An Audience with an Elephant (28 page)

At the other end of the spectrum the Thomas Beddoes Society, then with a membership of three, also heeded the call. This had been formed by John Lovell Beddoes, social worker (‘somebody has to be’), who had just heard about a kinsman his family had tended to keep secret. ‘When he died they brought pressure on his executor not to publish his writings, and I thought, “Hey, I need to find out about this guy.” I found he was a Romantic poet who was homosexual and committed suicide at 42. I thought, “Wow, let’s have a society.” Mr Beddoes, a bearded chap wearing a T-shirt with a portrait of his ancestor, another bearded chap, on the front, and on the back a line of his verse (‘If there were dreams to sell, what would you buy?’) sketched in the aims of his society. ‘If we can give him a boot and get him better known, so much the better.’

He is doing himself an injustice, for his newsletter attracts contributors like Patrick Leigh Fermor, who revealed he had discovered Beddoes in a cave. Amazing characters surface in its pages, such as the poet’s father, who invented laughing gas and tried it out on Coleridge, whom he first locked in a box made for him by the scientist Humphrey Davy. As a result he was later put in charge of Coleridge’s morphine intake.

‘Thomas Lovell Beddoes wasn’t on drugs himself,’ said his kinsman. ‘Mind you, he was on just about everything else.’ Membership was now fifty, ten of whom lived overseas, he said, another ten were members of the family, five his own friends, and the rest a hardcore of academics. ‘Literary societies have a problem with the academic lot and those who come along for a bit of a laugh,’ he added.

Thus while the Robert Louis Stevenson Club announces, ‘Seeking Mr Hyde – studies in Robert Louis Stevenson, Symbolism, Myth, and the Pre-modern’, a member of the Mary Webb Society said that her membership was a nice way of seeing Shropshire. They had had problems with members getting lost on tours of Shropshire, said a society official.

You get a glimpse of the vast purring expertise of the Jane Austen Society from the first sentence of its newsletter. ‘The committee has appointed a membership secretary on a part-time basis to oversee the increasingly technical development and maintenance of the database, and to avail the Society of the benefits of Internet entries on the World Wide Web...’. But as I read on, I found something wonderful. The Oxford branch was describing its June programme. ‘An expedition, possibly to Bath.’

I kept picking up leaflets and journals. I read of the George Borrow Society, the Barbara Pym Society, the Fanny Burney Society (formed in New Orleans, in a French restaurant), the Edith Nesbit Society, the Leo Walmsley Society... the Leo Walmsley Society? A novelist of the 1930s, praised as few have been. ‘A perfect yarn spinner,’ wrote Rebecca West. ‘I can only say I laid down this book with respectful wonder,’ so Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch said. ‘A magnificent piece of work,’ H.G. Wells. But the world had forgotten Leo Walmsley when his society was formed. Six of the books are back in print now, and they have 200 members reverently visiting every house lived in by the author during his three marriages. ‘We all turned up at his house in St John’s Wood and the lady had a terrible shock,’ said Fred Lane, the secretary. ‘There were 30 of us and she’d never heard of Leo Walmsley, but she showed us round. The only thing is, the more successful a society becomes, the more expensive it is to buy his books. The second-hand trade has heard of Leo Walmsley now.’

‘You see these little stalls laid out at our meetings,’ said Gabriel Woolf, the broadcaster who is the president of the Alliance. ‘You pick up books by people you’ve never heard of, like Leo Walmsley, and suddenly you’re hooked.’ A reading by Mr Woolf is the high point of many literary society meetings, and this year, with the actress Rosamund Shanks, he was doing a reading of Mary Webb, all coffins and country passion. ‘What be the farm to me?’ intoned Mr Woolf, tall and urbane, in his best Shropshire. Later he told me, ‘If you thought that was over the top, you should have seen what we cut out.’ He has also been Dickens, Tennyson, Auden, Saki and Kipling, but for all his gifts there are some writers he will not touch.

