Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden

by Janet Todd

  ‘I find it very poignant,’ says Fran enjoying her fry-up, especially the sausage. ‘My turn for telling, yes?’

  ‘Not till I have real coffee inside me,’ says Rachel.

  Do try to edit, whispers Jane Austen.

  The three assemble on a picnic bench outside the Elan café holding paper mugs of coffee.

  ‘Did you ever see anything like that statue of Shelley over there? Usually it’s girls who push their heads winsomely to one side – or St Sebastian. The women clutching the manly body are his muses not his harem, I guess.’

  ‘There’s no statue to the dispossessed of Elan,’ says Fran.

  To remember Tryweryn, a small sculpture of a rising bird was proposed. Someone objected it looked uncommonly like the Liver Birds, symbol of marauding Liverpool.

  Rachel grins, ‘You sound a quarrelsome people.’

  Fran enjoys being from ‘a people’ – sometimes she suffers from ethnic-envy.

  The owner of Nantgwyllt, a later Lewis Lloyd, kept a large household of gardeners, servants, coachmen and cowmen, also a do-gooding sister Gertrude who ran a school for local children and provided material for poor women to make frocks and breeches. Every deprived area needs its Miss Gertrude.

  Fran pauses to mutter to Jane Austen: she’s the kind of woman you never treated with proper respect – unlike your Victorian successors.

  The comment annoys the Author, who moves away. She’s sick of people telling her what she should have depicted: pushy authoresses, mixed-race hoydens, gleeful lesbians, cunning bastards, abolition of slavery, industrial reform, horrors of enclosure, war, famine, imperialism, death, sex, masturbation, philanthropic ladies …

  Life in the cottages was cold but cosy, bodies packed close. In autumn the squire’s mill ground grain to provide oatmeal for flummery and mess for pigs. After a good harvest they celebrated round a bonfire.

  (Rachel has a vision of Fran enjoying Morris dancing and folk fairs on muddy East Anglian commons. She’s warming to her new friend.)

  Christmas was a carnival upside-down time, the poor waited on by ladies of the House – to whom they curtseyed even in the lanes.

  Rachel chuckles, ‘If Harriet and Shelley had stuck around, they’d have been so way out with their free love and commune of spinsters and schoolgirls.’

  Hetty Price, a child in one of Nantgwyllt’s tenant farms, when in her seventies remembered prelapsarian Elan – well, Elan before the Flood.

  Like Tom Grove and most squires, Lewis Lloyd was a hunter – though few foxes roamed the upland valleys. Once, catching a foxy scent, his hunt galloped over hills and moorland, across streams and rivers, beyond Elan Valley and across the Wye and even across the Severn –

  ‘I don’t have geography enough for this tale,’ objects Rachel, sipping her coffee in hopes it’ll mask the taste of poached eggs. ‘Never mind, the point is to think far away.’

  Local huntsmen and hounds joined pursuit, riding on to Carno and Caersws – No, I don’t know where they are either – finally cornering the poor beast by a railway bridge. The squire couldn’t resist showing off his fleet hunter by making him jump a last fence. The horse obeyed and died. Lewis Lloyd sent his hounds back to Rhayader on a goods train while he carried home his saddle and bridle.

  ‘That’s a dreadful story,’ says Rachel.

  ‘You see, there was a train then,’ says Fran.

  Thomas is jiggling his leg again. Fran, whose short legs never behave like this, rejects the message. She continues. ‘There are other stories with an edge too, the informants being retired peasants.’

  ‘Can you retire from peasanting?’

  Lewis Lloyd exploited the locals as all squires do or they wouldn’t be squires for long. His rivers flowed for guests to catch salmon.

  Youths tried to outwit him by dressing as girls and luring fish with lights, then killing with spears. He set his hounds on them.’

  Listening from down the road where she’s dawdling, Jane Austen knows Fran’s thinking of Messrs Knightley and Darcy. As landowners, they’re problematic for leftie readers. Come on, she mutters, inequality is a fact of life. No one should be blamed for past beliefs and systems.

  Not waiting for an answer, she rushes on. How sure you are your age owns supreme virtue! But how will your great grand-children judge your treatment of farm animals? Of your parents? You are tenacious of your own merit. Do you think time will have no further operations, nor the human mind change again?

  ‘Is that it?’ asks Thomas.

  Fran shrugs. ‘Just a glimpse of local life, the usual tension of rich and poor, one thieving, one defending. Moral complexities change,’ she adds, à propos of nothing Thomas can see.

  They walk away from Elan village. ‘Shelley’d have liked this violent construction. He was obsessed by energetic machines,’ says Thomas, wishing his buttocks were squashing his bike seat.

