by Tom Cox
It was for John Holland, the half-brother of Richard II, that the Hall had been built, in 1398. After he was beheaded for his attempt to assassinate Henry IV, the Crown took hold of the estate until the reign of Elizabeth I, when it came into the possession of the Anglo-Norman Champernowne family, where it remained for the next three and a half centuries. The last Lady Champernowne to live at the Hall was known for riding her horse down to Dartington village and rapping impatiently on residents’ doors with her horse whip when she required their services. When the Elmhirsts arrived in 1925, the whole estate was near derelict, having been abandoned by the Champernownes four years previously. The Great Hall, where the main events at Dartington’s music and literary festivals now take place and where I once ended up talking about vaginal glitter in front of over a hundred pensioners, was missing its hammer-beam roof. On his first visit, Leonard Elmhirst had to fight through rampant brambles, bracken and rhododendrons to get a look at many of the buildings, but excitedly pronounced to his wife Dorothy that Dartington was ‘a fairyland’. Fortunately, funds to restore the buildings were not a problem. Due largely to an inheritance from her father, a financier who had been the Secretary of the American Navy, Dorothy was one of the richest women in America. During her first solo trips into Totnes, she often walked out of shops without paying for what she’d bought, since she was used to being accompanied by a purse bearer who handled all her transactions.
Leonard, whom she’d met at Cornell University five years earlier, was from a more humble but still far from ordinary background, being from Yorkshire’s landed gentry. Dorothy’s belief that her wealth entailed social responsibility, combined with Leonard’s interest in rural reconstruction, gained from the work he’d done in India with the poet Rabindranath Tagore in the early 1920s, led them to utterly transform not just the Dartington Estate but the surrounding area, creating hundreds of new jobs and a vast cultural overhaul. The school they founded was a small revolution in itself, being anti corporate punishment, anti uniform, pro freedom of expression, anti segregation of the sexes, with teachers who were intended to be friends, not authority figures. Within a few years, artists, writers, poets and musicians were flocking to Dartington. Ballet director Kurt Jooss and his dance company escaped Nazi Germany to make the estate their home between 1936 and 1940. Michael Chekhov, nephew of Anton, set up Dartington’s Theatre School. The legendary ceramicist Bernard Leach founded the estate’s Pottery School. In his autobiography, Ravi Shankar cited his visit to Dartington in the summer of 1936 as the moment when he realised he wanted to devote his life to music. It was on the estate that the social innovator Michael Young – a former pupil at Dartington – would draft the original proposal for the Welfare State and NHS.
The local feeling during my first couple of years living in the Magic House was that the Dartington Hall Trust, tasked with continuing the Elmhirsts’ legacy as the money finally dried up, wasn’t making nearly enough of all this esteemed history, having become lost in a swamp of branding and corporate functions. Many of the Hall’s public information signs looked tired and sad. Cranks, the legendary 1960s vegetarian restaurant on the village side of the estate, had been purchased by Nando’s. A couple of nearby villages made quite a big deal of the thousand-year-old yews in their churchyard, but the one at Dartington, which was at least 500 years older, sat in the shadows behind the Hall, unadvertised. A timeline of significant Dartington events had been stencilled on the 1980s German techno bar at thigh level but, rather ominously, left no room for the illustrious future. A lot of the community – particularly the older residents of Totnes, Staverton, Littlehempston and Dartington village – felt deeply protective and passionate about Dartington. The place and its history could make people shake with emotion. Not long after I’d moved there, my mum saw an old friend, who asked after me. When the news that I was living in Dartington was delivered, the old friend surprised my mum by spontaneously bursting into tears of happiness. It turned out she had been to school on the estate in the 1960s.
