Fatal Glamour by Paul Delany

very thick and I don’t like the expression of her mouth, but she’s a sensible girl. I can’t understand what you all see in these Oliviers; they are pretty, I suppose, but not at all clever; they’re shocking flirts and their manners are disgraceful.” 36
    The failure at Clevedon underlined the homelessness of the Neo-pagans. Ka’s parents were dead, the Oliviers’ parents mostly in Jamaica, Jacques’s father in France. There were advantages, however, to being orphans. In lodgings, still more in a tent or a river, they could live by their own rules. Gwen Darwin, whose parents were alive and highly respectable, was not allowed to go on these frolics unless she could convince them that a suitable chaperone would be there too. “Sometimes I think that every one ought to be killed off at 40,” she had written to her cousin Frances, “when I see what a misery all parents are to their children.” 37
    Another solution to the problem of parents was to make sure that when you got older you would be nothing like them. Walking on the cliffs at Portishead, Rupert, Margery, Bryn, Dudley, and Bill Hubback hit on a scheme to bring this about. The poet John Davidson had recently drowned himself in Cornwall at the age of fifty. The year before, in
The Testament of John Davidson
, he had glorified the life of the road as the only antidote to age and death:
    I felt the time had come to find a grave:
    I knew it in my heart my days were done.
    I took my staff in hand; I took the road,
    And wandered out to seek my last abode.
    Hearts of gold and hearts of lead
    Sing it yet in sun and rain,
    â€˜Heel and toe from dawn to dusk,
    Round the world and home again.’
    What if Davidson had only faked suicide? they wondered. Perhaps he was now enjoying a secret life, after casting off all his responsibilities: “The idea, the splendour of this escape back into youth, fascinated us.We imagined a number of young people, splendidly young together, vowing to
live
such an idea, parting to do their ‘work in the world’ for a time and then, twenty years later, meeting on some windy road, one prearranged spring morning, reborn to find and make a new world together, vanishing from the knowledge of men and things they knew before, resurgent in sun and rain.” 38 The walkers made a solemn pact to meet for breakfast at Basel station on 1 May 1933. Turning their backs on England, they would start a new life, “fishing for tunnies off Sicily or exploring Constantinople or roaring with laughter in some Spanish inn.” Jacques was invited in November; Godwin Baynes, Ka, and a few others would also get the call. “The great essential thing is the Organised Chance of Living Again,” Rupert told Jacques, instead of becoming “a greying literary hack, mumbling along in some London suburb, middle aged, tied with more and more ties, busier and busier, fussier and fussier . . . the world will fade to us, fade, grow tasteless, habitual, dull.” 39 It is unclear why 1 May 1933 was the target date, except that by then they would all be twice their present age, and Mayday was a festival of springtime and youth. They could hardly have foreseen that by the appointed day Rupert and Jacques would be dead, Margery insane, the others tied to duties that would make the gathering unthinkable. What really mattered, anyway, was the vision as it first came to them, for Rupert’s long letter of invitation to Jacques is the closest thing to a “Neo-pagan manifesto.”
    Their great aim was to throw off the natural accumulations of age: houses, jobs, spouses, children. One was not made old just by living long but by accepting a place in society without protest. To avoid being like your parents, you had only to get rid of everything your parents had got. “We’ll be children seventy-years, instead of seven,” Rupert vowed in conclusion. “We’ll
live
Romance,