We had such a nice little visitor yesterday, Bill and I. I answered a ring at the doorbell at ten o’clock, and there she was; a small lady wearing a camel coat, and followed in grave procession by an elderly man in a flat cap, who carried a large basket. I call her a nice little visitor because there’s really no other way of describing her. She’s so very small and slight, for a start. As far, Bill says, from being a dowager as it’s possible to be (dowagers requiring a certain bulk, it seems, in order to qualify for the status: they must weigh at least thirteen stone, and come accompanied with a husband, living, or at least of distant memory). This lady has not, nor ever has had, a husband. Her name is Miss Frances Fanshawe (Bill thinks it’s almost certainly spelt Featherstonehaugh), and I haven't yet found it possible to think of her without the preliminary ‘Miss’, for she is in every respect what I would call the perfect embodiment of the English maiden lady.
She was actually Bill’s visitor, not mine. To Bill must go the credit of having collected her, since she is one of his new dog-walking friends. She’s the one he always refers to by her dog’s name rather than her own – he calls her ‘Luca’s lady’, on account of the the way her big hybrid dog has, of sending her careering off across the common clinging desperately to his leash. Her dog is called Luca, after the town of that name (with the double c), in Tuscany. She found him sitting deslolate on the wall there, and brought him home. He has only very recently been released from quarantine confinement, apparently, and is not yet house-trained enough to be let free from his leash. Bill has been required to step in to give her ballast on several occasions, during one of Luca’s more headlong plunges across the common; and it has been all in the course of these little rescue missions of his , that their friendship has developed.
There she was on our doorstep yesterday, anyway, and it wasn’t more than five minutes flat, before I’d learnt most of what there is to know about her. She lives in the big Queen Anne house at the village end of high street; it’s called the manor house, and has the appearance of being somewhat down on its heels these days, for all its natural grandeur. Miss Fanshawe owns it outright, having inherited it from her late father; and lives alone there, save for an elderly housekeeper who is usually more than halfway tipsy, Bill says, at eleven o’clock in the morning (Bill has been to the house already, apparently; which was another little shock for me); and the still more elderly Mr Jessop, who accompanied her yesterday, and whom she introduced to us as the very good friend who looks after everything at the manor house for her.
Our own first duty as their hosts seemed to be to find somewhere for Mr Jessop to put down his basket - which contained, as Miss Fanshawe took some moments to explain to us, some “nice little fresh things” from the manor house garden. We invited them into my sitting room, and cleared some table space, then watched in wonder while the old man removed layers of coloured tissue paper to reveal lettuces, and hot-house strawberries; pale young rhubarb, and fine, fat, un-English-looking tomatoes. Miss Fanshawe's conduct towards Mr Jessop is of the utmost gentle courtesy – it seemed a nice quality in her, like all her others. She inherited him from her father too, apparently, almost as a sacred trust – so that it has become one of the more solemn pre-occupations of her life these days, to continue finding meaningful things for him to do…
All this information, and much more in a similar vein, tumbled from Miss Fanshawe’s lips in the first five minutes. She seems to have the gift, not uncommon in English maiden ladies, of perfect recall; she also has a command of the stream-of-consciouness narrative that Virginia Woolf might not have been ashamed to call her own. She saw Mr Jessop safely away with his empty basket, and then she consented to stay and have a cup of coffee with us. She had always wanted to see the interior of one of the gatehouses, she said. As a little girl, playing alone in the manor house garden, the walls of which actually abut those of the Macauley house at a certain point….. she had thought the little gatehouses quite the perfect manifestation of what Hansel and Gretel’s gingerbread cottage ought to be. Though of course they had passed out of Macauley hands years ago, Sir Jack having thought it prudent to sell them off… and it had somehow never been possible for her to become acquainted with any of the newer inhabitants who had come and gone.
She professed herself charmed with all that we have done here, which was just the way she might have done it herself, she said. She especially likes our attic, which is in process of being set up as a common sitting room, with one end partitioned off as a study for Bill. “So original” she said; “to be just across the footpath from one another.” “And so companionable too, to be connected at the roof like that.” She had never supposed there could have been a room up there, all those years ago when she had been cycling along the footpath as a girl. And then of course the great thing was, that we each had our particular private ‘side’ to retreat to, whenever we wished to be alone for a while…..
In such a manner as this did she chatter on for an hour, almost without pause for breath. It’s for just that quality of hers Bill likes her, he later told me. For the fact that when you’re with her you haven’t the smallest need to interject, or even to concentrate very much. You just go let it all wash over you, swimming gently with the current, until finally it drifts to its natural end, to evaporate in the upper air. It’s curiously restful, Bill says.
I make a pause at this point; being mindful, always, of the over-long blog, the too-discursive narrative. I haven’t even got as far as Theodora yet, however; which was after all the promised purpose of this page. So I’ll make a short break, and return almost at once, on a fresh page…
Saturday, 7 April 2007
Tuesday, 3 April 2007
Theodora's Story, Part One
3 April 2007
I remember it as a story that unfolded in my childhood, so that’s the way I’ll tell it. I shall probably be embarrassed by its lyricism , tomorrow. I’m embarrassed by it in advance indeed: I’m almost certain to go over the top in a Barbara Cartland sort of way to some extent. But then you see, it was a Barbara Cartland sort of world we lived in then, we children of the Forties and Fifties. It was also a rather grey and unromantic world in many ways; the war had just ended, and the great romance of the century had involved a king who gave up his throne for a woman whom nobody very much liked. Looking back on it now, I can see that the course of history might have been very different, had Mrs Simpson been prettier. The great British public has a forgiving heart, and Wallis might have lived to become queen after all, if only she’d looked just a little bit more like Theodora……
That is to jump the gun though, before I’ve even started. To begin at the beginning: it was 1948, and I was nine years old and in love with princesses. But I lived in New Zealand then, and since we had no princesses of our own, I was obliged to look for them in story books; or in the picture magazines that came from England – or sometimes on the newsreels at the little local cinema, which we called the picture theatre, and which was the only living visual record we had, in those long ago pre-television days.
