I collected PC Wrens in my teens and twenties, old, heavy papered, clothbound editions from John Murray’s “Imperial Library” mostly, though Dad found me a Beau Geste with a dustjacket for one of my birthdays, and have carted them around with me ever since. Now they live on a bottom shelf with my Maigrets, Saints (Simon Templar), and William books.
Last year I reread Beau Ideal, my favourite, for another project, so I was pleased when I decided to take part in the 1937 Club to find that Worth Wile qualified. Though, as I got going, I discovered that the story I thought I remembered belonged to another book altogether.
I was expecting a story about an engaged couple in Pakistan who ‘jump the gun’. The man dies and the woman is left to bring up their son unmarried and alone. Instead, Worth Wile is the story of officers in the British Army stationed in the ‘North West Frontier’ – the mountain country where present day Pakistan borders Afghanistan.
“The two main gateways on the North West Frontier are the Khyber and Bolan Passes. Since ancient times, the Indian subcontinent has been repeatedly invaded through these northwestern routes. With the expansion of the Russian Empire into Central Asia in the twentieth century, stability of the Frontier and control of Afghanistan became cornerstones of defensive strategy for British India.” (wiki)
There is also a love story, of sorts. I’ve said before that Wren isn’t very good at woman stuff.
The first character we meet is John Vere-Vaughan, a flying officer who gets shot down while on a bombing raid over Afghanistan – the shock on rereading Wren is how familiar his 1920s stories sound in the 2020s – is captured and held for ransom.
Glancing around, Vere-Vaughan noted with approval that female suffrage had evidently not reached this part of the Afghan Border; for the ladies who had spat upon him, flung mud and stones at him, and endeavoured to get at him with knife or talon, remained at the compound gate, whence they watched the proceedings with savage eyes
Two of his captors are apparently British officers in disguise living as Afghan tribal fighters. After 100 pages we lose track of Vere-Vaughan for a while.
Part II begins with Richard Wendover, the son and grandson of Generals who have spent their whole careers fighting in India, dreaming of the same for himself; and with his neighbour, Sybil Ffoulkes, “A good kid. Pity she wasn’t a boy”, daughter of another General in India, now retired. Sybil, then 11 or 12, has already proposed marriage to Wendover once (unsuccessfully), and despite their being mostly apart for the next couple of decades, continues in that determination throughout the book.
“Years later ..” a third significant character is introduced. Young Prince Nikolas Bailitzin, nephew of the Russian Ambassador to the Court of St James, proposes to Sybil and is refused. When we meet him again more years later (and on the other side of the Russian Revolution) in Afghanistan he has remade himself as an agent of the Soviet Secret Service.
I can see I am leading myself into just telling you the story, which as you’re unlikely to read it for yourself, is not entirely a bad thing, but I’ll be brief.
Wendover’s promising career is brought to a crashing halt when he is found drunk and asleep in charge of a fort he is meant to be defending. He is summarily court martialled and disappears; much later turning up as an Afghan tribal fighter. Much, much later his friends work out he was drugged by a ‘Eurasian’ – ie. a fellow officer who was NOT WHITE.
Sybil spends years trying to find out what happened; is eventually told Wendover has been seen on the British side of the border in his role as an Afghan; and wrangles an invitation to stay with yet another general, the North West Frontier is teeming with generals, who has a daughter her age.
Wendover gets a job in Afghanistan teaching Indian culture to Russian spies; is recognised, imprisoned and tortured by Bailitzin, but of course escapes the night before he is to be executed.
Veere-Vaughan makes his way back into the narrative; is rescued by Wendover. Wendover’s court martial is shown to have been illegal. Then just when he has been accepted back into the army, and – pretty unwillingly – into the arms of Sybil, he disappears again back into Afghanistan. There’s more, but the reviewers’ code forbids me to discuss endings.
Wren, it must be said, is in favour of British (and French) colonialism, and consequently his books must be read through the twin prisms of Boys Own heroism and the white man’s burden. How much of that rubbed off on teenage/twentyish me? A bit probably, it was after all the culture I was brought up in, in the 1950s and 60s, and that my father and his father were brought up in and wholeheartedly endorsed.
On the other hand, by 1971 I was a draft resister and my father and I were not speaking. And yet I still collected and read these books. It probably took me ten or maybe even twenty years to begin questioning both the sexism and the white man’s burden. And it is one thing to be aware of them theoretically and quite another to root them out.
Wren was employed in the Indian Education Service from 1903 to 1917 (and may have spent up to a year at the beginning of WWI in an Indian regiment). His first posting was in Karachi – ie. at the opposite end of present day Pakistan from the NW Frontier – but I can’t see where he spent subsequent years.
In any case he appears to have been a close and not always unsympathetic observer of Muslim culture. In this book, as in his North African French Foreign Legion books, his Muslim men can be both heroes and very villainous villains. Let me end with a quote from the one page I remembered to bookmark:
“It’s a sacred and solemn duty of one of these Pathans to kill a man who flirts with his wife as it is to say his prayers. It’s as much his duty to kill the man who has done that, or has killed his father or brother in the blood feud, or has blackened his face in some other way, as it is our duty to feed and clothe and educate our children. How should we like it, if an alien race, who were in a position to do so, hanged us every time we committed the offence of of feeding and clothing and educating our children?”
How should we like it indeed? Still not something we consider enough as we continue to colonise, rather than live alongside, Aboriginal Australians.
.
PC Wren, Worth Wile, John Murray, London, 1937. 420pp (Pictured: First Canadian edition, 1937, with dustjacket)
The Australian Legend 