Summary:
This British fiction digest regularly published science fiction in its pages (sometimes as a “Science Fiction Choice”), and this issue has the second (and final) instalment of a novella-length version of John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, a post-nuclear-holocaust tale about persecuted mutant telepaths. There is also Forty Day Road, which is a timeslip story from Christopher Landon, author of Ice Cold in Alex, the source novel for a classic WWII movie.
The rest of the magazine is non-SF material, most notable of which is H. E. Bates’ surprisingly transgressive (for its time) The Good Corn. There are also good stories from Brian Cleeve and David Beaty.

Galactic Central link
Archive.org copy

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Editor not listed

Fiction:
Trust Little Al • short story by Michael Gilbert ∗∗
Haunted Summer • short story by Mary Lee Settle ∗∗+
Cat’s-Paw • short story by W. S. Money ∗
The Good Corn • short story by H. E. Bates ∗∗∗+
Six Legs Are Welcome • short story by Geoffrey Household ∗∗+
Duel • short story by Brian Cleeve ∗∗∗
Forty Day Road • short story by Christopher Landon ∗∗+
Heart of the Storm • novelette by David Beaty ∗∗∗
Air on a G-String • reprint short story by Cordelia Baird Gross –
The Chrysalids [Part 2 of 2] • novella serial by John Wyndham ∗∗∗+

Non-fiction:
Fuchsias • poem by John Pudney
Mixed Bag • quiz
Rendezvous • poem and prose extracts
River Music • poem by Fleur Mountain
Carte Blanche • poem by Ogden Nash
Garden Pleasures • poem and prose extracts
Argosy Crossword

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John Wyndham’s novella version of The Chrysalids concludes in this issue with what is essentially the ‘chase’ half of the much longer novel (a more comprehensive review of the latter can be found here, and you may wish to skim that before reading on).
This part starts with a horseman coming upon some of the group as they cluster round Petra after she has telepathically shouted for help for a second time (a ferocious mutant predator attacked her mount while she was horse-riding in the woods). The horseman is suspicious as to why several people have come from different directions to help her, but they manage to assuage his misgivings before taking Petra home. The group later discuss what happened, and agree that David should train Petra so she can control her telepathic ability. During this training she mentions to David that she can detect “thought-shapes” that are being sent from the distant south-west.
Uncle Axel later warns David that people are asking questions about the group found with Petra. When David discusses it with the others they conclude that, if the authorities interrogate Petra, they will find out about their group, so they make contingency plans to escape the village. Later, however, it is Katherine and Sally who are arrested and questioned, while David, Petra, and Rosalind narrowly avoid being captured and flee towards the Fringes. A posse from the village pursues them, and Michael—who isn’t identified by the authorities as one of the group—joins it so he can give them constant updates about the its progress.
During the threesome’s journey towards what they hope will be safety, Petra mentions that the thoughts from far away are getting stronger and, after messages  relayed through Petra, they learn that (spoiler): the sender a woman; she lives in a place called Zealand (in a city with flying machines passing overhead; and that it is day there and not night. The woman tells David and Rosalind that Petra’s telepathic strength is exceptional, and that she must be protected at all costs. She also reveals her humourless superiority:

“We are the New People—so are you. The people who can think-together. We’re the people who are going to build a new world—a different world from the Old People’s and the savages’.”
“The kind of people that God intended?” I [David] suggested, with a feeling of being on familiar ground.
“I don’t know about that. But we do know that we can make a better world than the Old People. They were savages, half men. Shut off from one another, with only inadequate words to link them; tribes shut off by different languages; minds shut off by different religions. There was never any unity in them.
“Individually, some of them could think: collectively, they could not. The more complex they made their world, the less capable they were of dealing with it. They had no means of consensus. They could co-operate constructively in small units, but only destructively in large ones. They aspired greedily, and then refused the responsibilities they had created. With one hand they grasped reason, with the other they rejected it. Singly, some of them tried to be men; in groups, they remained primitive. There was, you see, no real communication between them: the system of words could work at all only where individuals were very similar: applied to large numbers, it broke down.
“They brought down Tribulation, which all but destroyed them. They were inadequate.”  p. 125

After more adventures in the woods (the Fringe folk capture the three and take them to their camp where they meet the spiderman, etc.) there is a climactic battle between the posse from the village and the Fringe folk. In the middle of the fight the Zealand woman arrives overhead in a helicopter and sprays everyone below with sticky webs which incapacitate them. The helicopter lands, and the woman releases the three children (while leaving the untermensch—and the horses—to die). David, Rosalind and Petra leave in the helicopter with the woman.
The last scene has them overhead the city in Zealand, where David senses the hive-mind below.
Although this part isn’t as good as the first it isn’t bad—and is a lot better than the version in the novel. This is because a lot of the padding—the idea of God’s image, and the Zealand woman’s evolutionary destiny lectures—is excised. That said, the whole thing is somewhat over-compressed, but this version is definitely worthy of consideration for any Best of the Year anthology.

