A soft drink: made with twenty per cent fruit concentrate and oil based colours from the art shop in the precinct, poured down necks in hot summer gardens straight out of the plastic jug (“we don’t want any breakages now boys…”; “break off out of here, ma, you’re embarrassing me!”): passed between muddy-fingered boys: red-cheeked and blood-knuckled, the kids by the towering sweetcorn in which you can run and you can hide and which the late summer drifts straight into, staying out past six o’clock for a telling off later in a thunderstorm, and your fat boy’s back got sunburned today – bare-chested in the back garden with big raindrops crashing into your skull – mother cut your hair last week – “nice haircut today” – and the kids to the south of Troll Bridge won’t be fucking with us any more… it stains the bedsheets on its way out and with a glassful of ZANG inside me (about 250ml recommended serving allowance) it is like the days on the yellow bicycle whose ridiculous oversized frame was too much for a kid like me – “hey kid, you never even heard of a comb?” – when a girl called H.S. from the street around the corner had a reputation for being a nice girl to talk to and after two years or so I thought I’d give it a try and I talked to her and it was nice, the rumour grinder was mincing up the truth for the food plate of the world and one day she tried to kiss me, it felt like a funny age, like eleven years; I thought it was a mistake but then it happened again and in that exuberant youthful naïve misunderstanding – guffaws all round, the fat blushing red-top! – I ran away; to look back now it seems hard to budge the vision in my eyes of the teary little unopened and hairless cavern between her legs – like a new pot of pickled gherkin – the dimly lit highway into the sweetness of her soul that I was too young to want to see, and too silly to drive on in to, and I wonder if she still holds it now beneath her cotton girls pants like she hasn’t grown at all, or left her bike or the disused railway line linking the villages of the south, and wants not to talk all night but just to have a dirty party with no sweets and no genetically activated fruit beverage just a long and furious love?
*
A street slang neologism: achtung! The masturbation! Oh goodness the terribility of the awful scenario! The knuckles are cracked or cracking like a professional yo-yo expert ready to demonstrate to a small crowd in an even smaller toy shop the wild stunts of his youth and his father’s youth before him – “and here ladies and gentlemen you may yelp as I ‘walk the dog’, yes, ‘walk the dog’… no no my love I’m not walking a real dog here in a toy shop am I, that’d be a crazy stunt for even me: Daring Pete, UK’s sixteenth most renowned Yo-Yo Tactician! Yo-yo tricks is one thing my dear, dog shit on a wipe clean linoleum flooring system with Lego to the left and dolls in aisle four is another entirely, ha ha! No it’s a trick I’m performing is all, it just eventually looks a little like walking a dog on a lead on a fine May morning. Let me demonstrate… (to the imaginary band with the imaginary snare drum) ready maestro… (Daring Pete provides a primitive soggy drum-roll from his own mouth to prepare the bored crowd of three for his dog walking yo-yo trick. One of them is unable to escape, suffering seeming entire body paralysis). And here it… (the suspense hangs before it can plummet)… IS! (The yo-yo wobbles and wiggles on its string and finally ceases all motion before it reaches anywhere even near the ground. An indifferent hush). All right, all right… (Daring Pete reddens, looks the yo-yo deep). You fucking thing! (The toy is thrown into the glass cabinet containing battery robots and tin soldiers). Fucking show me up, you fuck!” – and the cloth is laid with the covering of full stomach for optimum sperm protection. Zip, the fly screams! Rhythmic pumps of glands in the sad mid-morning light, up to down, slow to fast, watching a-giggle the foreskin playing over the tip like a bear climbing a short tree more to kill time than for any fun, and the movement doesn’t feel good anymore, nothing does after this many times, it’s all a bicep-test for the ejaculation and the spunk mountain when it becomes a worthwhile sport – “Welcome to sports day you old bastard! The boys by the track jack off for a trophy… loser? Gobble the juice up!” – and as it all builds up the nightmare builds with it…
KNOCK-KNOCK: “Son?”: oh shit it’s the door right in the middle of my…
“Fuck I mean, yeah?”
“I’m… I’m coming in.”
“Nah, fucking nah mum.” The door is open and mum is on the bed, sitting on its edge in a pleated ill-shit brown knee length… doesn’t look half bad for a woman her age maybe but hell look I can’t stop it my arm’s got locked into the motion and I’m damn well going for it all the way frantic as you like while my fucking mum’s watching on…
“You think I can’t ever smell it, son, when I’m down in the kitchen? Today it was too much – right over the tomato soup and the roast potatoes. It was there, refusing to be extracted by the extractor fan. And I couldn’t not come up here and have a… go.”
Weird woman that mother, oh god, I’m so clo-ose. A race of ecstasy miniatures crawled to the hole in the very tip of the length and they jump out together toward the cloth I laid out previous and I can feel the heat all on my chest even through the cotton and there’s mum…
“You know son, I use balls. Special balls. You know? Special… vagina balls.”
