An original work of fan-scholarship as preserved in the archives of the fellowship of unimaginative friends.
The Curious Affair of Peregrin Boffin
March 8, 1939. A house in north Oxford. Occupied, but the man who lives here is abroad – he has gone north to deliver a lecture. Another man is on the grounds, having entered the gate he stands in the garden by an open window, peering into a study. This second man is not a professional burglar. His name is Peregrin Boffin and his face is a picture of enchantment. His rapt gaze has been caught by a magic stone that had appeared on the desk inside the room earlier that day. The stone looks round and captures his heart; an object of impossible beauty. A great desire awakens in him to step through the window and touch the stone, cradle it within his hands. He hesitates, steps through the window into the room, picks up the stone, and vanishes.
On that day when the stone in the room materialized, Boffin had been watching the house in Oxford for over a year. The man who lived in it was a friend of a friend, and some years back Boffin had attended a party in the man’s garden. Apparently, the man’s best friend (long dead) had once laid down a most peculiar rock garden, which the man had reconstructed in his own garden. When he was done, he had invited the neighbourhood to a garden party where they could see it for what it was. Boffin would never forget that evening. He had felt queer the moment he had arrived, and to this day could not recall how, around midnight, he had found himself shoulder to shoulder with the Cambridge Professor of Anglo-Saxon pushing over the great stone at the entrance. Nor could he ever recollect without an embarrassed shiver his frantic polishing with his pocket handkerchief of the newly revealed underside of this tall, tower-like, now toppled stone, as a group of befuddled antiquarian enthusiasts searched its still muddy bottom for hidden inscriptions. All but two of the guests had engaged in similar antics, with a couple of emeritus history professors and a visitor from Denmark even digging holes in the lawn. Afterwards the rumour circulated that the beer so liberally handed out had been spiked. Boffin, however, had always felt there was something more sinister behind the whole affair.
That might have been that, had it not been for a chance observation in late December 1937. Passing the man’s house as he walked home with his Christmas shopping, Boffin had seen the man stepping into his garden with a single, comfortable-looking and newly polished stone in hand. Slowing his pace, Boffin watched as the man placed the stone carefully next to the herb garden outside the kitchen window and then returned into his house. The man was making a new rock garden! Stealthily, Boffin opened the garden gate, hid his shopping in some bushes, and crept to the large bay window of the study. He saw that the man was now sitting at his desk, pen by his hand, but the paper before him was blank. Hidden under the eaves, Boffin had watched with wonder as a stone began to appear on the paper.
This is Boffin’s story. He began it, though other hands have continued it. Even now it is not yet finished and already it has cost us many weary hours of watching and writing, argument, rethinking and rewriting. We labour gladly on behalf of our society, the Fellowship of Unimaginative Friends, founded by Boffin. Today, small groups of fellows still meet on occasion, and when three or more are gathered the conversation is usually amicable, as we swap notes and compare theories on the great rock garden, until the conversation turns, as it always does, to Boffin; then the talk gets heated, with snipes replacing banter between opposing factions as tempers rise. And when the talk is talked through the end result is depressingly familiar: each one of us has a different theory about that fateful night when Boffin disappeared; none can say truly what happened to Boffin.
The unimaginative friends, of whom your present scribe is (naturally) a humble fellow, unofficially began as simply the friends of Boffin – the friends, that is, in The Green Knight public house on that cold December evening in 1937 to whom he recounted the laying of the new stone he had witnessed earlier that day. That night it was merely received as a good story, sparking renewed discussion of the wild garden party when the rock garden had been vandalized some years earlier. But as luck would have it, one of the regulars at The Green Knight was the postman, and the next morning, delivering a special letter to the man’s children, he had struck up a conversation with the man about the new stone in his garden. Truth be told, the postman had not fully understood the explanation, in the giving of which, he reported, the man had become very animated. But the postman came away with the definite impression that the man was still angry about the vandalism in the old rock garden and had formed the idea of using his new first stone to ‘turn the tables on the guests!’
Naturally, this set tongues wagging in the public house; and beyond, for many corners of respectable Oxford had felt hot under the collar following the orgy of destruction at the former garden party, and did not wish to see such a disgraceful disturbance in their town again. Several of the guests at the old rock garden party now became regulars at The Green Knight. Still feeling embarrassed and a little embittered at their own antics a few years back, they feared the man’s revenge would entice them with good victuals and gorgeous trappings and then leave them stupefied all over again, full guests feeling unaccountably foolish.
Some, chiefly the younger drinkers, laughed at the greybeards and said this was likely to be a different story altogether. Even if this new stone signalled another rock garden, they said, most likely the stones and flowers would be borrowed from elsewhere in the man’s garden and not from that once more forgotten pile of stones heaped once again in an unused patch. Certainly, this first new stone looked homely and kindly in comparison with the great, grand, unbelievably ancient looking tower-like stone that had stood at the entrance to the old rock garden. Yet there was no denying the general concern that the new garden party would generate some unexpected occurrence; for though the man was not known for doing very much, the rumour was that he was an “elf-friend.” And so, while the design of the new rock garden seemed clouded by impenetrable fog, there was a shared feeling of apprehension that the man had some trick up his sleeve, or rather, magic hidden in his house. Around the end of February 1938, with a collective resolve to discover the magic, the fellowship was formed with Boffin as its president.
