In Tasmania

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Their destination – Boode – was Hordern’s headquarters and the birthplace of SPB’s mother: a rambling whitewashed farm with a huge garden that stood at the top of a narrow coombe. The two lighthouses that SPB claimed he could see from his bedroom window cast the same spell over him as the entrance hall at Yarde. He spent, he wrote, ‘joyous hours’ looking out at night over the sandhills and the flashing lights of Lundy and Hartland Point to Westward Ho!, the place named after Charles Kingsley’s novel, and where Rudyard Kipling had been at school, and which he wrote about in Stalky & Co. Hordern took both books with him to Tasmania.

  At Boode, SPB met his first author: a fruit-grower who had written the popular Exmoor romance, Lorna Doone. Richard Blackmore, he wrote, was ‘a large-hearted, lovable sort of a man’ with broad, sagging shoulders and a benign, rosy face, whose uncle had the curacy of Charles, ten miles away. He did not look like a novelist and he shunned society. ‘An air of rusticity enveloped him,’ remarked a contemporary. ‘Not the material rusticity of the farmyard, but that of the wind and the scents and the voices of the open spaces … he seemed to exhale the very presence of the moorland and coombes he loved and interpreted so well.’ Blackmore had tried school-teaching and market gardening before taking up historical fiction, and Hordern regarded him as his mentor.

  Hordern’s Wife

  Blackmore often strode up the muddy lane to visit Boode. He sat SPB on his lap and in a memorably low voice told stories of Lorna Doone’s hero, the young farmer John Ridd, and of Ridd’s love for a well-born, black-haired girl he had encountered in a moorland pool, and of the band of wild desperadoes who had kidnapped her, whose lair was in an unget-at-able place in the hills among the rocks of Exmoor. When SPB came to describe his upbringing, this was the experience he singled out. ‘Nothing can destroy the fact that I spent an idyllically happy childhood on these two farms. Nothing can destroy the fact that R.D. Blackmore with his strong Devon “burr” used to come over from Charles and dandle me on his knee.’

  Blackmore was not the only influential figure at Boode. There was Hordern’s wife Penelope. Hordern had courted her assiduously and talked of her as his own Lorna Doone. ‘She was one of the Downings of Pickwell Manor, Georgeham,’ SPB wrote. An elegant, large-nosed lady with a direct gaze, she was never heard to say a bad word about anyone, least of all her husband, but because of him she would end her days a long way from Georgeham, perpetually dressed in black, sitting bolt upright in a rented dining room, knitting cardigans and praying. Once upon a time, when Hordern had courted her, she had loved to dance, but religion had become her tipple. When her brother drowned in the Stella off the Channel Islands, it was felt that he deserved his fate ‘for travelling on so holy a day’.

  Less pious were Hordern’s eight children. ‘My cousins were a rackety crowd, and we were allowed more or less to run wild at Boode, of which I remember best the fragrant smells of the stables and the harness room, the peaches on the south wall, the gaily coloured if somewhat crude glass in the front door and greenhouse, the thick laurel bushes in the drive …’ SPB was an only child of remote parents. It was easy to understand why Boode became his second and happier home, and Hordern’s children his earliest friends. They formed, he wrote, a self-contained and completely content unit. Best of all his cousins, SPB liked Hordern’s youngest son Brodie, who everyone agreed was a dead ringer for him. He and Brodie used to play hide and seek in the laurel bushes. ‘Looking back, I find these were days of pure enchantment.’

  The Hordern Family

  On hot summer days Hordern rode them in his large hay-wagon down to Croyde Beach where they bathed and raced each other on surfboards. SPB’s description evokes the feeling that I had when walking with Max along Dolphin Sands: ‘My cousins and I used to walk along the banks of the Pill, climb on round the old wooden hulks, bathe naked from the sand dunes in the Estuary, set fire to the marram grass, which screams like a child in pain as it burns, play hide and seek in the vast solitude of the Himalayan sand dunes, watch fishermen pull in the salmon in their nets … and sometimes halt to remove the thorns from our bare feet. I seem to have spent the greater part of my Devon childhood days barefoot.’