And she’s guzzling it up faster than I can pump it out, like a virgin cocktail man in a darkened queer bar, licking the sperm up with one hand on her tits, and I’m just yelping uncontrollably…
“What a ZANG, I really deeply felt like that ZANG, ah such a fucking ZANG, ZANG, ZANG, ZANGGGGGGGGGGG!”
*
A Japanese cartoon character: “No one will ever defeat you, mighty ZANG, for the pure of heart shall never face conventional destruction! Take this, the ancient Sword of Defiance… and this, the contemporary Firearm of Incomprehensible Power! With this bounty you will forever prevail against the feared Bastard From The Mountain.”
Close up on ZANG’S face.
The background freezes.
“Good Oracle Nymph of the village bakery, I prostrate myself in thought at your symbolic feet! With these dangerous weapons in my knapsack, and with such love in my soul, the evils of the Bastard can never destroy the peace loving people of my beloved native village, from which I was so cruelly separated by a wicked alien plague in my formative years, found floating and forgotten as a baby on the River of Local Supremacy by my sensei and saviour, who taught me of my fate and heritage, and prepared me for the day that he knew would one day come: today. It is now this heritage which I must defend from the debauchery which sweeps the valley! My life has led to this moment… I shall finally destroy the Mountain of Evil.”
A mountain looms in focus in the background.
Lightning stereotypes its peak.
A distant cackle is heard.
“Only I, ZANG, can save the village and, ultimately, the world!”
Phallic tentacles dominate!
Hundreds of rounds of the Firearm of Incomprehensible Power are unloaded into the sky in jubilation!
The sky darkens!
Close-ups… long shots… theme tunes!
“ZANG! ZANG! ZANG!
ZANG will beat the evil!
Born of a pure mother,
And a semi-pure father,
Made ZANG himself pure, too;
Today he fights
For the purity of others
And largely succeeds in his quests
Because of the purity in himself
And while ZANG is fond of the ladies
It is only in the context of a meaningful relationship
Built of respect
It’s so good to respect the world!
ZANG!”
*
A medium to bad rock ‘n’ roll band: ZANG are bottom of the bill and flop after one long guitar solo… no saxophones… no groupies… the road manager got laid, but it was by his wife, and three years before the ZANG gig happened. It was a synthesizer doom outfit gone wrong.
I
Sure
Feel
Like
Zang!
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Saturday, November 22, 2008
from the archives
John didn’t like Steve, because Steve had a thing about Harry, but Harry had made Julian unsociable once and everyone, including elderly Barry and even diminutive Timothy from the nearby flats, thought that Harry’s influence was enough to make anyone become as much of a recluse as Peter, who hadn’t left his flat since Louis decided that Norris was actually called David and that Frank once had a pal called Richard who fathered two sons – Oscar and Charlie – before befriending big Daniel and his brother James so that they might form a team of four with Geoffrey, only Geoffrey wanted Jeffrey to be a part of it but Jeffrey didn’t want to be a part of anything unless Alexander was prepared to participate, and Alexander was a huge fan of William who in turn acted as a kind of middle man, trying hard to bring in not only the boys from the Shropshire Arms, being Colin, Douglas, George, Henry and Robert, but also all of his friends from the Devonshire Constitutional, like Simon, but Simon had developed a reputation and this had put off the likes of poor Paul and his eldest son Gary, who worked in an abattoir, while Michael, the friend of Johnson, wanted his old college buddy Ernest to be welcomed into the team, but the hot temper of Frederick made this an impossibility, as Lawrence had no choice but to introduce the local fishmonger, Arthur, to the master of meats and butchery, Ian, who sold spare animal parts to the scientist, Roderick, for experimentation, and fresh livers to Brian for use in his pies, but the farmer and landowner Leonard hated Dale so much for being tall that he decided to hire the simpleton Anthony to use his secret weapon, Francis, to get Dale via Kenneth who knew Jack who was an ex-business partner of Philip, the friend of Ivor, who had created Thomas in the back of Terry’s old Ford Cortina which was sold to him by Howard who once played a hand of poker with Eddie who was a friend of a friend of Alan who had apparently overheard a conversation between Christopher and Adrian who both met Andrew at a dinner function once and who are good friends with Graham who lent a lawnmower to Duncan whose mother’s boyfriend Samuel owned a small allotment right up the road from Benjamin’s place, and he had once played football with a team who claimed to have known Reginald, the second cousin of Nicholas who once brushed shoulders with Dale in a busy supermarket when he talked to Nathaniel about garden tools and car parking space, the specialist subject of Dennis, who was busy with his only uncle Edgar in the shed with Rhys, who was known to be dangerous and trustworthy, so Leonard would get Dale like that. Then every man realised he didn’t have a cock.
Sunday, November 09, 2008
the boy
I met the boy on the burning bridge. He wore trunks and sandals, and sat on the red hot iron rail with his legs swinging slightly over the sides as though he were somewhere else. It was Bishop’s Bridge. The boy looked serious.
