An Audience with an Elephant

by Byron Rogers

  One morning, a man came to read the electric meters. Syd Dernley was busy in his post office, but he noticed the man walk up his garden path. Five minutes later he saw the man come running down it, running faster than he had ever seen any man run, down the path and up the street till he was lost to sight Which was odd, considering he had come by car.

  His wife’s cousin had not known where the meters were, so the man had said to leave it to him, and had opened a few cupboard doors before opening the one leading down into the cellar. He must have switched the lights on, at which point the two green spots came on. ‘You know, I can’t remember anyone coming to read our meters after that. It were all estimates.’

  At the time I was writing a column for the Sunday Express and thought hangman Syd an ideal profile for the paper. But no, they wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole; it was explained to me that however much the paper’s readers might approve of hanging, it would be too much of a shock to confront them with a hangman. Their ancestors were not so squeamish. Hangmen, along with their victims, were the first authentic working-class heroes (and hangmen had a longer shelf life). Crowds met them when they arrived on business in county towns, and newspapers scrupulously noted their taste in dress. ‘Mr Berry,’ recorded the Carmarthen Journal, ‘unostentatiously dressed in a plain suit of dark clothing and wearing a red Turkish fez.’ (The italics are mine.)

  I kept in touch with Syd Dernley, a helpful man, who at one point sent me a table of weights and drops, a sort of hangman’s ready-reckoner. He also sent me various ideas for feature articles.

  In return, I read and tried to help him with a memoir he had written about his poaching days, and I must have kept this for some time, as I remember an irritated reminder from him (‘If you don’t want to find yourself dangling from one of your apple trees’). I never could cope with his humour.

  When we spoke last month, he told me the last gallows of all had finally been taken down (‘You know, the one they had at Wandsworth for blokes with a mind to run off with Queen’), although it had subsequently been reassembled at the Prison Officers’ Museum near Rugby. He urged me to go and see it; he himself, he said, had already been twice.

  End of an Era

  HE HOUSE IS up for sale. I have the particulars in front of me, and I am staring with admiration at one phrase, ‘situated in well-wooded grounds’. You have to hand it to estate agents: if Tarzan’s house came on the market, that too would be in well-wooded grounds.

  Every time he called, said the man from the village, he felt more and more like the Prince hacking his way through to Sleeping Beauty. But when it came to the actual building even the estate agents gave up. Undergrowth they could cope with, but this was beyond their adaptable little adjectives. It was, said the prospectus lamely, ‘an interesting residence’.

  The house had fascinated me ever since I moved to the village five years ago. It stood, or rather lurked, in its wood, quite alone and beyond the street lamps, 200 yards from the last houses, at the top of a small hill. At first I thought it was empty, for though you could see where a drive had been, the brambles and grass had closed in until there was little more than a sheep track leading from the gate. There were no signs of life, and at night the lights were never on.

  But then there was no need for lights. Its owner had been totally blind for the last 20 years of her life. She was the vicar’s daughter and had lived there ever since her father died in the 1930s. At that point her grandmother, who had never been able to stand clergymen, came back into her life to buy the land and build the house. Only the old lady built it in this crazy style, half suburban villa, with brick and rendering, and half Tudor. All the windows were latticed and all the interior doors were without metal fittings, just massive wooden latches.

  The gardens went first, because of the cost of the upkeep. The grass tennis court under the trees became a lawn, and then the lawn went and there was just undergrowth. The greenhouse was abandoned, and the sheds left locked. When the auctioneer’s men finally came they had to fell trees just to get to the garage.

  The older villagers, who remembered the vicar’s daughter as a young woman riding her bicycle erratically down the hill, kept an eye on her, but the majority, the newcomers, did not even know of her existence. She was ferried like royalty from her house to church and the odd tea party; the village shop delivered her groceries. Just outside the front door was a tiny hutch where she kept her one hen; daily she must have groped her way to that, and the one egg.

  When I was first told about her I remember thinking that I would probably never come on anything like this again, a community, not its social services or its nurses, but people who had known her looking after one of their own, as their ancestors would have done. The blind lady in the wood was one of the village’s last links with its history.

  She was ill for just three weeks and went into hospital, asking one of the villagers to keep an eye on the house for her, but she did not return. She died, as she had lived, without causing trouble to anyone.

  And now her house is up for sale. For weeks people have come and gone; gouging into the window sills with penknives, hacking pieces out of the plaster, the way house-hunters do now. Soon someone else will be there, felling the trees, cutting a path, painting the beams white. They may frighten truculent children with tales of the old lady in the wood.

  I drove past on the day of her death, and on the gate someone had left a single red rose.

