Also enclosed, in a separate envelope; couldn’t squash everything in one, to make you furious with rage, is the newly-issued Directory of Northern Writers, which includes your friend Dudley Hoys but excludes yourself. But you are in good company. Griffin, too, is omitted.
Your extremely kind and cordial invitation to L.H.S. at Easter touched me deeply and my callous disregard of it may well mean that it will never be repeated. But in fact the opportunity never arose; the bitter weather kept me indoors, drawing and rugging, and although I am now almost back to normal (i.e., back to smoking) I have only once ventured out into the country, this to walk the Whinfell ridge between Shap and the Tebay roads for a couple of miles or so to give me a start on WALKS ON THE HOWGILL FELLS. I felt none the worse, but my powers are disgustingly diminished, what with bronchial pneumonia and wedlock.
Incidentally, while honeymooning at York, I paid a first visit to the North Yorks Moors area. Not bad, not bad. I might yet do a COAST TO COAST WALK, St. Bees Head to Robin Hood’s Bay, crossing Lakeland, using the newly-created Dales Way into Yorkshire and ending with parts of both the Lyke Wake Walk and the Cleveland Way.
You will be dying to learn of my progress with the rug, and I am pleased to report that, as a result of diligent application, over 20,000 knots have now been completed and the whole should be finished within a fortnight. Then I hope to have it displayed on exhibition at many of the provincial galleries. It is by far the greatest of my accomplishments. If I am remembered, it will be because of the rug.
I assume you have now fled the bitter Northern weather are now back in suburbia.
AW
AW and Betty got married at Kendal Town Hall on 10 March 1970 – so at last AW started writing about Betty by name. Molly invited him and Betty to her home – but so far AW had not managed to get there.
The references to the Cumbrian writers Dudley Hoyes and Harry Griffin are all scurrilous – AW amusing himself by suggesting Molly was having affairs with them. She hadn’t even met them.
The correct title of Molly’s latest book was Cumberland Heritage published by Gollancz in 1970. ‘Mr A Wainwright’ is listed in the Acknowledgements.
LETTER 156: TO MOLLY LEFEBURE, 24 MAY 1970
38 Kendal Green, KENDAL
24th May 1970
Dear Molly,
Thank you for two entertaining letters and a well-deserved congratulatory telegram. I would have written earlier but found that a further period of convalescence was necessary after my rug affliction. Following such a sustained effort with a latchet hook I was quite unable to manipulate either pen or typewriter. I was making knots in my sleep and seriously disrupting normal marital relations. My fingers still sometimes go through the motions.
The really bitter pill was that the damned thing, when finally completed, couldn’t be used as intended because it slipped all over the parquet floor and was in fact positively dangerous. It is doomed to spend its days ignominiously under a table firmly pinned down by the table legs and four chairs. Never again. I keep seeing better rugs in the shops at half the price. Ready made, too. 220 hours of my life have been wasted.
Otherwise I am just about back to normal (i.e. smoking like a chimney) and getting around again. Latterbarrow (803’) and Hallin Fell (1291’) have both been conquered in recent weeks without undue distress. I have remained modest about these achievements and kept the news out of the press. And last week I paid a first visit to Black Force near Sedbergh in furtherance of my super new book (not yet started): WALKS ON THE HOWGILL FELLS. The going was arduous without the encouragement and help of a faithful, devoted and admiring new wife this expedition might well have failed. I must say I am enjoying having a faithful, devoted and admiring new wife (with a car). Not without good reason, she thinks I’m wonderful.
Betty is more than ever determined to get me up to L.H.S. after learning of your extremely kind invitation to me to meet Livia there. But I’m afraid Livia must be denied the pleasure of meeting the man who has come to mean so much to her. Because on Tuesday the 26th we are off to Scotland for ten days, touring the west and north in general and Wester Ross and Sutherland in particular. In the car, of course, with my f, d, and admiring new wife driving and me rubbernecking. Not for me any longer the bourgeoise discomforts of bus and train travel. So I’m sorry, but Livia must suffer a wretched frustration. I feel a bit sorry for her, not seeing me. Of course there’s always Dudley Hoys, who would do anything for you, or even, as a last resort, Griffin.
I await with impatience he appearance and world preview of THE HUNTING OF WILBERFORCE PIKE, but meanwhile am applying myself diligently to A SECOND LAKELAND SKETCHBOOK, which is well up to schedule and will be out in the autumn. In one drawing in this book L.H.S. appears unobtrusively in the background (‘Robinson and Hindscarth from Catbells’) No, let’s get it right: ‘Hindscarth and Robinson from Catbells’. Sometime this summer I shall be taking a long look at Newlands Church with the same purpose in mind.
With much of the tourist traffic drained off into limestone country the Lake District is strangely quiet this year, and this has undoubtedly contributed to the nesting of a pair of eagles with two eggs that are due to hatch this weekend. The area is being patrolled by wardens, but the actual site is being kept a dark secret. I know where it is, but all I can tell you is that it is amongst the eastern fells.
