Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  Elsfield Manor was certainly a country house, with many of the same accoutrements as those that the Buchans had known in their youth, but there were no broad acres to sustain it, nor did JB want them. He styled himself ‘a minor country gentleman with a taste for letters’; either he could not, or would not, become a farmer as well. The Manor’s upkeep and staffing entirely depended on him working at a great pace at business and writing. There was always something going on, for it was not so grand an establishment that the machinery of living could be hidden away from the sight of its inhabitants. There was bustle, but it was orderly, thought-out and energised by JB.

  A number of local families were dependent on the Buchans for employment. Amos Webb, who became a great friend, was of an Elsfield family and drove his employer’s Wolseley, the only car in the village. Mrs Charlett, a most good-humoured and unflappable middle-aged widow (‘decency personified’25 according to JB), was the cook, and her two daughters and son worked at the Manor. Mrs Charlett and Elsie, her daughter, the children’s nanny, were crucial to the smooth running of the house and stayed many years, Mrs Charlett sleeping in a room at the top of the steep back stairs, which must have been hard on her legs. The butler slept beyond the kitchen. Until James Cast was engaged in 1932, butlers changed fairly frequently at Elsfield, and their dismal quarters may have had something to do with that. Annie Cox, who had started working life as a maid at Moor Park before the turn of the century, was the housekeeper and Susie’s lady’s maid, and there were parlourmaids as well.

  The outdoor staff consisted of Mr Martin and two undergardeners, as well as Jack Allam, the gamekeeper, from whom JB and the boys, in particular, learned a great deal about the ways of wild birds and animals. Although JB bought the forty-five-acre Noke Wood, and Susie (with a small legacy) the forty-acre Beckley Common, both nearby, JB gave up shooting game early on in their time at Elsfield, so Allam became more a companion and mentor to the boys. He taught them to fish for chub in the Cherwell, find birds’ nests in Noke Wood, and shoot snipe on Otmoor. Perhaps because he could scarcely read, and so most of his knowledge came from observation, Allam seemed to JB to embody the virtues of ‘old England’. Although romanticised and given almost supernatural powers for fictional effect, the ‘dwellers of Old England’ in The Blanket of the Dark and Midwinter had some basis in the local men who worked for JB. The happiness of these arrangements can be glimpsed at the beginning of The Three Hostages.

  In the country houses that the Buchans had frequented before the Great War, servants often ensured that the family did nothing more taxing than outdoor sports and indoor games, as well as relentless entertaining on a substantial scale. But at Elsfield, as at Portland Place, staff gave JB the freedom and time for concerted public endeavour and paid work, as well as congenial socialising. For Susie, for whom housekeeping was not an absorbing interest, staff released her to follow her own literary, philanthropic and gardening pursuits, zealously protect her husband from unwanted interruptions, and provide comfortable relaxation by organising the entertainment of friends at weekend parties.

  She founded a Women’s Institute in the village, despite some initial opposition. The Women’s Institute movement, which had begun in a remote area of Ontario in 1897, crossed the Atlantic during the Great War; in the 1920s, Women’s Institutes were being founded in villages all over England, often by educated, socially assured women such as Susie. She was later to write that the Women’s Institute was the work that in all her life she loved the most,26 and she certainly put much of her energy into organising programmes and chairing meetings, both in the village and for the Oxfordshire Federation of Women’s Institutes. Along with her friend, the writer Elizabeth Bowen, she was also active at Oxford House, an organisation that carried out educational and social work in Risca in the Welsh valleys during the Depression.

