An Audience with an Elephant (15 page)

‘Crikey, you don’t half like ornaments,’ said a new milkman on his first day. ‘Ornaments,’ grumbled George Freeston. His whole family, he said, had always treasured things. Canal boat teapots. Brass bottle-jacks for roasting. Pewter pipettes for tasting beer. A camel’s bladder, stiffened with lacquer and used as a lightshade until too many children asked to see Mr Freeston’s bladder.

Some he rescued. Some he bought. And some he quietly acquired. As a corporal in the RAF, George scuttled across Europe behind the armies, acquiring fifteenth-century bronzes and cherubs from bombed chateaux, which he left in empty shell-boxes beside the road, all addressed to ‘George Freeston, Blisworth, Northamptonshire.’

And when he got back from the war, there they all were, someone having assumed they were his last remains. George was always lucky. The corner cupboard in his dining room had been an apartment block for a pig and some hens; and one piece of early nineteenth-century pottery was being sold as modern fairground rubbish when he came upon it. A lifetime’s triumphs among country-house sales, demolition sites, 30 years of crossing and recrossing England in a taxi (‘That pottery lion I got when I was taking my nephews and nieces to Whipsnade; I had to take all their money.’) When George bought the three cottages with his wartime gratuity of £76, he surfed in on a tidal wave of possessions.

Like Aubrey, he has not married. ‘People ask me what I’ve done with my life. I reply, “Nothing, I’ve just lived here.”’ He has been church secretary for the past 50 years, keeping the minutes and interpolating whatever bits of local information he thinks relevant. Thus, when the roads were bad, he noted how many villagers fell over on the way to church, adding that the vicar’s prayer that day had been, ‘that by reason of the frailty of our nature we cannot always stand upright’. Had things been different, had his family been able to afford further education, he would probably be an emeritus professor elsewhere. As it is, he has no ambition to specialise. ‘With me it’s people, past and present. You can’t talk to an academic historian about anything outside his subject.’

When the canal was nationalised he found its records abandoned in the rain; he has the letters of protest and apology; details of illnesses (‘Regret have fallen on head’), and wages, all its social detail. In diocesan records he came across the history of the village school: thus a remarkable man staggers to his feet, a seventeenth-century schoolmaster accused of drunkenness, in particular for his claim that over six nights, armed only with a fork, he fought the Devil; the authorities dismissed him, ignoring the grandeur of his defence that the fight had been a draw.

George has recorded the oral memories of the old who could remember the last dancing bear. And once, asking whether anyone knew anything of the time that the trade unionist Joseph Arch had come, he was stunned when an old man said he did not remember that, but his mother had told him Joan of Arc had come to Blisworth.

When anyone wants to know anything about the village, it is to him they write. Eight years ago, a letter came from Florida, from a man named Stone who had found reference in the library of Congress to a Hussar officer of that name, and to a Blisworth connection. George had grown up seeing that name on graves dug when the Stones were the village squires. One by one he traced them to the royal library at Windsor and Gwent county council (‘The Stones got everywhere’).

It has been an extraordinary eight years of letters in George’s exquisite calligraphy going weekly across the Atlantic. Then one summer the American came to meet his unpaid genealogist, and it was something of an anti-climax. ‘He was the sort of man who could go out of my life next week and I wouldn’t want to see him again. But I’ve loved the quest.’ George Freeston is a happy man. ‘I think this village will survive,’ he said. ‘And, it’ll even survive in a form which we would recognise. The old people, they would never have complained about anything; but these, they’ll organise petitions. I think that is one of the biggest changes. The man who moved in yesterday, he’ll see to it that Blisworth survives.’

An academic historian would ask, what has the man written? There is the amazing scrapbook, 3 feet by 2, which he submitted in Coronation Year for a competition on local history; a march-past of Blisworth’s parsons, brides and bargees, illustrated by his own watercolours. Apart from that he has written nothing.

But from lectures delivered without notes in a hundred schools and church halls, and from the way he responds to people who turn up at his door (‘Ah, then you must be the great grandson of so and so’), he has aroused more enthusiasm for the past than any academic historian. When I think of him, I am reminded of R.S. Thomas’s lines on the country clergy:

A happy birthday, George. I doubt whether I shall meet anyone like you again.

England and a Wake

T WAS STRAIGHT
out of
Kind Hearts and Coronets
, and all that was missing was Alec Guinness. The generations of admirals and generals, of vicars and colonial magistrates, had so filled the church that the family in this century took to recording its deaths in a book; they keep this in a locked glass case. ‘’Straordinary how few people know their eight great-grandparents,’ brooded the 14th baronet. He would not have been able to avoid his had he tried. At home they stare down at him from the walls, faces flicking back into lace and shadow. In church, when his attention wanders, there they are in marble.

‘They used to bury us under the organ,’ said Sir Hereward Wake of Courteenhall. ‘When that filled up we went into a big hole in the churchyard. I think there’s a dozen of us in that, the last of them my great-aunt Lucy. But this is a parish church, we accentuate that strongly. We’ve only been here 350 years –
this time
.’

This year, for the first time in the history of local government, a county council presented one of its poll-tax payers with his family history. Not a pamphlet. The Wakes of Northamptonshire by Professor Peter Gordon (Northants County Council, £19.50) is the size of a family Bible and a thing of beauty. Yet it is still nothing more nor less than an account of a single family. Only there happen to be 29 generations of this family, without break or illegitimacy, or even descent in the female line. The one surname is carried like a horse’s skull through the centuries, tweeds giving way to brocade to slashed velvet to ironmongery. ‘We started in Normandy. . .’ writes Sir Hereward in his preface, like a man with a bus timetable.

