by Tom Cox
A week after The Bear’s death, during our Christmas meal at her place, my friend Hayley found a potato – almost certainly grown at Dartington – with a mark on its skin bearing an uncanny resemblance to a small, neat cat. It was a quick turnaround, but we decided it was The Bear anyway.
I had spent a large amount of time looking after, and worrying about, both of these cats, ferrying them to and from the vet’s, medicating them, cleaning up after them, waking up in the early hours to check on them, cancelling trips because of them, which meant that, after their deaths, life became more carefree, but also didn’t, because of the guilt that I felt about their deaths making life more carefree. Another vibrant, technicoloured spring was in motion. Daffodils then primroses then bluebells grew around Shipley’s grave. One of the cordylines I’d planted less than two years before had already grown as tall as the ceiling of the Magic House’s ground floor. Roscoe was fully recovered. Ralph was about to turn sixteen but still looked five and had hair like a young Kurt Russell. More was going on in the evenings at Dartington: gigs, courses, talks, tightrope walking, conversations. My friends and I took glasses of wine and beer back from the White Hart to the Magic House’s garden and lit outdoor fires. Singing and guitars happened sometimes. Phoebe, one of Dartington’s employees, came down from the Hall with a shruti box, an obscure instrument from the Indian subcontinent whose miniature mournful bellows soundtracked our friends Emily and Seema’s solemn burning of some phone bills, payslips and insurance documents from 2013. Skinny-dipping stats were up again on the previous fiscal period. The deer-park wall restoration was completed and deer were reinstalled beyond it. The giant owl that made steam and travelled in a line at ground level called out into the evening and sometimes the smaller mortal owls called back. The new cafe, The Green Table, was rarely less than heaving, full of delicious, locally grown food, and contained beautiful 1960s furniture salvaged from the student canteen. Dartington’s new CEO, Rhodri Samuel, not only had good ideas and obvious passion for his job, but a detailed and respectful knowledge of the Elmhirsts and Dartington’s past. One of his upcoming projects was to restore High Cross House, the biggest of the flat-roofed buildings on the estate designed by William Lescaze in the 1930s, which had been sitting empty and damp for almost half a decade. I got talking to a printmaker in the cafe and ended up learning printmaking in a studio behind the Hall on printing presses older than the Elmhirsts. I swam and walked and consumed beer and cider and crisps and local salad in the sun and rain and didn’t lose 23,000 words of a book.
It was exciting to live in this revitalised Dartington, but I was still entranced by the estate’s more neglected corners: Aller Park, the old, empty school building, right at the head of the valley, with the phantom swimmers of its abandoned outdoor pool; the arcane ruin in the woods above School Farm. When I walked around Foxhole, a vast empty early twentieth-century building which had once been student digs, faded, peeling gig posters were still on the walls and the images of the pupils I’d seen larking around on silent early 1970s Super 8 films felt close enough to touch. For each of my summers at Dartington, part of my standard playlist had been Mark Fry’s Dreaming With Alice, a little-purchased, now very rare acid folk album from 1972, which sounded, at times, like a less needy Donovan, and struck me as a very Dartington record. To my delight, I discovered it actually was a Dartington record: Fry – now better known as a painter – had recorded the album in Italy, but written much of it as a teenager living in one of those very rooms I’d peered into at Foxhole, on a guitar he’d made himself in a Dartington carpentry class. All of Dartington’s ghosts struck me as very benevolent – well-meaning spectres who still loved the earth, even in death. There was a legend about a Woman in White, who would only appear to presage the demise of a resident at the Hall. This worried me slightly, as there were no longer any residents at the Hall, and it could be argued that the nearest thing to one was either me or the tenants of the cottages on the other side of the courtyard. I don’t think I ever saw her, unless her sartorial penchant was for kaftans and her favourite habit was to play the penny whistle in broad daylight under a swamp cypress.
*
In late August 2017, I woke at 3 a.m. to the sound of church bells drifting through my open bedroom window. I sat bolt upright, with a little shiver. There were two churches on the estate: the ‘new’ St Mary’s, close to the main road at the bottom of the hill, built in the late nineteenth century, and the old St Mary’s, behind the Hall. I’d got to know the bells just a little at the new St Mary’s lately, pulling on one of the ropes attached to them during an introductory campanology lesson I’d been given by the church’s head bell ringer. There’s an addictive rhythm to bell ringing, an elusive sweet spot to be hunted out, and soon you begin to see the bells turn over in your mind’s eye. It dispelled a notion that I knew was untrue yet had always lingered in my mind, that a church is a bit like a wound clock, or even a sentient being, and is able to ring its bells all on its own. In campanology you also get a new appreciation of the size and power of the bells. Even so, I knew there was no way that even at their loudest, with the wind blowing in the right direction, the bells of the new St Mary’s could possibly be so audible in my bedroom, a mile away. The old St Mary’s, meanwhile, was now only a ruined thirteenth-century tower, a church which had not rung out its song for a 140 years or more. The night felt thick and deathly still. ‘The witch is coming through my window,’ sang Mark Fry, in my head. I sat up for a while, listening to unidentified creatures rustle behind the hedge, behind Shipley’s grave.