There weren’t many princesses around just then, I seem to recall. Princess Elizabeth had married the year before, it’s true; bringing a splash of colour and romance into those drab, immediate post-war days. But the real princesses were not to come until several years later; when I was seventeen, and under the spell, successively, of Soraya of Persia, Grace Kelly of Monaco and Jimmy Goldsmith’s Isabella Patino. Isabella wasn’t a princess at all, of course, any more than Theodora had been, six years earlier… But it must have seemed to me that in both their stories were more of the elements of fairy tale to be found, than in those of many a real princess who came later.
What was it about Theodora, I wonder, that made her shimmer so, for me, on the cinema screens of my ninth year? ( I have to remind myself, here, that the girl whom I knew as Theodora then, is still alive today, in the person of the old lady at the end of the footpath about whom my window cleaner was so very disparaging the other day. Whichever way one looks at it, there’s a transition that will have to be made,here, and it’s not going to be a simple, or a comfortable one. I’m going to have to make it any day now, for all that: the word among the shop-keepers and the dog-walkers being, that Lady Macauley and her daughter always return from Italy some time in early April…)
To return to 1948 though, and the way I remember it - how into the gloom of those early post-war years, banishing the spectre of Mrs Simpson, and eclipsing even the romance of the married Princess Elizabeth, came the Lady Theodora Thane, who seemed to combine in her one young person, all the luminous blonde beauty of Grace Kelly, with the high romance of Soraya of Persia and the enchantment of Jimmy Goldsmith’s forbidden Isabella. Theodora’s was a forbidden love too, and at first I must have been rather puzzled by it. There she was, young, beautiful, an earl’s daughter; she seemed to have had all the good fairy's best gifts bestowed upon her – she danced, and sparkled for an hour; and then she took it into her head one day, to throw it all away and marry Jack Macauley; a Yorkshireman twice her age, who had made his fortune from the manufacture of boots, and shoes, and saucepans, and of whom her family passionately disapproved.
Remembering it now, I wonder how it was I didn’t find something vaguely disappointing about Theodora’s choice of lover. Jack Macauley was taller than Prince Rainier, it’s true, and more rugged-looking than the Shah – but in all other respects he must have seemed a curious choice, for a young girl who might have married anyone. He was already married, besides. He had been married young, to his childhood sweetheart in the north; he was the father of several adolescent children, and was obliged to go through all the public spectacle of an acrimonious divorce, before he could marry Theodora. None of these things seemed to count against him in the press and public estimation of the day, however. And nor, it would seem, in mine. In my recollected nine-year-old self, I can find nothing to suggest that I found him wanting in any way. I daresay his wealth had much to do with it. People will forgive almost anything in a man, it seems, if only he has millions enough; and Jack Macauley’s millions were almost legendary in scale by then….
I think it’s probably best if I break off at this point, though. A thousand words is more than enough for any blog, and there’s so much more to tell. I’d like to be able to tell it all, if I can, before the old lady returns who, astonishingly, is still Theodora. Bill has just come in from his vegetable garden, besides. He’s digging a plot in which to grow cabbages, out there in his tiny back garden. I see it as an excellent development on the whole. He must have had too much time on his hands, before; else why would he have preoccupied himself so, with the condition of my blog? But he’ll want his coffee now (I’m trying to encourage him to go to Starbucks for it). So I’ll put this aside for today, and come back again tomorrow, or just as soon as I have marshalled the rest of the remembered facts ….
I remember it as a story that unfolded in my childhood, so that’s the way I’ll tell it. I shall probably be embarrassed by its lyricism , tomorrow. I’m embarrassed by it in advance indeed: I’m almost certain to go over the top in a Barbara Cartland sort of way to some extent. But then you see, it was a Barbara Cartland sort of world we lived in then, we children of the Forties and Fifties. It was also a rather grey and unromantic world in many ways; the war had just ended, and the great romance of the century had involved a king who gave up his throne for a woman whom nobody very much liked. Looking back on it now, I can see that the course of history might have been very different, had Mrs Simpson been prettier. The great British public has a forgiving heart, and Wallis might have lived to become queen after all, if only she’d looked just a little bit more like Theodora……
That is to jump the gun though, before I’ve even started. To begin at the beginning: it was 1948, and I was nine years old and in love with princesses. But I lived in New Zealand then, and since we had no princesses of our own, I was obliged to look for them in story books; or in the picture magazines that came from England – or sometimes on the newsreels at the little local cinema, which we called the picture theatre, and which was the only living visual record we had, in those long ago pre-television days.
There weren’t many princesses around just then, I seem to recall. Princess Elizabeth had married the year before, it’s true; bringing a splash of colour and romance into those drab, immediate post-war days. But the real princesses were not to come until several years later; when I was seventeen, and under the spell, successively, of Soraya of Persia, Grace Kelly of Monaco and Jimmy Goldsmith’s Isabella Patino. Isabella wasn’t a princess at all, of course, any more than Theodora had been, six years earlier… But it must have seemed to me that in both their stories were more of the elements of fairy tale to be found, than in those of many a real princess who came later.