“What are you doing?” I asked weakly to the starkness of outside. “What are you doing?” Firmer, stronger.
He turned to me disinterestedly, then turned away. He spat into the river.
I felt a compulsion to approach him, picking my way through the heat of flames. I placed a tentative hand onto his shoulder. The flesh was cooking like pork and burnt me; all the same I left it there. We watched the river trying to flow, me and the boy, and the bridge as it burnt.
*
The boy came to my place. I cooled him with moisturiser and ice packs and frozen peas, and fed him the insides of a loaf of bread, doughy like bleached white guts, which he chewed gravely before the off TV set. I threw the crust away hungrily.
*
The boy told me about his school and how it worked like a distant memory. In school all the boys burnt and life was to be forgotten. It was a top school.
*
We went to the park in an afternoon and threw a Frisbee, the boy unusual in his trunks, his charred skin like spoiled barbeque. Children cried in a circle about us, in a way that seemed involuntary, and the boy kept on throwing the Frisbee. He was very proficient.
*
It built up for many days before I kissed the boy. He was unresponsive at first, and throughout the kiss, but he didn’t try to stop me. When I went to touch his slight dick he slowly moved my hand away, but didn’t say anything. I tried to kiss him again, only this time he laughed and looked past me at the blank screen. It was late.
*
The boy emptied the fridge with a passion for milk. I didn’t mind. He seemed to bask in the electrical light that was activated by the opening door. It shone on his abs and his back and I drank water from a glass and watched him.
*
The boy couldn’t stop burning himself. It had started on the bridge, or maybe not. Maybe the bridge was the middle of something far bigger. He burnt my car, seats first, then my table, my soft furnishings, my house.
*
The boy was the culmination of a lifetime of promises.
*
The boy sang a heavenly silent song, the notes inconsequential to the point of epic. He was a master of the glamour of alternative lifestyles.
*
The boy exhibited adjacent characteristics.
*
The boy used the bathtub for his interior excavations, an odd habit but one I found reassuring. The bathroom smelt terrible, brown and full, but I still washed it out daily without complaint, the boy watching curiously from the kitchen door, his eyes a-glaze with clandestine examination.
*
The boy knew not the ways of the mattress, asleep instead on a loose carpet patch in the draft of the front door, itself warped by poor weather and bad construction, his eyes open like fish eyes in the dark.
*
He was gone when I woke up, nothing but a boy shaped mark left on the carpet. It wasn’t as if I needed the boy or knew him that well, but all the same I was crippled with the reality of myself, and cried at the thought of my ill-conceived memories, longing for the burnt browned hues of his flesh, the frailty of his imagined touch, the physical companionship of his mysterious genitalia.
*
I wonder where the boy is now.
*
Without the boy I was ash falling into the river, I was twisted hot metal, I was humanity engulfed in the spreading heat, I was children burning and hanging in their blank classrooms, I was man.
“What are you doing?” I asked weakly to the starkness of outside. “What are you doing?” Firmer, stronger.
He turned to me disinterestedly, then turned away. He spat into the river.
I felt a compulsion to approach him, picking my way through the heat of flames. I placed a tentative hand onto his shoulder. The flesh was cooking like pork and burnt me; all the same I left it there. We watched the river trying to flow, me and the boy, and the bridge as it burnt.
*
The boy came to my place. I cooled him with moisturiser and ice packs and frozen peas, and fed him the insides of a loaf of bread, doughy like bleached white guts, which he chewed gravely before the off TV set. I threw the crust away hungrily.
*
The boy told me about his school and how it worked like a distant memory. In school all the boys burnt and life was to be forgotten. It was a top school.
*
We went to the park in an afternoon and threw a Frisbee, the boy unusual in his trunks, his charred skin like spoiled barbeque. Children cried in a circle about us, in a way that seemed involuntary, and the boy kept on throwing the Frisbee. He was very proficient.
*
It built up for many days before I kissed the boy. He was unresponsive at first, and throughout the kiss, but he didn’t try to stop me. When I went to touch his slight dick he slowly moved my hand away, but didn’t say anything. I tried to kiss him again, only this time he laughed and looked past me at the blank screen. It was late.
*
The boy emptied the fridge with a passion for milk. I didn’t mind. He seemed to bask in the electrical light that was activated by the opening door. It shone on his abs and his back and I drank water from a glass and watched him.
*
The boy couldn’t stop burning himself. It had started on the bridge, or maybe not. Maybe the bridge was the middle of something far bigger. He burnt my car, seats first, then my table, my soft furnishings, my house.
*
The boy was the culmination of a lifetime of promises.
*
The boy sang a heavenly silent song, the notes inconsequential to the point of epic. He was a master of the glamour of alternative lifestyles.
*
The boy exhibited adjacent characteristics.