There is only one other fantasy or science fiction piece in this issue (there were three last time), and that is a timeslip story, Forty Day Road by Christopher Landon (Landon is best known for the novel Ice Cold in Alex,¹ which became a popular British WWII movie.)
This story, like Ice Cold for Alex, is also set in the desert, where the demobbed narrator is sent by his company to search for signs of a locust swarm. During this expedition the team end up camping on an old slavers’ route, the “Forty Day Road.” One night, after celebrating the birthday of an American biologist with the group, the narrator wakes up in the small hours and goes for a walk up the road. When he stops to rest, he falls asleep.
He wakes to the sound of a large camel train coming up the road and, as it starts to pass him, he sees the slaves. Then the flank guards capture him and he joins the train. For the next four days he travels up the road with the slavers before (spoiler) slipping back through time to the future.
This is a slight piece (man falls through time, and then falls back) but there is some good description of the camel train and its people, and a neat, if perhaps unoriginal, last line that confirms his journey wasn’t a dream.

The rest of the fiction includes Trust Little Al by Michael Gilbert, which is a lightweight espionage story where a secret services type looks after a scientist on holiday in Austria. The latter is an unreliable womaniser (who paradoxically doesn’t brush his teeth much), so it makes for a demanding job. There is also a femme fatale, a (spoiler) abduction attempt, and a final twist where we learn that a couple of the characters are not who they seem. Slick, but it’s hard to care much about what happens.

Although it isn’t a ghost story (spoiler: the explanation at the end is mundane), Haunted Summer by Mary Lee Settle certainly feels like one for most of the way through, and starts with this:

I was ten. I spent the first part of the summer being wonderfully frightened by slipping into her room, and reading Ghost Stories or True Spiritual Experiences or Voices from Beyond. I would sit in the corner in the afternoon, for she was never there then, she always slept in the hammock on the downstairs back porch.
There in the half-dark, in the cool half-dark (for the blinds were drawn against the heat outside), the room was deep green, strangely larger than when the sun was allowed in, and it had the still silence of a room waiting—or asleep. Her big rocker would be empty, but the overstuffed seat was bent with use so that it didn’t seem empty.
Against the wall stood the huge bed that my Aunt Phemie had died in; my Aunt Eliza said she lingered for months after and that the hole never healed at all, not from the time they brought her home. The big bed sank in the middle, too, and that too seemed occupied, occupied by—I was learning a new language—ectoplasm and heat.
There I would sit with my back tight against the wall, for what I could see I didn’t fear so much, and I would read from the dusky pulp magazines about the ever-recurring spot on the floor, made by the drowned sailor, or stories about Things that weren’t anything but seemed made of flesh and slithered under the study door and crawled onto the study desk where the man who was writing the story used to sit.  pp. 18-19

This is (for the most part) a convincingly atmospheric tale about a young girl who lives in a big house in the deep South, and who thinks that the attic contains an “It.” When she eventually sees a woman with lank black hair who gestures at her, she flees. After summoning her courage, the girl goes back for another look . . . .
The explanation is disappointingly rational, which is a shame, but it’s worth a look.

Cat’s-Paw by W. S. Money begins with two sailors on a ship, one of whom, Charlie, expresses a vehement dislike of the resident ginger tomcat. Charlie goes on to complain about his sister-in-law and her cat, who both live with him and his wife. Then, on the return trip, he sees a shipmate with a monkey that chases off the ship’s tomcat, so he buys it, thinking that it will sort out his problems at home.
On the next trip the narrator speaks to Charlie and discovers that (spoiler) the monkey made friends with the cat but attacked the sister-in-law, who then left with the cat! Much to Charlie’s two-birds-with-one-stone delight.
If you are in the mood for a story about an unpleasant protagonist with family grievances and a poor attitude towards animals, this will be right up your street. It wasn’t up mine.

Highlight of the issue, apart from the Wyndham, is The Good Corn by H. E. Bates, which begins with much scene setting that involves a married couple on their rural small-holding. They put away money at the end of every market day for the family they plan to have but, after twenty five years, the woman has not conceived. When a new-born calf dies, she becomes depressed, and the doctor suggests to the husband that they make a fresh start somewhere else, and without livestock.
The second half of the story sees the couple mainly growing corn at their new farm. Later on they employ a girl to help the wife with the chores, and we eventually we find that the she previously had an illegitimate child. As she didn’t want to keep it her family gave it away. One day the husband and the girl talk while they are out in the fields, and (spoiler) he ends up kissing her. . . .
When the girl gets pregnant for a second time, the wife adopts a surprisingly pragmatic response to both her unfaithful husband and to the child that is born.
Bates manages to get an amazing number of what I thought would be 1950’s taboos into this story: failure to conceive, illegitimate birth, adultery, lack of maternal concern, and a wife adopting a husband’s child by another woman.
I’m becoming increasingly interested in this writer, and look forward to more of his work in the magazine.

