“The day my son was born I wept like a woman. The day my daughter followed him I sang like a gentleman. O my children! Scourge of the bedtime, wonder of the known universe! I love you, I love you, I love you!”
Charles Phillip Havelock III, writing in 1935
More, Havelock, more!
The more I read of his ramblings on the Mandrake, the further the depths of his instability seem to sink. Tucked amongst other papers – from his youthful ‘sandwich’ years, which I shall discuss further at another time – I found some almost devastating texts which shed much new light on his apparently methodical examining of the Mandrake phenomenon he claims to have observed in the waters of Norwich.
Firstly, much to my surprise and despite his well-documented sexual promiscuities and the unusual nature of his near lifelong manias, Havelock was married, to Mrs Elizabeth Rose Havelock (née Habberton). Also born in Norwich but in 1899, she married Pippin in 1922, aged just 23 to his 35. By many accounts a nervous woman, Mrs Havelock nonetheless formed the constant backbone of stability, constancy and support necessary to keep her increasingly obsessive husband rational for as long as he was. Whilst developing into a state of ultimate lovelessness, their marriage did remain a tender companionship throughout all of Havelock’s life, and still provided him with a – slightly routine if uncomplaining – sexual outlet up until his death.
Secondly, he had two children of names Christopher and Frances. A gap of two years separated the children’s births (Christopher in 1928, Frances in 1930).
However, it is around the children that the seed of doubt is irrevocably cast upon Havelock’s Mandrake suppositions. As documented in his own personal records, Christopher died a tragic death at the age of 9, drowning in Havelock’s beloved Wensum Park. Whilst Pippin and Lizzie, as she liked to be known, played idly with the young Fran on the landscaped grasses of that attractive park, Christopher had himself apparently initiated his own waterside recreation. The details following are unclear from Havelock’s notes, and a lack of witnesses corroboration made complete piecing together of the fatal circumstances incredibly difficult, but Pippin was alerted to disaster by the screams of a passing woman, who saw “arms, arms it was, struggling against the motion of the water”. Instantly mobile, Pippin was at water’s edge within a second, but was already too late to save his eldest child, who lay face down and still in the mighty Wensum.
In his [Havelock’s] own words:
“There I saw him, my Christopher, and I knew he had passed on, on and away from this earth. In desperation I flung myself – against my better judgement, considering the numbers of Mandrake congregated a mere stone’s throw from where I stood – into the current, as if challenging the river to take me in his place, somehow forcing it to submit to my will, but to no avail. My son was dead. Engulfed more in sadness than in the river, I clutched with one hand to my son’s dear delicate coat, and swam to shore, where with public assistance I pulled his lifeless body back to land, collapsing helplessly at his side, swooning in the ferocity of growing crowd of public interest. It was then I first noticed them – the beak wounds, the work of the devil himself. A new clarity dawned. This was not an accident but murder, vicious and unprovoked.”
In his grief, Havelock had convinced himself that Christopher’s terrible death was the result not of misfortune but of deliberate attack on the part of the Mandrakes (to which he had been devoting significant personal study and report for at least the decade preceding the death). Indeed, where others saw the slightest abrasions, probably from the child’s short struggle against the random debris of the river, Havelock saw wounds suggestive of a beak-led violence through his Mandrake-tinted spectacles.
For me – in the cold light of the twenty-first century, and admittedly with hindsight and distance from this tragic occurrence – the specifics of this event in Havelock’s domestic life are particularly troubling to the possible veracity of his claims relating the Mandrakes purported existence. In fact, following his son’s death, what seemed to start off as a rigorous method intent on proving the existence of these creatures soon became a very personal and largely irrational conviction that his son was the victim of a vicious attack by these – still zoologically unrecognised – animals, and that the same posed an immense threat to the future stability and public safety of humankind. It was the death of his son that had really, understandably, consumed him; Havelock then proceeded to construct his own reason for it in the only way that made sense to him, the only way in which he could alleviate the guilt he himself felt for his momentary lack of parental supervision. Devoured by grief, Havelock fuelled his own Mandrake fantasy until, for him, it was inseparable from truth. Although Christopher’s death was, by all accounts, an accident, Pippin needed to absolve himself from the responsibility he felt, and the best way he had of so doing was in having a sentient agent to whom blame can be extended in his place. In short, his Mandrakes.
