Time to Be in Earnest (46 page)

And then came the morning when Mrs. Price-Watts rushed into my part of the house to announce with a mixture of excitement and awe
that the invasion of Europe had started. Her eldest son was serving in the RAMC with the airborne forces, so that it was a time of anxiety as well as of huge relief and of expectation. And as the invading armies advanced, so the launch sites of the V-
1
s and V
-2S
were overrun and this most disagreeable of bombardments gradually ceased. The children have asked me why I didn’t leave Essex and sometimes I wonder myself. But it wouldn’t have been easy. Accommodation in safe areas was difficult to find. But I think the main reason was that after four years of war, those of us living in or near London had got used to staying put.

Over twenty years later, when Clare and her husband were in Huntsville, Alabama, I met and walked in the woods with Germans who had been sending off the V-
1
rockets and who had been recruited by the Americans at the end of the war. Even more ironic was to see a V
-2
on display at the local museum, and bearing the label: “The first intercontinental rocket of the free world.” British visitors at least managed to get the wording changed.

Today I gave the address at the Annual General Meeting of the Jane Austen Society, which was held, as it usually is, in the grounds of Chawton House. I was met at Alton station by Louise Ross and her husband Charles, who kindly drove me to the venue. I had previously met Louise when I spoke at Dartington and it was she who found me my treasured first edition of
Emma
.

The Jane Austen Society, which was founded in 1940 by Dorothy Darnell, then with the prime object of preserving Chawton Cottage, is one of the liveliest of literary societies. The grounds of nearby Chawton House are an appropriate place for the Annual General Meeting since the house was the property of Edward Austen, who was adopted by his wealthy kinsmen, the Knights, and who inherited Chawton with other properties in 1812. Until recently it was still owned by a member of the family but had fallen into disrepair and there was considerable anxiety, locally and among Austen devotees, about its future. At one time it was thought the grounds might become a golf course. The house has now been bought by a wealthy American lady who is restoring it and proposes
to use it to house her library of the books of pre-Austen female novelists. It will thus become a study and conference centre and I hope will occasionally also be opened to the general public.

Accompanied by the architect working on the restoration, I was able to see round the house before I gave my talk. Like most Elizabethan manors it strikes one as very dark, with low ceilings, leaded windows and wood-lined walls. The date, 1588, on one of the immense fireplaces identifies the age of the original building. The work of restoration is proving fascinating since the panellings are of different dates and some of the most recent work, once removed, reveals original sixteenth-century wallpaper. Even when restored the house will still be dark and it is hard to imagine these tortuous corridors echoing to the laughter of Jane Austen’s numerous nephews and nieces, including the children of Edward Knight, whose wife Mary died at his main property, Godmersham, after giving birth to their eleventh child. I wonder if Jane Austen, hearing the news, remembered the tart sentence in a letter she wrote to her niece Fanny after hearing that a neighbour had given birth to her eighteenth child: “I would recommend to her and Mr. Dee the simple regimen of separate rooms.”

Mary wasn’t the only one of Jane Austen’s sisters-in-law to die in childbirth and I have no doubt that it was her fear of—indeed repulsion at—the idea of possible yearly pregnancies and the risk of early death which played a part in her refusal of the proposal of Harris Bigg-Wither, which she at first accepted and then rejected next day. I don’t think she would have been deterred by the lack of romantic love. If the match were sensible and advantageous and she felt a genuine liking and respect, that would probably have been enough. Perhaps the liking and respect were not sufficiently strong or, more likely, she knew the marriage would be fatal to her art. She seldom wrote or spoke of pregnant women without sympathy, and sometimes a note of disgust. Her books were her children and they were sufficient.

We were fortunate in the weather. A very large marquee had been erected to accommodate about 700 people, some of them from the North American society. I am told the Society always has a sunny summer day for its AGM, but this year hovering dark clouds made it look as if the record was to be broken. There was, in fact, a brief shower at the beginning of my speech, but it was no more than a slight inconvenience. The talk—included here as the Appendix (
this page
)—was well received, largely, I think, because this audience could catch all the allusions and no doubt could themselves add to the number of clues I had discovered.

After the talk I had a very busy signing session and then went with Louise to join the congregation for Evensong at St. Nicholas, Chawton. It was so crowded that we had to stand. The service, largely traditional Prayer Book, included part of a prayer composed by Jane Austen and the hymn “Oh, for a Closer Walk with God” by her favourite poet, Cowper. Afterwards we visited the two restored gravestones of Jane Austen’s mother and her sister Cassandra. I know we should be grateful to Cassandra, who did much while they lived together with their mother at Chawton Cottage to ensure her sister’s privacy, to relieve her of some household duties and to give her time for writing, but it is hard to be sympathetic to someone who obviously settled into somewhat forbidding spinsterhood at an early age and who destroyed so many of her sister’s letters. I suppose she would argue that the eyes of posterity had no right to see them, but it is still a regret. It’s possible that some of them dealt with matters of family money, nearly always controversial, but on which a family like the Austens would particularly wish to be reticent. It was fortunate for Jane Austen that her brother Edward was given away for adoption and subsequently became rich, since it enabled him to provide a home at Chawton Cottage for his sisters and mother, but I suspect he could have provided one earlier and endowed it more generously.

