1989: “England’s Rain Reaches the Antipodes: Lumlocks Lost to the Waters”
From “The Morning Trumpet”
London, in its eternal drizzle, appears now to have exported its melancholy wholesale. Reports arrive from that distant colonial cousin, New South Wales, that Lumlocks—the minor yet mildly coquettish house of the Mallard estate—has succumbed to flood and flame. The occurrence, though tragic, is so baroquely layered that one suspects Providence of over‑writing the original script.
Constructed in 1862 by the Hon. Peregrine Mallard, Lumlocks began life as a folly disguised as a mansion. Visitors, it was said, never knew whether they were being hosted or performed upon. “The staircase ascended too eagerly,” wrote one forgotten diarist of 1873, “and the mirrors appeared to blush.” The place’s reputation for architectural self‑esteem rivalled that of its owners—until the recent deluge blurred the whole design into watercolour.
The fire that followed the flood—one must admire God’s sense of encore—completed the destruction. Its particular cruelty lies less in the loss of timber and plaster than in the incineration of the Fitzartur‑Mallard family papers. These were rumoured to contain genealogies of such imaginative reach that they practically bordered on fantasy. The late Lord Fitzartur famously insisted that “we descend from both sides of the Norman Conquest.” Some scholars considered this an anatomical impossibility; others admired it as innovation.
Mr Arthur Blandy, the family’s archivist and occasional dinner ornament, assures us the damage is immaterial. “It is of no moment,” he murmured to our correspondent, “the files were verified elsewhere—the originals lie in the family vault.” Such vaults remain conveniently unnamed. When pressed for confirmation, a spokesman somewhere between reticence and bureaucracy offered only, “The existence or otherwise of any Ducal archives is known only by close family members.” This, of course, confirms everything and proves nothing.
Conspiracy has elbowed its way to the buffet, as always. A Mr Greaves from Bethnal Green insists the conflagration forms part of a wider plan to erase colonial lineage linking Australia’s great estates to certain disqualified British peers. A pamphlet circulating in Mayfair (authored, we’re told, by “A Lady of Blue Ink”) claims the Mallards were under secret commission to store papers proving that Queen Victoria ordered a “second Empire” to be built beneath Sydney Harbour, all marble and irony. A historian of my acquaintance—Dr T. M. Larch, whose new book Empire’s Backyard: The Architectural Libido of the Colonies languishes unnoticed by libraries—suggests that “archives burn in sympathy with their owners’ reputations.”
Indeed, London society prefers that such histories disappear with a little smoke. One imagines the charred remains of Lumlocks smouldering politely, emitting the faint odour of discretion reheated. Yet, in this ash, there glimmers something pure: the perennial English gift for losing what cannot be proven to exist. Every ledger, every carbon copy, every parchment of pedigree returns to myth, where perhaps it always belonged.
If the Mallards grieve, they do so behind oak doors. If the archivist dreams, he does it by candlelight, re‑inventing what he can no longer number. And somewhere, inevitably, an insurance clerk in Parramatta adjusts the figures, ensuring that History—capital H—remains solvent.
Thus another estate dissolves into the landscape. The flood recedes. The fire cools. The past perfect tense continues to burn.
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