DMT-17

Unexpected Returns

/ kevinhobbs

Marion Bowman & Sandy Hobbs | Dear Mr. Thom # 17, 1990

Can anyone help us to establish the legendary status of two stories which have in common the fact that a unexpectedly early return leads to the discovery of a crime? The first appeared in a letter to a popular magazine (My Weekly, 3 September 1988, p55):

My daughter-in-law’s friends were going on holiday and took a taxi to the airport. At the check-in they discovered they’d left their flight tickets at home. There was nothing for it but to go back for them, so the husband took a taxi home. Arriving at his house, he was puzzled to see another taxi parked outside. The house door was open and they caught their earlier taxi driver robbing the house. He already had the TV, video and several other items in his taxi. The police were called and the thief detained. But what if the people hadn’t forgotten their tickets?

The second story has been told in two different versions in the West of Scotland:

A woman leaves her car in Lewis’s car park in Glasgow. She forgets something so has to come back to the car almost immediately, only to discover the car gone. She rushes to the car park attendant who tells her that a man came with his seriously ill daughter . He couldn’t get his own car to start, but since his was the same make as her car, he tried the keys and found they fitted, so he rushed off to hospital with his daughter and will return the car as soon as possible. The woman is irate and dissatisfied, and rushes off to find a policeman. When they get back to the car park, the woman’s car is there, and the car park attendant goes through the story again . Somewhat mollified, the woman says she is furious, but probably won’t take the matter further.

In version 1, the story ends thus:

The policeman asks her is she sure the car is exactly as she left it. A quick inspection reveals four bald tyres instead of new ones. The car park attendant is charged with running a tyre racket.

In version 2, there are two policeman, one old, one young:

The older policeman says that although it was wrong to take the car, it was obviously an emergency, so he suggests the woman drops the matter. However, the young policeman asks her to check the car and the tyre switch is discovered. The older policeman and the car park attendant are eventually charged.

Perhaps significantly, the second version has supposedly been told by a private detective!

We cannot recall having seen these stories dealt with in any work on contemporary legend. Somewhat similar to the car park story is “Make sure you lock your car!” to be found in Paul Smith’s The Bool of Nastier legends (London: Routledge, 1986, p 37). It is a rather simpler narrative, in that the car owner merely returns to discover the car engine being removed. However, it might well have been an “ancestor” to the one we have quoted.

Letter from Craig Fees

/ kevinhobbs

Craig Fees | Dear Mr. Thoms # 17, 1990

Craig Fees
Church Lane
Toddington
GL54 SDQ

Dear Mr Thoms…

One of the consequences of Britain’s membership of the EC—especially the establishment of the Internal Market in 1992—is what, to an outsider like myself, would appear to be the transformation of British Folk culture but which to the British appears in the guise of “changes to the way we live”.

In my PhD thesis (Christmas Mumming in a North Cotswold Town, University of Leeds, 1988, copies of which are in the Folklore Society and Vaughan Williams Memorial libraries). I discussed in depth the kinds of changes experienced in a single English town over the course of the last hundred years, demonstrating their logical and (so it feels in looking at things in retrospect) their inevitable development in a certain direction which envelopes all aspects of life and culture, a development and logic which enmeshes Britain more closely into continental Europe and which has a number of predictable consequences of vital interest to folklorists. Well, potentially: folklorists find interesting what they find interesting, which is not always what is happening in the world to which they have no choice but to belong. That, by the way, is the sort of statement which would normally lead me to tear up a letter and begin again – too much to say. and not enough time to say it in. which leads to something which almost has to be misunderstood.

The fact is, of course, that in England folklorists for the most part study not what needs to be studied but what takes their fancy, which is not so much their own culture – the culture which they must live- – but the culture of others, primarily Those Who have Gone Before. Consequently, for the most part – and there is nothing wrong with this – they are subject to and agents of the kind of development which is altering the England which future generations will regard nostalgically and attempt to study and record. They will attempt to study and record it because it will all but have disappeared, and it will appear to them to have been an England which was England still, because the England in which they live will appear to them to be relatively without character, in which decisions are made which spring not from the Englishness of the English culture but from a New World – and so on. The cultural power of Europe will have moved out of the reach of the natives of England, and it will be centred (cultural power lending to follow economic power) on the mainland, perhaps in Berlin. The English will find themselves responding to cultural movements and tastes whose origin is elsewhere: they will find themselves defined by Outsiders. responding to the concerns of Outsiders, meeting the needs of Outsiders. and so on; “English” customs will be taken over by continentals who can fulfil them so much better, the best of England will pass into other hands and so on. Which is to say, the transformation of the rural community, which has passed from virtual autonomy from the cities to virtual possession by the urban-socially, politically and economically-with the sub-urbanisation of the English countryside-will continue with the City, in this case, being (perhaps; Berlin rather than Birmingham or London.

This will mean many things. As they awaken to their deprivation of Culture. the English will demand. invent. acquire, take over symbols of their Identity – they will want experiences which confirm their Englishness over against the European-ness which they will be imbibing on the one hand and fending off with the other. They will create an all new “English folk-culture”, based on what writers have written and pundits said. They will plunder archives and blind themselves to the fact that in their search for roots they are uprooting the authentic England of Others and burying it.

Or will they? Is the logic of development really inevitable? Or can folklorists in England care? Can they look forward as well as backward? Can they take a role as cultural commentators? Does the FLS, for example, have a position on the loss of full-game test match commentaries from the BBC – a public position?
Having read my thesis, you will realise. my Dear Mr Thoms. how poorly I am putting my own case for the need for British folklorists to discuss the meaning and nature of 1992 and all that. I apologise. Nevertheless, do you think we can look forward to a dedicated seminar? In haste and with great regards,

Craig