What was it about Theodora, I wonder, that made her shimmer so, for me, on the cinema screens of my ninth year? ( I have to remind myself, here, that the girl whom I knew as Theodora then, is still alive today, in the person of the old lady at the end of the footpath about whom my window cleaner was so very disparaging the other day. Whichever way one looks at it, there’s a transition that will have to be made,here, and it’s not going to be a simple, or a comfortable one. I’m going to have to make it any day now, for all that: the word among the shop-keepers and the dog-walkers being, that Lady Macauley and her daughter always return from Italy some time in early April…)
To return to 1948 though, and the way I remember it - how into the gloom of those early post-war years, banishing the spectre of Mrs Simpson, and eclipsing even the romance of the married Princess Elizabeth, came the Lady Theodora Thane, who seemed to combine in her one young person, all the luminous blonde beauty of Grace Kelly, with the high romance of Soraya of Persia and the enchantment of Jimmy Goldsmith’s forbidden Isabella. Theodora’s was a forbidden love too, and at first I must have been rather puzzled by it. There she was, young, beautiful, an earl’s daughter; she seemed to have had all the good fairy's best gifts bestowed upon her – she danced, and sparkled for an hour; and then she took it into her head one day, to throw it all away and marry Jack Macauley; a Yorkshireman twice her age, who had made his fortune from the manufacture of boots, and shoes, and saucepans, and of whom her family passionately disapproved.
Remembering it now, I wonder how it was I didn’t find something vaguely disappointing about Theodora’s choice of lover. Jack Macauley was taller than Prince Rainier, it’s true, and more rugged-looking than the Shah – but in all other respects he must have seemed a curious choice, for a young girl who might have married anyone. He was already married, besides. He had been married young, to his childhood sweetheart in the north; he was the father of several adolescent children, and was obliged to go through all the public spectacle of an acrimonious divorce, before he could marry Theodora. None of these things seemed to count against him in the press and public estimation of the day, however. And nor, it would seem, in mine. In my recollected nine-year-old self, I can find nothing to suggest that I found him wanting in any way. I daresay his wealth had much to do with it. People will forgive almost anything in a man, it seems, if only he has millions enough; and Jack Macauley’s millions were almost legendary in scale by then….
I think it’s probably best if I break off at this point, though. A thousand words is more than enough for any blog, and there’s so much more to tell. I’d like to be able to tell it all, if I can, before the old lady returns who, astonishingly, is still Theodora. Bill has just come in from his vegetable garden, besides. He’s digging a plot in which to grow cabbages, out there in his tiny back garden. I see it as an excellent development on the whole. He must have had too much time on his hands, before; else why would he have preoccupied himself so, with the condition of my blog? But he’ll want his coffee now (I’m trying to encourage him to go to Starbucks for it). So I’ll put this aside for today, and come back again tomorrow, or just as soon as I have marshalled the rest of the remembered facts ….
Friday, 30 March 2007
Mention the name of Jack Macauley
Suddenly, it seems as if everyone wants to talk to me. The window cleaner must have released some vital trigger when he told me all those things about old Lady Macauley the other day; you have only to mention the name of Macauley in these parts, apparently (that of Jack Macauley, for preference) for tongues to be loosened and reminiscences scattered. I’ve begun to scatter the name about a little myself, as a matter of fact. I mentioned it to my hairdresser and to the milkman, and the man who stood beside me in the post office queue. It just happened to come up, yesterday, as I chatted with the woman who runs the little gift shop on the high street; and then it came up again, an hour later, with the other, very talkative one who works behind the counter in the local bakery. I did all this as discreetly as I could, of course - I didn’t want people to think me a lion hunter, or worse, an idle gossip. And the surprising thing was, that the response was positive in almost every case. It would seem that whatever else might fail in one’s attempts to blend in round here, when it comes to talking about Jack Macauley (or ‘Old Jack’ as he seems most often to be known), everyone in the village has an opinion to express, or a story to tell
Most of the opinions I heard were highly favourable. Most people smiled broadly at the mention of him, wanting to tell me what a great character he was: how philanthropic, how convivial – how uncommonly charismatic indeed, and somehow several sizes larger than the usual run of men. This is not to say that he was entirely without detractors, of course. No man can have been so philanthropic or so charming as to have been loved by everyone; and for every three people who smiled at the mention of Jack Macauley, there was another one who scowled, telling me the man was an upstart, who brought nothing but disgrace and scandal to the village. The old house still bears his name, for all that. It had another, more dynastic name at one time. It was Something, or Somebody-or-Other's House or Hall; a connection, probably, with the district, or with the family who had owned it without interruption for more than three hundred years. But that name apparently fell out of use at some point in Jack Macauley's long occupation; nobody seems to remember it now, and they call the old place Macauley's house instead. Which must make Jack's more severe detractors ask themselves, sometimes, if it’s after all not the meek, but the disgraceful – the upstarts and the scandal-makers – who most of all inherit the earth; or who are at any rate remembered longest after everything else has gone.
I went down last night to have another look at the old Macauley house. I wanted to see for myself how it could be that the old lady and her daughter should still be clinging on there, in semi dereliction, and so very many years after Jack had gone. I approached it by way of our little footpath, which was once a Macauley avenue, and stood a long time peering through the bars of the tall wrought iron gates. It was dusk by then, so that large portions of the house were thrown into deep shadow, giving it a spectral look. It is decidedly not a beautiful house. Not even by daylight, not even in its heyday under Charles the First, can its admirers have claimed that virtue for it. And to me, in that uneasy half light, it looked forbidding, ugly almost. I’d have walked away without turning round; and shivering a little, though the night was warm – had it not been for the fact that the place had become invested so, for me, with all the romantic remembered history of Jack Macauley and his Theodora.