I discovered a disappointingly logical explanation a few days later: some drunk members of the Dartington Summer School had managed to get access to the tower above the Hall that night, discovered there was a bell up there, and decided it would be a shame not to check it was still working. I rang the same bell a week later, in broad daylight, having been given a tour of some of the lesser-seen parts of the Hall, including Leonard Elmhirst’s old study with its secret door, which it is said he put into use when he was feeling antisocial and Dorothy had visitors. I also got chance to go up to the top of the tower of the old St Mary’s, where before I’d only seen jackdaws and three trumpet players who’d serenaded me the previous August as I walked past leaning gravestones which stood against a wall, like chairs pushed to the edge of the room to make way for an event. From here, the highest viewpoint on the estate, you got a new appreciation of just what a vast project the Elmhirsts had undertaken here in the twenties, taking all the ruined buildings and overgrown green spaces around and transforming them into utopia. I looked for the Magic House off to the south, but the dense leaf canopy of high summer gave the impression that it had used its magic to totally vanish.
Everything became a little ragged and feral after that; summer had shed its belt and stopped tucking in. Nature’s wisdom teeth started playing up again. I’d been friendly with many of the Dartington cattle, often stopping to let a Jersey or two lick my palm as I walked through their green and gold playground, but one day in September when I was passing through the field leading down towards the Magic House from the old badger setts, a herd of assorted breeds charged me. I turned to face them and ran a little at them and they backed off, before redoubling their efforts, and I leapt the wall at the end of the field, inches out of the reach of the leader’s horns. I had an idea for a new book swimming around my head: a different kind of book, not a very Dartington book. Hares – so rare in Devon – were one of its underlying themes. I was trying to decide whether to write this book, or a different one that I also wanted to write. I was on the phone to a friend, talking about this precise dilemma, when I walked out onto my wet autumn lawn, tatty with dead wildflowers at its edges, and found a freshly dead hare at the lawn’s exact centre. Shortly after, I heard a rumour, first from a tree surgeon friend, then from Mary, the lady who lived on the other side of the Hall and who knew all there was to know about unicorns, that part of the new redesign of the Gardens was likely to involve the re
purposing of my house. ‘You need to tell them how important you are, so they’ll let you stay,’ she advised me. But I wasn’t in the business of telling anyone how important I was. It had never been my style. Besides, I was the blow-in, the accident. A week later, I opened my front gate and found another hare, as dark as the sky above, dead, on the tarmac.
I am now struck anew by just what little time there was between me enjoying the best summer of all in the Magic House, and my departure in December of the same year. Months later, people were still asking me why it happened. That rumour about what the estate were planning to do with the house is not sufficient explanation. ‘I’d take that with a pinch of salt if I were you,’ a long-time Dartington affiliate had cautioned me. ‘They’re always proposing stuff like that, and it usually doesn’t happen, or takes years to.’ Eighteen months after I left, the Magic House remained tenanted as a residential property.
Imogen Holst, the legendary composer who lived and taught on the estate in the 1940s, summed Dartington up as a heaven on earth you felt you could live in for the rest of your life, before you realised that to go on learning you had to leave. I lived in utopia and would surely never live in another place so sublimely removed from the everyday yet so rich in culture and community spirit. But the word utopia comes from the Greek word ‘outopia’ which translates as ‘no place’. Did I want to live in utopia all my life? Wouldn’t that be a little like living a life without mistakes, where every decision you made was tediously and mind-numbingly correct? I had become a big fan of mistakes over the years and headstrong, impulsive behaviour had worked out pretty well for me. One of the problems of getting older, though, is that Experience happens and, no matter how much of a headstrong, impulsive person you remain, it will insidiously begin its work on that side of you: in the back of your head where resides the chorus of voices that disapprove of your headstrong impulsive behaviour – individual and real, or nebulous and societal – this choir of sensibleness will be joined by a new voice, which you might recognise with some dismay as your own. This can be frustrating. By late 2017 it felt like a long time since I’d made a major headstrong and impulsive decision that could be widely criticised by others. So I decided maybe it was time to do something about that.
