Make Room for the Jester

Title Page
FOREWORD
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About the Author
Copyright

LIBRARY
OF
WALES

Stead Jones and
Make Room for the Jester
: well, I’d never heard of it. But there are books that are unjustly forgotten, and I think this is one of them. When I read it for the first time a few months ago I was enchanted with it, not only for the memories of place and atmosphere it evoked so skilfully, not only for the light touch and the sympathetic voice of the narrator, but mainly for the brilliantly drawn portrait of an extraordinary individual, about whom I shall have more to say later on.

To deal with the biographical facts first: Stead Jones was born in Pwllheli in 1922, the youngest of a big family. He was actually christened Thomas Evan Jones: the Stead came, in a perfectly normal Welsh way, from the fact that his father once managed the local branch of the Stead and Simpson chain of shoe shops, and was himself known as Stead Jones. (When
Make Room for the Jester
was published Tony Richardson’s film of
Tom Jones
was not long out, and very popular, and Tom Jones the singer was having his first hits. Jones’ agent thought that the public would find it hard to cope with a surfeit of Tom Joneses; so the novelist became Stead like his father.) The young Tom was educated at Pwllheli Grammar School, and then at Bangor University, though his higher education was interrupted by service in the Royal Signals during the Second World War. He took part in the D-Day landings, an experience, he said, ‘which seems more alarming now [1964] than it did then’.

After the war he returned to university, and then became a lecturer in Lancashire. There he remained until he retired. He died in 1985, leaving a wife and two daughters.

So much for the quotidian, salaried and pensioned, golf-playing, respectable outward life. But where did this novel come from? Within four years during his forties, he published
Make Room for the Jester
and two others – and then there were no more. No more published, at any rate, for he continued to write: but publishers felt that for one reason or another the sort of novel he wanted to write wasn’t the sort the public wanted to read. Sometimes a writer’s tone, or subject, or world view, is not to the prevailing taste. Sometimes, dare I say it, publishers are simply wrong. Jones wrote on till the day he died; I hope there is another novel as good as this among the papers he left.

One admirer of the book has called
Make Room for the Jester
‘the Welsh
Catcher in the Rye
’, and it’s certainly true that Jones’ novel, like the infinitely more famous work by J.D. Salinger, contrasts the passionate authenticity of adolescence with the hypocrisy, the phoniness, of adulthood. But Stead Jones never had to deal with the sort of celebrity that came to Salinger. Perhaps his timing was unfortunate; if he too had published his novel in 1951, instead of 1964…

The novel is set in the little harbour town of Porthmawr. It’s in North Wales: we’re not in Dylan Thomas’ Llareggub, with its fishing boat-bobbing sea, but in a harsher place where there’s little point in having a boat at all because the fishing is dying. ‘No competing  
with Fleetwood and Grimsby,’ says one character. The year is 1936, and the narrator, Lew Morgan, is a scholarship boy at the County School. The events that begin the story take place during the summer holiday, when Lew and his friends the hard and daring Dewi, the agreeable blockhead Maxie, and the superbly inventive and eloquent Gladstone Williams become involved with an ancient feud between the Vaughan brothers Marius and Ashton. Marius Vaughan is rich and solitary and lives on the hill, and the feud involves the accidental death many years before of the youngest Vaughan brother, Jupiter. The plot begins when Ashton returns to Porthmawr from many drink-sodden years of wandering.

The events are farcical-tragical, and Lew is a good narrator; the story is safe in his hands. But one thing that lifts this book quite out of the common run is the character of Gladstone Williams. He’s seventeen, older than the other boys in this little gang, and whereas Lew is the educated one, the one set on a scholarship track towards matriculation and whatever lies beyond, Gladstone – for all that he has the best vocabulary, English and Welsh, in all Porthmawr – is what would later be called a dropout. ‘I found school very restrictive,’ he says airily.

But here comes the originality of the book: Gladstone is no proto-beatnik or ur-hippy, absorbed only with his own unformed self. He has assumed the task of looking after his three little half-siblings, Dora, Mair, and Walter, his mother being a drunken slattern, and he does so superbly. The scenes with the children are funny and tender and full of Gladstone’s boundless inventiveness, for his method of
keeping the children quiet or tractable or happy is to tell them stories. The older boys listen too:

But Gladstone is not just a charming fantasist. He represents kindly, protective adulthood as well:

And so on. The gentle teasing and warm reassurance continues beautifully for two more pages. What I find remarkable about this passage and others like it is the unaffected authority that Gladstone displays. He’s in charge of these children, and he’s neither embarrassed nor resentful about it. The author’s touch with Gladstone and the children is masterly.

