by Toby Litt
To attend the funeral, William Oliver Stephens would only have had to walk thirty paces – out the front door of his handsome wooden house, with one gable, and across the muddy Saint Eustache road.
William Oliver Stephens was a gentleman farmer, growing mainly potatoes. The land the church was built on had been his gift, and in grateful thanks the congregation called it Saint-Stephen’s.
Charles Smallwood would have played the organ, which he himself had built.
Since the beginning of 1850, the Reverend Thomas Ainslie Young – only 24-years-old – had buried in the small graveyard in front of Saint-Stephen’s two women, Mary Content, Daughter of Edward Hannah Schoolmaster of the Parish of St Martin and of his wife Margaret, and Mary Henderson, wife of William Wright Senior; and Edward Snell, son of John Snell, brewer. There were not that many deaths.
Saint-Stephen’s church was a neat substantial stone building, 43-ft long by 33-ft wide, and contained about 125 sittings. The congregation averaged around fifty.††
Inside the church there was a large centre aisle and two smaller ones. The whole service was performed within the chancel.
Thomas Ainslie Young would have given the usual readings from the Book of Common Prayer – ‘We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out’ – earth to earth – although William, if he had been alive, would have insisted that Laval earth was very different, and very inferior, to that of Cleator Moor.
Vicki Onufriu’s mother was Greek, and she has that intense, olive skinned look – coupled with a punky bob shaved up the sides and back. Later she told me, ‘I’m always on the side that lost – the Greeks, the Patriotes, the Irish – no wonder I’m called “Victoria”’.
We met, as arranged. We swapped snippets we’d learned about William over an espresso in the metro station café. Then we took a bus to Saint-Martin.
I didn’t know what I was hoping for. Vicki had already told me there was ‘nothing to see’. The original church of Saint-Stephen’s had been knocked down years before. I’d assumed it must have been made of wood; she told me I was wrong, it had been a modest but sturdy building of stone. I had thought you couldn’t just build houses on top of graves, however old; Vicki said, no, two houses had gone up in the 1950s. The one nearest the road was right on top of where the grave would have been.
Why go to a place that’s guaranteed to disappoint you? I suppose because there may be one detail, one thing learned, that you wouldn’t otherwise have known.
We got off the bus beside a grey field. The sidewalks were the sort that no one is expected to walk on – chunks of poured concrete dusty with winter’s pale mud. We crossed to where Vicki’s map said Saint-Stephen’s had been.
I had thought I would cry.
I didn’t.
There was no grave. There was nowhere to stand and look down. Instead, there were two ugly condos surrounded by trucks, boats. A black car was for sale, six hundred dollars.
It was an intersection, and soft drinks bottles were there, and lots of cigarette butts.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ I said to Vicki. I hadn’t brought flowers. I wasn’t sure about saying a prayer out loud. If there had been an empty field, it would have been easier.
Running off into the distance, up 110e Avenue, were spruce condos, less than three years old – each generation of them smaller and closer together.
‘I feel sorry for you,’ said Vicki.
We briefly talked about knocking on the door of the condo. Vicki looked at the speedboats. ‘I don’t think they’re very interested in history.’
I thought of the Hartleys, their quiet passion. I wished they’d been there with me.
There was nothing to focus on. William could be over here, or over there. The church might have meant very little to him.
I didn’t cry.
My father would have cried. I could have phoned him up, and told him where I was, and he’d have cried down the phone – and that would have made me cry.
My father is better at crying than I am.
Looking back, I really regret not phoning him. It would have been the right thing to do.
Vicki saw I was sad. She told me she understood how I felt. Her historical subjects weren’t her family but she spent so long researching them that she got to know them like relatives. Sometimes, she said, she got emotional seeing a name that was no longer on a list, a list that name had appeared on year after year. We might have hugged but didn’t.
‘I feel sorry for you,’ she said, again.
We took a photograph.
Not a very good photograph.
We crossed at the intersection and went to visit the brothers Goyer.
The Goyers have lived in the fine house built by William Oliver Stephens for three generations. It has a tin roof and a new porch but the elegant light grey stone in correct proportions was there in William’s time. The land around it is now grass or cultivated. Developers wanting to build more condos had made offer after offer, all refused. The brothers, only two left out of three, now in their nineties, had always said no. They still farmed, and sold their vegetables to those who wanted the best vegetables – the Spanish, the Greeks.
Inside the house, up a few concrete steps, things don’t move. Once they find a place, they stay there for decades. The walls were blue, the broad doorframes and skirting boards yellow, the next room green. We sat at the kitchen table.
The brothers were strong men who had grown old. One of them gave long explanations, the other followed with terse footnotes. They had the photographs out ready – of their root cellar, or caveau à legumes, looking like an Anglo-Saxon burial mound beside and behind the house, trees growing out of a hillock big enough to swallow a bus shelter. It wasn’t open yet, they said; they would open it in a week. I didn’t quite understand why they thought it was so important. Vicki explained. Parts of the root cellar – a stone stoop, a piece of an arch – probably came from Saint-Stephen’s church. They were things William might have seen and touched. Broken up and half buried, they were the closest I was ever going to get to seeing his grave.
