Sunday in Surrey

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It is 150 years since the publication of the most loved children’s book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, written by Lewis Carroll and illustrated by John Tenniel.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who took the pen name Lewis Carroll, was a writer, mathematician, logician, Anglican Deacon and photographer. He wrote the book in 1865 for Alice Liddell, daughter of the college dean.

Two years later, after garnering worldwide fame, he came down to Guildford (Surrey) in 1868, to settle his large family of six unmarried sisters by buying a house next to Guildford Castle. He also wrote the second book, Through the Looking Glass, here in 1871. Eventually he came to live and die in Guildford in 1898.

En‘gross’ing talk

In a year’s golden autumn in England, the Club I belong to, the aptly named Ramblers’ Club, had organised a trek in Guildford. The charm of the Ramblers’ circuit is that, land’s end to land’s end you could join up any Sunday at the advertised place and time, and be in for a surprise pack of trekking companions. The last one had bank and tax people!

I drove down from Central London to the Guildford Railway Station and met an even more esoteric group. We started our climb up on the tarred road before lurching over farm fences that separated neatly-tended hedges, groves, trees and rolling green lands and waters — that Sunday promised a sojourn in a kind of somnambulance.

The men and women seemed individually interesting. A German exporter with a faintly hidden colour prejudice; the prematurely-aged girl who had published a book; a pair who were dumb and deaf on rehabilitation at the City Lit; a wizened Jew who laughed at everything; a Japanese film-festival buff who was permanently placed in London to buy and sell films, her boyfriend; the charming goaty who was our leader, and his wife.

Exhausting them, I trudged up to a giant of a man who walked alone on the cold autumnal leaves. He was an American, but barely. Tom Cullen had made England his home ever since he got hounded out of his native California by MaCarthy.

He was a card-carrying Communist and proud of it. I had remembered the mention of his name on the Ramblers’ circular. Last Sunday he had led a walk around the East End, tracing the gory spots of the crimes of Jack the Ripper.

We were passing a narrow bund that separated a vast holding on the right and a small one with beefy heifers on the left. A girl up front was trying to feed a curious heifer. Another was riding a horse down the grassy slope in front of the Manor House towards a pristine private lake. A perfect ‘Wonderland’ picture.

Tom continued — “If you remember the sketch in the circular, the trail of Jack consisted of no more than a few hundred metres between the first and the last crime. Jack picked and attacked only soliciting females. The method was the same in every case save one. He disembowelled them. No, there was no sign of any sexual assault. The cuts were crude and obviously executed by a hefty, sharp instrument.”

I offered two theories — one for why he was not caught despite striking after a clear warning, and the other for the very method of the strike. Jack could have been a woman — a nurse pushing a perambulator, thus neatly explaining away the escape through the iron-clad cordoning of the area of attack.

The other — Jack was perhaps a flunky medico who tried out his surgical skills.
After a longish stop at a country pub, our path had now wound down to the gently flowing river. We crossed bridges, skirted farm land, dug into thick growth coming out on the banks of quiet waters flowing on, carrying no worse pollutant than yellowing leaves.
“No,” he said, “Both the theories are wrong. To take the second postulate first, it is true that Jack came from a long line of surgeons. But obviously he had no secret desire for excelling in the skills of his ancestors. He cut crudely and took out half-cut parts and strew them around. The first postulate is plain nonsense, only credible in films. The strength exerted and the targets precluded that. Soliciting was of the essence.”

We rejoined the group on the bridge over the rural river, re-entering Guildford on the opposite side to which we had left it. There was a swift flow of water under the bridge controlled by sluices.

Boys on canoes paddled right up to the mouth of the sluice and got a kick out of being flushed out into frothing, bitterly cold eddies back down the river. The game was to hold the canoe at the sluice. Strings were hung on as goal posts along the bridge.

“No,” Tom said, “I am absolutely sure that Jack was a solicitor by profession and committed suicide within a week of the last murder, which is why the killings remain an unresolved mystery. He certainly was a mentally distorted person who lived and practised in East Chapel. The last murder was the only one of the seven he committed in those terror-stricken months which he chose to conduct indoors. He took the victim in and cut bits of her, barely identifying each organ; nailed the kidney, the heart, the liver and other pieces of flesh on the wall.”

Fictional saviour

There was a loud scream as a canoe went right into the sluice and broke up, tearing away the paddler from the boat, which sent a timely shiver down my spine. I hastily left Tom and went in search of Alice.

On the undulating green bed of grass that rolled down from the picture-book church to the river bed was a life-size recreation of Alice, her attention drawn away from the sister reading a book to a hopping rabbit a few yards away, towards the hole now filled with water and autumn leaves, which led Alice through the most beautiful dream ever dreamt by man.

The Alice Garden lies between Guildford Castle and the bowling green. Remnants of the ‘Alice’ effect that swept the country are on view at the Guildford Museum, including the original illustrations of John Tenniel. In a letter in 1891, Lewis Carroll, sick of publicity, had said, “I almost wish I had never written any books at all.” But for me, Alice had come wiping all the gore from my mind, filling my heart with sheer joy.