Talking about cats, part of the nuptial package deal was that I should take over a feline named Krishna, who has quickly established himself in the household and become the terror of all living creatures in the garden. He is no ordinary cat, but a four-legged monster with an extraordinary penchant for climbing. You don’t look for Krishna curled up on the floor somewhere; you look for him on the tops of wardrobes and cupboards and on high windowsills and on any projections from the vertical conveniently near the ceilings. It is somewhat disconcerting to suddenly notice him surveying your steadfastly from some lofty vantage point far above your head. You can’t help cowering a little with Krishna. The point is that I now have a model to pose for the illustrations in your next cat book. I have nothing to learn about baleful feline glares and snarls and expressions of utter indifference to entreaties. In repose he sleeps with a big fat smile on his face. No wonder. He’s the boss in this establishment and right well he knows it.
I hope you have better weather than you had on the occasion of your last visit. Don’t get too involved with Dudley.
AW
AW had taken up rug making after a serious bout of pneumonia and had been told to stay indoors and not do any strenuous exercise for a while. AW hated doing it. When he had eventually finished his rug, he laid it out on the living room floor which was made of highly polished wood. He slipped when walking on it the first time – and injured his leg. So much for recuperative therapy.
LETTER 157: TO MOLLY LEFEBURE, 9 AUGUST 1970
38 Kendal Green, KENDAL
Sunday afternoon, 9th August
Dear Molly, or Molly dear, whichever you prefer
So I finally completed my convalescence the other day with an intrepid ascent of Great Gable from a car parked on Honister Pass and accompanied only by my faithful and adoring new wife, realizing full well that I might drop dead or be smitten by a stroke or develop a palsy or yellow fever or something as a result of the unaccustomed exercise following my long lay-off. I kept glancing at Haystacks where my charred embers will some day be decently scattered, and thinking not yet, buggar; and in fact I not only didn’t pass away from lack of breath but completed the ascent in fine style and had enough puff to visit Green Gable, Brandreth and Grey Knotts before returning to the car. I was mightily pleased with my performance. I am a fellwalker again.
Mind you, the summit of Great Gable was no place to be that day. All the decent walkers are doing the limestone country this year, of course, unfortunately leaving in possession of Lakeland an untidy and noisy rabble of school parties and dropouts. You would have thought there was a Pop Festival going on top of Gable. There were hundr
eds of near-humans draped all over the summit, an noisy, uncouth, illiterate mob with transistors going full blast, and after a brief visit to Westmorland Cairn we fled the place. Green Gable was little better, but Brandreth and Grey Knotts were havens of peace. It was heavenly to recline again in a bed of heather and be damned to the passage of time.
Yesterday I sent off to the printer the last few pages of a super new book entitled A SECOND LAKELAND SKETCHBOOK, and when I have finished this overdue letter to you I shall get cracking on WALKS ON THE HOWGILL FELLS, which, although you have never heard of the Howgill Fells, is likely to become the standard book of reference to that area.
After looking through A CUMBERLAND HERITAGE only cursorily when I first received a copy (due to other pressures at the time) I have recently spent my evenings, apart from watching Coronation Street of course, in a detailed study of the book. The amount of time you must have spend in digging out all that forgotten information is truly amazing, and you have produced a classic here greater even than Scratch & Co. I could have wished you hadn’t been so confoundedly dogmatic about the old so-called coach road over to Dockray, or that original unspoilt bit of the Sty Head track, or about the so-called memorial stone to John Bankes, but I suppose you must be right and I should be grateful that you preferred not to name the cheapjacks who spread their spurious fictions around and call them truth. Congratulations on a splendid book. I hope it sells well, but the price of books in general is becoming frightening to those of us who live by the pen, don’t you think? And will get worse. From July 1st printing costs jump by 30%, mainly due to big wage increases and paper prices. Books like this last one of yours are gong to cost the public around three guineas in future and even your best friends will sneak off to the Public Library to borrow a copy. Anyway, Jennie Lee said that authors are soon to get royalties on books borrowed from public libraries, so perhaps you will be able to continue to live in the manner to which you are accustomed, booze and all.
You can’t tell me anything about the eagles in the Lake District. I know all about them. They have built three eyries for use in alternate season and I know exactly where they are, but I am not going to tell you because you would want to go rubbernecking. This year the hatching was half successful, one baby being reared successfully and it has already taken to the air. I don’t think the secret will keep much longer. A Cumberland newspaper has already published a photograph of the nest, or a least of the crag where the nest is.
Your account of the guided mission to Scafell with a distinguished professor from California was a delectable piece of writing. Molly the Sherpa certainly did her stuff all right all right, and Professor Omygosh must have had an adventure he will never forget. No, I can’t honestly say that any foreign researchers have ever asked me to guide them. Nor has anybody else, come to think of it. But you are hardly fair to dear old Dudley in saying he doesn’t know one end of Cam Spout from t’other. He does, you know, he knows Eskdale better than anyone. Anyway, why so spiteful with old Dudley all at once. Not long ago you were as thick as thieves. He could do no wrong in your eyes. You turned to him when I jilted you in favour of Betty and for months you rammed his virtues down my throat, not that I cared. Now clearly it is all over between you, and posterity will be left not knowing what your true association ever was. There will be speculation, of course. Sometime in the 21st century an avid woman researcher, probably living in a remote farmhouse in a Lakeland valley, will start digging into the dusty logbooks and visitors journals at L.H.S. and the Woolpack and interviewing the oldest inhabitants to discover what their grandfathers ever told them about the shriveled little man and the big bosomed florid woman who for a fleeting period of history were thrown together in a mad romance that ended abruptly in mutual abuse and recrimination (I did hear tell as how the woman was half-French).