There’s another aspect of Gladstone’s manner that is so delicately handled it’s only visible in the tiniest details. From time to time someone such as Harry Knock-Knees, the town bully, will call Gladstone a pansy or a nancy-boy; and someone else will say of him meaningfully ‘He’s a
great
friend of the Vaughans, that one’, and there’ll be a lot of laughter; or Ashton Vaughan will say in a spiteful tone (or
sbeitlyd
, as Lew thinks, the Welsh word having a wider range of meaning than the English) ‘a proper little nursie boy, isn’t he?’ and this at a time when Gladstone, out of hearing for the moment, has been gently cleaning the vomit off Ashton’s face; or someone else will say of Gladstone ‘My opinion is that he isn’t right – never
was…’; and there is Lew’s own observation that ‘He had a voice like a girl’s, not high, but with a girl’s sound to it’; and then, most importantly, there is Gladstone’s own general attitude to the world, which I can only call camp. One of his fantasies involves ‘a master-plan to move the Azores (why do they have such vulgar names?)’

And his obsession with the Vaughans is due largely to his feeling that ‘they’ve got
style
, don’t you see?’ as he says to Lew, gripping his shoulder tightly.

Is Gladstone gay? Certainly he’s not like anyone else, and his sexual nature might easily be one marker of the difference. I think that if Stead Jones were writing today we’d know for certain, because he’d feel more able to allow a sexual dimension into the lives of his little gang. For the strange thing is that whereas these are boys of sixteen or so, with their hormones presumably fully functioning, their lives and speech are entirely chaste. The only one of them to express any sexual feeling is the animal-like Maxie, who watches a girl running down to the sea, her breasts bobbing inside her bathing costume.

That’s not to say that sexuality is absent from the novel. Sex is there, but mysterious, something for dreams and darkness. The consequences of sexual activity are only too evident, from the French letters washed up after every tide to the nightmare that poor little Dora whispers to Gladstone later on in the scene quoted above. And there is Eirlys Hampson, the glamorous woman with the ample
breasts and the silk blouses, whose teasing makes Lew blush. It’s just that the boys have other concerns for the moment, and Gladstone’s fascination with the Vaughans is at the heart of them. Certainly his courage, in acting the way he does without equivocation or apology, resembles the courage of every gay young person who has to live in what he calls ‘the primeval swamp of respectability’.

There are too many pleasures in this short novel to list in a very short introduction, but I must mention Jones’ character-drawing. Everyone is clearly imagined and clearly described, and everyone has a function in the story. There is a terrifying religious zealot in Mrs Meirion-Pughe; there is a philosophical carpenter, Rowland Williams, who has a quiet voice that says quiet, sharp things. There is the generous, teasing, troubling Eirlys. There are Dewi and Maxie, and there is the bitter and troubled Ashton Vaughan.

And finally, not as a central theme but as something that sounds now and then like a bell from the future, and arouses harmonics in all sorts of other places, the big question for every teenager in a small town, whether it’s Porthmawr or Pwllheli, Caernarfon or Porthmadog, or for that matter King’s Lynn, or Weymouth, or any one of a hundred thousand small towns in every country in the atlas: will we have to leave our native place in order to live as fully and richly as we feel we need to? Gladstone’s ambition is grand and clear and unequivocal: ‘I want to be the finest man in the world,’ he says.

But will that mean leaving Porthmawr behind and engaging with the larger neighbour to the east, whose language happens to be spread more widely around the world? One of the first questions Gladstone asks Lew after
hearing of Lew’s ambition to be a poet is ‘Welsh or English, which do you write?’ Lew’s answer is already implicit in his name, which the headmaster of the County School is very scornful about: ‘
Lew
? No such name as Lew, boy! Llywelyn is your name.’ The language question is one, perhaps, that teenagers in King’s Lynn or Weymouth don’t have to consider. It’s a delicate and complex one, and adults aren’t much help: the ferociously pious Mrs Meirion-Pughe thinks the English Bible unsuitable for Christians, while Rowland Williams in his carpenter’s workshop, talking to Lew about the Nationalists who’ve just burned an aerodrome in Pwllheli, expresses with his prophetical eloquence a passion that goes right through Nationalism and the language question, and deeply into something concerning the nature of humanity itself: ‘It’s a great fire we want that’ll scorch away all the institutions of mediocrity…’

This short novel isn’t perfect. But it expresses far more themes than many a weighty book five times the length, and it does so with a delicate precision that delights me more the more I read it. To this English lover of Welsh places, Welsh voices, Welsh weather (even), it brings back with a surprising intensity my own youth a quarter of a century later (at the very time Jones was writing this book, in fact) and a few miles down the coast from wherever Porthmawr is. And now that I know it, I’ll treasure it. The company of Gladstone has the same effect on me as it has on ‘the little ones’, as he calls them: he makes me happy.

Philip Pullman