I have my own little remembered story to tell about Sir Jack and Theodora, as I mentioned yesterday. I ought to have started out on it at once, today; instead of allowing myself to become side-tracked like this, with hearsay, and opinions expressed long after the event. My story will keep though - I’ll tell it tomorrow, for sure. For now, well it’s almost lunch time, and Bill will be hungry. I have capitulated so far as to consent to cook for him for just so long as his convalescence lasts; after which, as I remind him daily, he’s on his own.
I have deputed Bill, by the way, to go out there and test the responses to Jack Macauley among the other dog-walkers on the common… But I have to report that his appetite for the task has so far been a good deal less than enthusiastic.
Most of the opinions I heard were highly favourable. Most people smiled broadly at the mention of him, wanting to tell me what a great character he was: how philanthropic, how convivial – how uncommonly charismatic indeed, and somehow several sizes larger than the usual run of men. This is not to say that he was entirely without detractors, of course. No man can have been so philanthropic or so charming as to have been loved by everyone; and for every three people who smiled at the mention of Jack Macauley, there was another one who scowled, telling me the man was an upstart, who brought nothing but disgrace and scandal to the village. The old house still bears his name, for all that. It had another, more dynastic name at one time. It was Something, or Somebody-or-Other's House or Hall; a connection, probably, with the district, or with the family who had owned it without interruption for more than three hundred years. But that name apparently fell out of use at some point in Jack Macauley's long occupation; nobody seems to remember it now, and they call the old place Macauley's house instead. Which must make Jack's more severe detractors ask themselves, sometimes, if it’s after all not the meek, but the disgraceful – the upstarts and the scandal-makers – who most of all inherit the earth; or who are at any rate remembered longest after everything else has gone.
I went down last night to have another look at the old Macauley house. I wanted to see for myself how it could be that the old lady and her daughter should still be clinging on there, in semi dereliction, and so very many years after Jack had gone. I approached it by way of our little footpath, which was once a Macauley avenue, and stood a long time peering through the bars of the tall wrought iron gates. It was dusk by then, so that large portions of the house were thrown into deep shadow, giving it a spectral look. It is decidedly not a beautiful house. Not even by daylight, not even in its heyday under Charles the First, can its admirers have claimed that virtue for it. And to me, in that uneasy half light, it looked forbidding, ugly almost. I’d have walked away without turning round; and shivering a little, though the night was warm – had it not been for the fact that the place had become invested so, for me, with all the romantic remembered history of Jack Macauley and his Theodora.
I have my own little remembered story to tell about Sir Jack and Theodora, as I mentioned yesterday. I ought to have started out on it at once, today; instead of allowing myself to become side-tracked like this, with hearsay, and opinions expressed long after the event. My story will keep though - I’ll tell it tomorrow, for sure. For now, well it’s almost lunch time, and Bill will be hungry. I have capitulated so far as to consent to cook for him for just so long as his convalescence lasts; after which, as I remind him daily, he’s on his own.
I have deputed Bill, by the way, to go out there and test the responses to Jack Macauley among the other dog-walkers on the common… But I have to report that his appetite for the task has so far been a good deal less than enthusiastic.
Tuesday, 27 March 2007
What the window cleaner told me
“I’ve just been down at the old Macauley house” my window cleaner informed me the other day, in that way that window cleaners have of scattering intriguing pieces of information into the air, whilst positioning their ladders. “Hardly worth my while, actually. You’d need scaffolding, or a crane arm, to do a proper job down there – and the old lady’s certainly not forking out for that sort of thing!”
I was taken by surprise. I gathered that the house he referred to was the old mansion at the end of our footpath, but I hardly knew what kind of response to make, to what was after all, for me, a rather priceless little gem of information. I hadn’t even been aware that we had engaged a window cleaner, as a matter of fact. I had just happened to look out of the window at nine o’clock that morning and there he was, hauling his ladders down from the roof of a little grey transit van. I supposed he must have ‘come with the house’. Window cleaners tend to have that facility - attaching themselves to a house as steadfastly, after their fashion, as cats, or hidden subsidence.
I have to report that Bill had fled on sight of the man and his van. Bill has never met a window cleaner yet, he says, who wouldn’t rather be a poet or a philosopher. It's a curious fact, but it seems to go with the territory. It must have something to do, Bill thinks, with all that fresh air, and time for contemplation. This one had all the appearance of the armchair television pundit, besides. He’d given Bill a very knowing look - so that in no time at all, given half the chance, he’d have been leaning against his ladder wanting to talk Iraq.
I on the other hand, whilst recognising it for an ignoble impulse on my part, was unable to resist the temptation to draw him out a little further.
“Oh dear” I said, with all the appearance of genuine sympathy that I could muster; “The old lady wants good value for her money then, does she…?”
“Good value?” my new informant retorted. “Tell me about it! She’d challenge you over sixpence, if she thought she could get away with it! And her daughter’s just as bad… scared to death of the old woman, if you ask me. There must be a hundred windows down there, and that’s a fact. Give or take an attic or two - or ten. And I don’t do attics anyway; haven’t got the ladders for it. I can reckon on spending forty minutes down there, every time. More, if she takes it into her head to have the basements done. Or what she calls the Orangery…. A whopping great conservatory of a place, that is. Windows all over, ten feet tall. And she wants me to do the lot for a tenner! That’s the sort of thing you get, when people have a string of shops as long as your arm, and factories, and God knows what else, up there in Yorkshire or wherever it is, that Jack Macauley had his empire….. “
All this was manna of course, to my ears. Suggestive, too. It had required only the mention of Jack Macauley, for the old story to come tumbling back into my mind again, more or less verbatim. I knew it would probably have been prudent to have called a halt at this stage of the conversation. It never pays to encourage one’s window cleaner too much: one never knows what he might divulge about oneself, to his next client! He had told me most of what I wanted to know already, anyway. But there was just one vital piece of information still mssing, and so I risked a final feeler.