  She began to write books, sitting on the other side of a ‘partner’s desk’ from her husband in the library. There were works of history, such as The Sword of State: Wellington after Waterloo (Hodder and Stoughton, 1928); Lady Louisa Stuart, dedicated to her husband, and published by Hodder in 1932; and Funeral March of a Marionette, the story of Charlotte, Duchess of Albany, Bonnie Prince Charlie’s ill-fated daughter, which was published by the Hogarth Press in 1935, with a dust jacket designed by Vanessa Bell. These were works of solid research: Funeral March was based on a collection of letters in the Bodleian Library, written in French by Charlotte to her mother, Clementina Walkinshaw. The books were generally well received by critics; they reveal a capacity to marshal facts as well as sympathy for, and knowledge of, earlier times and contain, at times, wit and pungent comment: ‘Intrigue was certainly in her blood and it is a quality which, like bad spelling, is apt to run in families.’27 She also wrote children’s stories, such as Jim and the Dragon, The Freedom of the Garden and Arabella Takes Charge.

  Life at Elsfield Manor revolved largely around the schedule of its owner. It had to be so, if JB were to achieve everything that he needed to pay for such an expensive establishment. He had always valued punctuality,* but he also had the capacity to turn from one thing to another and then back again, without loss of concentration. Hilda Grenfell once wrote to him: ‘How do you manage to be so imaginative and so punctual? … I don’t understand how you command your actions in two worlds so completely and distinctly as you do and have time to be the best Pal in the world besides.’28

  In the spring and summer, at weekends, he would ride out in the early morning but be back for family prayers before breakfast. All his life he conducted, or heard, short prayers read every day: they were, for him, in George Herbert’s words, ‘the soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage’.29 On Saturdays, he started writing punctually at nine o’clock and worked steadily until lunchtime. He did not mind his children playing round him, provided that they were reasonably quiet. He did not work in the afternoons – that was the time for walking, playing with the children or energetic gardening – but he would go back to his desk after tea for a couple of hours. After dinner, he would read either to himself or out loud to the family (sometimes from a book on which he was at that moment engaged) or they played games. Only when working laboriously on the proofs of A History of the Great War in the early 1920s did he work after dinner. On Sundays after church, if no one was staying, he would go for a very long walk, wearing his oldest tweeds. A thirty-mile round trip via Brill was not unusual. He had always found walking spurred his imagination, and it was on these expeditions that he developed his plots.

  Each morning during the week, Amos Webb drove him to the station in Oxford so that he could take the train to London. There used to be a number of people who would swear they had seen him write his novels on the Oxford train, but in fact he never did.30 He spent the time reading or thinking. He would arrive back at Elsfield in the early evening.

  He had early developed that capacity that he admired in Raymond Asquith, of appearing to have infinite leisure whilst working immensely hard. He seemed to have time for everyone. And, although most of this came from his own orderly habits and capacity to work very quickly, he was greatly helped by Susie, who saw it as her life’s work mainly to promote his. By the time they moved to Elsfield, JB was sufficiently famous to be an object of curiosity and interest, not only for neighbours but for others with a weakness for lionising literary figures. Susie worked hard to shield him from people who arrived unannounced at the door, to catch a glimpse of the man whom they thought they knew so well from his books. It was not unknown for Susie to keep them talking at the front door while JB slipped out the back.

  Although he disliked those interruptions, he seemed infinitely tolerant of being asked favours by aspiring writers; indeed, from 1915 on, when he wrote a preface to Violet Jacob’s Songs of Angus, he acceded to many requests to read manuscripts, give his opinion and, if the books found a publisher, write a preface, foreword or introduction. He wrote more than forty of these, including an introduction to Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth, as well as, biz
arrely, a preface (by a man who never learned to drive) to a volume entitled Motoring To-Day and To-Morrow by the Earl of Cottenham. He also contributed stories, poems and essays to a variety of charitable publications.

  He made a habit of writing to his friends on the publication of their books. G. M. Trevelyan wrote to him, after History of England was published: ‘That’s the way to write to your friends, if you have a heart of gold.’31 But many an unknown, aspiring writer will have been astonished to receive an unsolicited letter of praise and encouragement from the great man. The warmth of heart that prompted this also caused him to praise politicians for good speeches, leaving himself open to the charge of ‘toadyism’. However, it was not done for personal advantage, but sprang from a ready appreciation of the importance of encouraging others. This was something that he learned from his parents.