Six Legs Are Welcome by Geoffrey Household has an intriguing start:

It’s no good waving at them. Take this one, for example! She’ll get bored with crawling up my arm in a moment, and fly off. For twenty-seven days in the month there’s just the usual mixture of insects, and on the twenty-eighth, for no reason at all, one species gets completely out of hand and fills up all the available air.
No, I don’t know what these are called—apart from their Indian name. Odd-looking creatures, aren’t they? Six legs. Red and black Asdic. And about an inch and a half of torpedo tube in the stern. That’s only a flying ant in your gin. Just pick it out. There you are—neither of you one penny the worse!
We’ll go inside in another half-hour when the mosquitoes come on duty. But you needn’t pay any attention at all to these fellows. They’re just satisfying their curiosity, with only one day to do it in perhaps. Well, yes, there are limits. I quite agree. I don’t hold with those Buddhist chaps who won’t squash a cockroach in case it turns out to be their defunct mother-in-law. I’ve no fellow-feeling for any of the little pests.
But if it hadn’t been for them I should be halfway through a life sentence now instead of farming this wonderful place. A man can never quite forget a bit of luck like that. It’s bound to influence him. Let me get you another glass. That one’s drowned herself. Weak heart, probably. Live and let live—that’s all I say.
This bit of Paraguay belongs to them quite as much as to me.  p. 43

There then follows a tale about a young woman recruited from a convent by an insalubrious bar-owner. When the narrator meets her he tries, over a period of several days, to make friends with the woman, but eventually her angry brother arrives. There is (spoiler) a knife fight where the bar owner dies, followed by the narrator, brother, and sister escaping into the night with the police pursuing.
Just when they look like they will be caught, a swarm of fireflies blinds their pursuers and lets them escape. This is a clever ending and nice image, but the bulk of the story isn’t entirely convincing.

Duel by Brian Cleeve² is a tale of unrequited love and jealousy in a small Irish village, and starts with the narrator, “Jamie the Book,” walking a girl home after a dance:

I could feel the warmth of her, and sometimes her arm would brush against mine by accident. There was a faint scent from her dress, and her hair was like a dark shadow swinging at her shoulders.
I wanted to say something to her, tell her how beautiful she was, but I was afraid. I knew how she’d turn to me, her eyes grey-green and cold as the sea, her mouth contemptuous, and she wouldn’t need to answer me. And I’d just blush and stammer, as I had a dozen and two dozen times before.
That was the kind of thing that drove the other boys away from her. The sureness of her, the bold swing of her when she walked, and the way she’d look a man straight in the face. They may like that kind of thing in the cinema in Ireland, but they don’t like it in a wife. It’s the girl with the little, meek voice and a couple of hundred pounds put by from her wages that they’re looking for.
A girl like Fran only frightens them, when she doesn’t annoy them.  p. 56

Later, Fran meets a stranger, and the narrator has to cope with his jealousy:

And for an hour I stravaiged up and down the hillsides round Ballysaggart, looking for the pair of them, although I still hadn’t an idea in my mind as to why I was doing it. I scrambled through the heather and over grey, naked rocks that burnt my hands with the heat of them from the sun, until my bad leg ached and the sweat blinded my eyes so much that I couldn’t have seen them if they were standing within five yards of me. At last I gave it up and went home again, flinging myself down on the bed and lying there until it was dark and the rage of jealousy inside me drove me out into the street again.
I wasn’t out long before I heard all about the stranger that had danced with Fran and come for her that same morning, laying his hand on her in broad daylight in the open street, and she letting him. The slut, they said. We always knew she was that kind of girl, we always knew it. And I didn’t know whether I wanted to kill them for saying it, or Fran for giving them reason, or myself for misery. But I only asked them about the stranger.
“From Clare,” they said, “where his father is an auctioneer. Rotten with money, and the boy down here spying out the land for a bit of a farm for himself. And maybe a wife.”
They looked sideways at me when they said that, and laughed, and I know now why men sometimes run crazy in the streets and kill whomever they meet.  pp. 59-60

Fran and the stranger eventually become a couple until one day when she is cruelly jilted in public. When she slaps the stranger he retaliates, and Jamie comes down from his vantage point up at the top of the street. He and the stranger fight each other with blackthorn sticks. Jamie wins, and Fran laughs. They walk defiantly down the street together.
This is a convincing portrait of village life, with good description of the characters and their emotional states.

Heart of the Storm by David Beaty starts with a description of a developing hurricane in the Caribbean before cutting to a BOAC airliner flying through the storm. The aircraft’s radio operator then picks up an SOS from a ship and, when the tugs can’t find the ship, Kelson (the aircraft captain and a dry, stiff upper lip type) decides to go and look for it. The rest of the crew don’t seem so keen (they don’t have that much spare fuel), but Kelson made his mind up, so off they go.
Most of the first half of the story comprises of description of crew interaction and operation, such as when they fly towards a radio beacon on the islands to fix their position before letting down through the cloud to low level:

To Bates, listening hard, it seemed almost unbelievable that there was anything beyond these clouds, that the world’s laws of physics and motion still held good in this grey, limitless universe. As though some unseen hand was disciplining it, the needle on the radio compass started to hunt only about twenty degrees either side of dead ahead.
Seeing its performance, Bates felt more cheerful. “We’re getting nearer, Skipper,” he said. “Seems just slightly port. Could you alter 5 degrees to the left?”
“I’m following the needle now,” Kelston replied, “as far as it’ll let me.”
Ten minutes later, the pointer steadied. Still slightly left. FY was pounding out now with a much more heartening strength. Suddenly, the needle seemed lost. It turned now one way, now the other, as though trying to make up its mind. Then decisively, it toppled over, and pointed behind them.
“Over it, sir,” Bates shouted.
“So I see,” Kelston said. “I’m turning on to one-three-five degrees . . . out to sea. Throttles right back.”
The engines died down to nothing. “I’ll have to put gear and half flap down, Mr. Hawkins. We’ve got to get down fast and I don’t want the speed to build up. Not in this turbulence.” The pump whined as it forced the hydraulic fluid into the terrific pressure needed to put the wheels down. When they were locked, Kelston lowered the flaps. Due to their drag effect, only 140 knots showed on the indicator, yet Easy Zebra was approaching the sea at over 4,000 feet a minute.  p. 82

If you don’t have an aviation background or interest, you’ll probably find this kind of thing as dull as ditchwater—but if you do, you’ll find these descriptions of steam driven aviation fascinating. Either way, these sections aren’t too long and don’t detract from the story.
Once the aircraft descends below the cloud they search the area and eventually find the ship, and then go to find the tugs. However, as they are low on fuel, they have to leave the area before the tugs and ship find each other. The aircraft eventually lands at San Miguel, after making an unorthodox visual approach below cloud.
The second half of the story is quite different from the first part, and we see a more reflective Kelston in his hotel room:

Now that he was back on the ground, like most other airline pilots, Kelston had a lost look about him which even the kindliness of the room could not quite drive away. Not even his own house where he spent a week out of every three, could be called his home. The nearest thing to it was the inside of a Marlborough. That noisy, confined little kingdom was where normally he felt happiest
When he was not flying, Kelston tended to feel frustrated, conscious of the many things he had not done with his life He had gone into his father’s export business, which had been one of the first casualties of the war. He had joined the Air Force, learnt to fly, acquired a certain tight-lipped stoniness on his face, which conveniently walled out his thoughts from other people.
And afterwards, partly because there was nothing else to do, partly because flying was now in his blood, he had joined British Empire Airways.
It was a familiar pattern that he shared with many people, but in his heart he was not satisfied with it. As a kind of sop to an active and intelligent brain that largely lay idle, for his work was mainly routine, he wrote articles on the technical side of flying for several aviation magazines.  p. 89

Kelston falls asleep, misses dinner time, and grumpily goes down to the bar. He is surprised when the head waiter comes to bring him to the restaurant, where they have kept food for him. The waiter asks him to phone the owner of the ship, and Kelston realises that the waiter and the serving staff (and nearly everyone else on the island) has a family connection of some sort to the crew on the ship—hence his special treatment.
During the call, Kelston discovers that the tugs will try to bring the ship into harbour as the eye of the storm passes over the island, and the owner invites him to come down and watch.
After some more scene setting at the docks, and the introduction of a female character called Karena, the operation concludes successfully. This second half puts the more technical/adventure oriented first part into a human context.
I enjoyed this. It’s certainly of its period (the ex-forces and taciturn Kelston, the wearing of pajamas for a two hour nap(!), etc.) but there is a lot of interesting period description of both the aircraft and the characters.³

Last, and most definitely least (I disliked this even more than Money’s cat story) is Air on a G-String by Cordelia Baird Gross (Harper’s Magazine). This is about Pansy St Clare, a teenage stripper (her mother started her in the occupation “when her voice changed”) who wants to be a cook. Then one day she sees a competition where the prize is a stove . . . .
Wrong in so many ways, but it has a clever last line.

There are three poems in this issue, Fuchsias by John Pudney (Sixpenny Songs, John Lane, 1953), River Music by Fleur Mountain, and Carte Blanche by Ogden Nash (The New Yorker, 1955), all of which seem dreadfully old fashioned or naff, and none of which I cared for. Ditto for the two poem and prose extract features, Rendezvous and Garden Pleasures.
There is also a quiz, Mixed Bag, and the Argosy Crossword.

This isn’t as good an issue as the last one but there is still a lot of interesting and/or entertaining work here.  ●

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1. Christopher Landon’s Wikipedia page is here. He also wrote the script of Ice Cold in Alex, and one the movie’s final scenes spawned years of Carlsberg lager adverts. (PS The barman in that clip should have faced a war-crimes tribunal for the way he pours the beer.)

2. Brian Cleeve was an award-winning broadcaster with RTE, as well as being a prolific novelist, and his short work mostly appeared in the likes of Argosy and The Saturday Evening Post. However, he also had two stories in F&SF in 1968, The Devil and Jake O’Hara (August), and The Devil in Exile (November).
His stories are listed on Galactic Central, and he has an extensive Wikipedia page.