*
The boy used the bathtub for his interior excavations, an odd habit but one I found reassuring. The bathroom smelt terrible, brown and full, but I still washed it out daily without complaint, the boy watching curiously from the kitchen door, his eyes a-glaze with clandestine examination.
*
The boy knew not the ways of the mattress, asleep instead on a loose carpet patch in the draft of the front door, itself warped by poor weather and bad construction, his eyes open like fish eyes in the dark.
*
He was gone when I woke up, nothing but a boy shaped mark left on the carpet. It wasn’t as if I needed the boy or knew him that well, but all the same I was crippled with the reality of myself, and cried at the thought of my ill-conceived memories, longing for the burnt browned hues of his flesh, the frailty of his imagined touch, the physical companionship of his mysterious genitalia.
*
I wonder where the boy is now.
*
Without the boy I was ash falling into the river, I was twisted hot metal, I was humanity engulfed in the spreading heat, I was children burning and hanging in their blank classrooms, I was man.
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Havelock: the demise, the dementia, the end
Havelock’s third obsession, then, as touched upon already, was with coitus itself, an obsession of great pride for the man Pippin, and one which he validated, practised, exemplified, displayed and performed most publically and with a frequency and gusto more common in men a fraction of his age. Whilst the young Havelock – enraptured as he was with the sandwich laden sirens of my previous account, and the mystical curves and passageways that constructed their physical feminine form – was rapidly initiated in the ways of physical intercourse, it wasn’t until he was well into his 30s (and by then into the twentieth century) that his sexual compulsivity became increasingly prominent.
What began as a simple desire for the momentary physical pleasure of orgasm had become, by Havelock’s fortieth year (shortly before the birth of his first son), a recurrent engagement in extreme acts of lewd sex without control, consideration or the attempted reduction of said acts. His life became devoted to the obtaining of these deviant types of congress, the likes of which rapidly grew in severity and psychopathy as time progressed. Whilst a great many people may devote significant thought to fantasies and imaginings of a sexual nature, that same majority is equally able to do so in a realm separate from the reality of their day-to-day lives, and any genital depravity they might duly contemplate occurs within the comparative safety of the mind and does not infringe upon of the social order of their public lives. Havelock had no such ability for separation, and by the time Elizabeth Rose had fallen pregnant with the zygote that would grow into Christopher Havelock, his life had become, in effect, one long sexual encounter – be it in procuring, having, or recovering from intercourse of any type, and with anybody.
He did not live a double life, far from it. Elizabeth was well aware of his carnal pursuits, and Pippin made no attempt to hide them. One can only assume that, regardless of his mania, Havelock remained in every other sense a decent man and an exemplary husband, providing material and emotional support in the abundance required of him. It so happened that alongside his otherwise flawless approach to familial provision, Havelock was, he would say, “immersed entirely in the most powerful drug of all”.
To quote his writings:
“I am a man possessed, possessed by the need for sexual completion at any cost and without regard for any further circumstance. This is how I know I am addicted, as an opium addict is to his drug. Neither my wife, my public standing, my reputation, my estate – none of it matters in the light of a vagina, or an anus; indeed none of it matters in the transitory reality one sees at the point of orgasm. I freely admit that the very world might end around me, and if there was sex to be had I would be there with trousers down. I am a rational man, perhaps too rational, and it is this same rationality that can provide me with such a clear insight into my addiction. I well know that it could be considered a problem, but I simply do not care. My wife has become secondary to my sexual needs. Whilst I do feel a tenderness towards her, developed from a contended lifetime companionship which I have no desire to terminate, with the exception of the sandwich – that most masterful food, itself a composite orgasm for the taste buds – everything in life falls secondary to my pleasure. It is the very man I became.”
Pippin’s desires grew rapidly from normal explorative sexual relations with his wife on discovery of an old copy of The Arabian Nights, and the couple would contort themselves into bizarre positions of vaginal entry, to Elizabeth’s indifference and Havelock’s red-faced delight. As the addiction grew, however, Havelock found the rather conservative outlook of Elizabeth’s draconian preference somewhat tiresome, and he began a constant search for ever more dramatic forms of genital relief. This started with simple sodomy in the marital bed (which although he never says as much within his journals, I get the distinct impression was significantly less than consensual, Elizabeth herself of Christian mentality and already with child), but soon escalated out of the privacy of the homestead and into the taverns and brothels of Norwich city.
No accounts of Elizabeth’s were found amongst Havelock’s papers, and I find it difficult to imagine the complexity of her feeling about her husband’s gruesome infidelities.
“A fine woman she may be,” he wrote in June of 1927, “but her inherent inflexibility into positions of sexual transcendence and vaginal manipulation is not conducive to the explosive ejaculations to which I have become accustomed, or even demand of my sexual experiences.”