“And old Jack himself…. “ I ventured. “Sir Jack, as I think he was, or is – does he watch the pennies too?”
“Oh God no!” was his incredulous response. “Old Jack died, it must have been twenty years back - and it’s just been the two of them ever since. There was a son, another Jack, but he married long ago and went away. They went away themselves for years, the old girl and her daughter, after Jack died. They closed the old place up - you can see what kind of a state it’s got into. …… It was only a year or two ago that they came back at all. And even now, they’re away for half the year. They’re in Italy now – that’s where they go in spring. In summer it will be to some other old place they’ve got, down in Suffolk, I think……….”
He had reached the top of his ladder by then; he was rubbing away with his cloth at the attic window (ours being sufficiently low for his ladders), and the rest of his story was lost to me. I called to him to say that I would leave his money on the window sill, and went inside to make Bill’s morning coffee. I thought I had learned enough, for the moment. But I decided to go down that afternoon to have a look at the old Macauley house myself, just to see how much more of the old story I could bring to mind…
I was taken by surprise. I gathered that the house he referred to was the old mansion at the end of our footpath, but I hardly knew what kind of response to make, to what was after all, for me, a rather priceless little gem of information. I hadn’t even been aware that we had engaged a window cleaner, as a matter of fact. I had just happened to look out of the window at nine o’clock that morning and there he was, hauling his ladders down from the roof of a little grey transit van. I supposed he must have ‘come with the house’. Window cleaners tend to have that facility - attaching themselves to a house as steadfastly, after their fashion, as cats, or hidden subsidence.
I have to report that Bill had fled on sight of the man and his van. Bill has never met a window cleaner yet, he says, who wouldn’t rather be a poet or a philosopher. It's a curious fact, but it seems to go with the territory. It must have something to do, Bill thinks, with all that fresh air, and time for contemplation. This one had all the appearance of the armchair television pundit, besides. He’d given Bill a very knowing look - so that in no time at all, given half the chance, he’d have been leaning against his ladder wanting to talk Iraq.
I on the other hand, whilst recognising it for an ignoble impulse on my part, was unable to resist the temptation to draw him out a little further.
“Oh dear” I said, with all the appearance of genuine sympathy that I could muster; “The old lady wants good value for her money then, does she…?”
“Good value?” my new informant retorted. “Tell me about it! She’d challenge you over sixpence, if she thought she could get away with it! And her daughter’s just as bad… scared to death of the old woman, if you ask me. There must be a hundred windows down there, and that’s a fact. Give or take an attic or two - or ten. And I don’t do attics anyway; haven’t got the ladders for it. I can reckon on spending forty minutes down there, every time. More, if she takes it into her head to have the basements done. Or what she calls the Orangery…. A whopping great conservatory of a place, that is. Windows all over, ten feet tall. And she wants me to do the lot for a tenner! That’s the sort of thing you get, when people have a string of shops as long as your arm, and factories, and God knows what else, up there in Yorkshire or wherever it is, that Jack Macauley had his empire….. “
All this was manna of course, to my ears. Suggestive, too. It had required only the mention of Jack Macauley, for the old story to come tumbling back into my mind again, more or less verbatim. I knew it would probably have been prudent to have called a halt at this stage of the conversation. It never pays to encourage one’s window cleaner too much: one never knows what he might divulge about oneself, to his next client! He had told me most of what I wanted to know already, anyway. But there was just one vital piece of information still mssing, and so I risked a final feeler.
“And old Jack himself…. “ I ventured. “Sir Jack, as I think he was, or is – does he watch the pennies too?”
“Oh God no!” was his incredulous response. “Old Jack died, it must have been twenty years back - and it’s just been the two of them ever since. There was a son, another Jack, but he married long ago and went away. They went away themselves for years, the old girl and her daughter, after Jack died. They closed the old place up - you can see what kind of a state it’s got into. …… It was only a year or two ago that they came back at all. And even now, they’re away for half the year. They’re in Italy now – that’s where they go in spring. In summer it will be to some other old place they’ve got, down in Suffolk, I think……….”
He had reached the top of his ladder by then; he was rubbing away with his cloth at the attic window (ours being sufficiently low for his ladders), and the rest of his story was lost to me. I called to him to say that I would leave his money on the window sill, and went inside to make Bill’s morning coffee. I thought I had learned enough, for the moment. But I decided to go down that afternoon to have a look at the old Macauley house myself, just to see how much more of the old story I could bring to mind…
Thursday, 22 March 2007
Mastiff Man (or The Brigadier)
Bill is doing rather better on the meeting-the-neighbours front than I am. Dogs are a great resource, of course. People will stop to nod and smile at a dog, where they will scarcely spare a second glance, for a human. Bill seems to have collected quite a little coterie around him out there on the common with the other dog-owners, at any rate. Most of his new friends tend to have names like “Poodle Woman”, or "Labrador Man”, it’s true (nothing sexist there, Bill says: it’s just the way things are); and to have prompted little more comment from him than the fact that there they are each day, and that they generally exchange a word or two with him whilst throwing their sticks, or exhorting their dogs to come to heel. One man only has excited anything like vehemence on Bill’s part, and that’s the one he calls Mastiff Man. “An old codger in plus fours and carrying a shooting stick”, is Bill’s description of him. “With a great grumbling brute of a muzzled mastiff on an extended lead.” He’s a retired army officer, apparently. An old brigadier, resident in these parts for many years. Loud, bluff, opinionated - a species of male dowager if ever Bill saw one. And wanting nothing so much as to discuss the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan, with Bill.