3. David Beaty’s Heart of the Storm is an extract from the novel of the same title. Normally I can’t stand extracts as they aren’t self-contained, but this one is, and it also interested me enough to make me dig out a copy of the novel from the Internet Archive. The better quality PDF of the US edition is available here (under a different title, The Four Winds, and a cover that makes it look like a romance novel).
Beaty himself is an interesting character: after his flying career (the wartime RAF, where he won a DFC and bar, and then BOAC) he subsequently became a writer and later trained as a psychologist. Using this latter qualification, he went on to be one of the first people in the aviation field to write on the subject of Human Factors. His Wikipedia page is here, and there is an informative Independent obituary here.  ●

Summary:
This digest-sized British fiction magazine regularly published science fiction in its pages (sometimes as a “Science Fiction Choice”), and this issue not only has the very good first part of the novella-length version of John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids (a post-nuclear-holocaust novel about persecuted mutant telepaths) but also has good fantasies from Willard Marsh and Joan Aiken. The other non-SF material (which includes stories by H. E. Bates and Paul Gallico) is, more or less, of equal standard. All of it is unpretentiously entertaining.

Galactic Central link
Archive.org copy

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Editor not listed

Fiction:
Queer Fish • short story by Kem Bennett ∗∗∗
Star Over Frisco • reprint short story by Willard Marsh ∗∗∗+
Summer in Salander • novelette by H. E. Bates ∗∗∗
Brandy for the Colonel • short story by Paul Gallico ∗∗∗
Elixir of Love • short story by C. S. Forester ∗∗
Last Message • story story by C. H. Milsom ∗∗
Music for the Wicked Countess • short story by Joan Aiken ∗∗∗
Memory of a Fight • short story by Gerald Kersh ∗∗
Both Watches of the Hands • short story by Rowan Ayers ∗∗∗
The Chrysalids (Part 1 of 2) • novella serial by John Wyndham ∗∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Not Quite Cricket • poetry and prose extracts
Animal Crackers • poetry and prose extracts
Food for Thought • quiz
Apples • poem by Laurie Lee
Argosy Crossword

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Argosy¹ (the UK digest magazine, not the American pulp) isn’t an SF magazine but, as I was skimming through some issues, I noticed that a couple of them had a serial version of John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids.² Further research revealed that this was a variant and much shorter version of the novel, so I thought it would be interesting to read both and compare them here (I’ve just reviewed the much longer novel: you may wish to skim that post before reading on).
The plot of the novella is essentially the same as the one in the novel: David, the narrator, is a (secret) telepath in a post-nuclear-holocaust world whose agrarian society has harsh laws to deal with any sign of difference or mutation. In this first instalment these strictures are limned in a number of set pieces: when raiders from the Fringes appear, one of the freakishly long-limbed mutants they capture bears a striking resemblance to David’s father; when David’s sister is born, no-one in the house acknowledges the birth until the inspector calls to issue a certificate of normalcy; David’s father Joseph Strorm falls out with a neighbour over huge greathorses that Strorm considers deviant. We also learn more generally about this world, and its offences and blasphemies, etc.
All of the aforementioned is brought into stark focus when David’s Aunt Harriet arrives at the family house with her own new-born child. In an excellent scene, we learn the baby is a mutant, and that she wants to swap it temporarily for Petra to fool her local inspector. Not only do David’s parents refuse but they denounce her as well. After she leaves, she drowns herself in a river.
This is followed by a long section where Uncle Axel describes the outside world, its radioactive Badlands and Blacklands, and its mutant races—all of this knowledge gained from his days as a sailor.
Petra then reveals herself as a massively powerful telepath when she almost drowns. This, and a second incident, sow the seeds of suspicion in David’s community . . . .
A very good first half.

I expected that the Wyndham piece would be the only science fiction or fantasy story here (other copies have a “Science Fiction Choice” indicated) but there are others. The first of these is a fantasy, Star Over Frisco by Willard Marsh (first published³ as Astronomy Lesson in The Yale Review, 1954). This begins with a man and a woman meeting for the first time as they leave a cinema in San Francisco. When they go for a coffee, we find out that she is Pearl Rembrandt, a switchboard operator, and he is Humphrey, a sandwich maker at a restaurant.
They go for a walk and fall in love. As they look at the sky Pearl sees a shooting star and makes a wish. She tells Humphrey that she wished for a star of her own, and then:

They came down into the leaf-locked slope of Portsmouth Square, opposite the Hall of Justice where no one should have been behind bars, no misery should have been abroad when love, their love, was proof enough against all chaos.
And then Humphrey tripped over the star.
At first they didn’t recognize it. It lay, small and deceptive, in a cushion of grass. They knelt above it, jointly lifting it to the wayward light. It was cool to the palm, and blurrily orange-coloured. It had five points that seemed to shift and twinkle, depending on how you looked at them.
“I thought they’d be bigger, somehow,” Pearl said.
“They’re all different sizes,” Humphrey said, with a casualness he had to force. It was a beauty, all right, no getting around it.
“Sort of makes a nice souvenir, doesn’t it? To round the evening off.”
Humphrey weighed the star experimentally. “Maybe we could have it dipped in bronze or something to preserve it. You know, like baby-shoes.”
He didn’t realize the psychological implication of the remark till Pearl giggled in embarrassment.  p. 20

The next day Humphrey has time to kill before meeting Pearl again that evening, so he goes to a museum where he notices a meteorite on display. He learns from the attendant that it contains many valuable metals, and realises that the star (which Pearl has kept) may be valuable. When Humphrey then goes to his regular bar he tells Ace the bartender about the previous night’s find, and mentions that it may be of value. Ace suggests that Pearl will have come to a similar conclusion, and plants a seed of paranoia in Humphrey’s mind.
The story ends with Humphrey going to Pearl’s house earlier than planned and, when he gets into her apartment, he is aggressive and threatening. Initially she is bewildered, but agrees to give him the star back. Then she realises it may be of value, and tells him she is going to keep it.
The last few lines (spoiler), in which the star destroys more than their love, is a genuinely surprising end to the story and one that lifts this piece into an entirely different league. It should be better known.