There is no doubt that Havelock was the talk of Norwich, as he engaged in his depraved sex across town with any willing participant, even earning himself the title Pippin de Sade, resultant from his penchant for buggery, and, latterly, of the incontinent specifically. In fact, his own “bugger the incontinent” becoming something of a catchphrase for the man, and an integral part of Norwich history (Brown Bugger Walk being one such example, one of the many historically vice filled streets where Havelock sought out the more dirty coitus he had grown to love).
In reference to his penchant for faecally charged anal intercourse, Pippin states:
“I can’t stop, and won’t stop. It is an urge I refuse to fight against, a natural urge, and I would fear myself if I were to cease such engagement,” he writes. “Let no man unfamiliar with the glory of the brown storm of sprayed liquid excrement raining with the force of the earth around their own rigid self possibly condemn the act. There is a very real beauty to it, an urgency, a unity with the essence of life.”
This sexual addiction lasted throughout many years of Havelock’s life, including the whole childhood of his two young children, yet never was a doubt cast in his mind – or, by all accounts, the minds of others – as to his devotion and suitability as a father. And why should it? He is adamant that, despite the ferocity of his sexual output, the security of his wife and children was never threatened, and he would simply never have allowed his actions to have had a directly adverse affect on their well being. Whilst like any other addict Havelock’s thoughts were ultimately aflame with his next dark encounter, he retained enough presence of mind to consider his family and his responsibilities to them, and to treat them with nothing but the love they deserved (often only minutes after orgasm elsewhere). Despite the moral questionability of his chosen lifestyle, the people of Norwich left him largely to his own devices, partly of out of politeness and partly out of a respect for the eccentricities that made him such a character and very much a product of Norfolk (in fact, Havelock has made several references in his writing to a locally published book of anecdotes and jokes relating to his varying addictions and manias, entitled “Havelock: Anecdotes and Risqué Humours of a Singularly Physical Man”. Unfortunately, there is neither a copy of the book or any reproduction of its pages within Havelock’s papers, and my research at the library here has so far yielded no results).
It was, however, his family that eventually brought other manias to the forefront of his mind, far more harmful than his sexual frequency. As I have already written at length, it was Christopher’s drowning in 1937 that irreversibly engulfed the man in the Mandrake delusions that would ultimately spell his downfall. In his grief at losing his eldest child, Havelock suffered a bout of impotence that would haunt him to his death. “Can I call myself a man any longer?” he asked. “The ugly flap of skin between my legs is truly the folly of the male. How pointless it has all been, this quest to bring it to attention. Without [Christopher], now, I am empty like the blood vessels inside it.” Despite trying to satisfy his urges voyeuristically, without the finality of orgasm Havelock no longer took the same blind pleasure from acts of the flesh, and not a vagina in the world could release him from the vice-like grip of Christopher’s death, and the Anatidaen subspecies he held so responsible for it.
Havelock’s own decline happened quite rapidly after his son’s death. Without intercourse as his incentive, he ceased the majority of his contact with the outside world, only leaving his estate to make observations pertaining to the Mandrake for his own analyses. Otherwise he remained locked within his study, producing page after page of rambling reports and hypotheses (which I will not even attempt to start publishing here, due to their massive length and largely nonsensical polemic).
Only three years after Christopher’s death, Havelock had decayed into the onset of dementia. Understandably, his writings seem to have dried up by this point, with very little output (or at least very little in my possession). The written silence is only broken by the last dated writings I have uncovered, from 1942 (despite the decline of his memory and general faculties), immediately following his arrest for the almost ritual slaughter of a mallard in Wensum Park, a revenge act five years in the making and, for police and doctors involved in Pippin’s case, exhibiting evidence of “irreparable psychiatric damage, resultant of dementia, and of danger to both himself and the public well being”.
Havelock wrote:
“From the haze my mind had become following the death of my beloved son, and following an end to the virility that first gave him his life, from this haze had awoken a beast of incredible clarity. I saw then that the only choice left to me was one of revenge. Where my rational pleas to our so-called men of science had failed, perhaps the irrationality of emotion would necessitate a reclassification of the natural order, in keeping with my Mandrake discoveries? My theory had run its course, and physical evidence was the final step in the legitimisation of the Mandrake as the monster it has become in our municipal gardens. I set out to trap a Mandrake, to keep it alive, as walking evidence of my claims, yet my emotion betrayed me. Entrenched in the passion of my history, the Mandrake was slain in the Norwich afternoon, and as its fragile neck gave way beneath my palms I felt the possibility of a dismissed mistake, but saw nothing beyond my awful tears.”
Pippin was found in Wensum Park wearing only a white shirt, covered in fresh blood. Around him were the misplaced feathers of the mallard he held, very much dead, in his hands, its neck clearly broken, one wing literally torn off, guts wrenched open. On the floor at Havelock’s feet were the mallard’s two legs, both only inches long (and not the ten or so feet Havelock claimed of the Mandrakes). There was blood around Havelock’s mouth, suggestive of his having gnawed at the duck in the chaos of the slaughter. Police reported having responded to a loud disturbance consistent with the cries of a very distressed duck from the park vicinity. On arrival they found Havelock at the scene as described. He was calm and did not resist arrest.
