Teacher, carer, author
Margaret Scutt, a Dorset teacher for forty years, had two novels published. Since her death, her family have found more. A chapter from the first of these, Corpse Path Cottage, is abridged here.
Published in December ’18
Margaret Alice Scutt was born in 1905 in Weymouth, where her father was Schoolmaster at St John’s. He, after an affluent childhood, had trained in poverty as a teacher following his father’s bankruptcy, and met Margaret’s mother, herself an assistant teacher, in Fordington, Dorchester. His career was successful, its advances moving the family several times within Dorset to his final headship in Lytchett Matravers.
Margaret loved and lived in Dorset all her life. Although she was born in Weymouth, the family soon moved to Milton Abbas where her father, Tom, was made headmaster at the village school. Villages were largely self-contained communities in those days and the school would have been one of its hubs with the church and the Milton estate. A brother and sister, Geoffrey and Lorna, were born here. The family moved in 1914 to Holt, where Tom was headmaster. His wife, Margaret Minnie, was a part-time teacher and the village postmistress; the post office was part of the schoolhouse. By 1917 Margaret had gained a scholarship to Parkstone School.
The rather romantically illustrated covers of Margaret Scutt’s previously published novels
She cycled to Wimborne every day, then caught the train to Parkstone.
Margaret’s ambition had been to be a nurse, but in 1924 she started work as an un-certificated teacher. In 1925 illness prevented further work until 1926, after which she taught in Blandford and Lytchett Minster. Now qualified, she moved to a post at Branksome Heath School, where she worked from 1930 to 1952. She lodged in Poole during the week but returned at weekends to Lytchett Matravers, where Tom Scutt had become headmaster in 1924. In 1952 Margaret moved to Sylvan School, where she became deputy headmistress until her retirement in 1966.
Margaret cared for her widowed mother from 1957 to 1963 while continuing to work full-time. After retirement in 1966, she remained active and devoted to family and local church. She died suddenly in 1988 in Poole.
Throughout her life, Margaret wrote short stories, playlets and verse, including for family members and for school and community events. Her first novel, I Do But Follow, was started during the war period 1939 to 1945. Margaret continued to teach full-time as well as carrying out night-time air raid lookout duties. Completed after the war, it was published by Hutchinson with an option for two or three more, the second being And Some There Be.
Much work was lost but many manuscripts were retained after Margaret’s death. She was a very much-loved aunt to the children of her brother and sister and in 2016 these five cousins agreed to start work on a project to ensure that Margaret’s work should survive.
Margaret’s published novels were shown to Emma Timpany, an author based in Cornwall, along with the unpublished manuscript of Corpse Path Cottage. As well as being a ‘Cosy Crime’ novel, it catches the essence of a post-war Dorset village before the advent of television and the internet changed social mores for ever. Impressed by its structure and style, Emma recommended the submission of the book to the publisher Robert Hale. It was immediately accepted and was published earlier this year.
Corpse Path Cottage is a crime novel written in the ’sixties. It encapsulates life in a Dorset village in the post-World War 2 period when writer Mark Endicott, a former PoW in the Far East, arrives in God’s Blessing to move into the almost derelict Corpse Path Cottage. It occurs to him that it would make the ideal setting for a murder. Before long one of the villagers is shot dead nearby and village lives begin to unravel, suspicions grow and only resolute police work solves the mystery. It is a tale of intrigue, bigamy and blackmail that exposes many secrets in God’s Blessing. The following extract is abridged from the first chapter of Corpse Path Cottage.
The bus, a battered affair which had once been red but whose acquaintance with paint went back to the distant past, was one of three which served the villages within a twelve-mile radius of Lake, and was fettered by none of the slavish allegiance to timetables shown by the town services. It was not due to leave for another half hour, and that it should leave on time was neither usual nor likely but already the heads of five or six occupants showed through the dusty windows. All the heads were female, and all their owners were hot, tired and as loaded as Mrs Cossett. They observed her with sympathetic interest as she heaved her considerable bulk up the steps, wedged herself into a seat, placed her bag on the floor beside her and heaved a sigh of relief: ‘Thank God for a seat,’ she observed, her voice slow and heavy like an underdone cake. ‘My feet be killing me.’