  This activity was only a tithe of the support he gave to others, freely, both in time and in financial help. He almost certainly helped pay his nephew’s school fees, as well as providing the cost of teacher training for the daughter of a school friend who had emigrated to Canada, and had fallen on hard times. He acquired a number of honorary godchildren. One of these, John Carswell, he put through school and university, after he became friendly with the boy’s parents, Donald and Catherine Carswell, who were hard-up writers.* When Lilian Killick’s husband was unemployed after the Great War, JB paid their mortgage and rates, until he got a job.

  In 1926 his uncle, Tom Buchan, a merchant seaman who periodically drank far too much, came back for a holiday from Australia, where he worked for a kindly clergyman, to see his sisters in Guernsey. They sent him away as he was drunk, and he was rescued by JB and Walter when he found himself down and out in London’s docklands. (He later took the Pledge.) They paid for his passage back to New South Wales, and gave him money and books for the voyage. Indeed, JB, and, most likely, Walter as well, continued to send Uncle Tom money from time to time.32

  JB could also be relied upon to do what he could to give young people a leg-up as far as employment was concerned, often providing letters of introduction. Willard Connely, an American, whom the Buchans entertained when he was studying at Oxford in the mid-1920s, scarcely recognised himself in the glowing picture painted by JB in his letter to a Fleet Street editor, to get him a job.*

  One small but characteristic act of graceful kindness concerned the twelve-year-old son of a Reuters man, who encountered JB at a garden party hosted by his father. As a result of a serious operation, the lad could not stand for long, but found himself engaged in conversation by one of his father’s colleagues. Two days later, Salute to Adventurers and Greenmantle arrived in the post, with the injunction that they should be read sitting ‘very quietly’ in a chair.33

  JB and Susie made friends with local people, such as Robert and Nancy Graves who lived at nearby Islip, Vernon Watney (of the brewing family) at Cornbury Park near Charlbury,** Percy and Clotilde Feilding at Beckley Park and, of course, the Gilbert Murrays and the John Masefields the other side of Oxford on Boar’s Hill. Susie’s sister, Marnie, who had been left a widow with three young children when her husband, Jeremy, died suddenly of pneumonia in 1930, lived not so far away at Wendover Dean in the Chilterns. In 1932, JB dedicated his children’s book, The Magic Walking Stick, to her children, Jeremy, Carola and Margaret.

  The Buchans tried very hard to reproduce their own carefree childhood for their children at Elsfield, even though JB was perforce often away from home. And they largely succeeded. The children were free to roam around Elsfield and the surrounding district, birds’ nesting and playing imaginative games, and only coming home for meals, when summoned by a police whistle. Their father walked with them, listened to them, took their preoccupations seriously, especially if these concerned history, literature and nature. Although they were aware from an early age that he was rather different from other fathers, they might well have replied, as Sir Walter Scott’s son did, when asked why people made such a fuss about his father: ‘It’s commonly him that sees the hare sitting.’34

  The Buchans took avidly to country life, and particularly the opportunities it afforded for keeping animals. JB would ride his hunter, Alan Breck, on whom he rarely if ever hunted foxes, and the children rode ponies, Alastair becoming the keenest and most skilful horseman. The family lavished attention on a succession of tyrannical and mischievous terriers, of which the best loved and worst behaved was Spider, part Sealyham, part wire-haired terrier, who was given to Alice as a puppy in 1927. He appears in Castle Gay as the disreputable but endearing and useful ‘Woolworth’. He was joined by an equally independent-minded, wholly black terrier called Black Douglas, known as ‘Duggie’.

  On Sundays the family attended service in the small, stone-built church of St Thomas of Canterbury, dating from the thirteenth century and in the Early English style. JB preferred to worship in the village where he lived rather than go to Presbyterian services in Oxford. Only when his mother arrived each April would he escort her to the services of the Presbyterian Chaplaincy, for she disapproved of this early example of ecumenism, referring to it as ‘bowing down in the house of Rimmon’,* a remark that never failed to irritate her grandchildren. JB told her that none of them were or ever would be Episcopalian, which was only in a very strict sense true.** But the regime at Elsfield was very different from that of Pathhead: the boys encountered a milk-and-water, highly ritualised Anglicanism at school, and the children grew up knowing less about the religion they professed than their parents, and without seeming to understand their father’s.