An old family. . . There is of course no such thing, for all families are old, otherwise none of us would be here, and, as the 14th Earl of Home pointed out in his one recorded joke, even Harold Wilson had to be the 14th Mr Wilson. But it mattered. . . God, how it mattered once. ‘What is an old family but ancient money?’ sniffed Lord Burghley, Elizabeth I’s minister, but then, as a first generation grandee, he would have had trouble with his full complement of great grandparents. Sir John Wynn of Gwydir, sixteenth-century Welsh squire and rogue, would have had no trouble with his, or with anyone else’s. ‘A great temporal blessing it is, and a great heart’s ease to a man, to find himself well descended,’ purred Sir John, quietly grafting a few more princes on to his family tree.

What lies they told, those hard-faced men who had done well out of monasteries or sheep or army catering, and if they lacked the imagination, the quick-witted genealogist could accommodate them. But what if there were a family with no need to lie, a family with the generations stitched into the centuries and not a banker or a brewer in sight, just the unbroken line going back to the Norman knight? David Williamson of Debrett’s says that at most there are only six families in our old class-conscious England. What is it like to belong to one and never have had anything to prove? ‘Nothing special about us,’ said Sir Hereward Wake. ‘It’s just that we have records.’

Alas, they have felt obliged to go back even beyond these. We were standing in the churchyard at Courteenhall looking at the graves of his grandfather Sir Herewald, the 12th baronet, and of his aunt Thurfride. Up until then the Wakes had names like Charles or Hugh or Baldwin. ‘Then the family read Charles Kingsley,’ said Sir Hereward.

The first known Wake is Geoffrey Wac, an eleventh-century Norman knight, who must be spinning like a top in his unknown grave at the news that his descendants now claim as an ancestor someone he would have remembered as a Saxon terrorist. But then Sir Geoffrey had not read Charles Kingsley’s novel
Hereward the Wake.

The claim is not entirely batty, for Geoffrey did marry an heiress of Bourne in Lincolnshire, and an historical Hereward is known to have held land in Bourne. But a nineteenth-century professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford thought it was, and said as much in a letter to Sir Herewald. ‘The whole of this story is highly suspicious. . .’. Undeterred, Sir Herewald went on christening his children with names he had found in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, and wrote back to say that the Wakes all had distinct Saxon features: ‘light coloured hair and eyes, and
nez retrousse
.’ The present baronet, with light-coloured hair and eyes and
nez retrousse
, was nicknamed Toby until he inherited, when he became Sir Hereward, like his own father. They are a dogged family. This is a story about hanging on.

The Wakes appeared in Northamptonshire in 1265, when they inherited Blisworth just down the road from Courteenhall. From here they rode out to fight the Welsh and the Scots, died in French sieges and on Crusades: most of them died young. But the carts creaked up Watling Street bringing new heiresses and they hung on until Bosworth when they fought on the wrong side. The Wakes, as usual, were for their King. Sir Hereward has just had the tomb restored in Blisworth Church of Sir Roger, the man who made that mistake. ‘A man shouldn’t let the tomb of his great-great-great. . . whatever it is. . . grandfather look a disgrace,’ he said.

It is not the oldest Wake tombstone. That turned up in Stamford in 1969 when a house was being demolished, and had been used at some time for building material. This was to a Lady Wake who died in 1380 in the heady days when, his grandmother a Wake, cousin Richard was King of England. The relationship was not close enough for him to drag the family down with him at his fall. ‘Stamford were kind enough to give me a copy of the stone, only I didn’t know what to do with it. . .’. Not surprising, considering how the family has filled Courteenhall Church. ‘In the end I put it in the belfry.’

After Bosworth, the family sold up and went walkabout. There was a fortunate marriage which set them up in Somerset and allowed them to buy one of James I’s new-fangled baronetcies. But oh calamity, as the actor Robertson Hare used to say, there were the Civil Wars: the Wakes rode out to fight for their King and lost the lot in one of Cromwell’s gaols.

William Wake, a later Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote movingly to his son, ‘Tho’ it has pleased God to reduce us to a very moderate Fortune yet somewhat there will occur . . . to inspire us with a desire of reviving us again the honour of a name that once was so great in the annals of our country. . .’. And the ‘somewhat’ did indeed turn up. His name was Sam Jones. Today he kneels in alabaster in Courteenhall Church, one of only three tombs not to a Wake. Sir Hereward has also had this tomb restored, but then, as I suggested, he has a lot to be grateful to Jones for. ‘Indeed,’ said Sir Hereward with feeling.

Sam Jones was a London merchant, and a rich one. ‘The trouble with us Wakes is that we never had money, we were never in commerce,’ grumbled Sir Hereward. During the Civil Wars, Sam was a Parliamentarian, and picked up Courteenhall at a bargain price. The King came into his own again, and Sam turned Royalist; unlike the Wakes, he knew the right side. He was a landed gentleman now and interested in other men’s family trees, even those of ruined baronets. His great-niece married the second baronet’s son, and inching its way slowly across the family, Courteenhall came to the sixth baronet who promptly changed his name to Wake-Jones. But the seventh had no such scruples, so the name Jones was sent spinning away, like a piece of discarded space technology.

No wars now, these were years when the Park was landscaped and the house built which now stands there. No travels either. Richard Wake, who as the second son is vicar of Courteenhall, comes running across the Park to assure his brother Sir William, on his death-bed, that he is going to Heaven. ‘I don’t want to go to Heaven,’ said old Sir William. ‘Courteenhall’s good enough for me.’ The railway came, cutting through their estate, and they objected to that, just as they would object to the motorcar which would bring the
M
1 through the estate. But what interrupted the idyll was the fertility of the family. The 10th baronet had twelve children, so the Wakes were off to the wars again.