by John Fowles
Much later, in the Fifties, a letter came out of the blue from a woman who had read a newspaper interview with me, and who claimed she was some kind of second cousin. It was more about herself, she had a dress-shop in Birmingham, but she remembered my mother from before the marriage, that she sewed beautifully and had a medlar-tree in her garden. She didn’t know why she remembered the medlars, which she spelt meddlers. I answered her letter politely, in the kind of way that discourages further communication. When I bought Thorncombe, I got a medlar and planted it; but it died two years later.
My father: it wasn’t until I went to boarding-school that I realized how outstandingly dull he was as a preacher, a handicap which was partly imposed by his general humourlessness and partly by his lifelong habit of sailing high over village heads. He was not at all a religious or a saintly man, even by the modest standards of the Church of England. He was something of a theologian, but rather in the way an army officer might have an interest in regimental history. He had a considerable collection of sermons and doctrinal pamphlets from the seventeenth century; but the eloquence and fluent imagery of that period never once went with him into the Pulpit. I used to cringe with embarrassment, sitting in the Vicarage pew and seeing how restless he would make the congregation as he droned, he had a special pulpit voice some of the cheekier village boys had the knack of imitating, especially when they met me out of range of adult ears interminably on towards Sunday lunch; or luncheon, as it was always called. I have admired the pruned and clipped ever since. He conditioned me there, as in so many things, by antithesis.
I sent him, during my first term at Oxford, just before he died, an Arbe reprint of Hugh Latimer’s 1549 Sermon on the Ploughers, one of the greatest pieces of hammering prose-poetry in the history of the English language, let alone the English church. He thanked me for it, but made no comment. It was meant to be a gentle revenge, but I think he took it as a sign that what he saw as certain doubts in me might after all survive the ‘reefs of higher education’ a phrase I once heard him use in a sermon on a characteristically irrelevant favourite bee in his pulpit bonnet: recruitment to the ministry.
He never, beyond some very cursory reference, introduced current world events into his sermons, which were always remorselessly dry and rarefied. One of his more educated wartime churchwardens had the temerity to suggest that a few more topical allusions would not come amiss; but father remained convinced that the village had quite enough of all that in the newspapers and on the wireless, and continued adamantly in his old course. On another wartime occasion a Negro chaplain from the American camp near by came and preached to a packed church drawn not by piety but by curiosity to see how this mysterious chimpanzee would perform. He had a fine voice and presence, and a touch of the revivalist in manner; and he stunned us, he was so warm and good. But not my father, who in a rare descent to cattiness condemned him in private afterwards as ‘overenthusiastic’. He was using the word in its technical church sense, of course; the following week he went fifteen minutes over time on the Arian heresy, just to put us all in our place.
I can see now that his real fear was of any nakedness of feeling. He had a bizarre use of the word ‘demonstrate’, which he twisted, or spread, to include any exhibition of anger, conviction, tearfulness any strong emotion, however innocent or justified. Other visiting preachers who showed a touch too much fervour, protesting parties in some village argument, even myself unfairly blamed for some misdemeanour… if only the good man would rely less on the demonstrative; all this demonstration doesn’t help the lady’s cause; do not demonstrate so, Daniel. It was not that he would have expected me to sit silent, if I had a reasonable excuse; simply that I had dared to advance natural temperament as self-justification. The word covered countless other things, in my case: sullenness, excitement, even mere boredom. He had some extraordinary Platonic notion of the perfect human soul, in which all the manifestations he counted as ‘demonstration’ were missing, or totally controlled. I dread to think what he would have made of the more recent political sense of the verb and noun.
Yet or perhaps, the English being what they are, because of this he was counted a good parish man. He was endlessly patient with the most garrulous old spinsters, sympathetic to the (slightly) more enlightened. Like many Devon villages, we had no real squire; there were various larger country houses in neighbouring combes where we were on visiting terms, but in the village itself he was the de-facto social and symbolic tribal chief; on every committee, consulted over everything. I think he filled that role well enough. He certainly believed in it, which was one good reason he was not truly religious. His real faith was in order; and his mildly privileged place in it. There were peasants; there were farmers and shopkeepers and, during the war, a heterogeneous collection of elderly evacuees in rented cottages; and there were people like us. I was never allowed a shadow of a doubt (perhaps because the truth about my mother’s background might have created one) as to where we belonged. Proof hung forever on the dining-room wall; an oil-painting of my great-grandfather, a bishop no less. To be fair, and even if his marriage had not proved it, father was not a snob. We might be out of a better drawer than the rest of the village, but we must never show it. No distinction was ever to be made between those it was our duty to be with pastorally and those it was pleasant to be with socially.
