports, the painstaking accuracy and sheer prolific extent of his work would appear to suggest either (a) a profound level of academic expertise in his field (of the family Anatidae, for example); or rather (b) a complete immersion in a fantasy world of his own construction, which had entirely replaced his perception of any meaningful shared reality as experienced by others, and for which he had created a parallel natural order, of sorts, an alternate zoology, in concordance therewith his off-kilter reality and to which he was entirely, crushingly devoted, as if it were the essence of Truth itself. My own early reactions to his often florid prose would favour the latter at this early stage in my familiarisation with his writing, but until I have conducted further research into the man, his claims and his life, I do not feel qualified to condemn this intriguing character to the historical waste bins of psychosis.

I will publish excerpts from his writings here on further reading, and as I come across and digest them myself.