An Audience with an Elephant (29 page)

The Stantons contacted Mohammed Al Fayed, the present owner of
Punch,
who allowed them access to the magazine records. Here they found that Philip’s father, Sir William Agnew, had left £1,353,592 on his death. Now, not long before this the great trade union leader Joseph Arch had campaigned for a weekly wage of 12s a week for agricultural labourers. For most of the population of Farthingstone it must have seemed as though the gods had come to the ridge when a family with this kind of wealth turned up.

Mrs Agnew, the Stantons found, had been a poet, contributing Verses descriptive of the Pastoral Beauties of her Northamptonshire home, which must have done wonders for the circulation of
Punch
. She wrote in faded, archaic language, as in this to Mary, Queen of Scots:

Which would account for the name Joymead. Mrs Agnew tried to revive Morris Dancing in Farthingstone, kitting her dancers out in full Tudor costume: bonnets, baggy breeches, slashed sleeves, the lot. Under the trees they stare bemusedly out of a yellowing group photograph.

The family was active in public works, meeting most of the cost of bringing water to the village, laying on electricity, restoring the church, so that there seemed to be no end to their benevolence. Mr Agnew became a magistrate (though, as his local newspaper obituary records, ‘he was not of the disposition to sit in judgement upon others and punish them’), and finally High Sheriff of the county. And, even when their grief came upon them, they remembered Farthingstone. After Joy’s death from tuberculosis, Philip Agnew gave, with Joymead, enough money to pay for a resident caretaker, also for a brass band to play once a fortnight through the summer evenings, and for a village tea to be held there on each anniversary of the birthday of his daughter who, as a child, had written, ‘In the very heart of England, safe from the tumults of the world, lies a small village...’.

Her brother Ewen, himself with not long to live, spoke at the opening of the garden. ‘Let (this) be a place where the old and infirm may spend calm evenings in the sunset of their lives; where the middle-aged, gazing southwards over this peaceful English valley, may gather comfort and strength, mental and physical, against the coming years; where young men and maidens may find a pleasant trysting-place; where children may gambol from morn till eve without causing anxiety to their mothers’ minds...’. It was 1922. The General Strike was just four years away, a post-war depression was gripping agriculture, yet in Farthingstone one of the gods, high-minded and distant, was speaking to nymphs and shepherds in the Arcady his family had created.

That same year they handed down the Rules of the Garden. No-one might cut flowers, beat carpets, allow ‘any horse, pony, mule, ass, bull, ox, cow, calf, heifer, steer, sheep, lamb, goat, hog or sow’ to enter, or himself deliver ‘any public speech, lecture, prayer, sermon, address of any kind’. There would be no animals, no politics, no religion in Eden. ‘They sound like instructions from another world,’ said Peter Stanton. But what was it like to be one of the nymphs and shepherds, and to live in Farthingstone under such unremitting benevolence? English villages are places of transit as much as any town. Could anyone in Farthingstone remember life under the Agnews?

‘I was in the shop the other day and someone said to me, “You must be the oldest woman in the village.” I was flabbergasted. You are, you know, when someone says something like that to you. But I think I must be.’ Rachel Frost was fourteen in 1939, when she left school to work in the Big House. Mr Agnew was dead, but Mrs Agnew lived on, alone except for the butler, the cook, the houseboy, the head housemaid and underhousemaid, and Rachel, the lowest of all, the kitchenmaid. ‘At mealtimes we all used to sit round a table, according to rank.’ Rachel’s father and uncle worked in the gardens, her mother as a young girl helped with the washing up.

‘She thought the world of Miss Joy. “Nelly, where are you?” That was my mother’s name, “I’m in the Blue Room.” “Quick, I’ve got some trifle for you.” I remember Mr Agnew as a tall man on a horse. We children would salute him, and very gravely he would touch his cap. But by the time I knew Mrs Agnew, she was this little lady living all on her own. Oh, she used to dress terrible, an old sweater tied around her, wearing shoes too big so you could hear her flip-flopping down the corridors. These Hussar officers we had billeted on us, they called her Waltzing Matilda. She was always in black after Miss Joy died, and would never talk to us, just sent instructions for lunch and dinner, though she hardly ate at all.