‘This actor came up to me, a very pale, gentle type, announced he was going to do a one-man show on William Cowper. I tried to be as encouraging as I could but I remember thinking, “Who the hell wants to see Cowper?” I thought no more about it till one morning I opened
The Times
and read that
The Life and Work of William Cowper
had opened in Carlisle. Not a ticket had been sold, but the usherettes, the report said, had heard him through.’

Other men’s enthusiasms always come up when members meet. ‘If you really want to meet crackpots, join a literary society,’ said the Reverend John Waddington-Feather, representing the Brontës. ‘The only reason the council sent me was for fear of some of our weirdos coming.’

‘I met this woman, lots of teeth and ambition, banging on about Shelley,’ said John Lovell Beddoes. ‘She runs something called the Shelley International and they meet once a year under his portrait in the National Portrait Gallery. But I lost interest when she told me Thomas Lovell Beddoes had been a woman.’ They told me about the Sherlock Holmes Fellowship, which meets to hear lectures on Victorian headgear, and of one lady, a devotee of nature poetry, who so terrified local farmers they did not dare take down a hedge in case a poet had once paused by it.

On the floor speakers came and went, describing their year in literature. The George Eliot Fellowship announced a George Eliot day culminating in a recital on her old piano, also a walk which would take in a school ‘once attended for a short time by her brother Isaac’.

An American lady, the founder of the Dymock Poets Society, described a recent collision between literature and Ledbury District Council. Dymock is a small village just outside the town, where in the years before the Great War, Robert Frost and Edward Thomas lived and their friends came to see them. When Ledbury acquired a new housing estate, the council decided to name its streets after the poets. The only thing was, there were seven streets but only six poets, until someone remembered one of them had had a girlfriend called Eleanor Farjeon, also a writer. The Council solemnly debated this and came to the conclusion it was too difficult a name to spell, at which point a television news crew descended on Ledbury with ‘Farjeon’ written on large placards. They invited passers-by to pronounce it. The impasse ended when a councillor remembered that W.H. Auden had got married in Ledbury.

He did not know that Auden was a homosexual, and that bride and groom, their marriage having been to obtain a British passport for her, parted later that day. When the next estate was built, the Council, said the American lady, called all the streets after cider apples.

Peter Ahearne, a member of the Thomas Hardy Society and a coach driver, offered his transport services. Kenneth Oultram, editor of the Alliance’s fanzine, informed the meeting that after years of trying to get them interested in literature, the Royal Mail had finally succumbed. Stamps were appearing which would feature Dracula, Frankenstein and the Hound of the Baskervilles.

Delegates were beginning to steal away. Fanny Burney went, in the shape of Lucy Magruder, a schoolteacher representing the Burney Society of America, who was over for a month’s holiday, in which time she would attend a Mrs Gaskell day in Manchester, visit every parish church associated with Jane Austen, then go on a German tour ‘in the footsteps of Mrs Gaskell’. ‘Oh dear, perhaps I shouldn’t be telling you all this,’ said Mrs Magruder. ‘You’re laughing already.’

The faces looked down from where their partisans had put the photographs, John Buchan’s cleverest-boy-in-the-school face, Hardy, whom his wife said looked like Dr Crippen, and only one face was missing, a plump, balding businessman’s face with a beard. ‘I’ve often thought that strange, but there it is,’ said Kathleen Adams. William Shakespeare alone has no society.

Secret Garden, Private Grief

N THE MIDDLE OF
England there is a secret garden. You can pass and not know it is there, the wall around it is so high, the wrought-iron gate in the arch so beautifully made as to be forbidding. When people move to the village of Farthingstone, near Daventry, they assume that whatever lies beyond that gate must belong to someone. Only the gate is never locked.

But even before I opened it, I had seen something else. About 100 yards away there was a seat set so deep into a wall this formed a cave about it. Cut into the seat was, ‘Stranger. Whate’er thy land, or creed or race, rest awhile. There is virtue in the place.’ It was a creepy sensation, for this was a tiny village with one church, one pub and one small shop, set on a ridge with no main roads near. Like most English villages in the year 2000, none of its population of some 150 was about in the day. What was so special about this place that some distant, and mysterious, agency should direct attention to it? I opened the gate.

