like the weather in the psalm, might rage, but Fidelity alone could call order. ‘Fidel! Fidel!’ Jock would shout. As there was nobody to answer the bells at the big house the two of them had acquired intimate raised voices. Quakers were practical and knew when to abandon quietness.
Jock had organised the bicentenary of George Crabbe two years before I arrived. It was now in his mind to let me have a cottage, make me a churchwarden and generally settle me. I can’t remember there being any consultation with the PCC. Taking me to the churchhe told me about Crabbe’s Sunday habits. How in the darkening winter afternoons the poet would climb onto a seat by the window and cry, ‘Upon my word I cannot see – I must give you the rest when we meet again!’ And how when his tithes were due, he would climb down from the pulpit and say, ‘I must have some money, gentlemen.’ Jock was a famous bat man both in Suffolk and in Borneo. These creatures had been so absurdly fantasised by humanity that they needed an informed protector, and this was Jock Cranbrook. Bats are mammals which fly like birds. They tell each other where they are by means of echo-location. There are Greater bats and Lesser bats, the last with horseshoe-shaped nose leaves. And there are the delightful pipistrelles, the long-eared bats, and bats which like to fly over water. It was chilly searching for bats, even over bonfires; and we rubbed our hands. They flew very near to where George Crabbe had made a bonfire of his three novels. He must have had a double dose of laudanum that day to have been so reckless about it. There comes a moment in many novelists’ minds when they think of striking a match. Now and then we would poke the embers with a stick to make them flare.
Being a ‘what’s mine is yours’ person, Jock gave me free run of his library. ‘Read away, Ronnie.’ Just after harvest he and I would climb up ladders to the grain silos and run the cornseed through our fingers, testing its fullness. On warm days I wrote in the walled garden,getting on with my novel, haunted by long-dead gardeners, armies of them. Their glasshouses and potting sheds; their serried rakes, spades and scythes hung on the wall in working order. There was a captured quiet and every now and then a briefly captured bird, like the gull in Mary Potter’s painting at Crag House. In spite of all this, at heart I was directionless . I could hardly explain this, it was so ungrateful. The young people in my novel were in a similar plight, or should we say interesting situation. I called it
A
Treasonable
Growth
from Wordsworth’s confession in
The Prelude
: ‘And most of all, a treasonable growth of indecisive judgements, that impaired and shook the mind’s simplicity.’
There were five children at Great Glemham House, Gathorne, Hughie, Juliet, Sophie, and Christina, whose godmother was Christine Nash. Ben had written
Let’s Make an Opera
for them, a William Blake chimney-sweep tale. I saw wherever I looked an interplay of life’s actuality, hopes and fantasies. It all seemed to work when Fidelity was around. Her husband, borrowing ‘a fiver till Thursday’ from the butler, would speed off to the County Council or the House of Lords, while she would say, rather like Christine, ‘Now, where would you like to write – we mustn’t freeze the muse.’ And I would make myself scarce in the walled garden when it was fine, or into my bedroom if it was not, in either corner out of place. Yet the pages piled up. There was so muchgoing on that it was hard to know what to put in or leave out.
Only fragments of what recurred there half a century ago hang around in my head like the dislodged tesserae of a once elaborate floor. One complete memory of all is the music. Concerts usually took place on summer afternoons in the drawing room. The audience spilled out onto the terrace. Stack chairs, the scent of tea. Heavy curtains into whose pelmets it was rumoured Jock had encouraged
Jock had organised the bicentenary of George Crabbe two years before I arrived. It was now in his mind to let me have a cottage, make me a churchwarden and generally settle me. I can’t remember there being any consultation with the PCC. Taking me to the churchhe told me about Crabbe’s Sunday habits. How in the darkening winter afternoons the poet would climb onto a seat by the window and cry, ‘Upon my word I cannot see – I must give you the rest when we meet again!’ And how when his tithes were due, he would climb down from the pulpit and say, ‘I must have some money, gentlemen.’ Jock was a famous bat man both in Suffolk and in Borneo. These creatures had been so absurdly fantasised by humanity that they needed an informed protector, and this was Jock Cranbrook. Bats are mammals which fly like birds. They tell each other where they are by means of echo-location. There are Greater bats and Lesser bats, the last with horseshoe-shaped nose leaves. And there are the delightful pipistrelles, the long-eared bats, and bats which like to fly over water. It was chilly searching for bats, even over bonfires; and we rubbed our hands. They flew very near to where George Crabbe had made a bonfire of his three novels. He must have had a double dose of laudanum that day to have been so reckless about it. There comes a moment in many novelists’ minds when they think of striking a match. Now and then we would poke the embers with a stick to make them flare.
Being a ‘what’s mine is yours’ person, Jock gave me free run of his library. ‘Read away, Ronnie.’ Just after harvest he and I would climb up ladders to the grain silos and run the cornseed through our fingers, testing its fullness. On warm days I wrote in the walled garden,getting on with my novel, haunted by long-dead gardeners, armies of them. Their glasshouses and potting sheds; their serried rakes, spades and scythes hung on the wall in working order. There was a captured quiet and every now and then a briefly captured bird, like the gull in Mary Potter’s painting at Crag House. In spite of all this, at heart I was directionless . I could hardly explain this, it was so ungrateful. The young people in my novel were in a similar plight, or should we say interesting situation. I called it
A
Treasonable
Growth
from Wordsworth’s confession in
The Prelude
: ‘And most of all, a treasonable growth of indecisive judgements, that impaired and shook the mind’s simplicity.’
There were five children at Great Glemham House, Gathorne, Hughie, Juliet, Sophie, and Christina, whose godmother was Christine Nash. Ben had written
Let’s Make an Opera
for them, a William Blake chimney-sweep tale. I saw wherever I looked an interplay of life’s actuality, hopes and fantasies. It all seemed to work when Fidelity was around. Her husband, borrowing ‘a fiver till Thursday’ from the butler, would speed off to the County Council or the House of Lords, while she would say, rather like Christine, ‘Now, where would you like to write – we mustn’t freeze the muse.’ And I would make myself scarce in the walled garden when it was fine, or into my bedroom if it was not, in either corner out of place. Yet the pages piled up. There was so muchgoing on that it was hard to know what to put in or leave out.
Only fragments of what recurred there half a century ago hang around in my head like the dislodged tesserae of a once elaborate floor. One complete memory of all is the music. Concerts usually took place on summer afternoons in the drawing room. The audience spilled out onto the terrace. Stack chairs, the scent of tea. Heavy curtains into whose pelmets it was rumoured Jock had encouraged
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