Four o’clock and the driver came back. I told him where I wanted to go and he said he had never heard of it. I told him generally where it was and he responded with an infuriating sort of dithering, as if we were playing riddles (“is it over by…” “do you mean the road out to…” “are you sure you don’t mean…”). I even told him the road number but he said the roads don’t always have numbers. I produced a map I had printed out from Google (“where did y’get this map from” he asked, even though it clearly said Google). Eventually I told him to drive to a town in the north of the county and we would pick up the road from there.
We set off through the congested city traffic.
I sat in the back of the car, which I think offended him a little. To repair relations, since I was dependent upon him for the success of the trip, I asked him about his life and he responded with such a wave of friendliness that I was effectively co-opted into his family. He had been thirty years a driver, his wife was a teacher, when his wife had her teacher friends round he always liked to work late…
We left the city and drove through winding lanes. The driver pointed out a ruined castle, behind trees, where there was a supernatural stone that confers the gift of rhetoric upon all who kiss it. I told the driver that there was enough rhetoric in the world without me adding to it.
We arrived in the town in the northern half of the county. This town is entirely dependent upon the processing of sugar beet. We found the address Fiona had given me years ago and I knocked at the door. There was no answer. I thought of asking at the neighbours’ doors but then thought: some things are not meant to be. We got back in the car and drove through the very congested centre of the town (magnificent ruins of a castle).
Stationary in traffic I saw this shop window displaying garden gnomes in green waistcoats (at the Institute of Technology earlier in the day, while we were having tea in the upstairs room, a member of staff had told me about her researches into “the local shaman tradition which is in touch with the fairies, the Otherworld” pronouncing “Otherworld” impatiently, as if annoyed she had to explain herself - “da Utter-worlt”).
In the centre of the town a sign pointed to the road we were looking for. We were soon driving out into the countryside (“it’s a grand straight run”). I was conscious of a very gentle gradient that over several miles took us uphill.
The driver (“call me Brendan”) asked why I wanted to go to such a remote place. I told him I was interested in a great writer who had once lived there. He asked me the name of the writer, and when I told him said he had never heard of her.
We arrived at the place. I told the driver to slow down and look for a pair of gates and a church. We saw the church on the left and pulled off the road, parking on a square of gravel before the iron gates.
Leaving the car I walked up a steep narrow track to the church. It was still light although the sky threatened rain (one or two spots occasionally fell). The time was just after 5 o’clock.
The left-hand side of the track was bounded by a stone wall, and peeping over this wall was a herd of calves. I fell in love with these calves, the shy way they looked at me, the mock-fear with which they ran off to a corner when I raised my camera then quietly crept back again. I know it is ridiculous to anthropomorphise animals, but I felt we were all friends (“we are all in this world together and have to get through it as best we can”).
The Anglican church was teetering on the edge of abandonment. The windows were too high up to look through, the glass showing cracks and one or two small holes. Another ten years and the roof will be off and ivy will be smothering the walls.
Notice the inscription above the door. Notice the school-room attached to the right - an Anglican bequest to the children of the village. Both religious traditions are buried in this graveyard.
The door was locked. The inscription above the door said Domus Mea Domus Orationis (the words of Jesus when cleansing the Temple: My house is a house of prayer…). And for some reason into my mind came the Latin inscription above Gavin Maxwell’s fireplace: It is no will-o'-the wisp I have followed here.
Looking through a window of the schoolroom (obviously disused) I saw that a few photographs were on the pink-washed walls, and propped on the mantlepiece was a painting of a big house - the “big house” of The Author. This must be the painting she had done when, already exiled in Kent, she had sent the painter over to record her old home and he had found it already in the process of destruction (notice in the painting the steps leading up to the front door).
On a grassy ledge at the back of the graveyard, abutting the demesne wall, was the grave of The Author. From left to right the stones are: The Author’s father, The Author’s grandmother, The Author (and her husband). She died aged 74.
