lane, a low red-brick boundary wall to the graveyard led up to an oak-beamed and shingle-roofed lych-gate where the lugubrious Reverend Ferguson posted his notices every week. For years I thought his name was ‘Vicar’. ‘Morning Vicar,’ was all I had ever heard. In the background the grey church tower stood square-shouldered against the sky.
The sweeping branches of ancient oaks and beeches trembled their shadows over the lichened gravestones of many of my ancestors, barely legible now. Far below, their bones and oak coffins were sifting down into archaeology in sure and certain hope of everlasting oblivion, earth to earth. Those trees seemed to me to be the very essence of antiquity. Their roots writhed silently beneath the tombstones and the flagged paths, tilting them drunkenly. The massive trunks powered upwards in plaited thongs of great strength, branched into an algal tracery against the sky where they clutched at the clotted nests of a hundred and more thronging, clamouring rooks.
A bit further on, on the other side of the lane and right at the end of the village, matching ornamental ‘in-and-out’ wrought-iron gates, both invitingly and forbiddingly painted bright white, were set a hundred yards apart. A dense privet hedge six feet high ranged between them like a green rampart. Behind the hedge, a long gravel driveway crunched through neatly mown lawns to link the two gates in a sweeping arc. Those gates announced the presence of a house that didn’t need a name; it was and always had been the Manor House.
It was the home I longed for. Even now, sixty years later, it is engraved upon my soul. Not my parents’ home at that delicate moment in my young life – my father was leading a peripatetic existence as he worked tirelessly to build a business and we had migrated to wherever he needed to be: Yorkshire, Bath, Devon, south Somerset; no, the Manor House was my father’s family’s long home to which we always gravitated as surely as bees return to their hive, however far afield the capricious winds of fortune had wafted us.
Family lore had it that Henry VII had made an ancient branch of our family Lords of the Manor, vassals to their feudal superior, Edward Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence and 17th Earl of Warwick in his magnificent medieval castle, around which the county town has mushroomed. In deference to this historical patronage many sons of our family had been christened Warwick, right up to the present day.
The house was built in the seventeenth century when fire ripped through the original Tudor oak-timbered manor house and razed it to rubble. Since then it had been added to seemingly endlessly, wings and extensions bursting out at every point of the compass and several in between, as if for centuries each successive generation had felt the need to append their own whimsical additions. By my time in the late 1940s, the original Jacobean oak-beam and straw-brick beginnings had been hemmed in on all sides by sprawling Carolean, Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian wings, each apparently oblivious to any sense of architectural cohesion. The result was a jumble of gables and eaves on steeply pitched roofs with plunging valleys beneath a thicket of towering chimneys.
Getting around inside these ill-fitting extensions demanded long corridors leading to many external doors over countless steps, flights of stairs and varying floor levels more akin to a ship than a dwelling. And yet this random agglomeration of additions had awarded the house all the vernacular charm and mystique of a Cotswold village, in what seemed wilful denial of its much more formal intentions.
The house stood at the edge of a modest estate of farms and woods and was surrounded by broad acres of gardens and grounds. Close to the house they started off with the prescribed orthodoxy and the unmistakable Englishness of a country house, dignity upheld by manicured lawns, clipped box, privet and yew hedges and topiary, partitioned by walls and steps of ancient limestone intricately patterned with dark mosses and pale lichens. As you moved outward a network of flagged paths led you through a walled rose garden, the stonework dripping with bright aubretia, up stone steps and on beneath Japanese pergolas at the path intersections, smothered in tangles of rambling roses; then on past extravagant herbaceous borders and shrubberies bursting with scent and colour. Well away from the house, the walled gardens relaxed into much more casually arranged fruit beds of gooseberries, black and red currants, raspberries, loganberries, rhubarb and, finally, lurking discreetly in the distance, the ordered rows of vegetables.
Espaliered against the long south-facing wall, ten feet high, were pear, quince, plum, damson and apricot trees, where red admiral and peacock butterflies sipped the fruits’ oozing and fermenting sugars and basked drunkenly in the sun. That wall was an important boundary, a physical and aesthetic barrier between the disciplined world of horticulture and formal gardening and an altogether wilder world beyond.
Passing through any of its several archways another world opened up, tamed perhaps but certainly not domesticated, another country where long ago nature had claimed primacy, despite periodic, half-hearted summer mowings and prunings of its rampant, inexhaustible verdure. It was a country of ancient orchards, luxuriant paddocks and copses, weedy ponds, nettle banks and marshy hollows, lime kilns long abandoned, fox earths and badger setts, rabbit warrens and thorn thickets where roe deer lay up during the day. Yet further, on to the pocket-handkerchief meadows of the Manor Farm, where the rickety old farmhouse and ivy-smothered labourers’ cottages seemed not to have been built but to have grown organically out of the soil.
Behind the Manor House a discreet back drive led past the green-painted doors of the old coach house-turned-garages, to a veritable hamlet of outbuildings where the essential services of centuries of self-sufficiency had been performed: coach houses ivy-clad and a wide stable yard with a cast-iron hand pump and loose-boxes under a pan-tiled roof bursting with untidy sparrows’ nests, the laundry cottage, servants’ outdoor lavatories, wood and coal stores, pig stys, potting sheds, apple stores, saw mill, workshops, and four long, brick-based and white-painted glasshouses.
The Manor House was where, coming and going, we had been for centuries, and where my Victorian widower grandfather, born in 1873, now lived out his horticultural old age with my father’s younger bachelor brother, Uncle Aubrey. Looking back now, I see that to have spent so much of my childhood at the Manor House and to have experienced that rarified, virtually unchanged Edwardian world was a particular privilege no longer attainable in modern society. To me, throughout the 1950s, it was Xanadu, a private kingdom all my own and everything a country child could hope for, even though at some point I became dimly aware that I was a tenuous and perhaps the final tendril emanating from a broader vine, the roots of which were planted elsewhere.
* * *
Properly, our family were Yorkshire folk. We had been in the West Riding since the reign of Edward III, whose heralds issued a grant of arms to ‘Johannes Cay of ye lands and manors of Wodesham’ in 1367, which, 150 years later, would emerge as the elegant, stone-built Elizabethan Woodsome Hall at Kirkburton, much as it stands today. As a confused schoolboy struggling to locate our place in history, I once asked my father what we were. ‘We are Plantagenets,’ he replied enigmatically.
I was always a lazy student of history, struggling with meaningless names and dates, but in early adulthood I began to understand that just as contemporary politics had severely impacted upon my immediate family, so down the centuries we had always been pawns in the grander machinations of power. To hang on to what we had, and even to survive, over the centuries we had been forced to duck and weave. As worthy (and opportunistic) Protestants we wisely ingratiated ourselves with Thomas Cromwell when Henry VIII set about dissolving the vastly wealthy Catholic monasteries. By some deeply devious political chicanery we came in for several thousand acres of rich glebe farms to add to our expanding Yorkshire estates. We leapt into Catholicism to avoid being burned at the stake by Bloody Mary, and bounced out again to appease her passionately Protestant half-sister, the virgin queen.
We were dashing Cavaliers in the court of Charles I – effusive supporters of the Royalist cause – and studiously kept in with Prince Rupert of the Rhine. One gallant ancestor, a knight called Sir John, was appointed Colonel of Horse to the king. He had helped raise 700 West Riding men to fight for the Royalists, for which he accepted a baronetcy
