An Audience with an Elephant (16 page)

‘You can find out a lot about the British Empire just by reading the wall above our old family pew,’ said the 14th baronet. ‘Not that I was interested in such things when I was a boy. I kept getting stuck on the inscription to Emily, aged sixteen. “She leant upon the cross and died. . .”. Never could work that out, I used to read it over and over.’

Yet just beyond this is Drury’s Ride. Sent with despatches from Constantinople on the eve of the Crimean War, Drury Wake rode across the Balkans in six days and seven nights and permanently damaged his spine. Then there is Herwald’s siege (their variations on a name were endless). Holed up in a bungalow during the Indian Mutiny this amazing man actually kept a diary, ‘written with the stump of a pencil, on the wall, at any moment that could be snatched, in case we should be scragged. . .’. Philip, a mounted policeman, rode into the riots of the Australian Gold Rush but cheerfully wrote home. ‘The heat is fearful and being very fat, it tells on me. . .’. As they become recognisable personalities, the Wakes emerge as very human people.

Baldwin, a bad sleeper, was in the habit of drinking his hair shampoo, which contained chloroform. Only one night he drank too much and, peacefully blowing bubbles, Baldwin passed into what the old Welsh chroniclers called the long sleep. But the brother who gave the family most cause for alarm was William, the heir. A century and a half on, the 11th baronet still causes alarm, for this was the man who could have lost the lot. ‘The 11th was no damned good, he made a complete hash of things,’ said the 14th. ‘Luckily he died young.’

William married the daughter of a man who kept a hotel. His father got a doctor’s certificate (‘Mr Wake is now labouring under a state of
delirium tremens
combined with imbecility. . .’) but William got his Margaret. In 1847, staying in Jersey, he also got a human skeleton for some reason, was unable to pay for it and got clapped in gaol, from which he made an amazing escape; he ordered a piano then sent it back, having first concealed himself in the packing case. William died on the eve of having every tree in the park cut down for ready cash.

And then there was the 12th, Herewald, he of the retrousse nose and the Saxon ambition. Outwardly a hunting squire (‘When you’re going to take a fence, throw your heart over and jump after it. . .’) he was also a man who could put up this hand-written notice in his woods, ‘If there is any bird-nesting this season at all, the little boys or girls will not be my friends any longer. . .’. Then the real sanction: they will also not be invited to his parties. He thought scythe blades should be attached to the axles of the hated motor-cars, but when he saw young men marching to the Great War there was no play-acting. ‘Cannon fodder,’ he was heard to mutter.

His eldest son was part of that by then, who had made the Army his career and was just old enough to have met the antediluvian Duke of Cambridge, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, who asked, ‘They tell me you need brains in the Army now. I never had any. Do you?’ ‘No sir.’ ‘I thought not,’ said the Duke approvingly. Hereward was actually a bright man whose forecasts on the war impressed Lloyd George. During World War II he got Courteenhall Parish Council to form its own Invasion Committee (‘Food and Cooking. Miss T Wake: Fuel. Sir Hereward Wake: Housing and Population. Lady Wake. . .’).

P.G. Wodehouse could have invented that. And he would have been proud of inventing the curious figure astride the motorbike accelerating through the park en route for the dust of someone else’s attic. The 13th baronet’s sister Joan Wake spent her days rescuing historical documents from the gale of the world and virtually single-handed set up the Northamptonshire Records Society. So what did it matter if, applying face powder, she forgot she was wearing spectacles and powdered these so that she collided with the furniture?

She, too, is straight out of Ealing comedy and would have been played by Margaret Rutherford. When the village water supply failed and no action was taken, she simply telegraphed the Ministry ‘Cholera imminent’, and of course there were civil servants leaping out of the hedges. Yet she refused to write the family history, saying it would be too boring. ‘She was more interested in other people’s families,’ said her nephew.

He is at the Hall now, a bit deaf after the war (‘Someone asked, shooting accident? I said yes, Germans mainly’), and at 76 more interested in his ancestors than when he day-dreamed in the family pew, trying to understand why a girl should have died from leaning on a cross. The book was his idea, but only as a record of his immediate family. It was just that the Professor found he couldn’t stop.

‘We Wakes wear our descent like our shoes.’ It is an image Sir Hereward has used before. ‘We don’t like to look at them.’ The shoes gleam. ‘We’re not better than anyone else, it’s just that we’ve always been around. I’m an ordinary human being but people seem to expect a lot of me. “Oh Sir Hereward, will you open this?”’ But it does allow him some fun. The story is told that he once came upon a new vicar putting up the hymn numbers in Courteenhall Church. ‘No. Mistake there. We never have more than two hymns, one psalm, and I read the lesson.’

According to Church law. . .’ began the startled cleric.

‘The only law here is Wake law.’

The dead are closer now, his grandchild in the churchyard and his sister killed in a point-to-point accident (‘It was the darkest day. The whole family was there watching’). We hovered over the book in the locked case. ‘That was my father’s idea, he said we couldn’t go on putting Wakes up all over the church.’

‘Do you have the key?’

Sir Hereward, who has the key to everything, did not answer. ‘It’s given us an opportunity to write a few home truths, that book,’ he said. ‘Things we couldn’t put on a wall.’

‘Do you have the key?’

