I would like to post a few thoughts on Colin Caffell’s book “In Search of the Rainbow’s End” and looking at the title of this thread it’s as good a place to post as anywhere though I might easily have posted it in the “grief” category, as no matter how Colin tries to live up to his tough father’s expectation descendant from slaveholders I sense all too often this forceful emotion understandable as it may be, and one hopes that this has not clouded his judgement or expression. It’s an absorbing book, a page-turner which if not directly then certainly through a kind of subliminal osmosis lends an insight into Colin’s family life with Sheila and the twins, their murder, the part he played at the trial and his subsequent quest for solace.
For those of you searching for that one piece of evidence which would ultimately confirm Jeremy’s guilt you will look in vain. There is circumstantial evidence galore for those of my mindset: Sheila lying down near her mother and not in her twins’ bedroom, her former room as a girl which would have made more sense if she were escaping the world and taking her sons with her, Nevill’s alleged dossier of evidence against Jeremy which he had mentioned to Robert Boutflour, Barbara Wilson’s conversation with Nevill who remarked on Jeremy’s desire to own a 5 shot automatic handgun: “If he gets one of those we’ll all have to look out” and his remark about the shooting season coming up that accidents do happen, both of which to my mind put the remark about “I must never turn my back on that young man” into an indisputable unambiguous context. There’s his boasting to Colin about how many pages his witness statement runs into, his crude sexual jokes in the hearse on the way to the crematorium, and Jeremy attempting to get Sheila to load a gun at David Boutflour’s son’s christening.
We are told of Jeremy’s unhappy schooldays at Gresham’s, where he was relentlessly physically, psychologically and allegedly sexually bullied by the older and stronger boys, who despised him for being the son of a tenant farmer when they were descended from landed East Anglian gentry, Jeremy finding escape in turn in bullying the younger boys as he learned to play the system. In his target practice skills he would learn that handling a gun earned him a modicum of respect among his peer group. His initial honesty in owning up to the fact that he was adopted, possibly in an attempt to seek affection was rewarded in him labelled as “The Bastard” throughout his schooldays.Maybe it was because of this his Housemaster described him as “aloof” and “a loner”.
If Jeremy was having a hard time at school Sheila was not having it much easier. Forced to find friends at a private school in Eastbourne mid-way through the term she was confronted with a series of cliques among her classmates who ridiculed her for her unsophistication in dress and speech. After many pleadings it would be Nevill not June who finally succumbed a year later to moving her to Old Hall School in Norfolk, where she appeared more contented. Both Jeremy and Sheila would experience this double feeling of rejection, once at birth and again when their parents sent them away. Both children would suffer psychologically with Sheila developing schizophrenia partly through the religious moralizing of her mother(there was no evidence of congenital mental illness among her natural birth parents) and expressing emotional outbursts which became all too common, whilst Jeremy bottled it all up inside, the explosive consequences of which became all too apparent.
The twins are the stars of this book and they shine out vividly: whether bringing a smile to one’s face with their common outburst of “it was p*ssing down” with rain said at the dinner table in front of what to them were frightening adult figures ,Colin’s recollection of his dropping them off for the last time at White House Farm with their clinging bodies sending an all too prescient message to their father, the family party which Jan in retrospect described as “their funeral”,Daniel’s series of sombre drawings which may have induced Colin’s surreal nightmarish dreams yet his insistence that the twins have gone to a better place and they will all be reunited one day in the future.
We continue on this rollercoaster journey with Colin with its chiaroscuro leitmotif as he discusses possibly at too great a length for some readers his life and alter-ego, or Shadow to use his words, as befits his anti-hero status in the book. One sympathises with Colin’s view that it is all too easy to kill in a rage,and his contrasting of this symbiotically with Jeremy’s planned executions. However we might not all feel the need to subject ourselves to expert psychoanalysis,or listen to Wagner’s Götterdämmerung in the process,( some of us might have more prosaic tastes),but then again how many of us will ever experience the shade of darkness on Colin’s level, however much we might all be searching for the crock of gold at Rainbow’s End.
