J. B. Morton - Friends and Adventures

Friends and Adventures

Morton fell in with J. C. Squire's circle of acquaintances. Squire was the editor of the London Mercury, and his reputation for helping young writers had caused him to accrue a posse of writers and poets, which Morton was happy to join on excursions to pubs in the area of Fleet Street.

This also introduced him to Hilaire Belloc, whose second son, Peter, became a close friend until his death in 1941. Belloc was 52 when Morton met him, and looked older. Both Belloc senior and Morton enjoyed cross-country walking, and improvising songs as they walked; the three of them sailed Belloc's cutter, the Nona. Like Belloc, Morton was a Roman Catholic, and shared many of the attitudes of the Chesterton-Belloc circle.

Morton applied his love of the surreal not just to his writing but to everyday life. Walking through Guildford one day with Gerald Barry, Morton stopped at a pillar box. He talked into its opening: "Are you alright, my little man? Don't worry, we'll soon get you out." Soon, a concerned crowd gathered to see who was trapped inside. Somebody summoned the fire brigade to help, while Morton and Barry made a discreet exit. Events like this were quite frequent: on another occasion he littered Virginia Woolf's front doorstep with dozens of empty, quart-sized brown ale bottles.

Wyndham-Lewis recalls that on their first meeting, the door 'burst open' and 'a thick-set, bucolic figure, all over straw and clay, strode in and banged passionately on the floor with a thick gnarled stick uttering a roar soon known and feared in every pub on Fleet Street: "Flaming eggs! will no one rid me of this stinking town?"'.