After a while he said, ‘Look, I’m worried about you. I’ve read the things you write. . .’. He unlocked the case, and there were pages of exquisite calligraphy but no home truths. ‘Look at that, my father gets five pages. Can you image five pages on a wall?’

Over tea his wife said, ‘Didn’t you manage to stuff a sexton into that church once?’

‘I believe so,’ said Sir Hereward vaguely.

He has had the Leper Window unblocked and proposes to have this inscription cut into the stone, ‘Remember the lepers and all outcasts’. It is such a poignant message, I was still thinking of it when I got outside and heard the motorway. The
M
1, a mile away and screened by trees, is an even band of sound as though some huge creature beyond the park were trying to clear its throat. Northampton also gets closer every year.

Norman St John Stevas Chooses a Title

S YOU WOULD
expect, he chose his new title with care, Lord St John — adding ‘of Fawsley’. It must have appealed to the romantic in him, for this is a name out of mediaeval chivalry. But there is something else. Because of his title, the former Mr Norman St John-Stevas now enters English history forever linked to one of its blackest moments.

You find that place-name on road signs in the lanes south of Daventry and on the green footpath markers, but it is only when you follow these that you find there is no Fawsley. There is a lake, yes. And a manor house. And a church. Nothing else. Even a century ago the
Northamptonshire Gazeteer
was puzzled. ‘There is no village in this parish; it contains but four houses altogether.’

When I first saw it I thought it one of the most beautiful places on earth — the lake at sunset with the swans upon it; the Tudor mansion with its great oriel window; the medieval church, its door so tiny you stoop to enter, standing in grassland with no road leading to it. But nothing prepares you for what is inside the church, the alabaster and brass of the tombs which occupy two-thirds of it, one of them taking up most of a wall. And all to one family, the Knightleys. They were as proud as the Hapsburgs, these Knightleys, with the 334 armorial quarterings to show their descent. At the edge of the woodland the stone arch shows where their world began, the 700 acres of their park.

And yet there is something odd about it all. For instance, the church is centuries older than the manor house, so Fawsley was there long before that. Also nobody built a church in a field. In a closed little world like this, no grandee would have walked 300 yards across his park to worship in his own family church. But there is one clue. When the sun is at the right angle you can see bumps in the grass near the church — not many, for the lake has covered most of the evidence, but enough to show that there were once buildings here.

You have to go to the records for the rest. At Domesday there was a village at Fawsley, and an old one, for the courts of justice had met at the foot of a great beech tree, 19 feet in diameter, chillingly called Mangrave. In the poll tax of Richard II’s reign there were 90 taxpayers, which would have made Fawsley one of the largest villages in the county.

Then in 1415 the Knightleys came; and the Knightleys were sheep farmers, whatever their tombs may proclaim. The evictions began in the late fifteenth century and two generations later there were 2,500 sheep. No village. No people. Nobody knows what became of these, it is too long ago and they would have been illiterate. Most of them would have starved, pathetic bundles of rags blown here and there. It is only the emptiness at Fawsley, and in records elsewhere the odd scribbled note ‘where 40 people had their livings, now one man and his shepherd hath all’, which point to the tragedy.

He might just as well have styled himself Lord St John of Culloden.

Listening for England

KNEW HIM EVEN
before the studio lights came on. I could make out that bulk of neck and shoulders in the back row as George sat four-square, hands palm down on his thighs, facing the cameras like a statue in the Valley of the Kings.

It had begun a week before, during a television documentary, when some woman new to village life said brightly, ‘Of course, the worst thing about living in the country is the inconvenience of bulk buying.’ This had stopped George in mid-gin.

Because his wife runs the post office, and he sometimes has to deliver the mail, he has come to know all there is to be known about village life. He talks of dead houses, where once birthday and Christmas cards came, and now no letters ever come, because these are weekend cottages. Then there are the other houses where nothing moves after 7.00 in the morning because the commuters have gone by then. So there are these beautifully painted doors with which he can associate no human face.

George is not opposed to change. It is just that an image is pursuing him, of a summer morning in the village where nothing moves in the main street, no children play, but everything is immaculate, and quite dead. The bulk-buying comment confirmed it all. He phoned the programme and spoke for five bitter minutes and was, of course, invited to a studio discussion.

Out of the shires came George to speak for England.

He drove the 300 miles there and back the same day. Such distances are nothing to a man capable of driving 650 miles in a day when he had forgotten his coat in a Sussex pub. Besides, ‘after that thing was over, you couldn’t have seen my heels for dust’.

At first he had been fascinated by his thirteen fellow guests. Carefully chosen, as he thought, they would surely represent village life in his time. He scanned their faces to see who his enemies might be. An elderly peer took him on one side. ‘I. . . I. . . I. . .’. George waited, thinking some ancestral insight was about to come, ‘I. . . I’m deaf.’ Then there was the American businessman who kept looking at his watch and talking about the Shuttle he had to catch. Surely, breathed George, surely he wasn’t going back to America that night?

‘No Birming-hahm.’

George had so much to say. He wanted to tell them about his worries, the cost of housing which now meant his sons could not live in the village, the planning committees which only allowed developments the old families could never afford, and, with the sale of council houses, the lack of rented accommodation.

And he did start to say it, until the sound man came on to the studio floor muttering that the microphones were acting up. Then there were the other voices, insistent and sharp, other faces which caught the chairman’s eye. For this was television where the quick and the very quick burgeon like bindweed.