‘Ah, and so be mine, too,’ said a thin lady in a knitted hood, which gave her the appearance of an elderly pixie.
‘I could stand if ’twern’t for my carns,’ said a deep voice from the back seat. ‘Do what I will for the varmints, carve’ ’em out or burn ’em out, back they come – and wuss than ever in the spring.’
‘So do mine,’ said Mrs Cossett, with mournful pride. ‘Fust change in the weather, and don’t I know it! This I feel now be on my little toe, and a proper devil. I don’t ’low as no-one wouldn’t scarcely believe it, but I feel it this very moment. Yer,’ she added, raising one forefinger and pressing it to her brow with a dark, dramatic gesture. ‘Right up in my head.’
Far from being disbelieved, it appeared that all her hearers had experienced a like phenomenon, of which all were ready and anxious to give details there and then. A conversation which might have been entitled ‘Corns I have known’ continued for some moments. ‘But ’tis these queues as finish me,’ said Mrs Cossett, her flat voice dominating and silencing the chorus like a steamroller, slow but inexorable. ‘Week after week, I say I won’t come never no more, for tain’t never worth it. And then I think, well, this time I mid just strike lucky – and God knows we get little enough.’
The blast of agreement was deafening. Every woman had her particular grievance to air, and none waited upon her neighbour. The bus resounded as to the outcry of a flock of starlings. ‘Money gone afore you can turn round, and what can you get for a pound note? What the government be thinking of … This stuff they call cooking fat – about so fat as our tomcat … Points here, and kewpons there …’
Into the rising babble poked the enquiring head of a stranger. Peace fell as seven pairs of eyes fixed themselves on the first male to set foot on the bus that morning, summing him up with ravenous interest.
‘Is this the bus for God’s Blessing?’ he asked generally.
‘She be,’ answered Mrs Cossett, giving the vehicle no more than its due since the name ‘Flossie’ was stencilled on the dashboard. She added, for good measure, ‘She goes out at twelve, that is if she’ll start.’
‘All things,’ replied the stranger, ‘are with God.’ He glanced at his watch and stepped onto the bus, revealing himself as a tall, broad shouldered man who might have been anything between thirty and forty years of age. He wore an ageing sports coat with bulging pockets and brown corduroy trousers, and carried an obviously weighty rucksack. A slight but sinister cast in the left eye disfigured a face which needed no handicap. A black spaniel of far more aristocratic appearance than its master followed him with decorum.
‘Talks like a ’vangelist; looks like one o’ they there hikers,’ said Mrs Cossett to herself. ‘Nor no oil painting, neither, though he mid look as if he thought he owned the bus.’ ‘ My God!’ she added aloud, leaning forward in deep agitation.
Her voice was echoed by a muttered and unevangelistic oath. Over her bag, a good half of which projected into the aisle, the stranger had tripped. Before her horrified gaze, like a horn of plenty, it now poured forth a stream of assorted merchandise. A toilet roll trundled merrily to the back of the bus; a bag of cakes burst open and scattered its contents, followed by a wire saucepan cleaner, a soggy newspaper parcel and various oddments.
With an anguished squeal, Mrs Cossett bent to retrieve her property. The stranger bent at the same moment. Their heads met with a dull thud.
‘Of all places to leave a bag!’ said the culprit, evidently deeming the best defence to be attack.
‘Eef,’ retorted Mrs Cossett, her normally high colour deepening, ‘you was to put yourself about to find my cuke, you mid do better than blaming others for your own faults. Cukes is cukes, if only half a one, and a wicked price to pay, and if folks had more sense than to look where they be planting their great feet –’
The hiker glared around him with a vague impression that an instrument of music was the missing article in question. At that moment, a small female who had been burrowing under a seat emerged with her hat on one side, triumphantly brandishing half a cucumber, very much the worse for wear. ‘Here you be, dirt and all. Old Webby hasn’t swep’ out his bus since afore the war, I should say.’
‘Which war?’ enquired a sepulchral voice from the back seat. The bus rocked happily with the exception of the hiker, who was picking up cakes and dissuading his dog from looking on them as manna from heaven, and Mrs Cossett, who was not amused. She received her battered goods with hauteur, repacked her bag and lifted it with an ostentatious effort to her lap.