I was still feeling bad about not having cried. Perhaps there was some detail here. I asked if the Goyer brothers remembered, as children, playing on the ground opposite, where the church had been.
‘We always played this side of the road. Our uncle, with his eight children, lived and farmed opposite.’
The Goyer’s elder brother had died, his house had been left empty, broken into, squatted then demolished.
They didn’t want to say more about this. The older brother told me he liked the Queen. He asked me if we had supermarkets in England.
What was the ground where the church had been – what was it like, before the two condos were built there?
The elder brother spoke for a while. I couldn’t always understand his accent, but he made a pushing gesture with his hands – I thought he was miming mowing a lawn.
Vicki translated: the old church land was farmed. The elder brother hadn’t been mowing but ploughing – following behind an imaginary horse. This would have been in the 1930s. The condos were built twenty years later.
‘My uncle,’ he said, veg-musing, ‘grew tomatoes, beans, potatoes, carrots…’ He paused, trying to think of the word in English. At last it came, ‘Cucumber.’
As he ploughed, his Uncle turned up bones.
* ‘The Graves of a Household’, Miscellaneous Poems, Felicia Dorothea Hemans, quoted from Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century, edited by Alfred H. Miles, George Routledge & Sons, 1907; www.bartleby.com/293/39.html, retrieved 6 January 2016, 11:36. This poem describes the resting places of four children who once ‘fill’d one home with glee’. Although very fitting for William’s epitaph, the Memoirist transposes his resting place with another. For the first of the children it is said: ‘One, ’midst the forests of the West, / By a dark stream is laid – / The Indian knows his place of rest, / Far in the cedar-shade’. Yet the grave William’s is compared
to is oceanic. ‘The sea, the blue lone sea, hath one – / He lies where pearls lie deep; / He was the loved of all, yet none / O’er his low bed may weep’. William is seen to be not just incorporated into some corner of a foreign field but unreachably submerged; Lycidas, not Adonais.
† ‘Memoir of the Author’, Henry & Mary, 2nd ed., pp. x–xi.
‡ Cleator Moor Notes, News, and Views [By “Denton”.] ‘Henry and Mary Again’, Cumberland Pacquet, 21 March 1929.
§ He was also called John – the Litt tradition of naming first and second sons John and William has stuck.
¶ Private communication, 5 October 2015.
|| Ancestry-Quebec Vital Registers-Records & Church Register [Droin Collection] 1621–1967; Burial-Laval, Anglican Saint Vincent de Paul, Reg.
** Letter No. 7.
†† ‘The Church’, 2 September 1842.
22
BLOODLINE
I came back from Canada meaning to finish this book quickly. All the research was done. I just needed to put it together.
Six months later, I am still working.
Much of that time I have been struggling to take my writing back from William. Somehow, he’d muscled into almost every sentence I’d written about him.
He was a bit of a bully.
The whole book was starting to become more his than mine, and I really did have to wrestle it back from him.
I don’t want to relive the fight for you, paragraph by paragraph. But overall I realized* that I’d become pompous, that I wasn’t saying what I meant but showing what I was capable of. I was being Williamesque. At times it felt as if William was being me. Together, we were writing a bad book. This was humbling. He probably felt it, too.
I needed to put some distance between us.
From first word to last, I went through de-Williaming myself.
It was time to sum him up.
The worst that can be said about William (and as I’ve mentioned earlier) is said by the writers of Wrestling and Wrestlers.
The truth… is that from the time he left the paternal roof, his course through a checkered life to the bitter end, was marked by a series of disastrous failures.†
This is absolute, devastating, and wrong.
William’s own view of himself had already been smuggled into Henry & Mary – it is the explanation of Henry’s downfall.
The greatest misfortune of his life had been the want of some honourable and determined aim, which, by pointing out a road to happiness and independence, would, at the same time, have furnished ample employment to a genius so fertile by devising and pursuing the necessary means for attaining them…‡
Writing about himself, in a letter sent not many years before he died, William said:
I look upon it that the most important thing for youth is always to have some object in view, some aim and end, the attainment of which shall find occupation for both mind and body and to which everything else should be made subservient. I am satisfied my own failures and sorrows have all sprung from a want of this kind in early life.§
The Memoirist, always kindly, saves his saddest words for his farewell:
But we cannot close this hasty sketch of the life and character of William Litt, without an expression of our feeling, that he was certainly capable of much more than he ever accomplished, and that it is impossible to speak, even with the utmost partiality, of what he was without at the same time some sentiment of regret for what he might have been.
Perspectives change; both of the occupations in which William was a success, sport and art, were not seen as fitting for a gentleman.
He was thought of as a great loser in life.
In many ways, he was. He lost his country, his family, his health.