A passageway of tall box hedges led to lawns, and beyond the lawns there was on one side a beautiful ironstone building with columns. No doors. This was open to the weather like a shrine, and on the other side of the lawns there were more columns in the same stone, forming a cloistered walkway around a courtyard. The courtyard was also open, this time to the sky. Everything was so quiet, the craft so perfect, that the questions mounted. What was the place? Who had had it built?

There was a metal plate on a bench in the shrine-like building: ‘In memory of my daughter Jane, 1972, and my husband Arthur, 1978, who found happiness here.’ But behind this, in the building itself, was an inscription cut into a stone niche like some memorial to the Roman dead. The garden, this read, was given to the village by Philip and Georgette Agnew in memory of their daughter Joy, who was just 22 when she died in 1921. The garden was called Joymead. Not the Agnew Garden or Joy’s Garden, but that much older word, Joymead.

In the cloisters there was another inscription in another niche, added by the Agnews in memory of their son Ewen, and those others ‘who lost their lives in the Great War or died from its consequences’. That last phrase must have been significant, for Ewen, according to the date, died in 1930. There was one other thing, a sundial, there in memory of a grandson, Joy’s son, Michael Evans, killed in World War II. All that beauty was becoming overlain by sadness. And it didn’t end there.

In Farthingstone church the three lovely stained-glass windows on the south side, commissioned from William Morris’s old firm, are in memory of the three dead Agnew children, the third being a girl who had died in infancy. The private grief of one family rolls round and round the village, and at every turn there is this perfect taste.

Who, and what, were they? Artistic, certainly, the quality of these memorials showed that. But where had they lived? The cost suggested it had to be the Big House. However, this was yet another shock as I started to piece the story together, for though the stables had survived, themselves as grand and as big as any manor house, there was no manor house.

But there was once. Called Littlecourt, it had been bought, and greatly altered, by the Agnews in 1899. When the last of them, old Mrs Agnew, died in 1957, the village was startled to learn that the House, around which their own lives had turned, was to be pulled down. This, it was said, was one of the provisions of her late husband’s will, that on her death nobody else might go through the unhappiness the family had known there. And the extraordinary thing is, the House was then demolished, an Irish team moving into the village so that in the end not a stone remained.

Such things happen in history. Richard II tore down the palace of Sheen after the death of his first wife, but you do not encounter this extravagance of grief among late-20th century ratepayers. You can just imagine the consternation in the local council offices, an official being confronted by the fact that not only was the House unoccupied, it no longer existed.

I learnt all this from Peter and Sue Stanton, a young couple who moved to Farthingstone ten years ago, and as part of the village’s Millennium History researched and wrote an account of the family. ‘When we first came I was astonished to find anyone could go into Joymead at any time,’ said Peter, a sales rep. ‘I had thought it a private place, I didn’t know then that it was the village’s big secret. But when we started to write about the family we found people knew so little about them. We knocked on every door and managed to get just one picture of Joy, not even one of her wedding, yet all this was just two generations ago.’

The Agnews, they found out, had been part of the family firm which, in the nineteenth century, starting in a small shop selling clocks in Manchester, moved into the fine art business to the point where they negotiated purchases for the National Gallery. It then diverted into print, the Philip Agnew of Farthingstone, that man of grief, being, of all things, the proprietor of the humorous magazine
Punch.
The Stantons wrote to the firm, still in business in Bond Street, and an elderly nephew replied.

He remembered Philip, he wrote, as an extremely serious man, fond of music and so teetotal he would not allow any alcohol advertising in his magazines, which was strange, for his wife was from a family in the wine business in Egypt. As a small boy, the thing that had most impressed him was her fear of thunder, at the slightest approach of which all curtains had to be drawn and the lights put out, ‘a rather unnerving experience for a young visitor,’ he added dryly.