Found only to be stricken with the unspent grief of his long-dead son, and riddled with dementia, Havelock escaped a prison sentence and was instead sent – for convalescence (and public safety) – to Fletcher’s Convalescent Home in the nearby coastal town of Cromer. In truth, Havelock had no chance of convalescence, his dementia was at too advanced a stage for that, and at the time no treatments were available to slow the process. His transferral to Fletcher’s was really the result of the great affection that Norwich still felt for the man, and the desire it had as a city to avoid any stricter punishment for him.
The limited records I could find show that Havelock died, with Elizabeth and Frances at his side (although it is unlikely that he recognised them by that stage in his illness), on September 5th, 1947. It was his birthday. He was sixty years old.
*
For me, Havelock’s story represents something far greater than at first one might consider. In its way, it goes beyond the story of one man and becomes the story of a city, or of a county, or of mankind itself. I think there is a bit of us all in Havelock, and certainly a bit of Havelock in us all. He was great man, a man of passion and determination, a man of compulsions and manias and often skewed moralities, but really a good man, a man who loved his life and life itself, a man who loved Norwich. Havelock represents something wonderful about humanity, about the things we can achieve – or not – and about the incredible beauty of the functioning, sensory, human organism. I read his words and I feel that he is the culmination of something much bigger than himself, and no matter how outlandish his claims ever were they ring with a truth that is so rare today, a truth that comes from the sheer force of his own existence.
Within the pile of papers I acquired there are myriad other writings, including a rather Sadean and often quite tedious encyclopaedic account of hundreds of his sexual exploits, and many pages of journals and correspondence that – while quoting in some places or paraphrasing in others – I simply do not have the time or inclination to publish here.
Also amidst the documents was Pippin’s recipe for his purported “Ultimate Sandwich”, which he believed was the final logical conclusion to the sandwich puzzle to which he had devoted so much of his life, in short: construction of the perfect sandwich and its component parts. Based on two decades of trial and research, I thought the safest place for this recipe and its place in culinary infamy was within the archives of the Museum of Culinary History and Alimentation, in London. I did, of course, make the sandwich according to Havelock’s recipe, but it was really nothing special. I guess you had to be there.
Fletcher’s Convalescent Home stands derelict now, a fine building on the Cromer skyline, hidden behind a modern redbrick one-storey old person’s home called Benjamin Court, at the Cromer entrance to Roughton Road. I have been trying to arrange a tour of the abandoned premises, but have had no luck in contacting anyone so far. I have heard rumour that the last Manager of the home before its decommissioning lives locally to me now, and I will endeavour to track him down and try to find out more clues about the last months of Havelock, prior to his death.
It somehow feels like a terrible betrayal to come to the end of a story like this one. There are always more facts to uncover, more people to talk to, and despite the arduousness of my reading I don’t think I’m ready to let Havelock go. As long as the papers sit in my drawer I will be pulled into his world, of Mandrakes, of intercourse, of sandwiches, of belief. It’s as if I need to know, but I don’t yet know what.
I just can’t ignore the enigma of Charles Phillip Havelock, III.
What began as a simple desire for the momentary physical pleasure of orgasm had become, by Havelock’s fortieth year (shortly before the birth of his first son), a recurrent engagement in extreme acts of lewd sex without control, consideration or the attempted reduction of said acts. His life became devoted to the obtaining of these deviant types of congress, the likes of which rapidly grew in severity and psychopathy as time progressed. Whilst a great many people may devote significant thought to fantasies and imaginings of a sexual nature, that same majority is equally able to do so in a realm separate from the reality of their day-to-day lives, and any genital depravity they might duly contemplate occurs within the comparative safety of the mind and does not infringe upon of the social order of their public lives. Havelock had no such ability for separation, and by the time Elizabeth Rose had fallen pregnant with the zygote that would grow into Christopher Havelock, his life had become, in effect, one long sexual encounter – be it in procuring, having, or recovering from intercourse of any type, and with anybody.
He did not live a double life, far from it. Elizabeth was well aware of his carnal pursuits, and Pippin made no attempt to hide them. One can only assume that, regardless of his mania, Havelock remained in every other sense a decent man and an exemplary husband, providing material and emotional support in the abundance required of him. It so happened that alongside his otherwise flawless approach to familial provision, Havelock was, he would say, “immersed entirely in the most powerful drug of all”.
