friends Sue and Barry Watts. Barry had developed carpentry skills building wooden boats, and had recently contracted to do some restoration work at St. Mary Redcliffe Church. His project was to restore the large, wood-and-stone garden shed in back of the Sexton’s house next door. The shed was a comparatively recent addition to the grounds of the medieval church, having been built early in the 1920s. In World War II a German bomb blew apart a tramway nearby, the blast throwing a tram rail through the roof. (The errant rail is now a memorial on the church grounds.) The shed had been ineptly repaired, and time and the weather had been nearly as disastrous as the tram rail in the years since. Restoring the shed would take Barry a couple of months of finely detailed work. The details of that work, as interesting as they were, are irrelevant to this account, aside from my helping with the early business of removing the contents of the shed to a nearby garage. Over the years the shed had been used as a sort of warehouse, and it was packed with otherwise homeless junk. It reminded me a little of a yard sale, in that there was nothing apparently interesting about any of it except for the lurking possibility of some small, hidden treasure….
In the end, I had more fun puttering around in that old garden shed during the three days we were in Bristol than I had looking at all the cathedrals and museums and “sites” that Europe afforded us during the rest of our long holiday, and on top of that, I found my hidden treasure, such as it turned out to be. Statutes of limitation and copyright being what they are, there’s no danger in my admitting that now. There were a number of wooden crates with screwed-down lids piled against the back wall, and of course it was none of our business to look inside, although we wanted to badly. There was a steamer trunk, however, out of keeping with the rest of the crates and buried beneath them, which no one had gone to the trouble to lock. I simply couldn’t help myself; I took a look inside. I was disappointed at first to find nothing much in it—some personal documents and vaguely interesting old magazines (more interesting when I came to understand what they were). At the bottom of the trunk, however, lay a number of parcels wrapped in calfskin and tied neatly—manuscripts of some sort, apparently (or allegedly) written down nearly a century earlier. I had no idea by whom until later, when I had the leisure to study them.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. What happened was that I left Barry to his work and read through some of it on the spot, quickly coming to a decision that—I’m ashamed to say—could be viewed as reprehensible, not least of all because I took advantage of a friend. That afternoon I boxed up the manuscripts and mailed them home. I wasn’t guilty of theft, mind you, because as soon as I had the opportunity I photocopied all of them and then mailed the originals back to Bristol, where Barry was just then finishing his work. He returned them to their trunk, put the trunk back into the pile of crates and junk, and several days later moved out to Harrogate where he opened a fish and chips restaurant.
“The Ape-box Affair” was (substantially) one of those manuscripts—and so my guilt perpetuated itself when I mailed it to UNEARTH as my own work, although the story originated with Jack Owlesby. I’ll insist, however, that his was unpublishable as it stood. Parts of it were fragmentary, for one thing: the first half was mainly a collection of notes and odd paragraphs. The alchemy that turned it into a story was of my own devising. I considered sending it out as the work of Jack Owlesby, but it seemed to me that UNEARTH, having published one story by Blaylock, might be induced to publish another, whereas they wouldn’t have heard of Jack Owlesby, and wouldn’t be able to contact the man in any event. You can imagine that I wasn’t keen on the idea of explaining how the
In the end, I had more fun puttering around in that old garden shed during the three days we were in Bristol than I had looking at all the cathedrals and museums and “sites” that Europe afforded us during the rest of our long holiday, and on top of that, I found my hidden treasure, such as it turned out to be. Statutes of limitation and copyright being what they are, there’s no danger in my admitting that now. There were a number of wooden crates with screwed-down lids piled against the back wall, and of course it was none of our business to look inside, although we wanted to badly. There was a steamer trunk, however, out of keeping with the rest of the crates and buried beneath them, which no one had gone to the trouble to lock. I simply couldn’t help myself; I took a look inside. I was disappointed at first to find nothing much in it—some personal documents and vaguely interesting old magazines (more interesting when I came to understand what they were). At the bottom of the trunk, however, lay a number of parcels wrapped in calfskin and tied neatly—manuscripts of some sort, apparently (or allegedly) written down nearly a century earlier. I had no idea by whom until later, when I had the leisure to study them.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. What happened was that I left Barry to his work and read through some of it on the spot, quickly coming to a decision that—I’m ashamed to say—could be viewed as reprehensible, not least of all because I took advantage of a friend. That afternoon I boxed up the manuscripts and mailed them home. I wasn’t guilty of theft, mind you, because as soon as I had the opportunity I photocopied all of them and then mailed the originals back to Bristol, where Barry was just then finishing his work. He returned them to their trunk, put the trunk back into the pile of crates and junk, and several days later moved out to Harrogate where he opened a fish and chips restaurant.
“The Ape-box Affair” was (substantially) one of those manuscripts—and so my guilt perpetuated itself when I mailed it to UNEARTH as my own work, although the story originated with Jack Owlesby. I’ll insist, however, that his was unpublishable as it stood. Parts of it were fragmentary, for one thing: the first half was mainly a collection of notes and odd paragraphs. The alchemy that turned it into a story was of my own devising. I considered sending it out as the work of Jack Owlesby, but it seemed to me that UNEARTH, having published one story by Blaylock, might be induced to publish another, whereas they wouldn’t have heard of Jack Owlesby, and wouldn’t be able to contact the man in any event. You can imagine that I wasn’t keen on the idea of explaining how the
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