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.
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