“ Fellow wants to talk strategy, for God’ sake!” was Bill’s expostulation on returning from his walk this morning. “Seems to think that everything would be all right out there, if only the people on the ground would listen to him, and take his advice.”
This is in fact red rag territory, for Bill. He’d hoped to pass unrecognised here, but people do have a tendency to think they know him, from having seen him standing tall against turbulent backgrounds on the television so often, shouting his reports from war zones. His usual response to being accosted on the street is to say that he has no opinions in the matter. Or none, at least, that he’s prepared to go to the stake for. Opinions are the first thing to go, he always says, in his line of work. He has learnt, the rough way, that an opinion expressed today has a way of rearing up to shoot one in the foot, tomorrow; and that to put one’s head above the parapet in any cause is most of all to risk getting it blown off…. It doesn’t seem to have gone down very well with the brigadier, however. “Positively sloped off… “ Bill observed, of Mastiff Man's departure from the scene this morning. “Just the sort to take aim and shoot the messenger, if there’s no-one else within range….”.
I confess I can’t think of any way of helping Bill out of this one. Save perhaps suggesting that he take a different route when going out with Monty in the mornings? With people of the brigadier’s sort, avoidance is usually the only possible course. I’m thinking of getting a dog myself, however – it seems to be the most effective way of getting to know people, round here.
“ Fellow wants to talk strategy, for God’ sake!” was Bill’s expostulation on returning from his walk this morning. “Seems to think that everything would be all right out there, if only the people on the ground would listen to him, and take his advice.”
This is in fact red rag territory, for Bill. He’d hoped to pass unrecognised here, but people do have a tendency to think they know him, from having seen him standing tall against turbulent backgrounds on the television so often, shouting his reports from war zones. His usual response to being accosted on the street is to say that he has no opinions in the matter. Or none, at least, that he’s prepared to go to the stake for. Opinions are the first thing to go, he always says, in his line of work. He has learnt, the rough way, that an opinion expressed today has a way of rearing up to shoot one in the foot, tomorrow; and that to put one’s head above the parapet in any cause is most of all to risk getting it blown off…. It doesn’t seem to have gone down very well with the brigadier, however. “Positively sloped off… “ Bill observed, of Mastiff Man's departure from the scene this morning. “Just the sort to take aim and shoot the messenger, if there’s no-one else within range….”.
I confess I can’t think of any way of helping Bill out of this one. Save perhaps suggesting that he take a different route when going out with Monty in the mornings? With people of the brigadier’s sort, avoidance is usually the only possible course. I’m thinking of getting a dog myself, however – it seems to be the most effective way of getting to know people, round here.
Monday, 19 March 2007
Here be dowagers
19 March 2007
Here be dowagers
I’ve had my first comment! Discounting those from Bill of course, which tend to be verbal only, and are directed mostly at what he calls my extreme verbosity - which itself falls so very far short, he says, of that altogether shorter, sharper, more staccato kind of thing that is generally thought to be the defining characteristic of a blog…. I respond by telling him that he’s under no obligation whatever to read my entries. And in any case, when was it, precisely, that he became an arbiter of what does, or does not constitute a blog? It’s entirely likely of course that he has been blogging clandestinely himself, for months. What could be more natural after all than that, given his present state of health, and trapped in domesticity as he has lately been reduced to become…. he should have taken to haranguing the politicians, or the MOD, or the Foreign Office (or even the Prince of Wales), with vituperative daily or bi-weekly blogs? I shall have to institute what I think is called a profile search, to see if I can locate him…
My online correspondent was altogether more generous. (It’s absurd, really, the degree of pleasure one can derive, simply from knowing that one person at least has visited one’s site! Is it a question of “by the numbers of your comments shall ye be judged”, I wonder? Or is there some other criterion by which a blog’s success is measured? Time will tell, I expect: that, as everything else). My commenter calls herself Ali, anyway ( I’m taking her to be a woman, largely by virtue of her apparent familiarity with sausages..). And she seems to have been interested most of all in what my butcher has had to tell me about local affairs. I do hope he tells me more; since, quite apart from any curiosity of my own, I should like to be able to please and satisfy Ali. Unfortunately, she left no profile footprint, so I am unable to thank her personally. Or better still, to make a link with her site, if she has one…. But, thank you Ali, wherever you are – you have saved me from nil points ignominy, and made my day.
Nothing much else has happened since yesterday – save that Bill did return rather disgruntled from his walk this morning; complaining that picture-postcard-pretty though the district undoubtedly is, and as Pooh-bear as I will ….. he still finds it lacking in some essential ingredient (tanks, probably; or what I think are now more properly called armoured vehicles); and that what he most foresees in prospect for us here is not so much dragons, as deadly dowagers! The place is fairly heaving with them, he said. He counted a dozen of them on the high street, and another six at least, out on the common with their distinctly dowagerial dogs. He seemed genuinely out of humour over it. And cast a wary eye inside my sitting room as he passed, I noticed; as if he quite expected to see it bristling already, with dowagers drinking tea.