When, in the Barn Cinema, across the courtyard from the Great Hall, I watched found footage of the Dartington Foundation Day celebrations from 1969 – a lone Leonard presiding over them, in brown bowtie and yellow shoes, beneath the courtyard’s gigantic swamp cypress, a few months after Dorothy’s death – the swell of nostalgia was more powerful than any collective emotion I’ve ever known in front of any recorded entertainment. Gleeful shouts emerged from the dark, as older audience members recognised themselves or their friends. Such strong local affection had not come quickly to the Elmhirsts, though. In the twenties they won little favour by refusing to let the south Devon hunts ride on their land. By agreeing to pay agricultural workers the minimum wage, which most farmers in the South Hams region steadfastly refused to do at the time, they sparked a minor Devonshire rerun of the Peasant Revolt that had famously taken place across England around the time of the Hall’s construction. Reverend Martin, the village rector, felt personally attacked when the Elmhirsts did not attend his services. He wrote to Leonard, complaining of nudity he had witnessed on the estate, including ‘a young woman, thought to be in her twenties, very well-developed, wearing nothing but the scantiest pair of drawers’. By the late sixties, the Trust’s public relations officer had amassed a bulging file of anti-Dartington comments in the local and national press, including ‘a sort of nudist colony, free love and all that’, ‘it’s run by the BBC’ and ‘Communists trained in Moscow’.
Here, on top of a hill in Devon, 230 miles from the capital, twenty miles from any major population centre, the counterculture had been happening, decades before the counterculture was even a thing. Those loose handmade outfits I was always seeing worn up the hill, behind my back garden, those hushed conversations I heard about foraged diets, self-exploration and spiritual well-being? They didn’t begin here in the twenty-first century, or even during the era of the Flower People; their association with Dartington stretched right back to the interwar period and Dartington’s links to the Fabian Society. When my dad visited on one of the first hot days I experienced at the Magic House, and insisted on sunbathing topless, I worried a little, protective about my tenancy, and keen to be on my best behaviour in every way. I didn’t need to. Dartington’s association with nudity was long and illustrious. After a new CEO took over in late 2015 and began to slowly inject new life into the estate, one of the sure signs of Dartington moving back in the direction of its former self was that the following summer the amount of skinny-dipping in the river markedly increased.
Even in the ‘quiet’ period of those first couple of years, there was plenty of stuff going on in the Dartington Gardens: meditation, frightfully well-spoken nocturnal teenage rapping sessions, martial arts, dance, yoga, throat singing, post-foraging summits, tightrope walking, squatting, blanket-based plots to reinvent society. One day I ascended the hill and took up a stranger on his offer of a Korean massage, which involved him freeing my upper body of toxins by karate chopping me about the neck and shoulders while performing a kind of beatboxing that sounded not dissimilar to the noises my friends and I made while playfighting when we were eight. Afterwards, I felt loose and relieved, although much of the relief possibly came from no longer having to stifle a giggling fit.
During my time at the Magic House, my mum, who is such a keen gardener you assume she’ll leak pure green blood when she cuts herself, taught me a new horticultural term: ‘garden escape’. As well as the scarlet pimpernels, clematis and euphorbia that had blown over the hedge from next door, I inevitably experienced other, different kinds of garden escapes. Faded when I first moved in, the PRIVATE signs on my gates were more striking after I went over them myself with white paint, but strangers still occasionally wandered through the garden of the Magic House – sometimes because they didn’t spot them, or sometimes just because they were nosy, or belligerent. One May weekend when my friends Rachel and Seventies Pat were staying, Pat and I popped out and left Rachel in the garden playing her guitar on the
step in front of the Crittall windows. Coming out of a creative reverie, she looked up to find a fey man in a kaftan standing in front of her. ‘I’m ever so sorry,’ he explained. ‘I seem to have wandered off course and lost the rest of my t’ai chi class.’ One winter, a boy of sixteen or so living on the estate repeatedly walked through my garden on his way to school, in clear view of the living room window, without any apparent inhibitions. ‘But it’s really muddy over there!’ he protested when I gently explained to him that it was, like, y’know, my house and stuff, and that it might be an idea if he fucked off and didn’t do it any more. As annoying as it was, here his trespass seemed somehow less of a violation than it might elsewhere. At Dartington, after all, the earth was a common treasury for all.