In essence he was a subtle rather than classic example of why the military and the ecclesiastical, cross and sword, so often seem just two faces of the same coin. He wasn’t a stern man at all, in spite of his lack of humour, which sprang much more from a diffuse absentmindedness, almost an unworldliness, than any intrinsic disapproval of laughter. There was nothing in his personal nature that overtly tyrannized the household, indeed he was always at his most patient where some fathers might have ranted and thumped the table; and I am sure it was not simply because I was an only child, and technically motherless. I was hardly an angel before I went to boarding school at fourteen, yet he never once used physical punishment on me. He disapproved of it, even in the village school, though he finally sent me to where the juniors were caned once a fortnight with monotonous regularity. The real tyranny came from the totally accepted belief in the system, the existing social frame. Just as a soldier cannot question orders, the hierarchy of command and all the assumptions that underlie it, nor could we. One might at a pinch discreetly object to the outward manner of some other vicar from a neighbouring village, or of some high-up from clerical headquarters at Exeter, even of the bishop himself; but not to their right to be exactly who they were. During the war, of course, that was in the nature of things; all social evolution was petrified, which was the main reason Labour won that first election afterwards. Though quite unconsciously, and despite his being an arch-demonstrator, father must have approved of Hitler for keeping progress so firmly at bay.
I tried to put it all in the play I based on him; one other parallel I made there still holds, I think, and that is the way the English turn all outward freedom (as contrasted with that of the imagination) into a game with set rules: one where every freedom is allowed except the freedom to break those rules. I suspect the Anglo-Saxons were a much more taboo-dominated crowd than the Celts they drove out of England. If the Romans brought civilization, the German tribes brought ritual codes, which have survived in our hideous national inventiveness over games proper, the art of wasting time according to someone else’s book. I particularly loathed team games at school as I have ever since though I thought at the time it was merely because they were an obvious emblem of the whole sadistically stereotyping system. But I see now it was one more negative way in which father and his world-outlook conditioned me.
We lived very simply, though much more out of parsonical good taste than necessity. The living (or both livings, since we also had a neighbouring parish-hamlet in our cure) was well endowed, and my father had several hundred a year private income on top of that; and there was the money my mother had left in trust to me; even Millie had a smal
l income of her own. That came to seem like another hypocrisy, when I realized in later boyhood that our supposed poverty was really mere thrift. No doubt a good deal went on charity and the upkeep of the two churches, but the former certainly didn’t begin at home in terms of birthday presents, pocket-money and the like. I have been careless with money ever since, one more item on the bill.
My father had one real passion, which endeared him to the village and belatedly endeared him to me as well. That was a mania for gardening. Though he would potter about on our occasional picnics and botanize with me, he did not really approve of wild plants and nature. He drew some analogy between horticulture and God watching over a world; in nature things happened behind your back, could not be supervised and controlled. At any rate, his own garden and his greenhouse he adored. That and the seventeenth-century texts he liked to browse over were his only real indulgences very nearly his sin, in the case of gardening. If he couldn’t get cuttings of rare shrubs honestly, he was not above stealing them, with a mixture of blatant casualness and ill-concealed guilt that was delicious. He always carried an umbrella, on even the most unlikely days, to hide his ill-gotten Irishman’s heels and seedlings in. It was one of the few things Aunt Millie and I were allowed to tease him over; and assumed monstrous proportions when one day one of his victims happened to be in our garden and spotted a successful scion of some precious rarity from his own. Father was shamed into an outright lie about its real provenance, and he wasn’t allowed to forget it.
All my most affectionate memories are of him standing in his greenhouse, wearing the ancient and faintly episcopal purple baize butler’s apron he used for gardening. Sometimes, in hot weather, he would take off his dog-collar and be taken by some unsuspecting stranger for the fulltime gardener we did not actually permit ourselves. As an adolescent I got bored with all this side of his life, I wanted to read books and roam the countryside during my holidays, but when I was younger I used to help him pot and all the rest. He bred carnations and primulas especially; used to exhibit, before the war, and judged shows to the end. If we were short of humour and several other kinds of light in that house, there were always flowers, a feeling that the large garden was a part of the family.
It seems absurd now. A small boy rushing in to breakfast: The Osmanthus is out! The Clernatis armaudii! The Trichodendron! They weren’t Latin and Greek to me. They were like our dogs and cats, loved and very familiar. There was a walled kitchen-garden as well, but father had no interest in vegetables. Thrift was abandoned enough to allow a man to come in twice a week to look after them. His prides there were the fruit-trees, the apples and pears some previous incumbent had gone in for and my father added to; old gridded espaliers and gnarled cordons, their fruiting-spurs as brittle as charcoal. I suppose people still grow them, Jargonelle and Glou Morceau, Musk Bergamot and Good Christian; the russets and pippins and wardens and codlings and nameless ones Aunt Millie’s Tree, the Yellow Devil (because it used to rot in the apple-loft), the Green Spice. I knew them as other little boys knew county cricketers and football teams.
And I owe him other poetries, quite literal, though like so many true gifts from parents to children, they took many years to mature. When I was a child he liked, or at any rate regarded it as his duty, to come and read to me at bedtime, if his duties allowed. Sometimes, as I grew older (though not nearly old enough) he would read a simpler passage from one of his seventeenth-century texts I think more for the sound of the English than for the religious content, although he may have hoped for some Couè-like benefit. Occasionally he would try to explain the doctrinal situation behind one of these passages in terms a small boy might understand, as a less abstruse father might have tried to convey the real history of cowboys and Red Indians. I certainly grew up with a vision of some very confused theological gun-slinging, and a distinct sense that the Church had once been a much more exciting place to inhabit.