I first read Jane Austen when I was eight or nine years old and attended the Sunday school attached to Ludford church. There was a small cupboard in the hall with a number of books which we children could borrow. Some, like
The Wide, Wide World, A Peep Behind the Scenes
and
Jessica’s First Prayer
were of depressing piety, but I also discovered there
Little Women
and
Pride and Prejudice
. It seems curious now that the latter should appeal to a child so young, but I was hungry for books and this was one I could both read and to an extent understand, although the irony must have eluded me. Jane Austen has remained my favourite author.

It seems extraordinary, if indeed it is true, that she was once seen as a gently born, pure-minded spinster, dutiful daughter, compliant sister, affectionate aunt. We don’t need the letters to show us a different Jane. There is passion in the novels, even if it is too subtle to be recognized by Charlotte Brontë. And there was passion, too, in her life, if only the passion of what the critic D.W. Harding described as “regulated hatred.” To me it is far more like controlled resentment. We have to resist the temptation to foist on to her a twentieth-century sensibility; she was hardly deprived by domesticity of a university education or a profession, but she must have known that, however brilliant or successful her brothers,
it was she who had genius. And yet, until she could earn from her novels, she was totally without power to control her own life. If her father decided to move to Bath, then Jane moved, neither consulted nor considered. Every penny she had to spend came from her father or a brother. Even Cassandra had the income from the £1,000 left to her by her fiancé. Jane had nothing. No wonder she said, once the money started coming in, that it was the pewter as well as the fame which she relished.

We drove past the cottage on our way to Alton Station. It looked spruce, as if it had been recently repointed, and the little village was full of cars. When I first visited Chawton there was a great quietness about the place and it was possible to believe that it looked much as it had in Jane Austen’s time. With the bypass the road is certainly quiet and outwardly the changes are small, but I suspect that the television series have led to a large increase in visitors (there were nearly 50,000 last year) so that the cottage will begin to acquire that carefully preserved look of all monuments.

Today to Cambridge Crematorium for the funeral of Doris. I arrived much too early, as I usually do, and sat quietly in the garden. Between the ordered rose beds and tended grass was scrubland red with poppies, and beyond it I could see women working in a field, bending between rows of unidentifiable crops. I wondered how much they were paid for such back-breaking work and who got most of the profit, the grower or the supermarket.

I arrived from the station by taxi. Drawing up at the crematorium, the taxi driver said, “I believe in God, but all the rest is crap. If God did send His son to earth, assuming He had a son, I don’t see why we think He came as a human. It’s just our vanity. It’s making ourselves too important to think God would bother to make His son look like us. He’d be much more likely to make Him an eagle.” I felt unable to argue this interesting theological point.

As Doris was an unbeliever, the service—if that is the appropriate word—was humanist. It was ably and sensitively conducted by a woman humanist who had obviously taken considerable trouble to make it appropriate to Doris’s life and interests and who had visited Doris to discuss
with her what she would like. All Doris’s friends took part, either with a reading or a personal reminiscence. I have been to other non-religious funerals which have been less successful. All ceremonies, even the simplest, need preparation. We may believe that we go into the darkness like animals but we still have a human need to celebrate with love and dignity this final rite of passage.

My mother’s ashes are buried somewhere in this crematorium garden, although “ashes” has always seemed a ridiculously anodyne word for what is essentially the packaged grit of crushed bones. She died in Chesterton Hospital after an old age made unhappy by Parkinson’s disease and unrelievable mental anguish. That final misery left me wondering, as it still does, why those who live good lives relying on the support and comfort of their religious faith should be denied its solace at the end. My father, who was then living in a small and damp flat close to Poole Harbour, arrived for the cremation wearing his boating clothes, not from any lack of respect but because I don’t think it occurred to him that it would be appropriate to change. After the service—although that is too dignified a word for the cold impersonalities of this preliminary to hygienic disposal—he walked round the garden surveying the shrubs with a gardener’s eye, before finally saying, “This one looks healthy,” and deciding that the ashes should be sprinkled beneath it. I have no hope of identifying it now.

His own death was more merciful. He had been admitted to a residential home overlooking Oulton Broad, where he settled very happily and might have enjoyed a peaceful decade or two if he hadn’t taken it upon himself to scythe the lawn. He was found dead among the tall grass and wild flowers on a warm June afternoon. The doctor said that he had suffered a major heart attack and had almost certainly died instantly and without pain. Perhaps I, who am like him in so many ways, will be equally fortunate.