It did occur to me to suggest that he might denounce the local women as much as he liked, yet have had the decency to leave the dogs out of it! I was quite on the point of asking him what he thought there could be, about a dog, that could possibly be construed as dowagerial? But I thought better of it. He’s still a bit morose, as I said. His view of everything and its dog is on the jaundiced side, just now. Restored to his customary good spirits he’ll be the first to acknowledge, I’m sure of it, that what he currently sees as a deadly dowager, is in reality nothing worse than a blameless matron going about her usual business on the streets. Much like me, in fact…
Here be dowagers
I’ve had my first comment! Discounting those from Bill of course, which tend to be verbal only, and are directed mostly at what he calls my extreme verbosity - which itself falls so very far short, he says, of that altogether shorter, sharper, more staccato kind of thing that is generally thought to be the defining characteristic of a blog…. I respond by telling him that he’s under no obligation whatever to read my entries. And in any case, when was it, precisely, that he became an arbiter of what does, or does not constitute a blog? It’s entirely likely of course that he has been blogging clandestinely himself, for months. What could be more natural after all than that, given his present state of health, and trapped in domesticity as he has lately been reduced to become…. he should have taken to haranguing the politicians, or the MOD, or the Foreign Office (or even the Prince of Wales), with vituperative daily or bi-weekly blogs? I shall have to institute what I think is called a profile search, to see if I can locate him…
My online correspondent was altogether more generous. (It’s absurd, really, the degree of pleasure one can derive, simply from knowing that one person at least has visited one’s site! Is it a question of “by the numbers of your comments shall ye be judged”, I wonder? Or is there some other criterion by which a blog’s success is measured? Time will tell, I expect: that, as everything else). My commenter calls herself Ali, anyway ( I’m taking her to be a woman, largely by virtue of her apparent familiarity with sausages..). And she seems to have been interested most of all in what my butcher has had to tell me about local affairs. I do hope he tells me more; since, quite apart from any curiosity of my own, I should like to be able to please and satisfy Ali. Unfortunately, she left no profile footprint, so I am unable to thank her personally. Or better still, to make a link with her site, if she has one…. But, thank you Ali, wherever you are – you have saved me from nil points ignominy, and made my day.
Nothing much else has happened since yesterday – save that Bill did return rather disgruntled from his walk this morning; complaining that picture-postcard-pretty though the district undoubtedly is, and as Pooh-bear as I will ….. he still finds it lacking in some essential ingredient (tanks, probably; or what I think are now more properly called armoured vehicles); and that what he most foresees in prospect for us here is not so much dragons, as deadly dowagers! The place is fairly heaving with them, he said. He counted a dozen of them on the high street, and another six at least, out on the common with their distinctly dowagerial dogs. He seemed genuinely out of humour over it. And cast a wary eye inside my sitting room as he passed, I noticed; as if he quite expected to see it bristling already, with dowagers drinking tea.
It did occur to me to suggest that he might denounce the local women as much as he liked, yet have had the decency to leave the dogs out of it! I was quite on the point of asking him what he thought there could be, about a dog, that could possibly be construed as dowagerial? But I thought better of it. He’s still a bit morose, as I said. His view of everything and its dog is on the jaundiced side, just now. Restored to his customary good spirits he’ll be the first to acknowledge, I’m sure of it, that what he currently sees as a deadly dowager, is in reality nothing worse than a blameless matron going about her usual business on the streets. Much like me, in fact…
Sunday, 18 March 2007
I Beatrice
18 March 2007
Day Two: A road runs through it
I’ve been ‘out there’ almost twelve hours now, and so far, nobody has commented. I daresay I ought to have expected as much, and should be patient. But then, suppose nobody were to comment? Not one person. Not ever. It would be very disgraceful, wouldn’t it? The blog equivalent, so to speak, of nil points in the Eurovision Song Contest! Still, nil desperandum and all that: the only thing seems to be blithely to go on, as if one thought that someone, somewhere must be listening……
To return to the story so far, therefore, and tell you that what the road of the title actually runs through is our house, my brother Bill’s and mine. Though strictly speaking it isn’t so much a road, as a little public footpath. It was once one of the approach avenues to the local stately home: a great, gaunt Jacobean mansion that stands in splendid isolation on the river bank, about a hundred metres from here. The house looks abandoned now, for all the world as if it were peopled only by unfriendly ghosts – though I’m told by my friendly butcher (he being the one person who has so far addressed more than three words to me) that a very old lady and her daughter still live there. The same old lady, the butcher tells me, around whom some ancient scandal was enacted, years ago in my remote girlhood. It seems an unlikely story. That particular old lady would be about a hundred by now! It would be rather like suddenly discovering that Wallis Simpson was still alive. Or Nell Gwynne, or Queen Victoria. It has excited my curiosity however, and I look forward to learning more. Just as soon as I have met someone other than the butcher, whom I might ask.
I began by explaining that the road isn’t so much a road, as a little footpath. And I ought to explain too, that the house isn’t so much a house, as a pair of tiny gatehouses; each one quite complete and separate in itself, but joined to the other at the top by an ornamental superstructure, that conceals the common attic and bestrides the road. It seemed just the thing for Bill and me; we could hardly believe our luck. We had been looking for something that was divisible down the middle in some way, but had hardly expected to be separated by anything quite so emphatic as a little road. Here, we would be able to lead our perfectly separate, independent lives – yet to meet, had only to pop out of our respective little doors like the man and woman in the Swiss weather clocks…….
We make odd housemates, Bill and I. Everybody says so, and none with a more genuine astonishment than we ourselves. It just happened that we found ourselves washed up on the shores of approaching old age alone, and more or less simultaneously (I widowed, he divorced) - so that the sensible thing seemed to be to pool resources, and look for a house to share. I can see it’s not going to be easy though. Brother and sister we may be, but we have never been close, and our lives could hardly have been more different. I have spent the last decade caring for our elderly parents, and then for my first grandchild - whilst Bill has been racketing about the world, as he puts it, in his capacity as foreign correspondent for one of the television channels. He’s not used to sitting about, and certainly not in cottages. He has been accustomed to live his life out of suitcases, always ready at a moment’s notice to fly out of what he calls the danger of the domestic front, into the comparative safety of a war zone. He says that’s why his marriage failed, and his children no longer seem to want to speak to him…..