To quote his writings:
“I am a man possessed, possessed by the need for sexual completion at any cost and without regard for any further circumstance. This is how I know I am addicted, as an opium addict is to his drug. Neither my wife, my public standing, my reputation, my estate – none of it matters in the light of a vagina, or an anus; indeed none of it matters in the transitory reality one sees at the point of orgasm. I freely admit that the very world might end around me, and if there was sex to be had I would be there with trousers down. I am a rational man, perhaps too rational, and it is this same rationality that can provide me with such a clear insight into my addiction. I well know that it could be considered a problem, but I simply do not care. My wife has become secondary to my sexual needs. Whilst I do feel a tenderness towards her, developed from a contended lifetime companionship which I have no desire to terminate, with the exception of the sandwich – that most masterful food, itself a composite orgasm for the taste buds – everything in life falls secondary to my pleasure. It is the very man I became.”
Pippin’s desires grew rapidly from normal explorative sexual relations with his wife on discovery of an old copy of The Arabian Nights, and the couple would contort themselves into bizarre positions of vaginal entry, to Elizabeth’s indifference and Havelock’s red-faced delight. As the addiction grew, however, Havelock found the rather conservative outlook of Elizabeth’s draconian preference somewhat tiresome, and he began a constant search for ever more dramatic forms of genital relief. This started with simple sodomy in the marital bed (which although he never says as much within his journals, I get the distinct impression was significantly less than consensual, Elizabeth herself of Christian mentality and already with child), but soon escalated out of the privacy of the homestead and into the taverns and brothels of Norwich city.
No accounts of Elizabeth’s were found amongst Havelock’s papers, and I find it difficult to imagine the complexity of her feeling about her husband’s gruesome infidelities.
“A fine woman she may be,” he wrote in June of 1927, “but her inherent inflexibility into positions of sexual transcendence and vaginal manipulation is not conducive to the explosive ejaculations to which I have become accustomed, or even demand of my sexual experiences.”
There is no doubt that Havelock was the talk of Norwich, as he engaged in his depraved sex across town with any willing participant, even earning himself the title Pippin de Sade, resultant from his penchant for buggery, and, latterly, of the incontinent specifically. In fact, his own “bugger the incontinent” becoming something of a catchphrase for the man, and an integral part of Norwich history (Brown Bugger Walk being one such example, one of the many historically vice filled streets where Havelock sought out the more dirty coitus he had grown to love).
In reference to his penchant for faecally charged anal intercourse, Pippin states:
“I can’t stop, and won’t stop. It is an urge I refuse to fight against, a natural urge, and I would fear myself if I were to cease such engagement,” he writes. “Let no man unfamiliar with the glory of the brown storm of sprayed liquid excrement raining with the force of the earth around their own rigid self possibly condemn the act. There is a very real beauty to it, an urgency, a unity with the essence of life.”
This sexual addiction lasted throughout many years of Havelock’s life, including the whole childhood of his two young children, yet never was a doubt cast in his mind – or, by all accounts, the minds of others – as to his devotion and suitability as a father. And why should it? He is adamant that, despite the ferocity of his sexual output, the security of his wife and children was never threatened, and he would simply never have allowed his actions to have had a directly adverse affect on their well being. Whilst like any other addict Havelock’s thoughts were ultimately aflame with his next dark encounter, he retained enough presence of mind to consider his family and his responsibilities to them, and to treat them with nothing but the love they deserved (often only minutes after orgasm elsewhere). Despite the moral questionability of his chosen lifestyle, the people of Norwich left him largely to his own devices, partly of out of politeness and partly out of a respect for the eccentricities that made him such a character and very much a product of Norfolk (in fact, Havelock has made several references in his writing to a locally published book of anecdotes and jokes relating to his varying addictions and manias, entitled “Havelock: Anecdotes and Risqué Humours of a Singularly Physical Man”. Unfortunately, there is neither a copy of the book or any reproduction of its pages within Havelock’s papers, and my research at the library here has so far yielded no results).
It was, however, his family that eventually brought other manias to the forefront of his mind, far more harmful than his sexual frequency. As I have already written at length, it was Christopher’s drowning in 1937 that irreversibly engulfed the man in the Mandrake delusions that would ultimately spell his downfall. In his grief at losing his eldest child, Havelock suffered a bout of impotence that would haunt him to his death. “Can I call myself a man any longer?” he asked. “The ugly flap of skin between my legs is truly the folly of the male. How pointless it has all been, this quest to bring it to attention. Without [Christopher], now, I am empty like the blood vessels inside it.” Despite trying to satisfy his urges voyeuristically, without the finality of orgasm Havelock no longer took the same blind pleasure from acts of the flesh, and not a vagina in the world could release him from the vice-like grip of Christopher’s death, and the Anatidaen subspecies he held so responsible for it.
Havelock’s own decline happened quite rapidly after his son’s death. Without intercourse as his incentive, he ceased the majority of his contact with the outside world, only leaving his estate to make observations pertaining to the Mandrake for his own analyses. Otherwise he remained locked within his study, producing page after page of rambling reports and hypotheses (which I will not even attempt to start publishing here, due to their massive length and largely nonsensical polemic).
