on the other, that of his wife Lady Beatrix (died 1374), with her dogs at her feet.
In the gallery of the south transept hung Bishop Grandisson’s enormous mechanical clock, with its square wooden face painted bright blue. It showed the time with an intriguing system of planetary symbols, based on the Ptolemaic model, with a golden sun, and silver moon, and a gilded star, moving steadily round the gleaming dial of heaven. Such images sank deeply into the child’s mind, unconsciously reappearing in the great ballads written twenty years after.
The moving Moon went up the sky
And nowhere did abide:
Softly she was going up,
And a Star or two beside.16
In his autobiographic poetry Coleridge transformed his unhappy memories into an idyllic Romantic version of his “native home”. In “Frost at Midnight”, written in 1797, the bells of St Mary’s are given a thrilling, other-worldly quality, far removed from his playground miseries. The endless carillons of feast-days and fair-days, when the chimes were rung for twelve hours at a stretch, are made to promise a dream-like expansion into future happiness. He was here describing his memories as a teenage schoolboy in London, long after the “exile” from Ottery had occurred, and the poetic myth of his childhood was already being prepared for his own son, Hartley.
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,
Whose bells, the poor man’s only music, rang
From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,
So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come!17
There is perhaps a hint of bitterness in the slight rhythmic dip in the third line, where Coleridge may really have been thinking of the “poor boy’s only music” at Ottery, but otherwise the verse rises with an unbroken surge of Romantic longing to the climactic outburst of syllables in the last line, “articulate sounds”, which has an almost religious force. (It is a note that Wordsworth was to explore fully in The Prelude of 1805.)
7
In reality, for little Sam the bells brought scant release. Because of his small size and difficult temperament, he was kept on at dame-school until the age of six – not to be “trusted among my Father’s School-boys”.18 By then his elder brothers, tall distant figures, were going out into the world. William left Wadham College, Oxford, and became a schoolmaster in Hackney, aged twenty-three. James – a stocky, red-faced, resolute young man – left Ottery aged sixteen, with ten guineas sewn into the back of his waistcoat, to join the ranks of the 6th Regiment of Foot; then Edward, “the Wit of the family”, left for Pembroke, Oxford.19 Coleridge significantly put down these departures to his mother’s influence in family affairs. She was, he said dispassionately, “an admirable Economist, and managed exclusively”.20 “My Father…had so little of parental ambition in him, that he had destined his children to be Blacksmiths etc, & had accomplished his intention but for my Mother’s pride & spirit of aggrandizing her family.”21
This was almost certainly untrue of the Reverend John, whose whole career showed a headmaster’s natural drive for distinction. His academic successes were renowned throughout the county. But Coleridge’s feelings for his mother were to become ambiguous, and finally bitter. By comparison his father – his lost, beloved father – was to be transformed into a humorous paragon of gentleness and understanding, utterly without worldly ambitions.
During these difficult childhood years, after being the “darling” who sat, as he fondly recalled, “at my mother’s side, on my little stool, to read my little book, and to listen to the talk of my elders”, he clearly felt he became at first an anxiety, and then a disappointment, to her.22 He felt this rejection as deeply as anything in his life, and at sixteen would say of the mother of a schoolfriend in London that she “taught me what it was to have a mother”.23 In later life, he often repeated this sense of looking for mother-substitutes. At twenty-nine, he told his friend Tom Poole that Mrs Poole “was the only Being whom I ever felt in the relation of Mother”.24 In middle age the search for a lost mother continued, with strange consequences.25
Exactly how this process of alienation occurred is difficult to say, for Coleridge wrote and talked more and more about his father, and less and less about his mother as he grew older. But he seems to have felt, very early on, that in her eyes by comparison with his brothers, he was already a failure by the time he left Ottery. There are no contemporary accounts of mother and son together in these early days. But some years later, when he revisited Ottery in the autumn of 1799, there was a revealing incident which was recorded by his friend, Robert Southey. “We were all a good deal amused by the old lady,” – Ann Coleridge, aged seventy-two, was by then rather deaf – “she could not hear what was going on, but seeing Samuel arguing with his brothers, took it for granted that he must have been in the wrong, and cried out, ‘Ah, if your poor father had been alive, he’d soon have convinced you.’”26
It was amusing to Southey, but not to Coleridge. In his poetry it was to produce the recurring image of a lost or rejected child, for ever attempting to return home, or recover the feelings of home, or somehow – marvellously – to reinvent them.
The pluck and determination of his older brothers was exemplified by John, who had been in Calcutta since 1771, and within five years rose to the rank of lieutenant. His courage and generosity became legendary in the family. His vivid, good-hearted letters arrived regularly at Ottery throughout Coleridge’s boyhood, often bringing money. They could hardly have failed to fire Sam’s imagination. In 1775 a typical missive arrived from Monghyr, on the Ganges, a hundred miles south of the Nepalese border.
I left Calcutta about the end of April…You have no doubt heard of Monghyr, famous for its wild, romantic situation, and especially for its being the Montpellier of the East. About two miles from the garrison there is a Hotwell in which the water continually boils; the Natives esteem it sacred, and flock thither from all parts of the country to receive a Holy Sprinkling, as they imagine it has the Virtue of cleansing them from their sins…27
It may have been glimpses like this that first turned Coleridge towards his lifelong fascination with travel books. James came to rely on John for help in his own military career, eventually receiving from him the sum of £1,000 to purchase a commission. Francis so worshipped John that he finally contrived to join him in India at the incredibly early age of twelve. John even had a remarkable plan for Sam to join him in India as a cadet; but this was to be forestalled by his own tragic death from malaria, at Tillicherry, in January 1787. He died penniless, having sent all his money home or lent it to fellow officers.28