The second fantasy in this issue is Music for the Wicked Countess by Joan Aiken,⁴ which concerns a new schoolteacher called Mr Bond arriving at Castle Kerrig, a small village in Ireland. One day, after he starts at the school, he plays the piano for the children. They like his performance and tell him that he should play for the Wicked Countess who lives in the castle in the middle of the woods (there is also a casual mention of leprechauns). Mr Bond thinks they are pulling his leg as he knows there is no castle in the area, something he confirms later on a fruitless walk:

He ate some bread and cheese in a bad temper and sat down to play it off at his own piano. He played several dances from Purcell’s Fairy Queen, and had soon soothed himself into forgetfulness of the children’s provoking behaviour. Little did he know that three white faces, framed in long golden hair, were gazing through the window behind his back. When he had finished playing for the night, the maidens from the forest turned and went regretfully back to the Castle.
.
“Well,” asked the Wicked Countess, “and does he play as well as the village talk has it?”
“He plays till the ears come down off your head and go waltzing along the road. Sure, there’s none is his equal in the whole wide world, at all.”
“I expect you are exaggerating,” said the Countess sadly. “Still, he would be a useful replacement for Bran the Harpist, ever since the fool went and had his head chopped off at the Debatable Ford.”
She looked crossly over to a corner where a headless harpist was learning to knit, for, being unable to read music, he could no longer play.  p. 86-87

After this, the Countess tries various ruses to get the teacher to her castle: lost keys; one of the maidens changes into a snake and gets pickled in a jar; a potion in his milk is drunk by the blue tits; an invitation goes unread, etc.
Eventually the Countess approaches Mr Bond as he walks in the forest, and invites him to the castle. He manages to avoid drinking the tea (and potion) provided, but agrees to play for her. After two leprechauns return with his piano (and carry it up the stairs), she invites him to play one of his own compositions. This sets up the story’s payoff, which is that, released from the chore of playing folk songs and country dances for the children, he launches into his own avant-garde compositions. These destroy the magic tower block by block, leaving the occupants to flee and Mr Bond alone in a clearing with his piano.
Thereafter the Countess and Mr Bond ignore each other . . . .
This is minor stuff, and I don’t think the ending will necessarily convince anyone, but it’s pleasant and lightweight fun.

Elixir of Love by C. S. Forester probably qualifies as an SF story, too, although it’s a fairly slight piece. In this one an Oxford professor sees the mass-mating of goldfish in the narrator’s garden pond. He concludes the goldfish’s simultaneous behaviour must be because of something in the water. He tasks his laboratory staff to isolate the compound.
Some weeks later the professor is atypically forward with a blind date at a dinner party the narrator sets up; the story eventually ends with some decorous description of an amorous wedding party.

One other story which may be of interest to fantasy readers is Both Watches of the Hands by Rowan Ayers—it isn’t fantasy but is such a wild flight of fancy it is halfway there.
The story opens with a despondent ex-Navy lieutenant called Michael Hancock, who is now in civvy street operating pleasure cruises and not enjoying the experience:

Nothing ever seemed to work out as it should. When the tides were right, the weather drove the holiday-makers inland to cinemas and amusement arcades. When the weather was right, Silver Streak was generally lying uselessly and unproductively on the soft, oozy mud that remained when the tide had run half a mile out to sea.
And on the rare occasions when both were right, there was usually something wrong with the engines, and he had to spend several sickening, dirty hours bent double in the narrow engine-room space, while his rival, the Mary Lou, chugged mockingly about the bay, loaded to the gunwales with eager passengers.  p. 97

Just as he is about to depart on another trip three naval ratings Hancock knows from his military service arrive and ask permission to come aboard. Not only do they treat Hancock like he is still their skipper, but they begin to carry out their duties as if they are on a Navy ship. Not only that, they subject the passengers of the pleasure boat trip to naval procedure. There is initial resistance from them and, to a certain extent, from Hancock, but everyone soon gets into the swing of things:

Michael still could not believe the situation. Before him, on either side, stood ten solemn men and women, ostensibly at ease. Neither their sex nor their age seemed to intrude any more into the neat pattern of well-established naval discipline, and he felt that he had to make no concessions, even to himself.
He was the Captain, this was his ship, and these were his crew. Nothing else could now be allowed to challenge the fantastic absurdity of the position. He hoped and prayed that Leo, his own regular bowman, who always went below for a sleep the minute the Silver Streak left the jetty, would not emerge through the open hatch to restore any of the reality.
“I should just like to say a few words,” Michael began, and was surprised by the tone of his voice. Someone in the ranks began to mutter.
“Keep silence, there,” shouted Brewis with dramatic effect.
“For some of you,” continued the Captain, “this may be your first seagoing appointment.” It was an opening he had used before many times. “And you may find things a little strange at first. But I want you to settle down into the routine as quickly as possible, and make this a really happy and efficient ship.”
He dug his hands into the pockets of his duffel and glowered at the motley crew before him. “That can only be achieved,” he said, “by teamwork, and complete co-operation, from the oldest among you, right down to the youngest boy.”
For a moment he caught sight of the awe-stricken child who had been proving such a pest, and the sight nearly deflated him.
“That is all I have to say,” he added quickly, “except to wish you good luck, and safe landfalls.”
“Hear, hear,” said the reedy voice of the small man.
The young blonde in the port watch began to clap very softly, until Brewis turned on her savagely and withered her into silence with one of his special disciplinary glances. A couple in the starboard watch were gazing at Michael, wide-eyed. They too had somehow been caught up in the fantasy of the moment, and saw before them a strange new life opening out. Visions of walking the plank, keelhauling, cockroaches, whippings, and being clapped in irons hovered indistinctly about their brains.  p. 104

Matters take a semi-serious turn when the passengers form a watch on both sides of the boat, and the enemy is sighted (the Mary Lou). Action Stations is called, and they set course for it at full speed . . . .
This one is a lot of fun.

As for the rest of the fiction, Summer in Salander by H. E. Bates⁵ is a novelette labelled as a “New Short Complete Novel.” Initially it reads like mid-period J. G. Ballard:

Manson lifted one corner of the green gauze window-blind of the shipping office and watched, for an indifferent moment or two, the swift cortege of a late funeral racing up the hill. It flashed along the water-front like a train of cellulose beetles, black and glittering, each of the thirty cars a reflection of the glare of sun on sea.
He wondered, as the cars leapt away up the avenue of jade and carmine villas, eyeless in the bright evening under closed white shades, why funerals in Salandar were always such races, unpompous and frenzied, as if they were really chasing the dead. He wondered too why he never saw them coming back again. They dashed in black undignified weeping haste to somewhere along the sea-coast, where blue and yellow espada boats beat with high moonlike prows under rocks ashen with burnt seaweed, and then vanished for ever.  p. 26

To an extent the Ballard comparison holds true for the rest of the story as it is, essentially, a psychological portrait of the protagonist, Manson, although he is a more conventional character than would be found in Ballard’s work.
We learn that Manson is a shipping manager or some such in an unspecified Mediterranean backwater, and that he is due to meet an out of season ship when it arrives that afternoon. When he gets on board the purser tells him that the only passenger disembarking cabled ahead asking Manson to organise a hotel room for her. Manson has no knowledge of any cable, and expresses his irritation at being used as a travel agent. Manson then meets Vane, the female passenger, for the first time:

 “It was awfully good of you to meet me,” a voice said.
When he turned, abruptly, at the same time as the sweat-bright faces of the policeman, the customs officer, and the purser, he saw her standing behind him, a tall, black-haired girl, with an amazing combination of large pure blue eyes and black lashes, her hair striped across the front with a leonine streak of tawny blonde.
He found himself at once resenting and resisting this paler streak of hair.
“It was really very good of you,” she said. “My name is Vane.”
He checked an impulse to say, “Spelt in which way?” and she held out a hand covered with a long yellow glove.  p. 28-29

Although Manson is discomfited and annoyed at the situation he is in, Vane soon proves to the dominant character. It isn’t long before Manson is eating out of her hands, beginning with him recovering a left-behind handbag from her cabin (the unmade bed and smell of perfume give Manson a “startling sensation of intimacy”), helping her with her bags, and then taking her to his hotel.
The rest of the story shows how Manson, generally a passive, beached character, is drawn into Vane’s orbit (she is, by contrast, assertive and energetic). When Vane says she would like to go to the hills that weekend, he ends up going with her.
The second part of the story has them travel by car and mule to a house in the mountains, along with a servant Manuel. During their stay, Manson becomes ever more infatuated with her, and eventually comes out of his shell to insist that they should go up to the high plateau together (hopefully leaving Manuel behind so they can be alone together). Manuel suggests that the trip is not a good idea, but Manson pressures Vane to go on what turns out to be a fateful trip.
I’m not sure that the story ultimately amounts to much, but it provides such good descriptions of both place and person and character that it’s definitely worth a read. It certainly made me think about digging out more of Bates’ work. (Since writing this last, I’ve read his transgressive The Good Corn in next month’s issue—more of this in my next Argosy review.)

Queer Fish by Kem Bennett is a story about Arthur, a dock worker and sometime boatman, and his bete noire (because of Arthur’s occasionally illegal salmon fishing), the local water-bailiff. After Arthur baits the bailiff in the pub one evening he goes to his boat. There he is held up at gunpoint by two strangers who were in the bar earlier, and forced to take them to France. Or at least it seems that way until we learn that (spoiler) Arthur has put them ashore on another part of the English coast (they were too seasick to notice). Arthur is greeted by the police on return but, because of his actions, he gets the better of the bailiff (the police don’t care about the salmon he caught on the way back). A cleverly plotted if minor, story.