I can see now he always wished I was older; it was as if he foresaw that when the nine-year-old he read to became the nineteen he secretly dreamt him to be, such conversation would be impossible: I should have escaped him. But I mustn’t make him too austere and unworldly. He very rarely returned from his occasional sorties to Exeter, where he always found time for an hour or two in the antiquarian bookshops, without something for me: it was usually a story by one of the boy’s writers of his own childhood, a Henty or a Talbot Baines Reed, and I would much rather have had the latest Biggies or a Beano Annual, but I still enjoyed them.
Once he handed me, after one of these expeditions, a book of fables. The price he bought it for is still on the flyleaf: one shilling and sixpence. He had obviously glanced at it, decided the English was suitably simple and edifying, and the pictures pretty and harmless. I thought the queer little uncoloured prints terribly dull; at first glance, a really measly present. But in fact it was a Bewick, the 1820 anthology of his work patched together round Gay’s Fables. Though I didn’t realize it then, it was my first contact with a great English original. At the time (I was ten) I thought the book a ludicrous and shameful error on my father’s part, because turning through the pages for the pictures I came on one I knew he couldn’t have noticed in the shop: the famous cut of a doctor of divinity spurning the solicitation of a one-legged beggar, while behind him a dog pisses down his gown—a little moral tale whose concise brilliance I was to remember all through my childhood… and beyond. Then there were other scandalous scenes of ladies with bare breasts. I was shocked particularly and then fascinated by the one that was headed Indolence and Sloth: the sleeping young man with the jordan under his bed and the two women, one naked and the other clothed, beside it, seeming to discuss something as they watched him. I was tempted to show this gross lapse of caution to Aunt Millie, but didn’t, in case my father promptly descended on the book and confiscated it.
Just how great and quintessentially English an artist Bewick is I still have to learn each time I look at him; but at least the small boy came to realize something intense and private in the artist that called to his own nature. He began a little, through the years, to see with Bewick’s eyes, as he was later to see with John Clare’s and Palmer’s and Thoreau’s. That dog-eared copy of the Select Fables is now the last book I would ever sell.
A somewhat similar thing was to happen two or three years later, when I was in the throes of first puberty. One wet day, in despair, I pulled down a dull-looking book from an upper shelf in my father’s study. It was the first volume of Herrick’s Hesperides; by benign chance the page fell open at one of his coarsest epigrams and I saw a word in print, fart, I had hitherto imagined was something one only giggled over, out of reach of adult ears, at school. Up in my room I read on. Much of it I couldn’t understand, but the mingled brutality and eroticism of what I could was a revelation. I was to purloin those two volumes countless times again during the following years. They had a profound influence, the secrecy with which I had to steal them, rearranging the books so that no empty space showed, then hiding them in my room… but, with a healthier secrecy, their lyrical genius, and Herrick’s underlying pagan humanity, also seeped into me. His former ‘lothed’ living at Dean Prior was within cycling distance of us, and I must have been one of the youngest votaries who has ever stood before his epitaph there, though I think it was less out of gratitude than sheer disbelief. How could someone of my father’s calling ever have existed and been allowed to write such wicked verse?
Later, at Oxford, I had one day to produce an essay on Herrick for my tutor. I wasn’t so foolish as to make it quite autobiographical, but it did make an engaging minor poet out to be a pinnacle of human sanity and supreme exponent of love of fife—he was my Rabelais, of course. ‘Very interesting, Mr Martin,’ said my tutor when I had finished reading. ‘And now perhaps next week you would be kind enough to write me an essay on Herrick.’ The snub was deserved; but I was dealing with someone who had only read the man… not lived him.
My father did do some censoring. Another bedtime
book he read from was the Jacobean collection, The Shirburn Ballads. It was not until he died and I was going through his library before the great bulk of it was sent for sale that I discovered the Shirburn is not just an anthology of hymn-tunes; the religious ballads were the only ones he ever read to me, to my recollection. I had already been set at literal Latin and Greek at my prep school, and my father read English verse with the emphatic stress of his own classical schooldays. He particularly liked the broadsheets in the rhythm of the amphimacer, which indulged this love of a heavy beat we would even get them at Sunday School occasionally. He would stand there, waving his free hand like a would-be conductor, making me go red as the kids around tried to stifle their giggles… how could he make such an ass of me with his stupid poem-reading? But now, at least in their bedtime renderings, they are among my good memories of him.
All that heart can conceive, ear can hear, eye can see,
All, and more, I possess, sweet JESU CHRIST, by thee.
Heaven and earth, all therein,
Life, limb, thou gavest me.
Have I not cause to sing
Jesu, come thou to me.
Though the world tempt me sore,
though the flesh trouble me,
Though the Devil would devour,
my refuge is in thee.