The day of Christopher’s death, 25th April 1937, really signified the loss of Havelock’s already tenuous grip on sanity, and ultimately pushed him over the metaphorical edge.
What I find saddening about Pippin’s story is that, despite the outlandishness of some of his scientific ideas, he argued for them with such conviction and respect that it couldn’t help but give them credence. His self-assuredness and self-confessed devotion to “the observable naturalistic phenomena of Norfolk’s parks, public spaces and hinterlands” seemed to suggest a very real authenticity to his hypotheses, one led by scientific method and not some personal faith. And yet his previous writings – all unpublished until now, of course – were very much dismissed by an already dubious scientific community following Christopher’s death and Havelock’s new growing preoccupation with strategy, planned attack and conflict (rather than observation, record and further observation). His decade of thought, committed to the Mandrake phenomena and in constant struggle to garner the scientific attention and due, recognisable study the evolutionary anomaly deserved, had been rendered meaningless by the desperation that any parent must feel on losing their child, but that pushed Havelock into illogical, emotive suppositions.
In truth, the scientists of the time had no doubt been waiting for an opportunity to put Havelock ‘back in his place’, and they leapt at the chance to posit the idea that he was, in fact, an understandably grieving man of more than unsound mind, and not the best representative of the natural sciences that one would require to verify the Mandrakes existence. As long as no other reported sightings of Mandrakes had been reported (none had) they thought it prudent to dismiss his lengthy reports as the folly of a man broken by the loss of a son. They did not so much dismiss the reports as turn Havelock into a figure of national public ridicule, the insult which drove him, on top of his mental instability, to a state of complete reclusiveness.
His wife, too, was a broken woman, losing far more than a child on that dreadful day under Norwich skies. Her husband sacrificed the very essence of himself to the severity of his own beliefs, and was never the same man again (Havelock was eventually ridden with debilitating dementia, but I shall examine this further later).
Of course, there is still the chance that Havelock was right. It is all too easy to dismiss his hypothesis as the work of melancholy, influenced not by observable fact but by a desperation for answers, for reason in the most unreasonable of tragedies. In his work of 1970, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", Thomas Kuhn examines the parallels between myth and science, stating:
“If these out-of-date beliefs are to be called myths, then myths can be produced by the same sorts of methods and held for the same sort of reasons that now lead to scientific knowledge. If, on the other hand, they are to be called science, then science has included bodies of belief quite incompatible with the ones we hold today.”
Like myth, science is created as a narrative within a particular paradigm, and its only claim to verifiable truth lies within the fact that it has not been disproved. Yet. Science is built upon the understanding that things can – and will – be disproved with further research and knowledge. Kuhn continues: “Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none. New and unsuspected phenomena are, however, repeatedly uncovered.” For Kuhn, an anomaly to which does not fit into the established paradigm will be often be discovered, and that paradigm will have to be reassessed to incorporate this new information.
Truth is fragile.
It is difficult to fairly assess Havelock’s many treaties on the Mandrake so far out of the context in which he wrote them. In fact, it is all-too-easy to dismiss them as the ravings of a madman, supported by no meaningful evidence save the passionate beliefs of that singular individual so intent on a kind of intellectual justice for his own child. However, one thing that science has proved many times – since Copernicus and onwards – is that truth is not absolute, and that truth for one generation may be the ridicule for another. Science is forever waiting a revolution of knowledge. Such theories of Mandrakes may be beyond our comprehension and beyond the field of our personal experience, but are they so far from the possible as to render them worthless?
For myself, and for Havelock, the answer is no. I will admit to feeling slightly violated by the historical facts of his familial loss, knowing as I do of the enhanced paranoia of the man following his son’s early demise, but the evidence I have read has been too great to ignore. If nothing else it merits further investigation, something the figureheads of the zoological world refused to grant the so-called madman during his life.
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