Brandy for the Colonel by Paul Gallico⁶ opens with a retired French colonel overhearing his housemaid talking to a young man, an aspiring painter. He learns they are unhappy because they cannot go to Paris to live together as she will lose her dowry if she does. After this passage there is a character sketch of the retired colonel, which tells us of his love of the local brandy, and the termagant of a wife who keeps him away from it:

And, to conclude this portrait of a man better than most of us, if Colonel Bobet had any complaints about the character of his wife, he kept them to himself. He had chosen her when she was young, beautiful, kind, and good-tempered. If age and disappointment in what life had brought her had now curdled these attributes, it was not her fault, he reasoned. Even a life in which much can be arranged can play shabby tricks, such as the old wound that cost him his brigade and perhaps the marshal’s baton. And besides, every man was born to bear trials, and she was his.  p. 63

The colonel then attempts to resolve the matter with his wife (who controls the maid’s dowry) and the wealthy Marquis (who owns the local brandy company, and may have been a war-time collaborator), but fails. After this the colonel summons his old Resistance comrade Pantoufle, and sets in progress a plan which gets the couple the money they need to go to Paris, and also satisfies his wife’s desire to get her house painted.
The final act reveals (spoiler) that Pantoufle is now the advertising manager of a brandy firm that is a rival to the Marquis’, and the paint job on the colonel’s house now reveals an advertising slogan that can only be seen from the Marquis’ house.
The ending isn’t terribly convincing, but the story is a pleasant and interestingly contrived tale with some good, if stereotypical, French colour.

Last Message by C. H. Milsom (a one-shot wonder according to Galactic Central) is set on a ship in heavy weather whose radio operator picks up an SOS from a ditched aircraft. After the ship rescues the survivors (spoiler) the pilot tells the ship’s captain that they sent no distress message as the aircraft’s radio operator died trying to fix the aerial.
The nautical description in this story is convincing but the reveal is rather abrupt.

Memory of a Fight by Gerald Kersh is a relatively brief (and minor) vignette of a Roman boxer’s career. This involves meeting his twin brother in his last fight.

The magazine has, as well as the fiction, a number of filler items. Two of these are poem and prose features, Not Quite Cricket, which has two poems and one vignette (which escaped me) on that subject, and Animal Crackers, which is three pages of forgettable verse and prose extracts about animals. That said, I was taken by a line from a 1681 letter of Sir Thomas Browne to his son, “I beleeve you must be carefull of your Ostridge this returne of cold wether . . .”

Apples is an okay poem from Laurie Lee. The magazine also contains Food for Thought, a quiz, and the Argosy Crossword.

I enjoyed this magazine more than any other I’ve read recently. Some of it is particularly good (the Wyndham and the Marsh), and most of the rest is either noteworthy (the Bates) or just good, unpretentious entertainment⁷ (the Gallico, Aiken, Ayers, etc.). This mid-1950’s British magazine is also a lot less buttoned-up and conformist than I expected. Recommended.  ●

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1. There is some limited information about this magazine on Wikipedia and Galactic Central.

2. The serialisation of SF novels in mainstream publications wasn’t unusual in the 1950s: John Christopher’s The Death of Grass appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, for example, while a version of Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (as Revolt of the Triffids) appeared in Collier’s.

3. Willard Marsh’s story was also reprinted in F&SF, June 1955 (using its Yale Review title, Astronomy Lesson).

4. The Wikipedia piece above about Argosy reveals that Joan Aiken (known for the The Wolves of Willoughby Chase) was the magazine’s feature editor from 1955 to 1960. Her Science Fiction Encyclopedia page is here.

5. H. E. Bates is best perhaps best known for his Darling Buds of May books (which were made into a very successful TV series which I’m not sure I ever watched). His Wikipedia page is here.
There are a couple of useful websites listed in that latter webpage. One, the H. E. Bates Companion, gives this information about Summer in Salander:

In the second volume of his autobiography (The Blossoming World, 67), Bates would summarize the tale as follows: “a woman both rich and selfish sets out, having left her own husband, to destroy, rather after the manner of a spider with a fly, a young man she meets while on holiday on an island.” In a late essay (“H.E. Bates — By Himself”) Bates cites this story as the rare case in which a work of imagination is later replicated in real life, with a “precise replica of the Mrs Vane of my story: rich, selfish, bored, running away from her husband and looking for someone to play cat and mouse with” appearing on board ship when Bates and his wife were returning to the island he used as the story’s setting.

I don’t think this accurately describes the story. First, Vane doesn’t play “cat and mouse” with Manson—she dominates their relationship from the start but doesn’t intentionally torment him—and she doesn’t set out to “destroy” him either. Manson is the one who insists on going up to the high plateau despite Vane’s resistance, and his fall is an unfortunate accident.

6. Paul Gallico wrote The Poseidon Adventure among others. His best known story appears to be The Snow Goose, which is available as a PDF on the Saturday Evening Post website.

7. One wonders if there is an opening in the current SF magazine market for a publication which runs more entertaining stories—an Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine* for the twenties, if you will.
*The Scithers version (in spirit if not in actuality).  ●