He’s home from hospital now, settled to some extent in his side of the cottage – though finding all sorts of fault with my arrangements. He has his doubts about the cottage’s perfect capacity to contain him, for a start. He’s a big man, inclined to lounge; he says his legs have a way of coming up against solid objects, no matter in which direction he tries to extend them. His head is in constant contact with the ceilings, besides – I hear his bellowed imprecations, and wonder how long it will be before he learns to duck. He’s rather morose just now for Bill, in fact; I’m told it’s a part of the recovery process. He goes out each day for longish walks of course, but only with his dog. His old Monty has seen it all, he says - is a regular old dog-at-arms himself, and the only possible companion. (I ought to explain at this point that Bill’s imagery always tends to have something of the battlefield about it. It’s only to be expected, I suppose, from one of his experience. Though it can be just a little un-nerving; and I do wonder how well it will go down in so obviously peaceable a district? Or indeed in blogland?).
All these things will settle down in time, I expect. Bill will find some way of extending his legs, and defending his head – and some person just congenial enough, it’s to be hoped, with whom to drink his daily pint in one of the local pubs. And I - well, sooner or later I must begin to meet people, and make friends. Everything will turn out to have been all for the best in the end, I’m sure. It will have to, since what with stamp duty and everything else, there’s not the smallest possibility of our moving yet again…
Day Two: A road runs through it
I’ve been ‘out there’ almost twelve hours now, and so far, nobody has commented. I daresay I ought to have expected as much, and should be patient. But then, suppose nobody were to comment? Not one person. Not ever. It would be very disgraceful, wouldn’t it? The blog equivalent, so to speak, of nil points in the Eurovision Song Contest! Still, nil desperandum and all that: the only thing seems to be blithely to go on, as if one thought that someone, somewhere must be listening……
To return to the story so far, therefore, and tell you that what the road of the title actually runs through is our house, my brother Bill’s and mine. Though strictly speaking it isn’t so much a road, as a little public footpath. It was once one of the approach avenues to the local stately home: a great, gaunt Jacobean mansion that stands in splendid isolation on the river bank, about a hundred metres from here. The house looks abandoned now, for all the world as if it were peopled only by unfriendly ghosts – though I’m told by my friendly butcher (he being the one person who has so far addressed more than three words to me) that a very old lady and her daughter still live there. The same old lady, the butcher tells me, around whom some ancient scandal was enacted, years ago in my remote girlhood. It seems an unlikely story. That particular old lady would be about a hundred by now! It would be rather like suddenly discovering that Wallis Simpson was still alive. Or Nell Gwynne, or Queen Victoria. It has excited my curiosity however, and I look forward to learning more. Just as soon as I have met someone other than the butcher, whom I might ask.
I began by explaining that the road isn’t so much a road, as a little footpath. And I ought to explain too, that the house isn’t so much a house, as a pair of tiny gatehouses; each one quite complete and separate in itself, but joined to the other at the top by an ornamental superstructure, that conceals the common attic and bestrides the road. It seemed just the thing for Bill and me; we could hardly believe our luck. We had been looking for something that was divisible down the middle in some way, but had hardly expected to be separated by anything quite so emphatic as a little road. Here, we would be able to lead our perfectly separate, independent lives – yet to meet, had only to pop out of our respective little doors like the man and woman in the Swiss weather clocks…….
We make odd housemates, Bill and I. Everybody says so, and none with a more genuine astonishment than we ourselves. It just happened that we found ourselves washed up on the shores of approaching old age alone, and more or less simultaneously (I widowed, he divorced) - so that the sensible thing seemed to be to pool resources, and look for a house to share. I can see it’s not going to be easy though. Brother and sister we may be, but we have never been close, and our lives could hardly have been more different. I have spent the last decade caring for our elderly parents, and then for my first grandchild - whilst Bill has been racketing about the world, as he puts it, in his capacity as foreign correspondent for one of the television channels. He’s not used to sitting about, and certainly not in cottages. He has been accustomed to live his life out of suitcases, always ready at a moment’s notice to fly out of what he calls the danger of the domestic front, into the comparative safety of a war zone. He says that’s why his marriage failed, and his children no longer seem to want to speak to him…..
He’s home from hospital now, settled to some extent in his side of the cottage – though finding all sorts of fault with my arrangements. He has his doubts about the cottage’s perfect capacity to contain him, for a start. He’s a big man, inclined to lounge; he says his legs have a way of coming up against solid objects, no matter in which direction he tries to extend them. His head is in constant contact with the ceilings, besides – I hear his bellowed imprecations, and wonder how long it will be before he learns to duck. He’s rather morose just now for Bill, in fact; I’m told it’s a part of the recovery process. He goes out each day for longish walks of course, but only with his dog. His old Monty has seen it all, he says - is a regular old dog-at-arms himself, and the only possible companion. (I ought to explain at this point that Bill’s imagery always tends to have something of the battlefield about it. It’s only to be expected, I suppose, from one of his experience. Though it can be just a little un-nerving; and I do wonder how well it will go down in so obviously peaceable a district? Or indeed in blogland?).
All these things will settle down in time, I expect. Bill will find some way of extending his legs, and defending his head – and some person just congenial enough, it’s to be hoped, with whom to drink his daily pint in one of the local pubs. And I - well, sooner or later I must begin to meet people, and make friends. Everything will turn out to have been all for the best in the end, I’m sure. It will have to, since what with stamp duty and everything else, there’s not the smallest possibility of our moving yet again…
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