‘That’s better,’ said the stranger, seating himself behind her. ‘Out of harm’s way now.’
‘’Tis to be hoped so, I’m sure,’ said Mrs Cossett distantly.
The spaniel crawled beneath its owner’s seat, flopped, yawned, and laid its head on its paws. The stranger drew a newspaper from his pocket and became lost in it. The women behind him began talking again, but Mrs Cossett remained majestically silent.
A tall thin woman in a tall black hat shot into the bus, startling the spaniel into a short bark.
‘There be mackerel in Brown’s,’ she announced.
‘What!’ exclaimed Mrs Cossett, forgetting her woes and sitting bolt upright. ‘They never had a thing but stinking saltfish, and that young toad in there, God forgive him, said there wouldn’t be nothing all day. Lucky to have that, he said—’
‘Be there much of a queue?’ interrupted a wistful voice.
‘Queue! They be from Brown’s to the Odeon, and springing up like mushrooms every minute.’
‘Ah, well,’ said Mrs Cossett, sinking back resignedly, ‘they must have ’em as can. Mackerel nor no mackerel, my feet won’t take me down town again.’
‘Terrible tiring today, Mrs Cossett,’ assented the newcomer, settling her angular form beside her. ‘I’ve had about as much as I want my own self by now. And how be the world using you?’
‘Mustn’t grumble, Mrs Hale, mustn’t grumble,’ replied Mrs Cossett sorrowfully. ‘Heard the news?’
‘I don’t never hear nothing. What?’
‘Jimmy Fairfax have got himself a housekeeper. This be she coming now.’
They both watched with interest the arrival of a thin, neatly dressed woman in black, with a nondescript pale face and mousy hair dressed in a bun which pushed out her felt hat at the back. She passed on to a seat near the back. A pretty dark haired girl followed, who greeted the two ladies pleasantly and looked at the stranger with a faint gleam of interest. The bus filled steadily but the seat beside the one male remained vacant until a small woman bearing the invariable shopping bag and looking tired and nervous placed herself at his side. He adjusted his bulk to make room for her and returned to his paper. Beneath the seat the spaniel lay still.
Mrs Hale glanced around, satisfied herself that the new housekeeper was some distance away, and turned to her companion: ‘Talking of Jimmy Fairfax, I suppose you heard as Corpse Path Cottage were sold?’
‘No!’ exclaimed Mrs Cossett. ‘Well, if that don’t go to show! Baldy Lovejoy, the liar, told me as Jimmy had put a reserve of 900 on it. Nine hundred!’ repeated Mrs Cossett, laughing heartily. ‘Even wi’ prices as they be – that be hanged for a tale, I said to un.’
‘It weren’t, though,’ said Mrs Hale.
‘What!’
‘Mrs Cossett,’ said Mrs Hale, wagging her head. ‘Jimmy Fairfax did put that reserve. And what’s more, he got it.’
‘He never!’
‘He did. Mrs Plummer, she dropped in at the sale, wanting to know what they cottages over to Fairmile made, and she heard it with her own ears. She said the auctioneer hisself was took aback.’
‘And well he mid be! Housing shortage nor no housing shortage, that beats all. Why, those ’vacuees they put in from London never stayed more than a week. Sooner be killed in comfort, they said. The whole place be falling to pieces – and stuck in the middle of a bog whenever the rain comes. Corpse Path Ruin ’ud be nearer the mark.’
‘True enough, true enough,’ agreed Mrs Cossett, ‘but who were the loony as bought it – man or woman?’
‘Man. Endalott or Bendalot, or some such outlandish name. Whatever it be, the feller must be out of his mind.’
‘Not necessarily,’ said the stranger, leaning forward.
There was a moment of incredulous silence. Both ladies started violently and turned surprised faces on the speaker.
‘P-pardon?’ stammered Mrs Hale.
‘I said, in answer to your somewhat sweeping statement – not necessarily. The gentleman, far from being a loony, might have good and sufficient reasons for his behaviour. To take only one supposition, he might be a fugitive from justice. Thief – blackmailer – forger – murderer. You pays your penny and you takes your choice.’
Corpse Path Cottage by Margaret Scutt, is published at £19.99 by Robert Hale, an imprint of the Crowood Press, ISBN 978-0-7198-2582-8. www.crowood.com