From the graveyard I could look down into the demesne. The Author wrote with such sensitivity about this place that I was slightly reluctant to go on, not wanting to have my imagination dispelled. The Author was so associated with this place that the air, the local water, the produce of the surrounding fields must all have contributed to the sustenance of her mind, in its way as perceptive as Jane Austen.
I returned to the gates. It was a du Maurieresque encounter (“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again…”). Both du Maurier and The Author published their greatest novels in the same year - 1938.
With a little effort I opened the gates. My intention was to carrying on walking until I was challenged. But actually I did not see another person the entire time I was in the demesne.
I followed the winding drive as it curved along the swell of the sloping hill. Past an iron-bar gate, half off its hinges, partially overgrown by long grass. This is the iron gate The Author mentions twice in her 1929 novel (and a wonder it has not been carried off to the University of Texas as a literary secondary relic).
To my right were trees supporting a large rookery. The noisy rooks were settling down for the night. In her 1942 “biography” of her big house (an enigmatic work in which nothing is what is first seems) The Author describes how she would be wakened by the noise of the rooks in the morning.
I arrived at the site of the former house. Even with the dereliction, overgrowth and dumped vehicles the place was unmistakeable. Although no walls of the main block were standing I could see clearly the wide dry moat of “the area” that surrounded the house and gave light and access to the basement level.
It was a thrill (I am not exaggerating) to see that the stones strewn about at my feet were from the steps that The Author writes about so often (the steps as family history, the steps as literary motif, the steps as symbolic bridge between two worlds). How long before these steps are purchased, transported and reassembled at the University of Texas, as a tangible adjunct to The Author’s papers? I picked up two tiny fragments of the steps to keep myself.
The bridge that used to support the steps was still in place, and so I could walk across the area and onto the floor of the house itself, where the main entrance hall used to be. Thrown onto the ground was part of the surround to the front door (I recognised it from a photograph of The Author’s father). Isaiah Berlin, Rosamund Lehman, Iris Murdoch, Sean O’Faolain, Carson McCullers, Cyril Connolly… I thought of all the great authors who had walked on this floor when the house stood. Now everything was a jumbled wreck. To paraphrase Shelley: look upon my works ye aspirant writers and despair.
Trees torn down, walls smashed, lawns ploughed up. It was as if, after two hundred years, the house had produced The Author and so had no further need to exist. In return The Author made sure the house would endure on a metaphysical level through the beauty of her prose.
In England the site would be owned by a Trust and tidied up. There would be a teashop selling postcards. Once a year there would be a literary festival attended by Melvyn Bragg.
Stumbling a little I managed to climb down to the old basement kitchen. The brick ovens were still in one of the walls, the oven doors rusting in the grass. Beneath the grass the flagstone floor was still in place.
At the back of the site were a few of the estate offices put up by The Author’s grandfather at the end of the nineteenth century.
Looking inside, I saw one of them still had a moulded ceiling (I didn’t go right inside in case it collapsed on my head).
From the old stable yard I could see in the distance the hills that harboured the insurgents. The Author writes of how exposed the house seemed in the early 1920s. Insurgents walked across the demesne on their way to burn neighbouring houses and shoot at the police in crossroad ambushes.
The literary history of a nation fitted onto a postcard. This montage illustrates the official canon of dead male writers. There is no place for The Author, even though she is as good as any of them.
Why?
Obviously she was a woman, and even today women writers struggle to be recognised.
More problematic, she worked as a spy for the British government during the Second World War, watching the activities of the Germans in the neutral state. This identification as a spy is expressed in her 1949 novel (as all her characters are aspects of herself, the shock she recounts at discovering her lover is a spy should really be taken as an inward accusation). In an anthology of local writers The Author’s name was included but struck out, as a demonstration of repudiation by the community (although it cannot have been in their interest that Germany should have won the war).
I went back along the drive. Just as I got to the car the rain began. I suddenly realised how cold it was, and how long I had been gone.
