Saturday, June the 25th, 2005

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Picnic for Detectives

On Thursday, I mentioned in passing Picnic For Detectives. This annual event has become one of the key dates in the Hooting Yard calendar, which is somewhat surprising, given its inglorious beginnings.

The very first Picnic For Detectives was hardly a picnic at all, and the official historian of the event estimates that only a handful of those taking part were bona fide detectives. All we know for certain is that a small group of people, no more than four or five, pitched up in a field with a couple of hampers, and spent an afternoon there. Meteorological records show the day was one of arctic squalls, but the field was in a temperate zone inland. In fact, it was just across the road from Pang Hill Orphanage. This anomaly has fascinated weather-fixated Picnic For Detectives buffs, who are legion.

So, not only do we have just a few people with a couple of hampers, we do not even know what was in those hampers. If you are familiar with ordinary picnics, you would expect to open up a hamper to find sandwiches, savoury flans, some fruit, crackers, cheese-related foodstuffs, cake, and bottles of refreshing barley water. Hardboiled eggs would be likely, too, unless the film director Alfred Hitchcock was one of the picknickers, for as we know from the many biographies, he was terrified of eggs.

Hitchcock was not present at the picnic across the road from the orphanage that is counted now as the first Picnic For Detectives, but unfortunately we do not know the names of those who were. In fact, the whole thing is shrouded in mystery. All we can say for certain is that the following year, in the very same field, there was a second picnic, and this one was attended only by detectives, either by chance or design. This second picnic was blessed with what the records call “humid balminess” and “scattered dappling sunlight”. Examination of surviving crumbs from the site indicates that all sorts of pies were eaten, with or without cutlery.

“I for one hope they did use cutlery, or at least forks,” wrote Sidney Cack, “For there is something disconcerting and undignified in the mental image of a team of tiptop detectives sprawled in a field shovelling pie into their mouths with their fingers.”

It seems that those resounding words “Picnic For Detectives” were first used a year later. The third picnic is the one that became legendary. Over forty detectives gathered in the field, and their hampers were each emblazoned with a badge, a heraldic device, a coat of arms, an emblem, each one caked in mud as a safeguard. The picnic menu was written down for the first time, and to this day is recited at the crack of every dawn by the urchins in the orphanage. It was at this third Picnic For Detectives that a pack of beagles was employed to frighten off swooping crows, magpies, gulls, and other scavenging creatures with beaks and wings. Nowadays, the beagles in the pack are bred specially in the Detectives' Beagle Breeding Compound, their psychological state carefully monitored while they are still puppies.

One innovation at the third Picnic For Detectives which did not survive was musical accompaniment. The experimental percussionist Zoltan Taplow was invited along, despite having no background in police work. He was stationed in a corner of the field and asked to play suitable picnic music. His energetic thumping upon reconditioned metal drums and shamanic gongs was drowned out that day by howling winds and the steady convoy of cement-mixer trucks growling along the road. There is one body of opinion which suggests that Taplow was merely a figment of the overheated imagination of one of the detectives, a tall, stooping forensics specialist who had spent too much of his career aboard ships. The absence of Taplow from nearly all A-Z directories of experimental percussionists tends to support this view.

The music, real or imagined, was inaudible. But the picnic itself was a triumph. It is the subject of two novels, a stage play, a long-running television serial, an opera, and no less than three films, the finest of which is probably Picnic For Detectives : Three, the title of which was changed to Hot Picnic For Detectives Impact by the distributors, concerned that cinemagoers would be confused into assuming they had missed two earlier features. Detective Captain Shuddery, who was given a sabbatical from the force to produce and direct the film, disowned it, but he need not have done, for it is a towering work. It may be that his critical faculties deserted him when, immediately after completing the film, he was badly injured when attacked by a swan. It is certainly true that his nerves never recovered, and he spent what ought to have been the prime of his career chewing toffee in the hothouse of a nursing home, surrounded by gigantic and abominable plants.

By the time Shuddery's film came out, that third Picnic For Detectives was lost in the past, a sepia-tinged memory of tweed suits, massive walrus moustaches, essence of violets, organdie ruffles, reticules and Gladstone bags. From the fourth year onwards, with the introduction of lobsters on the menu, Picnic For Detectives took on its startling calendrical significance. Who, today, can imagine a year in Hooting Yard without it?

Remarkably little has changed over the years. Still, there is the ceremonial march-past of retired detectives on Picnic For Detectives Eve, where the wheelchairs of the infirm ancients are pushed along by teams of tots from Pang Hill Orphanage. Still, the lobster pots are made of beaten bronze in a factory far away. Still, the field is laced with buttercups and dandelions, and spurge allowed to spread. Still, anxious eyes are cast up to the skies in the morning, the weather discussed in almost insane detail by all who linger on the Pang Hill pathways. Still the hampers bear badges which glisten under their caking of mud. And still there are detectives. And still there is a picnic for them, in Hooting Yard, but once a year, come hell or high water, come rain or shine.