Naturally, nothing happened for some months. The man simply stopped working in his garden; most days he got on his bicycle and left the house. At this point there were only the two stones, the first, the party stone, where the mischief was expected, and one terrible central stone. Boffin had not been surprised to see this second stone erected; indeed, his reputation at The Green Knight went up considerably after this, because all those who had seen the three terrible central stones of the old rock garden felt a tremor of recognition when they glimpsed this new central stone. This new stone was larger and, if anything, more foreboding than any of those three monstrous stones, yet bears a family resemblance to all of them. A progenitor, it was whispered in the public house.
One bitterly cold day in January, when nobody was likely to step into the garden and he knew the rapidly falling snow would cover his tracks, Boffin had entered the garden and inspected the central stone at close quarters. You needed to know what you were looking for but, yes, worn markings traced the face of a monster long vanished from the face of the earth. The face of the monster was human, but his eyes stared at you with a cold mythological hunger. And on closer inspection the surface of this apparently coal-black sheer rock revealed embedded lumps of semi-precious amber, entombing frightening-looking winged insects from a primordial age of the world, trapped and held for time out of mind in the fossilized sap of some prehistoric northern tree. Boffin had drunk no beer but only spirits that night.
Alarmed by Boffin’s report, the fellowship tried various tricks to gain entrance to the house, where it was generally agreed the source of the mystery was to be found. They recruited a neighbour to the conspiracy, and before he was unmasked the neighbour many times disturbed the man at his work, asking a favour but really spying on his study. This neighbour told the friends a strange story of an enormous canvas and a vast painting, of which he could recall agonizingly few details. After some while, though, he stopped coming to The Green Knight and rumour had it that he had hung up his hat and entered the picture. He lived there for a while, it was said, with his own wife. But Boffin and many of his friends said that a picture was not so different to a rock garden, of which they had already dug up one, and what they wanted now was to see the inside of the man’s house.
One idea that sounded feasible was to impersonate an elf-friend. It was generally agreed that the man’s door was open to them. But nobody was too sure what an elf-friend was, although it was thought that the man’s best friend had been one. Today we suspect that the man’s third son was also one, as likely were a few select acquaintances back then, but none dared attempt recruit any of the man’s close friends to the conspiracy, let alone his children, and all those who took it upon themselves to impersonate elf-friends were given good morning at the door and sent on their way.
So the friends had to settle for Boffin’s walk-by garden observation approach, which they now performed in pairs. And though for some weary months the walker-watchers reported nothing, all of a sudden one day in the summer their efforts were rewarded: the man stepped out into his garden and revealed an unmoving third stone of the rock garden. The watchers reported that the man had shifted the soil before laying the stone, placing it in the middle of an up-down-hill, so bringing into view what had always been there. This report started the rumour that the third stone was ‘uncreated’ and so, for a while, it was agreed that all the magic of the new garden party was contained in this one, singular, third stone.
But soon after the laying of this third stone, around the autumn of 1938, as the leaves fell and the wind began to nip, the man raised a mound of earth so that the top seemed to touch the stormy weather, placed a small flower upon it and then pierced it with a dark splinter of the terrible central stone. All talk of the third unmovable stone now ceased, for it was agreed by all that it had no bearing whatsoever on the terrible piercing of the flower. Everyone was most concerned, and Boffin now became obsessed with discovering the mystery of this new and terrible rock garden.
There is not much more to be told of Boffin. He and his friends kept a keen watch on the study after this, but his friends began to keep a wary eye on him – though, in the end, our watch was not wary enough. In the new year the man stopped working on the rock garden and in March he left his house and travelled to Scotland. During these winter months the regulars at The Green Knight began to lose interest in the new rock garden – all but Boffin, who talked endlessly of the relationship between the stones and the flowers, till the other regulars begun to shuffle in their seats and his friends avoided his table. It was only out of a sense of duty that I myself accompanied Boffin on his daily walk past the house on that fateful day in March 1939.
What I am telling you now, I saw with my own eyes. When we walked past the house the rock garden was just as it had been left at the close of 1938. But Boffin insisted on entering the garden and peering into the window of the study. I stood at the gate and waited, but Boffin signalled to me that he was going to remain under the eaves. My feet were growing cold and the snow was starting to fall, so I left him to it. But that evening a group of us from The Green Knight grew worried and we went to the man’s house to see if Boffin was still there. We were just in time to see what happened, but alas too late to intervene. An odd light appeared within the study, Boffin carefully and silently opened the window and stepped into the room, reached out for the stone that was the source of the light, and vanished!
Boffin’s disappearance was more than a nine-day wonder. A search over the whole of Oxfordshire and even the Berkshire Downs failed to find any trace of him. But then, one day in the late summer of 1940, Boffin inexplicably reappeared. But he was changed, almost beyond recognition. He now wore wooden shoes and it was clear that something nasty had happened to his feet, but he refused to tell us what, or even to talk at all about his experiences between his inexplicable disappearance and unaccountable reappearance. He was now grim of face and refused to have anything more to do with our Fellowship of Unimaginative Friends, of which he was the founder and the first president. To this day he keeps himself to himself and most days is to be seen working in his own garden, making endless rock gardens of his own. The less charitable among our fellowship say that he has turned from the true path of lore and now spends his time chatting with creative friends in a place with the uncouth name of
plaza. But we will not forget Boffin, the first and greatest of our unimaginative fellowship and one day, or so we hope, we will discover the truth of what happened when he touched that stone and so bring him back to his true home, which as all know in their hearts, is Lore.