Each morning I await my free copy of THE HUNTING OF WILBERFORCE PIKE from Livia. It never comes.
LETTER 158: TO MOLLY LEFEBURE, 16 DECEMBER 1970
38 Kendal Green, Kendal
16th December 1970
Dear Molly,
I received your letter, smelling vilely of gin, which no doubt accounted for its general incoherence. The message it purported to convey, if message there was, suffered from a welter of crossings out and misspellings and although I was generous enough to accept your apology for the haste in which it was written, I am left unhappy that your mind could have been in such turmoil and am still confused as to the role I am supposed to play with regard to the third Scratch classic, (sic) which I received safely a few days later. Hitherto your instructions have been reasonably explicit; they must have been penned in lucid intervals when you were off the bottle, but on this occasion you have thrown the thing at me and left me to work out for myself what I’m supposed to do with it.
Nor can I understand your mention of Mr G’s desire for the Siamese cat drawing from Wilberforce Pike. I said yes to this request almost a year ago, and in any case never got those drawings back from Livia, not that I wanted such reminders of a shameful episode in my artistic career.
It is good to know, however, that the book has been so well reviewed (can’t think why) and my sympathies are with the Halifax reviewer who thought Wilberforce Pike was 2634’. The trouble is that these flattering eulogies only spur you on to do more. I wish you would stick to your Cumberland Heritages and so do something worthwhile for posterity. Scratch and Co are amongst the banalities of life.
Meanwhile I am ranging far and wide over the magnificent Howgills, treading where no man has trod before but where multitudes will tread from Easter 1972 onwards. Now I see that a 168-mile footpath, Offa’s Dike, is to be opened next year. This will surely call for a super guidebook, but piling up for early attention are Walking the Border, The Pennine Watershed and a Coast-to-Coast Walk (St. Bees Head to Robin Hoods Bay). I am also committed to one Sketchbook per annum. These, coming on top of the marital duties I am now expected to perform, would exhaust a lesser man. Even so, time presses hard and you can imagine my rage and fury when you blithely command me to illustrate yet another cat book. You have me under your thumb, and well you know it.
All right, then, tell me what you want me to do, and say whether a deferment until 1985 is possible. If Scratch is as immortal as you seem to think, time is of little consequence. But Offa’s Dike is urgent and soon there will be a clamour for a Companion to it such as has not been heard since guidance was provided for the Pennine Way.
Okay, okay, what do you want me to do with Loona Balloona apart from the obvious?
Thank you for a lovely Christmas card. You said you weren’t going to send any more, you rotten thing. A shilling, this one’s cost me.
AW
Molly eventually did meet AW – she thinks probably around 1971. They then planned to do a book about the old packhorse roads of Lakeland and did some research together on various routes – along with Betty, driving them.
While investigating an old road over Shap, Molly said it was one way, AW said another. They shouted and argued, each insisting they were correct. Finally in exasperation, Molly yelled at him ‘That’s the fucking road down there!’
AW was silent before replying ‘I thought you were a lady.’
Molly says AW didn’t speak to her for two years, but they did become friends again, though the joint book never happened. (In 1985 AW did a slim book on his own called Old Roads of Eastern Lakeland.)
AW and Betty visited Molly’s house in the Newlands valley house and Molly and her husband visited AW and Betty at home in Kendal.
‘When we arrived at Kendal Green for the first time, AW opened the door and said “Did you have to bring him?” John didn’t mind. He took our Great Romance in his stride.’
Part 15
Fan Letters, 1969–80
During the 1970s, AW published twenty-two books – a sudden spurt, partly due to the fact that he was now happily married and domestically settled and had his own chauffeur – but also because a lot of the books were quite sh
ort, with usually more drawings than words.
It meant his fan mail grew even larger, but he still insisted on answering every letter, if not always immediately. And of course he still did not give away his home address to ordinary readers but continued to use the Westmorland Gazette as his address.
Most of the letters are from readers who love his books, and just want to tell him; others are informing him about their own walks and experiences; some pick holes in his spelling or routes, and they mostly get short shrift.
Once he retires in 1967, and begins to feel he is getting on a bit, he often uses this as an excuse not to take up suggestions and invitations made by readers or old friends. He also begins to harken back to the old days in Lakeland, before all the cars and tourists. He wrote a letter in 1969 – undated – to the Westmorland Gazette, complaining about what was happening to Kendal. In 1969 there was also a letter to an old friend from the past, George Haworth, who had been with him at Blakey Moor secondary school in Blackburn. He had gone into the Post Office, not the Town Hall. He was hoping AW would join them at an old boys reunion dinner.
LETTER 159: TO GEORGE HAWORTH, 16 SEPTEMBER 1969
The Wainwright Letters Page 28