Only three years after Christopher’s death, Havelock had decayed into the onset of dementia. Understandably, his writings seem to have dried up by this point, with very little output (or at least very little in my possession). The written silence is only broken by the last dated writings I have uncovered, from 1942 (despite the decline of his memory and general faculties), immediately following his arrest for the almost ritual slaughter of a mallard in Wensum Park, a revenge act five years in the making and, for police and doctors involved in Pippin’s case, exhibiting evidence of “irreparable psychiatric damage, resultant of dementia, and of danger to both himself and the public well being”.
Havelock wrote:
“From the haze my mind had become following the death of my beloved son, and following an end to the virility that first gave him his life, from this haze had awoken a beast of incredible clarity. I saw then that the only choice left to me was one of revenge. Where my rational pleas to our so-called men of science had failed, perhaps the irrationality of emotion would necessitate a reclassification of the natural order, in keeping with my Mandrake discoveries? My theory had run its course, and physical evidence was the final step in the legitimisation of the Mandrake as the monster it has become in our municipal gardens. I set out to trap a Mandrake, to keep it alive, as walking evidence of my claims, yet my emotion betrayed me. Entrenched in the passion of my history, the Mandrake was slain in the Norwich afternoon, and as its fragile neck gave way beneath my palms I felt the possibility of a dismissed mistake, but saw nothing beyond my awful tears.”
Pippin was found in Wensum Park wearing only a white shirt, covered in fresh blood. Around him were the misplaced feathers of the mallard he held, very much dead, in his hands, its neck clearly broken, one wing literally torn off, guts wrenched open. On the floor at Havelock’s feet were the mallard’s two legs, both only inches long (and not the ten or so feet Havelock claimed of the Mandrakes). There was blood around Havelock’s mouth, suggestive of his having gnawed at the duck in the chaos of the slaughter. Police reported having responded to a loud disturbance consistent with the cries of a very distressed duck from the park vicinity. On arrival they found Havelock at the scene as described. He was calm and did not resist arrest.
Found only to be stricken with the unspent grief of his long-dead son, and riddled with dementia, Havelock escaped a prison sentence and was instead sent – for convalescence (and public safety) – to Fletcher’s Convalescent Home in the nearby coastal town of Cromer. In truth, Havelock had no chance of convalescence, his dementia was at too advanced a stage for that, and at the time no treatments were available to slow the process. His transferral to Fletcher’s was really the result of the great affection that Norwich still felt for the man, and the desire it had as a city to avoid any stricter punishment for him.
The limited records I could find show that Havelock died, with Elizabeth and Frances at his side (although it is unlikely that he recognised them by that stage in his illness), on September 5th, 1947. It was his birthday. He was sixty years old.
*
For me, Havelock’s story represents something far greater than at first one might consider. In its way, it goes beyond the story of one man and becomes the story of a city, or of a county, or of mankind itself. I think there is a bit of us all in Havelock, and certainly a bit of Havelock in us all. He was great man, a man of passion and determination, a man of compulsions and manias and often skewed moralities, but really a good man, a man who loved his life and life itself, a man who loved Norwich. Havelock represents something wonderful about humanity, about the things we can achieve – or not – and about the incredible beauty of the functioning, sensory, human organism. I read his words and I feel that he is the culmination of something much bigger than himself, and no matter how outlandish his claims ever were they ring with a truth that is so rare today, a truth that comes from the sheer force of his own existence.
Within the pile of papers I acquired there are myriad other writings, including a rather Sadean and often quite tedious encyclopaedic account of hundreds of his sexual exploits, and many pages of journals and correspondence that – while quoting in some places or paraphrasing in others – I simply do not have the time or inclination to publish here.
Also amidst the documents was Pippin’s recipe for his purported “Ultimate Sandwich”, which he believed was the final logical conclusion to the sandwich puzzle to which he had devoted so much of his life, in short: construction of the perfect sandwich and its component parts. Based on two decades of trial and research, I thought the safest place for this recipe and its place in culinary infamy was within the archives of the Museum of Culinary History and Alimentation, in London. I did, of course, make the sandwich according to Havelock’s recipe, but it was really nothing special. I guess you had to be there.
Fletcher’s Convalescent Home stands derelict now, a fine building on the Cromer skyline, hidden behind a modern redbrick one-storey old person’s home called Benjamin Court, at the Cromer entrance to Roughton Road. I have been trying to arrange a tour of the abandoned premises, but have had no luck in contacting anyone so far. I have heard rumour that the last Manager of the home before its decommissioning lives locally to me now, and I will endeavour to track him down and try to find out more clues about the last months of Havelock, prior to his death.
It somehow feels like a terrible betrayal to come to the end of a story like this one. There are always more facts to uncover, more people to talk to, and despite the arduousness of my reading I don’t think I’m ready to let Havelock go. As long as the papers sit in my drawer I will be pulled into his world, of Mandrakes, of intercourse, of sandwiches, of belief. It’s as if I need to know, but I don’t yet know what.
I just can’t ignore the enigma of Charles Phillip Havelock, III.
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