The Dog Ate My Emails and Other Fractured Fairy Tales.

I feel the same way.

Excerpts from The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey:

(The author says it better than I ever could. The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey, is a brilliant and entertaining fictionalized version of the mystery of Richard the III and the Princes in the Tower. Remarkably timely in its outlook, especially if you consider the fact that it was published 62 years ago.)

“Forty million school books can’t be wrong,” Grant said after a little.

“Can’t they?”

“Well, can they?”

“I used to think so, but I’m not so sure nowadays.”

“Aren’t you being a little sudden in your scepticism?”

“Oh, it wasn’t this that shook me.”

“What then?”

“A little affair called the Boston Massacre. Ever heard of it?”

“Of course.”

“Well, I discovered quite by accident, when I was looking up something at college, that the Boston Massacre consisted of a mob throwing stones at a sentry. The total casualties were four. I was brought up on the Boston Massacre, Mr. Grant. My twenty-eight-inch chest used to swell at the very memory of it. My good red spinach-laden blood used to seethe at the thought of the helpless civilians mowed down by the fire of British troops. You can’t imagine what a shock it was to find that all it added up to in actual fact was a brawl that wouldn’t get more than a local reporting in a clash between police and strikers in any American lock-out.”

***

“That’s partly why I like to research so much,” Carradine volunteered, and settled back to staring at the sparrows.

Presently Grant put his hand out, wordlessly, and Carradine gave him a cigarette and lighted it for him.

They smoked in silence.

It was Grant who interrupted the sparrows’ performance.

“Tonypandy,” he said.

“How’s that?”

But Grant was still far away.

“After all, I’ve seen the thing at work in my own day, haven’t I?” He said, not to Carradine but the ceiling. “It’s Tonypandy.”

“And what in the heck is Tonypandy?” Brent asked.

***

“Tonypandy,” Grant said, still in that sleep-walking voice, “is a place in the South of Wales.”

“I knew it was some kind of physic.”

“If you go to South Wales you will hear that, in 1910, the Government used troops to shoot down Welsh miners who were striking for their rights. You’ll probably hear that Winston Churchill, who was Home Secretary at the time, was responsible. South Wales, you will be told, will never forget Tonypandy.”

Carradine had dropped his flippant air.

“And it wasn’t a bit like that?

“The actual facts are these. The rougher section of the Rhondda valley crowd had got quite out of hand. Shops were being looted, property destroyed. The Chief Constable of Glamorgan sent a request to the Home Office for troops to protect the lieges. If a Chief Constable thinks a situation serious enough to ask for the help of the military a Home Secretary has very little choice in the process. But Churchill was so horrified at the possibility of the troops coming face to face with a crowd of rioters and having to fire on them, that he stopped the movement of the troops and sent instead a body of plain solid Metropolitan Police, armed with nothing but their rolled-up mackintoshes. The troops were kept in reserve, and all contact with the rioters was made by unarmed London police. The only bloodshed in the whole affair was a bloody nose or two. The Home Secretary was severely criticised in the House of Commons for his ‘unprecedented intervention.’ That was Tonypandy. That is the shooting down by troops that Wales will never forget.”

“Yes,” Carradine said, considering. “Yes. It’s almost a parallel to the Boston affair. Someone blowing up a simple affair to huge proportions for a political end.”

“The point is not that it is a parallel. The point is that every single man who was there knows that the story is nonsense, and yet it has never been contradicted. It will never be overtaken now. It is a completely untrue story grown to legend while men who knew it to be untrue looked on and said nothing.”

***

Dear Alan (said Laura)

Nothing (repeat nothing) would surprise me about history.

***

P.S. It’s an odd thing, but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythological tale they are indignant not with the teller but with you. They don’t want to have their ideas upset. It rouses some vague uneasiness in them, I think, and they resent it. So they reject it and refuse to think about it. If they were merely indifferent it would be natural and understandable. But it is much stronger than that, much more positive. They are annoyed.

Very odd, isn’t it?

***

If the Butler story was an invention to oblige Richard, then Richard must have rewarded Stillington. But there was no sign of Stillington’s being obliged with a cardinal’s hat, or preferment, or office.

But the surest evidence that the Butler story was true lay in Henry VII’s urgent need to destroy it. If it were false, then all he had to do to discredit Richard was to bring it into the open and make Stillington eat his words. Instead he hushed it up.

(Or in modern parlance, yeah… the dog ate my emails.)