  From 1920 onwards, Anna Buchan came every April to Elsfield, and was followed a week later by Mrs Buchan and Walter. These were happy times, something of the flavour of which was captured in family group photographs taken by Walter. Although JB could never spend as much time in adult life with his Scots family as he would have liked, and his correspondence is full of expressions of disappointment that they don’t meet more often, he tried hard to see them. He would shape his visits to Nelson’s Parkside Works around weekends that could be spent in Peebles, staying at Broughton for at least part of the summer holidays and, as often, leaving the children there with their nanny, especially before they were old enough to enjoy the rigours of an August spent at a remote fishing lodge in the Highlands. He was encouraged in this by Susie, who was sincerely attached to Anna and Walter, as they were to her, and extremely dutiful to Mrs Buchan, who must sometimes have made her grind her teeth but about whom she was steadfastly loyal.

  The ‘English’ Buchans settled easily into Bank House or Gala Lodge at Broughton when they were in Scotland, walked with Walter, shopped in Edinburgh with Anna, attended tea parties with Mrs Buchan, looked out for them in the audience when JB gave lectures in Glasgow or speeches to rural communities in the Borders, and sometimes played a prominent part in the annual Beltane celebration in Peebles. Anna relied heavily on JB for literary advice and encouragement. Walter looked to JB to provide political gossip, book talk and glimpses into a less confined, more urbane world, while he depended on Walter to act as his banker, and informal adviser on tax matters. As JB wrote to Walter soon after he arrived in Canada in 1935, ‘You are by far my greatest friend.’ The converse seems also to have been true.

  The children, when young, revelled in an atmosphere of fond adult family attention, Alice and Anna finding a mutual interest in amateur dramatics, Shakespeare and reading, while the boys found Walter a kindly, indulgent uncle in whom they could confide. The childhood naughtiness of Billy gained him the unhelpful soubriquet of ‘Bad Bill’ from the childless Anna, but it also earned him £25, since she put an affectionate portrait of him into her novel, Pink Sugar, and promised him a farthing* for every copy of the first edition that sold. The dedication reads ‘To John and Susan Buchan because of Bill.’

  Thomas Nelson’s had emerged from the war in poor shape. More than eighty men did not return, including Tommy Nelson himself. Foreign markets had gone. The home market had changed (causing the comp
any’s staple of ‘Sevenpennies’ reprints to be abandoned). There were great difficulties associated with the supply of paper. The company had been shaken by Tommy’s death, and no one more so than JB; moreover, Tommy’s share of the capital was in trust for his children. The enormous works at Parkside imposed a massive burden of fixed costs. In August 1920 the Board was discussing how to deal with an overdraft of £38,000.35 The business was in much the same situation as Walter Scott’s publisher, Constable, had been in the 1820s, ‘like a drunken man, who can avoid a fall only so long as he keeps running’.36 The dominant personality in the firm, after Tommy Nelson’s death, was his brother Ian, who set about attempting to inject greater professionalism into its direction and was not intimidated by JB’s reputation. George Brown, JB’s fellow director and closest colleague in the firm, resigned in 1921.

  It was imperative in the early 1920s to find other ways of making money than through libraries of cheap reprints, and JB encouraged his fellow directors to contemplate expanding the company’s existing presence in the school textbook market. Here he was helped by the friendship he had forged with Sir Henry Newbolt. The latter had chaired a committee set up in 1919 by H. A. L. Fisher, President of the Board of Education, to investigate how to improve the teaching of English in schools. This committee reported in 1921 and JB asked Newbolt to help in editing a series of books based on its recommendations. The series was entitled ‘The Teaching of English’ and the books became standard texts in schools for many years. They followed this with ‘The Teaching of History’, the eleven volumes of which were written by well-known historians such as Robert Rait, an old Oxford friend of JB’s.*