The under-25s who had grown up in the Totnes and Dartington bubble often had a particular anointed aura about them that I’d not quite seen anywhere else. Their life surely had many of the usual agonies of adolescence, but from the outside, from April to October, it came across as one long, hugging and drug party, alternating between the river, the woods and the beach. They were as extremely sheltered as any extremely educated and unusually worldly young people can be. If they came across as arrogant, which they frequently did, it was usually in the politest, gentlest way, although things got marginally edgier down by the skate park on the other side of the station. ‘You look like John Lennon!’ a youth once shouted at me there, strutting a bit and showing off to his mates as I walked past – an observation that warmed my heart not just with its high level of inaccuracy but with its civilised nature, especially when I compared it to remarks I’d received in the corresponding area of the previous market town where I’d lived, such as the memorable ‘All right Poncey Scarf, I bet you take it up the arse’ and ‘SHOES!’
All of this could, of course, be seen as the cultural contrails of the Elmhirsts: a direct result of the people they’d initially attracted here, those who’d settled here permanently, the people who’d been influenced by those people, and the offspring of both. The alternative Sands School in nearby Ashburton was founded in 1987 by ex-pupils and -teachers from Dartington. According to the parent of a pupil there whom I met, the school had only one rule, which was that nobody was allowed to throw a fridge out of a tree. This was apparently in contrast to the period prior to the day when a pupil had thrown a fridge out of a tree, at which point there had been no rules at all. In one piece of fairly well-known Dartington folklore, a Sands pupil had reportedly phoned Childline to complain when her parents had forbidden her from going to a rave in Haldon Forest, near Exeter. These were the same children who listened to drum’n’bass behind my garden hedge on summer nights, which I did my best to drown out with records by Funkadelic, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Bonnie Koloc, Buffalo Springfield and Tim Buckley. One quiet, flawless night in 2016 I was standing on the opposite side of the Gardens, the best part of a quarter of a mile away from my record player, on which it was still possible to very clearly hear Buckley’s Happy Sad album playing, and watching a badger scuttle into the undergrowth just as a hot-air balloon eased overhead through an unblemished sea-blue sky, when my phone rang in my pocket. It was a friend from town and he sounded excited. He asked me to walk farther up the hill, from where, he assured me, I’d be able to see the crop circle he’d just made in a field on the opposite side of the valley.
‘But don’t aliens make them?’ I said.
‘Noooo,’ he replied. ‘That’s far-fetched nonsense. The aliens just send down psychic waves to me so I can make them on their behalf.’
For years, I’d had a yearning to write fiction about alternative societies, hippie life, communes and the occult, but on my best day, with all the will in the world, I could not have made a fraction of this life up.
Yet I hadn’t really come here for any of this. A central factor in the distilled nature of life around Totnes and Dartington is that for the best part of a century it has been a place people relocate to not just because of what’s there but because of the lifestyle it promises, which of course then makes it even more distilled. But I hadn’t moved there for the culture; I’d moved there because I’d fallen in love with the surrounding countryside and was going out with a girl who lived less than half an hour away. I spent a lot of my time at Dartington feeling like the biggest garden escape of all, something a bit ragged around the edges that had blown in on the breeze then grown, a weed amongst wildflowers. I didn’t talk the talk and I didn’t wear the cultural uniform. ‘So are you working for Dartington?’ more established residents of Totnes would typically ask, when they found out where I lived. ‘So how come they let you live there?’ they would often say, when I told them I wasn’t. ‘I don’t know: it’s a mystery!’ I’d reply. The monthly rent of the Magic House was beyond my original budget and, because of this, I’d initially imagined I’d only be able to stay there a year at most. But somehow I managed to keep going. A year passed. Then another. Then another. I realised the House had changed me: I felt calmer at my core. I was a never-going-back vegetarian, as opposed to the slightly half-arsed one I’d been when I arrived. I’d finally taken the plunge to go independent and give up writing for the national media, rather than just telling myself I would, and had begun to enjoy my work more than I had in my entire life. I looked different to when I’d arrived and felt more me, physically: browner, wirier, greyer in the beard, but happier, on the whole, with my appearance. I began for the first time to be beamed a very vivid psychic picture of my distant future self, still here in four decades’ time, even browner and wirier and greyer and calmer, still walking back down the wildflower path shivering from the river or the cold lido, no longer just a ragged northern blow-in but as much an integral part of the furniture as the lady who rented one of the semis on the other side of the Hall and knew everything there was to know about bookbinding and unicorns. Would the estate have finally decided to replace the Magic House’s terrible, repeatedly malfunctioning boiler by then? I hoped so. My future vision was not set in stone, but it was a definite path that appeared eminently possible. ‘The Gothic House? That’s where the very old man lives, in the middle of all the plants. They say three of his four cats are now in their late forties. He has had them since the time when polar bears and phones still existed.’