Snow began to fall on the day I left: the first I had experienced in all of my nearly four years at the Magic House. That was a weird thing about this Narnia: it was almost never white. An icy wind blew the ashes from my last, monumental fire-bowl fire over the garden. It looked messy, but they would do it good, in the long run: more fertiliser in the land of magic growth. For a fortnight I had been experiencing that same tunnel vision I’d experienced on the day The Bear had died when I took the cat food mountain to the shelter. It made me hyper-efficient and stronger than my strength. The previous day, I’d carried a king-size bed frame, alone, down to the car, gaffer-taped it to my open car boot then driven it to the charity shop, who refused it on the grounds that it was missing a safety sticker, then to the recycling centre. By 4 p.m., I had burns on my hands – from the fire, but also from an absent-minded moment with my kettle earlier that morning – my sweater was covered in ash and soil, and I was trying to find Roscoe, who was missing, while also instructing my movers on which of the outside plant pots did and didn’t need to go into the van and trying to remember how many sugars they had in their tea. In twenty minutes the Property Manager was due to arrive and do her final inspection, and I needed to clean up the last of the glass from an internal window I’d smashed with the corner of the bed frame.
As I was coming down the stairs carrying a full-length mirror and an aloe vera plant and the edge of the mirror was digging into the angry blister that was forming on the worst of the burns on my wrist, I noticed that a well-bred-looking stranger was standing in my hallway. ‘Oh hello,’ said the well-bred-looking stranger, who sounded even more well-bred than she looked. ‘I noticed you were moving out and wondered if that meant the house is up for rent again, and I was wondering if it would be a convenient time to look around.’ Somehow restraining my inner Shipley, I told her that no, it would definitely not be a convenient time to look around. Outside, weather fell, seeping down through dead brambles and soil towards Shipley and The Bear. ‘The witch is coming through my window,’ Mark Fry had sung on my stereo the previous night. ‘The winter snow upon her hair.’
The moment I know I’ve moved out of a house is usually when I start to pack the multi-sockets. They’re always one of the very last things you remove: part of that collection of straggling, uninteresting essentials that appear to take up no space in the final illusion of emptiness but in fact fill a few boxes and bring your car dangerously close to capacity. After that, all that’s left are spiders, a five-pence coin, lines of dust-fur ghosting where bookshelves once stood, a couple of screws and elastic bands and the lost lid from the beloved dried-up pen you reluctantly threw away five months earlier. Leaving the Magic House was different. The moment I knew I moved was when I shut and locked the doors: not the big front door on the Gothic side of the house, but the Crittall-style French doors, likely installed in the 1920s, on the side facing the Gardens. They made a different noise to the one they usually made, louder and more reverberant, and I heard it in the chamber of my chest as well as my ears, and it was now that I realised on a greater level that you don’t live in the Magic House twice, and it was over. I felt like a man leaving a building for the last time in a film, and that somewhere in the dark empty room beyond, which looked bigger than it ever had when it had been mine, there was already a ghost forming of another version of me who had stayed here forever. No longer in possession of the keys to any house on earth, I walked to the car where the cats – the two who weren’t staying behind with my ghost – were waiting. The freezing sky was full of good and bad, and I blew up the lane.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Illustrators are too often unacknowledged or barely acknowledged presences in books, so I’ll start by thanking Clare Melinsky for the wonderful psychedelic jacket design of this one – which turned out to be everything I’d imagined it could be and more – and my mum, Jo Cox, for the thirteen prints you will have found inside. Jo has contributed linoprints to my latest three books, despite finding the process of cutting the lino very difficult, due to the arthritis in her hands. More recently, the pain has got to a point where it’s impossible for her to continue, so the linoprints in these pages will probably be her last in that medium, but what a grand and special finale they are. Knowing such beautiful images were going to be sitting alongside my writing was an extra motivating force to try to bring my own work up to scratch. Thank you to Imogen Denny, Katherine Ailes, Mathew Clayton and the rest of the team at Unbound for helping to make this book exactly what I wanted it to be. Thank you Jenny Porrett for the help researching my ancestry, Wes White, Johanna van Fessem and Steve Leighton for the Avalonian expertise, Ed Wilson for the top agenting, my dad for the top dading, Matt Shaw for the website help, Dave Holwill for the top typo-spotting on my website, Tristan Allsop, Brian Jackman and Margaret Morgan-Grenville for helping me with my Kenneth Allsop research, Rob and Donna for the soup, Charlotte Faulkner for the ponies, Allen Cotton and Jane Allen for the info on Teapot Lane (Worms Lane), Justine Peberdy and Phoebe Wild for the secret tour of Dartington Hall, and Sara Benham for the prison tour. Finally, I’d like to thank coffee and swimming. I couldn’t have done it without either of you, or at least not in the same way.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Tom Cox lives in Norfolk. He is the author of the Sunday Times bestselling The Good, The Bad and The Furry and the William Hill Sports Book longlisted Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia. 21st-Century Yokel, was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize, and the titular story of Help the Witch won a Shirley Jackson Award.
@cox_tom
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