I still like William, even having lived with him for so long. I think he was an admirable man. But his desire to be liked by everyone, at every moment, undermined him. He needed to care less about his reputation. It is a waste of energy to try to win every battle. Sometimes it’s necessary to lose.
Mainly, William’s contemporaries thought him a failure because he didn’t make money. There was, so far as we know, almost no legacy for his children. Betty continued to live close to poverty, if not quite destitute. Hers was the hardest life. However much he was able to send home of his schoolmaster’s wages, William left her with the children; she raised them. We have no way of knowing what she might or might not have been like.
What of the children? What of the male line between William and my father?
William’s eldest child, my great-great grandfather William Jnr, was the most successful of them. His brother John became a carpenter. He died in Liverpool in 1854. Joseph, a mariner, ‘died in Calcutta, as the result of an accident aboard ship’.¶ Of William Jnr’s sisters, Nanny lived the longest – until 1900. She was the mother of Mrs Cubby, who gave the fondest account of William’s life. Elizabeth, a dressmaker, lived until 1867. The youngest child, Hannah, had died in 1847, aged 15 – William may have heard news of this.
He also lived to learn that William Jnr, who had previously won distinction as a student in the Royal Veterinary College, London, had been awarded a certificate of thanks by them. This entitled him to the rank of Honorary Fellow of the London Veterinary Association. The work he was recognized for was a thesis on the hock-joint of the horse.
William Jnr was a success in his profession and, it seems, elsewhere. In response to an enquirer, his eldest son wrote:
Figure 24. William Jnr, who was said to look very like his father. I am still hoping that a painting of William will turn up.
He was a very highly educated man, a brilliant speaker, a very fair poet and a voluminous writer – principally for the press – in his spare moments. Hampered by a large family he was compelled to adhere to the drudgery of a comparatively unremunerative profession, bring afraid to sacrifice the small substance for what might have proved an unsubstantial shadow… I believe the finest speech he ever delivered was in proposing “The Memory of Clive [of India]” at the inauguration of the Clive Statue in the Market Square in Shrewsbury.||
After William Jnr died, in 1864, a meeting of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons at the Plough and Harrow Hotel in Edgbaston offered conventional Victorian-era condolences to his widow, Edith, and then broke into real feeling when it said, ‘His death will be greatly lamented, not only by yourself, family, and friends, but by the profession at large, for whose advancement he laboured incessantly, especially with his pen’.
Another writer, it seems.
William Jnr’s first son was called William, and was also a vet, but I am descended from William Jnr’s fourth son, John, not a vet but a doctor, also in Shropshire. John died young, aged 38, after marrying Emma Phethean and having just one son, John Percy.
I possess one object that belonged to John, my great-grandfather, a strange sort of family heirloom, it hangs high in our front hallway and is five and a half paces in length – it is an oar, of the kind used in the Oxford–Cambridge Boat Race. About a quarter as heavy as it looks, the long shaft ends in a blade wooden, gilded, painted with a crest showing three lions, the initials P.B.C, and listing the names of the places where (I initially presumed) it raced.**
Figure 25. John Litt.
My father had told me about John – that he was a professional oarsman, and that he died of heart fever, or because his heart exploded (due to effort).
It turned out, on some research, that John Litt was a gentleman–amateur oarsman – a very successful one. The P.B.C. on the oar stands for Pengwern Boat Club. They still race out of Shrewsbury. The painted names of the places he raced were, I discovered, the names of the places his coxed four won. The crew comprised J. Cock, St J.C. Crampton and W.P. Mitchell. In August 1877, they were in the final of the West of England Challenge Vase.††
The race, which was a most interesting one, was splendidly rowed, the crews being almost level for about half the distance. The Shrewsbury men spurted, and gained when near the enclosure
, a slight lead, and though the Avon appeared to increase their speed, they could not name up for what they had lost, and the race was eventually won by Shrewsbury by a short half length. Time, 3m. 11secs.
For this the prize was 100 guineas.
Rower John’s only son, John Percy, was born on July 2nd 1887. He, too, attended Shrewsbury School. He, too, became a doctor – a G.P. I have his war record. Between 1915 and 1919, he was promoted from Captain to Major. As part of the Royal Army Medical Corps, he served in the Expeditionary Forces to Gallipoli and Salonica. He was decorated a Chevalier of the Greek Order of the Redeemer (5th Class).
During his military career, he was mainly in charge of sanitation. One commanding officer noted, ‘He has had many difficulties to overcome and has proved that he possesses administrative ability of a high order’.
Figure 26. My father’s father, John Percy.
He was a very strong swimmer, my father says. The story goes that, stationed in Constantinople, he wanted to swim the Hellespont – as Byron had done – but wasn’t granted permission. There is no doubt that he would have made it across.
I’ve found out that each male generation between William and my father wrote, wrote something – even my father wrote some newspaper columns on antiques, and left a play behind from his Dublin years.
‘It’s in your blood,’ my father said, after I announced I wanted to be a writer. I used to doubt it – I can’t any more.
And what about me? Am I a success or a failure, in comparison to William? To my father?