  A Ghost in the Church

  SMALL CHURCH IS TO CLOSE. There were a few paragraphs in the local paper, but it is the usual matter of accountancy, a congregation of nine unable to afford repair bills of £150,000. But this is no ordinary church – this is St Guthlac’s at Passenham in Northamptonshire. Come inside for a moment.

  It is a summer evening and there are shadows on the two inscriptions above the south door. Both are in Latin. The first celebrates the rebuilding of the chancel in 1626, and the text is what you would expect. Psalm 116, verse 12. ‘How can I repay the Lord for his goodness to me?’ But the second text is not at all what you would expect. St Luke 12, verse 20, Stulte Hoc Nocte. . . ‘You fool, this very night your life will be demanded of you.’

  The church guide-book, its words chosen with care, describes this as an enigma in its context. It does not mention the story, still told, that when the man who had the chancel rebuilt came to be buried, his bearers heard a known voice speak from the coffin. ‘I am not ready.’ They opened the coffin but there was no movement in the wild, spade-bearded face, which now, in marble, is also in the chancel wall. Yet when they buried him beside the altar the voice spoke again. ‘I am not ready yet.’

  And you are in familiar territory, are you not? An English parish church; a puzzling quotation; a dominating long-dead local figure. All you are waiting for is the horror to come as quietly as the tide and break among stone flags and the damp, for in life you have stepped into a ghost story by M.R. James.

  Three-and-a-half centuries after his death they still remember Sir Robert Banastre in Passenham, mothers bringing children to order by the mention of his name. Architectural historians also remember him. His chancel, said one, was unique. And it is. Sit down, for the restoration work of the 1950s has restored it to the way it would have looked in Banastre’s time. You will have already noticed that you are in an unusual place, entering from the west through the bell tower, past the eighteenth-century boxed pews painted a pale matt green. And then you come to Banastre’s chancel.

  Even old Pevsner was startled into one of his rare, wintry adjectives. ‘Very remarkable furnishings,’ he wrote. The roof is a deep blue, sprinkled with gold stars so you feel you have strayed into a planetarium. But everything else is deliberately archaic. On the walls are paintings of biblical figures, not put up to overawe the poor, but huge and elegant. The only thing is, they were put up centuries after the fashion for wall paintings had gone, and just before it became imperative to whitewash them over. The man who had this done must have thought himself i
n his private chapel, and where St Mark should be, his own face, under a linen skullcap, looks down.

  And Sir Robert had only just begun. His choir stalls froth with carvings and there are misericords from a time long after these had gone out of ritual. You sit there, passing your hands over carvings in the twilight, and you have the odd sensation these are moving. So you bend to look, and wish you hadn’t. For these are not the quaint beasts of the Middle Ages, these were meant to terrify: hoofed demons, legs shaggy with hair, their mouths agape, eyes bulging, breasts sagging.

  Why did he have all this done? It has been suggested Banastre was a secret Catholic, this prominent courtier to James I and Charles I, but no secret Catholic would have dared commission anything like this. And why did his villagers hate him so? The local historian Sir Gordon Roberts thought it might be because Banastre had enclosed their common land, but this, he found, had been done long before. As for the stories of cruelty, he found that Banastre’s will bulged with bequests.

  Yet they did hate him and went on hating him and told so many ghost stories these have become matter of fact. I asked one man when he had last seen a ghost, and he said Tuesday night, when a voice spoke out of the darkness. A human shape? Oh yes, except this was a human shape in a large hat with a feather.

  How odd it should feel so remote here, for the main road is only half a mile away and over the water meadows the roofs of Milton Keynes show above the willow trees, massed like an army. There are just fifteen houses in Passenham, also a tithe barn, the manor, the church. And if it is remote now, think how much more it must have been in the early seventeenth century, when a powerful man might have done what he wanted here.

  A summer evening with shadows, and the sudden wish to be elsewhere.

  Note: But the church didn’t close.

  Author biography

  Byron Rogers writes for the Sunday Telegraph, the Guardian, Saga magazine and most other publications. He is also the author of The Green Lane to Nowhere: the Life of an English Village and The Last Englishman: the Life of J.L. Carr, both published by Aurum Press. A Welsh-speaking Welshman, he lives in Northamptonshire and has succeeded in marrying an Englishwoman.

  ‘It has seldom fallen to me to read a book with such unalloyed pleasure. This is for winter evenings, to be read aloud by the fireside in the old way. . . and it is a delight. Just as critics have identified Graham Greene’s “Greeneland”, now we must speak of Byron’s World, no less exclusive, no less captivating and no less bewitching’ — Cambria magazine

  Copyright

  First published in 2001

  by Aurum Press Ltd, 7 Greenland Street, London NW1 0ND

  This eBook edition first published in 2012

  All rights reserved

  © Byron Rogers, 2001

  The right of Byron Rogers to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publishers’ rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

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  ISBN 978–1–84513–850–9