  If SPB’s cousins were his best friends, then his spirited uncle took the place of a father. In autumn, under Hordern’s tutelage, SPB followed the stag-hounds on foot through North Molton; and on Fridays drove with him into Barnstaple market where Hordern bought and sold cattle. Hordern’s herds and flocks were among the finest in the country, winning prizes at agricultural shows from Launceston to Norwich. Sounding a premonitory note, SPB remarked that after market was over his uncle ‘invariably bought me some outrageously expensive present. His generosity was not confined to me. He went bankrupt because he could not find it in his heart to refuse anybody anything. He was the kindest man I have ever known.’

  Hordern passed on to SPB his taste for books, his love of Devon, and his talent for extravagant living. He was perpetually hosting large parties at Boode at which champagne freely flowed. ‘He enchanted me by his behaviour,’ SPB wrote. ‘I can’t remember whether he drank champagne for luncheon regularly, but I do remember how delighted I used to be when he took up empty champagne bottle after empty champagne bottle and hurled them one after another through the large dining room window on the lawn outside. I remember this lawn contained more broken glass than grass because we used to try to play tennis on it.’

  One day in 1900 the champagne ran out. Cleaned out by his generosity, Hordern put the two estates up for auction. They had been in the family’s possession 700 years, since the reign of King John. Four months later, having earned his sisters’ ‘lasting enmity’ for going through their money, he booked his passage for Tasmania.

  V

  ‘I HAVE NOW RECOVERED FROM THE SHOCK OF YOUR PHONE CALL & would like to thank you so much for being in touch … There are so many things that I would like to ask you that I am hoping you will have the answer for.’

  Five days had passed since Ivy had written, enclosing directions to the farmhouse. I drove up the Midlands Highway to Launceston, and west along the coast, past a gigantic white board – ‘Have you missed Ulverstone, the centre of attraction?’ From Ulverstone, the road dipped and rose through potato fields and lines of towering macrocarpa, and along the horizon the Dial Range slid away in a sharp band of blue.

  The farmhouse lay a mile or two beyond North Motton on the lip of a valley overlooking Gunn’s Plains: a neat white weatherboard bungalow set in beds of red carnations and dahlias. Ivy’s parents built it after their marriage in 1921 and named it for Hordern’s property in England. ‘We’re Boode House,’ Ivy said on the telephone. ‘They used to use the name, people did.’

  There was no car in sight, and it crossed my mind that the sisters had gone out or even forgotten that I was coming. I walked through the neat front garden planted with pink lilies and rapped on a chocolate-coloured door. Silence. I thought, peering through a window, I saw a shadow getting up from a large bed. When I looked again, the room was empty.

  The door cracked open. Presently, two tiny old women emerged, in unbuttoned hand-knitted, turquoise cardigans and matching fluffy slippers, and shielded their eyes from the sun. They seemed frail, and I had the impression that if I hugged them they would crackle like two poppadoms.

  ‘It’s called the Garden of Eden up here,’ Ivy said with pride. ‘Did you see the turn off to Gunn’s Plains? It begins round there, Dad reckoned.’ She was wiry, with a thin, wrinkled face that made her nose look sharp, and her small eyes more bloodshot. Her hair was long and grey and she wore it parted in the middle in the style of the 1930s.

  Maud had a plumper face and smooth straight hair, and appeared agitated.

  They led the way down a dark corridor of slot-and-groove walls, past a silver-framed photograph of Lady Diana, in pride of place beside the telephone. Past a bedroom with a cupboard from which ranks of bridal dolls stared down at me through veils. Into a kitchen.

  The wood-pattern
ed vinyl wallpaper was hung with plates of young girls with posies in their hair and a ceramic prayer to ‘The Miracle of Friendship’, and on the table there were plates heaped with food.

  ‘How long have you lived in this house?’

  ‘All our lives,’ Ivy said.

  ‘Except one or two days,’ Maud said.

  ‘How many days?’ I asked.

  Ivy counted on her fingers. ‘Three weeks for me, near enough. Maudy would be longer. You had a fair while in hospital, didn’t you?’

  But Maud was keen for us to eat. She poured me a cup of tea and soon I was settling into a plate of spam and a meat-loaf that tasted with the sweetness that comes of being cooked in apricot jam.

  ‘Not like what we served up when we were all younger, but we can’t digest what we used to.’

  ‘Don’t put that there,’ Maud said.

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ Ivy said and moved the jug. Then smiled at me: ‘She’s too slow and I’m the opposite.’ She tapped her tiny head: ‘So far I’m pretty good up here. Like the insurance fella said: “It’s in there somewhere, but you’ve got to get it out.”’