‘I used to find it very strange. I kept finding these white hairs in the combs in Madam’s boudoir, but Madam had brown hair. I mentioned this to the butler, and he said that one night I would have to come round late. So I did, and he said I had to be very quiet. We crept up the stairs, he opened a door to the balcony above the Music Room, it was a huge room, and suddenly there was the sound of a piano.

‘Madam was playing a grand piano, I hadn’t known until then that she could play, and apparently she hadn’t since her husband died. But there was someone else playing as well, a Captain Moseley, one of the Hussar officers, on another grand piano. I can see it now, it was magical. I was fifteen years old. Everything around them had dust-sheets over it, even the curtains had covers. But it wasn’t that. Madam had her hair down. It was long and white and tied in a blue bow, and she looked so beautiful. The hair I knew must have been a wig, though I don’t know how she got all that hair up under it.

‘She called on our family a few times, but she would never sit on cushions, she had this fear of infection. And when she talked, she spoke ever so quiet. She looked too frail to be alive, a puff of wind could have taken her away. But she had the whole road rerouted, you know, to go round her house. My uncle called it the New Road.’

Having listened to all this as quietly as the young girl had listened to the pianos, I said, ‘Could she do that?’

Miss Frost smiled. ‘She did it. They had a whole row of cottages pulled down. I know they had others built in their place, but not quite enough, if you take my meaning. Some of the old had to go and live with their children, and one old chap had to go into the workhouse at Daventry. They was heart-broke, some of the old ones. Mr Agnew, he didn’t like the allotment sheds, said they spoiled his view. Know what he did? He had trees planted so they hid the sheds, only then there were pigeons in the trees, which ate all the peas in the allotments. They had a whole farmhouse pulled down once, I think that may have had something to do with the view as well.

‘Only then they decided to have a lychgate built for the church. To do that they had to get rid of some of the graves, and this chap, he had the pub, he came running to tell my mother, “Nelly, I’ve just seen something I doubt I shall ever see again.” This coffin was open, and there was a lady in it, with hair down to her knees, just bone of course, but the hair was beautiful. And the wind came and blew it all away. But some people hadn’t been buried that long. One old lady never went to church again on account of the fact that the Agnews had had her mother dug up. They had the money, and they could do it.

‘They did some good things. If someone was ill they sent soup, and when they paid for the electricity they had it laid underground so you couldn’t see it in Joymead. Mind you, you could see it everywhere else. I was too late to see the entertaining and the parties. There was never any guests in my time, except when the Hussars came. I remember this chap, the Hon. Verney Cave, he had this hare sent down from Scotland, monstrous great thing it was, hanging in the larder. It had a bowl under it to catch the blood, only after a while this was catching maggots as well.

‘The Hussars had their own cook, a corporal. The trouble was, he didn’t know how to cook anything, all he could do was tap-dance round the kitchen, singing, “I’m a little prairie flower / Growing wilder every hour. Nobody wants to cultivate me / So I’m as wild as wild can be.” So when the Duke of Gloucester came to supper with the officers, the corporal didn’t know how to cook the hare.

‘The cook, she wouldn’t skin it, she kept getting short of breath whenever she came near it, so I had to do it. She kept prodding me with a rolling pin towards the thing. Not that it needed skinning, when you pulled, whole bits fell off. But we cooked it and made some sort of gravy, and the corporal who served it said he’d seen maggots floating in the gravy. But they ate it. They ate the Gorgonzola as well, and that was even more far gone than the hare. They made a hollow in the cheese, and poured port in and, according to the corporal, you could see the maggots swimming round in circles like they were having a race. The Duke of Gloucester said it was the best meal he’d ever had.’