The two fragments of the steps I brought away with me.
We set off through the congested city traffic.
I sat in the back of the car, which I think offended him a little. To repair relations, since I was dependent upon him for the success of the trip, I asked him about his life and he responded with such a wave of friendliness that I was effectively co-opted into his family. He had been thirty years a driver, his wife was a teacher, when his wife had her teacher friends round he always liked to work late…
We left the city and drove through winding lanes. The driver pointed out a ruined castle, behind trees, where there was a supernatural stone that confers the gift of rhetoric upon all who kiss it. I told the driver that there was enough rhetoric in the world without me adding to it.
We arrived in the town in the northern half of the county. This town is entirely dependent upon the processing of sugar beet. We found the address Fiona had given me years ago and I knocked at the door. There was no answer. I thought of asking at the neighbours’ doors but then thought: some things are not meant to be. We got back in the car and drove through the very congested centre of the town (magnificent ruins of a castle).
Stationary in traffic I saw this shop window displaying garden gnomes in green waistcoats (at the Institute of Technology earlier in the day, while we were having tea in the upstairs room, a member of staff had told me about her researches into “the local shaman tradition which is in touch with the fairies, the Otherworld” pronouncing “Otherworld” impatiently, as if annoyed she had to explain herself - “da Utter-worlt”).
In the centre of the town a sign pointed to the road we were looking for. We were soon driving out into the countryside (“it’s a grand straight run”). I was conscious of a very gentle gradient that over several miles took us uphill.
The driver (“call me Brendan”) asked why I wanted to go to such a remote place. I told him I was interested in a great writer who had once lived there. He asked me the name of the writer, and when I told him said he had never heard of her.
We arrived at the place. I told the driver to slow down and look for a pair of gates and a church. We saw the church on the left and pulled off the road, parking on a square of gravel before the iron gates.
Leaving the car I walked up a steep narrow track to the church. It was still light although the sky threatened rain (one or two spots occasionally fell). The time was just after 5 o’clock.
The left-hand side of the track was bounded by a stone wall, and peeping over this wall was a herd of calves. I fell in love with these calves, the shy way they looked at me, the mock-fear with which they ran off to a corner when I raised my camera then quietly crept back again. I know it is ridiculous to anthropomorphise animals, but I felt we were all friends (“we are all in this world together and have to get through it as best we can”).
The Anglican church was teetering on the edge of abandonment. The windows were too high up to look through, the glass showing cracks and one or two small holes. Another ten years and the roof will be off and ivy will be smothering the walls.
Notice the inscription above the door. Notice the school-room attached to the right - an Anglican bequest to the children of the village. Both religious traditions are buried in this graveyard.
The door was locked. The inscription above the door said Domus Mea Domus Orationis (the words of Jesus when cleansing the Temple: My house is a house of prayer…). And for some reason into my mind came the Latin inscription above Gavin Maxwell’s fireplace: It is no will-o'-the wisp I have followed here.
Looking through a window of the schoolroom (obviously disused) I saw that a few photographs were on the pink-washed walls, and propped on the mantlepiece was a painting of a big house - the “big house” of The Author. This must be the painting she had done when, already exiled in Kent, she had sent the painter over to record her old home and he had found it already in the process of destruction (notice in the painting the steps leading up to the front door).
On a grassy ledge at the back of the graveyard, abutting the demesne wall, was the grave of The Author. From left to right the stones are: The Author’s father, The Author’s grandmother, The Author (and her husband). She died aged 74.
From the graveyard I could look down into the demesne. The Author wrote with such sensitivity about this place that I was slightly reluctant to go on, not wanting to have my imagination dispelled. The Author was so associated with this place that the air, the local water, the produce of the surrounding fields must all have contributed to the sustenance of her mind, in its way as perceptive as Jane Austen.
I returned to the gates. It was a du Maurieresque encounter (“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again…”). Both du Maurier and The Author published their greatest novels in the same year - 1938.
