[...]... ill-clothed and alienated from the ‘phlegmatic British public’ he is driven to meditate upon the cost of war, the moral degeneracy of victors and vanquished and, in the newsreel image of the spires of the cathedral, still standing amidst the rubble of bombed Cologne, a symbol of the persistence of religion Even as he angrily leaves the crowded cinema, we see a strange duality in the character of the man,... from a cousin of his father’s, a gifted and indefatigable story-teller, who is fictionalized as the eponymous character in the story ‘Siams’ Only The Eleven Men of Eppynt’ does not fit conveniently into one or other of these categories; it is simply a piece of narrative invention The organization of the stories in this book and in the discussion of them that follows takes account of the writer’s chronological... perceptions and thoughts of first one then the other The quality of the language, the density of the imagery, the extended images, associated more often with poetry than prose, should alert us to the seriousness of the writer’s intention He saw it as more than a yarn about smugglers and excisemen It concerns the triumph of venality over morality, integrity and trust: at the end the ‘one true Englishman’... unremarked’, is not up to it His queasiness at the sight of the hooks in the kitchen ceiling of the old xxxii Introduction farm tend to confirm the suspicion – and so it proves In a dream or ghostly vision (reminiscent of the conclusion of The Palace’), presences of the farming past of the area and, importantly, the voice of his father authoritatively in control of affairs, finally betray him He cannot... added in the interpretation of their evidence and the telling of the tale Allusion distorts and slows apprehension, so that, like Ellesdon and Manley, the reader peers into the darkness and sees imperfectly The narrative point of view shifts restlessly; we do not know until the end which of these two has the better grasp of the affair, which is to be trusted, as the story twists suddenly between the perceptions... feet are loud In the aisle Shortly is heard the roll Of despair, the Israelitish women crying at the wall Dragging their sorrow like hair The mock heroic comes easily to Mathias who sees, beneath the vain pose, the frailty of man To understand both the poem and the story, the reader needs to be familiar with the long tradition of religious oratorios (vocal music being another of Mathias’s many... little, oddly The chance sun of the moor struck him below the cheekbone, brimming in through the doorway, filling the charlatan’s tale with passion For a moment the cheek was a pool of pig’s blood with poor men swimming in it Then the shaft shut off as suddenly as it had come The shed seemed cold The tale of the moor was close to the telling and the question struggled for lips to speak it The story begins... All, with the exception of ‘Joking with Arthur’, were gathered into Mathias’s only collection, The Eleven Men of Eppynt and Other Stories, where they were joined by two stories making their first appearance in print, The Neutral Shore’ and ‘Agger Makes Christmas’ Only three stories were written in more than twenty years following the publication of The Eleven Men of Eppynt, and they complete the present... level The invented gossip of the four men, largely about the ghastly effects of the waste and water from the mine on vegetation and livestock, is interrupted by a rumble The pent-up water in Myddleton’s old workings bursts out and, as they run clear from the mine entrance, sweeps down the mountainside to flood the houses of Talybont The four men take their candles to inspect the mine and are met by the. .. remarkable work of historical detection, was published in 1963 The influence of his studies into this upsurge of protest among recusants in that part of the borderland known as Archenfield is apparent in several poems and, inasmuch as it involves certain friends and supporters of the Devereux, the Earl of Essex, fleetingly in one of his short stories, The Palace’ In the summer of 1969, he quitted the education . the use of imagery are far less developed in them than in the published stories. Nevertheless, they offer a useful introduction to the short story œuvre of Roland Mathias, not least because they. and Planet, where the final three stories first appeared .The text of the latter and of the remaining stories which were gathered in The Eleven Men of Eppynt follows that of the published versions, except.