She paused. ‘It was sad for Madam at the end. She had just one servant, and Mr Michael’s old nanny used to come and stay, but no one else ever did in that huge house. Still, we had no idea it was going to be pulled down. And the saddest thing of all was still to come. There’d been this huge clearance sale, and my cousin Charlie, he went to Banbury the day after. And I shall never forget this, he said the Agnew photograph albums, and their papers and letters, were blowing all over the Cattle Market. Apparently nobody had emptied the drawers and the cupboards and the dealers had just tipped the lot out. That was terrible. Charlie said it was a heartbreaking thing to see.’

It would be hard for any of us to understand how he felt, for this was the family from the Big House, of Miss Joy and Master Ewen, and little Mrs Agnew who feared thunder and cushions but who could still divert roads. All their lives they had been in such awe of them, and now all that was left was blowing round a cattle market.

Peter Stanton is Chairman of the Joymead Managers now. ‘A glorified caretaker really, when you think they used to meet on Tuesday afternoons. Who could afford to meet on Tuesday afternoons now?’ The Agnew endowment barely covers the annual insurance cost, and no brass bands play on summer evenings. ‘And who’d come to listen if they did?’

But they still hold the annual tea on each anniversary of Joy’s birthday, and in a good year perhaps half the village comes.

The Last of Things

The Gallows Humorist

ONLY SPOKE TO HIM
a month ago, so it was a shock to hear about the death of Syd Dernley of Mansfield. I can remember as though it were yesterday, and always will, the afternoon six years ago when we met, and Mr Dernley in the neat little bungalow talked about his old job, while Mrs Dernley made scones for us. She kept emerging with fresh batches, chiding me for my lack of appetite, while her husband, brisk and informative, produced a length of rope for my inspection, or sat, lost in nostalgia. And believe me, if there is anything more terrifying than a hangman, it is a nostalgic hangman. . . Mr Dernley was Britain’s last surviving executioner; he was 73.

We met because he took exception to something I had written about a hangman my grandfather knew, who had decorated his front room with nooses and portraits of his Victorian colleagues, and whose life, the
Carmarthen Journal
noted in its 1901 obituary, had been dominated by just one thing, ‘a deep-seated longing to participate in the infliction of capital punishment everywhere’. The paper had begun the obituary with a remarkable sentence: ‘He has at last “shot his bolt”, as he himself would put it.’

His name was Robert Evans (though on occasion he called himself Anderson), a solicitor’s son from Carmarthen, who, by a bizarre coincidence, lived in a house that has subsequently become a symbol of lost innocence to generations of Eng. Lit. graduates: Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill. The hangmen Calcraft and Marwood were his guests here, and successive Home Secretaries must have groaned at seeing that address on the eager letters of advice on scaffold etiquette they received from it most months. ‘The doomed one should be addressed firmly and, as far as can be, cheerfully assured that he will not be hurried into eternity without being allowed proper time and means to prepare himself, and he should be made to feel confident that no unnecessary punishment be inflicted on him. . .’.

Evans or Anderson built a gallows in his garden, on which he would sit his neighbours, my grandfather probably among them, and ply them with strong drink. When I wrote about him I made the point that he would have been none the worse for some urgent medical attention; and in the post a few days later there was a letter. Why, enquired the writer, should a hangman not have a sense of humour? He himself had been a hangman, and he had a sense of humour. Mr Dernley asked me to tea.

But writing about ‘Y Crogwr’ (The Hangman), safely tucked away in Victorian Wales, or reading about such men in Thomas Hardy, was worlds away from this jolly man hopelessly addicted to practical jokes. At one point he produced a safety razor stuck into one of the old round-socket electric plugs (‘Know where I can get this fixed?’), and a little later, a wobbly, lifesized rubber hand which he had in his sleeve (‘Shake’). Had it not been for the friendly presence of Mrs Dernley, and my own curiosity, I should have run howling into the spring afternoon in the first minutes of that meeting.