With a little effort I opened the gates. My intention was to carrying on walking until I was challenged. But actually I did not see another person the entire time I was in the demesne.
I followed the winding drive as it curved along the swell of the sloping hill. Past an iron-bar gate, half off its hinges, partially overgrown by long grass. This is the iron gate The Author mentions twice in her 1929 novel (and a wonder it has not been carried off to the University of Texas as a literary secondary relic).
To my right were trees supporting a large rookery. The noisy rooks were settling down for the night. In her 1942 “biography” of her big house (an enigmatic work in which nothing is what is first seems) The Author describes how she would be wakened by the noise of the rooks in the morning.
I arrived at the site of the former house. Even with the dereliction, overgrowth and dumped vehicles the place was unmistakeable. Although no walls of the main block were standing I could see clearly the wide dry moat of “the area” that surrounded the house and gave light and access to the basement level.
It was a thrill (I am not exaggerating) to see that the stones strewn about at my feet were from the steps that The Author writes about so often (the steps as family history, the steps as literary motif, the steps as symbolic bridge between two worlds). How long before these steps are purchased, transported and reassembled at the University of Texas, as a tangible adjunct to The Author’s papers? I picked up two tiny fragments of the steps to keep myself.
The bridge that used to support the steps was still in place, and so I could walk across the area and onto the floor of the house itself, where the main entrance hall used to be. Thrown onto the ground was part of the surround to the front door (I recognised it from a photograph of The Author’s father). Isaiah Berlin, Rosamund Lehman, Iris Murdoch, Sean O’Faolain, Carson McCullers, Cyril Connolly… I thought of all the great authors who had walked on this floor when the house stood. Now everything was a jumbled wreck. To paraphrase Shelley: look upon my works ye aspirant writers and despair.
Trees torn down, walls smashed, lawns ploughed up. It was as if, after two hundred years, the house had produced The Author and so had no further need to exist. In return The Author made sure the house would endure on a metaphysical level through the beauty of her prose.
In England the site would be owned by a Trust and tidied up. There would be a teashop selling postcards. Once a year there would be a literary festival attended by Melvyn Bragg.
Stumbling a little I managed to climb down to the old basement kitchen. The brick ovens were still in one of the walls, the oven doors rusting in the grass. Beneath the grass the flagstone floor was still in place.
At the back of the site were a few of the estate offices put up by The Author’s grandfather at the end of the nineteenth century.
Looking inside, I saw one of them still had a moulded ceiling (I didn’t go right inside in case it collapsed on my head).
From the old stable yard I could see in the distance the hills that harboured the insurgents. The Author writes of how exposed the house seemed in the early 1920s. Insurgents walked across the demesne on their way to burn neighbouring houses and shoot at the police in crossroad ambushes.
The literary history of a nation fitted onto a postcard. This montage illustrates the official canon of dead male writers. There is no place for The Author, even though she is as good as any of them.
Why?
Obviously she was a woman, and even today women writers struggle to be recognised.
More problematic, she worked as a spy for the British government during the Second World War, watching the activities of the Germans in the neutral state. This identification as a spy is expressed in her 1949 novel (as all her characters are aspects of herself, the shock she recounts at discovering her lover is a spy should really be taken as an inward accusation). In an anthology of local writers The Author’s name was included but struck out, as a demonstration of repudiation by the community (although it cannot have been in their interest that Germany should have won the war).
I went back along the drive. Just as I got to the car the rain began. I suddenly realised how cold it was, and how long I had been gone.
The two fragments of the steps I brought away with me.
5 comments:
fine words to describe moments like this, I was there with you
You are welcome to join me anytime, Anonymous.
Terrific descriptions! Those stones from the steps are the perfect souveniers.
I might put in an offer for them all James, and reconstruct them myself.
I get gooseflesh just reading your account! Thanks for chronicling this and showing what remains
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