  Ivy was impatient to show off the fruit of her research into our common family tree. She darted in and out of the room as I ate, each time returning with a letter or a photograph that she wanted me to look at, finally a sheet of paper six feet square with a forest of names entered in microscopic hand. Beneath the names of my grandparents, it was strange to see my name.

  ‘We felt we already knew about them before you were in touch. Of course, we are sorry about the sad parts, but seems we all have those.’

  Once, she came back holding a calf-bound photograph album. She did not know who the people were. Had I any ideas?

  It was the usual thing: studio portraits from the Victorian and Edwardian eras of men with wax-tipped moustaches and women with round, puddingy faces.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘They didn’t think enough of themselves to write down who they were. They know who it is, but what about the next generation?’

  After I had eaten, she took me into a little light room adjoining the kitchen. This was the Sun Room, where she had compiled her chart.

  There was a framed photographic portrait of a good-looking man dressed in a jacket tight-buttoned at the neck. I had a fleeting impression of intense fiery eyes, a black moustache, a small goatee.

  ‘That’s grandfather Hordern.’

  Facing him was a sepia photograph of a substantial ivy-covered country house. It was taken from across a grass tennis court and was of a family gathering on a summer day in the 1890s. Wide open on the ground floor of the house were two sash windows, and beside the court, beneath a parasol, sat a bonneted woman in a black bombazine dress, and two other women. They were watching a young man with a blurred face who wore white trousers and was gripping a tennis racket. The woman in black was Hordern’s wife and the two women, I suppose, were probably Hordern’s spinster sisters. I was wondering if the blurred figure could be SPB when Ivy said: ‘We reckon your grandfather sent that.’

  She knelt by a canvas trunk that her grandfather had lugged halfway across the world. The shipping company had stamped the figure 8 on the outside, and the trunk was fortified with wooden slats and metal hinges, and still had stickers on it: PLYMOUTH, MELBOURNE, PASSENGER’S LUGGAGE ULVERSTONE.

  She opened the lid and dipped her little hand underneath. This was where Hordern had stored the things that mattered to him most.

  Either from this trunk or from another part of the house Ivy brought forth the relics: Hordern’s riding crop; his gold and porcupine toothpick; a copy of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, dedicated to Thomas Arnold’s mother and with Hordern’s neurotic-looking signature; and Lorna Doone in a red binding, dated 1883 and with Hordern’s name on the title page in pencil.

  Then the trophies. Red rosettes like flattened carnations for his prize bulls. Plus blue cardboard placards.

  – First prize Devon bull, Launceston, 1894

  – First prize, Devon County agricultural show, 1896

  – First prize, Barnstaple, 1897

  – Certificate of merit, Best Mixed Breed Pig, 1885

  More photographs: my grandfather’s room at Christ Church, in which, above a velvet sofa, hung an oil painting of Lorna Doone; a portrait of SPB’s mother sitting surrounded by potted ferns and gazing up at the Reverend Brodie Mais; another large country house – Yarde; a second portrait of Hordern.

  The studio photograph was taken several years after the one in the frame. Hordern’s tie was loose round his neck, his lips were slightly open, and he had lost his vigour and his hair. His face was turned from the camera and his eyes, downcast, followed the melancholy angle of his moustache.

  From near the bottom of the trunk, Ivy drew out a sheet of stiff paper that she unfolded and spread on the floor. A black and red poster announcing the sale at 3 p.m. on June 29, 1900, at the Golden Lion Hotel, Barnstaple, of Boode House – a ‘well-built and conveniently-planned’ residence set in 140 acres with a summer house, coach house, conservatory and four-stall stable. And a tennis lawn that, until very recently, had glittered with broken glass.

  VI

  ‘WE HAVE THOUGHT FOR A LONG TIME THAT YOU DON’T LEARN ABOUT things until you are meant to,’ Ivy said.

  I came by a more or less credible, satisfactory version of Petre Hordern’s story in part from what Ivy told me and in part from others, and also from what SPB had written about him.

  The empty bottles sailing through the open sash windows had presaged the sale of Boode. As a young man, Hordern had modelled himself on John Ridd, the honest yeoman farmer summoned to run the family estate after his father was murdered by the Doones, a family of outlaws living in a moorland valley. But he was more like Anthony Fenn Kemp than John Ridd.