On the evenings when I walked up into the Gardens, the cats would often follow me: not The Bear, who knew his limitations and did not leave the boundaries of the Magic House’s garden, but invariably Roscoe and usually Shipley and Shipley’s brother Ralph. If you were going to get away with looking normal walking a cat anywhere, it was here. Shipley and Ralph would stick close by my side, but when we headed back Roscoe would typically stay on without us, looking for a clarinet player or shamanic healer to cop off with. If it was August or late July, music would float over from the studios and offices behind the house, where musicians were rehearsing for the Dartington International Summer School, the classical festival that had been held annually here since 1953. In the same buildings could also be found the studio of Soundart, the experimental community radio station where, once a fortnight, or once a month, or sometimes just when I felt like it and there happened to be a slot free, I broadcast a two-or three-hour radio show. The first time I made a show for Soundart, I was directly preceded by the station’s beekeeping show, presented by a beekeeper called Dick who, when I arrived, was making a heartfelt apology on air to his bees, having decided he had spoken unkindly about them earlier in the show. During the subsequent month I was scheduled after a very youthful man who was hosting a Scotch-egg-eating contest. I asked him how long he had been DJing on the station. ‘About a decade,’ he answered.
‘So how old were you when you broadcast your first show?’ I asked.
‘I’d just turned ten,’ he said.
After moving to a much bigger studio as part of the new Dartington regime in 2017, Soundart also briefly broadcast live wildlife discos where the audience danced, or more often sat, to old archive sound-effect records and other, more experim
ental sounds. At the one I attended, the fire alarm in the building went off, but we all took well over a minute to realise this, having thought the noise was just part of the set. My position at the radio station was voluntary but if I was lucky I received payment in fruit and veg. Locating my diary from 12 June 2015, I see that for that week’s show I was paid the impressive sum of one apple, one large broccoli floret and two courgettes, which I deemed to be more than fair.
Eventually, irresistibly drawn in by the innumerable greens and yellows and reds and oranges I saw every time I walked past, I enrolled on one of the introductory horticulture courses at School Farm, the organic allotment down the hill on the other side of the Hall. Here I learned how to delicately handle cotyledon leaves, puddle in a bed of leeks, tie the correct knots in the string holding up climbing tomatoes and not choke at the rotting nettles in our organic feeds, which everyone agreed smelled like used nappies. I ended as barely less of a bumbling novice than I had been at the beginning but it was pleasing to think that some of the tomatoes and lettuce that turned up at The Green Table, the estate’s phenomenal new cafe, later that year had been given their first nudges towards adulthood by me. I had gardened before I went to Dartington, in the most basic sense, but being there made me want to do so more creatively. I made myself part of my garden, enjoyed getting its grass and soil and seeds and weeds on me, reshaped it, used its wild mint to make tea. I stopped going to the hairdresser’s. I didn’t have a hairstyle. I had hair. On some days, it had zero caterpillars in it. That was about as good as it got. I planted foxgloves and cordylines and ivy-leaved toadflax. Enhancing the green circle around the house for the bene-fit of a future I might not be part of never occurred to me as a waste of time; I was just being good to the Magic House, in a way that seemed only correct, since the Magic House had always been good to me. Friends began to refer to the house as if it was a person, easy-going and selfless, a positive influence to be around. Two couples who looked after it for me while I was away separately reported that they’d not been getting on beforehand but felt easy and harmonious after their stints there. Wildlife flocked to the house’s goodness through the gaps in its edifice. Educated moths seemed to view it as an exclusive gentlemen’s club. I arrived downstairs one morning to find a song thrush casually perched on a picture frame, unperturbed by my presence. One evening a colony of several hundred flying ants moved into the boiler room and the entrance hall. I dealt with the situation by leaving the back door open to the night, putting Neil Young’s 1969 debut album on the turntable, and letting them get on with being flying ants. By the morning, they were gone. The boiler remained just as faulty.
