In my book, Utterly Immoral, I cover the places Robert Keable lived in his extraordinary life, from Croydon to Tahiti via Cambridge, Bradford, Zanzibar, Basutoland, Le Havre and Dunstable. Robert Keable was actually born in Clapham and only moved to Croydon when he was about 10. He remained very fond of Croydon and wrote about it in his novel Peradventure. (see post on June 25^th)  

Robert Keable also referred to Croydon in his novel Lighten Our Darkness (published as Anne Decides in America). Lighten our Darkness, was written in 1926 while Robert was in Tahiti but in the novel he recalled, rather grimly, the train journey he would have regularly taken through south London:

Now and again a street opened up, a canyon of heat and dirt, with slatternly women and quarrelling children on every doorstep at this hour. Or now they were passing garden on garden running down to the railway, gardens wherein, for the most part no attempt was made at gardening. Rather they were given up to clothes-lines and rabbit-hutches and chicken-runs… The staring advertisements, the grim utility of everything, the sense that neither builders nor users cared anything except the sheerly practical… Even the parks they glimpsed suggested the same thing. They were not there because of the beauty of grass and trees and shrubs: indeed the public with its waste-paper and hideous clothes and ungainly perambulators, and the authorities with their dreadful benches and stiff walks and waste-paper baskets and stark iron notices and railings, did their united best to spoil the beauty.

For some reason Robert decides to have a dig at nearby Norbury in the book. Perhaps there was some rivalry between Croydon and Norbury when he was at school. His characters have the following conversation:

‘The amazing thing is that places exist of which one never hears at all. Norbury, for instance. What is Norbury? Who lives there? Why have I never heard of Norbury?’

‘…It’s a desperate place to have anything to do with’

‘I should think so. It looked so fearfully respectable. Like a disguised criminal.

‘Exactly. And I should imagine its inhabitants are of those who fill our prisons or our lunatic asylums.’

Lighten Our Darkness ends (spoiler alert) with a plane crash at Croydon Aerodrome. Robert would have flown there, probably from Paris, in 1924 at the end of his grand tour of southern Europe and northern Africa in 1924. The inspiration for crash was an accident in December 1924 when a De Havilland DH 34 crashed in Purley near Croydon killing all eight passengers. This led to the first ever public enquiry into a civil aviation accident. The findings were published in February 1925, two years before Lighten Our Darkness was published. Croydon Airfield remained the main passenger airport serving London up until the beginning of the Second World War eventually closing in 1959.

Croydon airport began to fly international passenger in 1920 and was the world’s first airport to introduce air traffic control and a control tower. In Lighten Our Darkness there is a description of a visit to the airport by Aubrey and Mildred who were meeting the plane which eventually crashed. Since the airport expanded greatly between 1926 and 1928 Keable’s description of a visit to the airport before the expansion is interesting.

They parked the car and entered the enclosure, making their way to the arrival hangar. There was already some autumnal evening haze over the ground, which definitely added to the sense of spaciousness there is about the place. Uncomplete as an air-station though it undoubtedly was in comparison with the aerodrome of the future, one had a feeling here, nevertheless, that never has and never will belong to a railway-station.

Mildred (said)… ‘I’d prefer meeting them by rail. It’s warmer.’

‘I expect there is a waiting room somewhere. Shall I go and see?’

‘No. I don’t want to miss any of it. What are all those buildings for?‘I don’t know in detail; that’s the beauty of it. Can you feel how wonderful it is here, Mildred? Look at this great, open, silent place – it’s nearly a thousand yards long. That’s the control tower from which a hidden little man can direct the movements of the great machines. That’s the aerial lighthouse that flings a pillar of fire into the air by night. Over there they’ve got the name cut in the turf in superhuman thirty-foot letters. Then of course there is a wireless station somewhere: I dare say they’re talking to Dick’s ‘plane now. It’s all big, clean, silent. And presently a little speck will appear in the sky, and drop down there before us, up-wind, that way, and Dick and Ann will step out. No crowd, no fuss, no dirt. Like gods.’