  Hordern was 28 when he inherited the two estates; the famous herds that his father had managed for 70 years, ever since he was fourteen; and £30,000. This was a hefty sum, but Hordern spent it briskly, and even had to borrow a further £10,000 from his sisters. ‘He was too good-natured,’ Ivy said in his defence. ‘Mum said that he packed up hampers and sent them to people at Christmas. They used to have champagne parties in Boode and if Auntie Ethel behaved she was allowed to the banisters to watch.’ Ivy clung to the belief that her grandfather had invested a large proportion of his fortune in cattle-feed.

  ‘He used to mix with those higher-up ones – like the Kaiser. He used to play tennis with him. We got a book from the library because we weren’t sure who the Kaiser was.’ Hordern was known as ‘the Lord of Gratton’, although Ivy could not explain the reason.

  At Boode, there were parlourmaids and cooks and a governess (‘Miss Tatum’) for the children. The walls were hung with oil paintings from floor to ceiling. Ivy had a cutting from the North Devon Journal of February 13, 1877, a report on Hordern’s coming of age for which his father had thrown ‘a grand dinner’ for 100 farmers.

  But 15 years on, many of the farmers who had toasted Hordern on his 21st birthday congregated in a field adjacent to Boode and watched him raise the hammer at the first of four enforced auctions.

  In 1892, he sold a flock of 1,000 Devon Longworth sheep and a whole herd of pure-bred Devon cattle. Another cutting, this one from the Live Stock Journal, remarked that Hordern ‘may fairly boast that he possesses one of the best herds of the breed in the kingdom in that with which he is about to part’. The animals included the sire Quartly, winner of Royal Agricultural Show’s First Prizes at Shrewsbury and Norwich, ‘a neat, small-boned animal of almost faultless symmetry’.

  Three years later, Hordern sold a further 62 pedigree cattle, 788 sheep, 60 pigs and ten horses; and in 1899, a year before he emigrated, he disposed of the balance of his livestock.

  The advance notice for this, Hordern’s penultimate auction, was the most effusive of the lot. ‘No more noted herd of cattle has come before the public than the old-established one of Mr P. Hordern of Boode.’ The prizewin
ners included Johnny-Come-Quick and Fire-away (‘with regard to this last bull a competent critic has declared that there is not a weak point in him’). News of the auction of 96 ‘superb Devon beasts, including all the prizewinners’ spread rapidly to the country’s prominent breeders, among them Queen Victoria, who sent a representative to bid for a bull called Joy. But competition was keen and Her Gracious Majesty, said the North Devon Journal, lost out to the President of the Devon Cattle-Breeders Association, and was obliged to content herself with Hordern’s two sires, Peace and Plenty. ‘I have never seen a better lot of stock,’ remarked Hordern sorrowfully in the course of an excellent lunch.

  Joy went for 45 guineas; Curly, a famous milker, for 25; and Johnny-Come-Quick for 21. But the auction – and the cheers that were called for him – did nothing to improve Hordern’s situation. At the age of 43 he was broke and disgraced. There was only one option left. ‘He was too much imbued with the spirit of his class to hesitate in the choice of his next step,’ Somerset Maugham wrote of Warburton, a character in one of his stories. ‘When a man in his set had run though his money, he went out to the colonies.’

  VII

  ‘WHY TASMANIA?’ I ASKED IVY.

  ‘He was reading things, Mum said. It sounded nice. He used to study it.’

  It was not too hard to piece together the books that Hordern might have studied. He knew several families in Devon who had been hounded out of England by the weather and drawn to Tasmania by the eulogies of Anthony Trollope. In Australia and New Zealand (1873), the novelist had fondly characterised Tasmania as a listless Sleepy Hollow and its people as slumbering Rip Van Winkles, being eaten out of house and home by rabbits imported from Europe. And yet Trollope’s admission that if he had himself to emigrate he would choose Tasmania encouraged a flotilla of English settlers, including his cousin the Reverend William Trollope (who ended his days in Kempton of all places, and was buried against the east wall of Kemp’s church). ‘It is acknowledged even by all the rival colonies that of all the colonies Tasmania is the prettiest,’ Trollope had written. ‘It is a Paradise for a working man as compared with England.’