  ‘And firearms,’ adds Rachel. ‘He shot at Welsh sheep. He called them maggoty and mangy. To me they look clerical and prosperous, especially the ones nosing into your car, Thomas. I guess they were thinner then.’

  In fact, Welsh sheep are famed for their symmetry, sound constitution, and delicately tasting flesh.

  ‘Shelley could have been a projector. Just before he died, he was building a steamboat.’

  ‘Devising schemes for extracting sunbeams from cucumbers,’ laughs Rachel as they cross the road.

  Thomas breathes heavily. Even Rachel can exasperate. He’ll be silent about the iron machinery ordered by the poet for his last boat.

  He returns to the car to unhitch his bike. While Rachel and Fran continue to walk by the water, he rides off along the bumpy tracks towards the remains of the Cistercian abbey of Strata Florida, once landlord of Elan Valley. He’s on an exhilarating high of speed, a Shelleyan flight. By the time he meets up with them again, he feels genial and accommodating. His face is rosy, the hue of an older man.

  All three stare across the sombre lake, each thinking what anill-assorted but comfortable trio they’ve become. They hear the croak of ravens, cries of buzzards, curlews, plovers, water ousels, herons and sandpipers. Names flash through Fran’s mind, though she can’t recognise the different sounds, as Dad could. Far off up the other bank they see wild mouse-coloured ponies galloping.

  ‘So, an end to the history of these hills and valleys, the struggles to extract lead from rocks, rescue snow-felled sheep. Nothing left.’

  ‘ “A tingling silentness”,’ quotes Thomas.

  ‘Awesome,’ says Rachel, forgetting her resolve to jettison the word. The Hoover Dam flashes through her mind: America invariably overtops in scale and enterprise. Even though it isn’t raining and there’s an intermittent, quite thrilling sun, she isn’t transported. But she’s content enough. She watches a floating leaf saturated with dark water, sinking.

  Fran’s about to mention the appalling treatment meted out to water; Thomas prevents her. ‘When he was young, Shelley thought that, if water could be manufactured, the deserts of Africa might be transformed into rich meadows and vast fields of maize and rice.’

  Rachel walks off, letting the lake lap the rim of her Le Chameau boots. When she returns, she says, ‘Shelley loved water. He was always looking for it. It was a mania, he had to be near it.’

  ‘Gazing into it, I bet,’ says Fran. ‘Like Narcissus.’

  The women exchange smiles.

  ‘Shelley liked it flowing and restless,’ says Thomas briskly. ‘This water here travels fast to Brum. It’s the kind of engineering project he’d have admired. Steam and mechanical power. They change the world as his poems should.’ He turns so the wind won’t banish his words, ‘You know this enterprise – forcing land to give water to a thirsty city – beats what the gentry did in England, making lakes and rivulets for private viewing.’

  Now scrambling around on the edge of the road, Jane Austen is raring to contribute. I always mocked the efforts of improvers who wanted to fell avenues of limes, move cottages to enhance a
vista, that sort of thing. So vulgar and ostentatious.

  Fran can’t leave this alone. You really did like a great estate, though, didn’t you?

  Jane Austen says simply, I loved beauty.

  A few fuchsia rhododendron clusters lean towards where a fast-flowing brook tumbles into the lake. It’s framed with delicate ferns, jittering like butterflies. Behind rise dark leaden rocks, lichen and moss – scraps of hair on an old head. A skirting of deciduous trees, fir above, then the barren moorlands beyond.

  To Fran it’s achingly lovely. She feels air condense into droplets on her exposed hair. She looks up. ‘A red kite I think, they’re so fast swooping I can’t be sure.’

  ‘Pigeons are faster than eagles except when they dive, did you know that?’

  ‘Swifts are faster than pigeons,’ says Thomas.

  ‘Stands to reason,’ laughs Fran, ‘with that name.’

  ‘I love engineering,’ Thomas continues, ‘the audacity of men and machines. Napoleon carving a carriageway through the Alps.’

  Forgive me for absenting myself, says Jane Austen into Fran’s ear. Not really my interest. Politics and people, yes, but when brother Edward spoke of drainage and ditches in Kent, I admit to yawning over my excellent wine. I attributed it to the warmth of the fire, of course.

  Righto, murmurs Fran uneasily. Do go back and I’ll hurry on. Honest.

  The date is March 12, 1891.

  Wales is ripe for submerging, Birmingham and London greedy for water, for other people’s rivers and rain. A proposed London scheme includes three of the Wye’s tributaries, Elan, Claerwen and little Ithon. Why not? They flow through (almost) empty acres. London is nearing six million.

  But Birmingham, a greater wen, more sudden in growth, is sickly, its white and rickety people prey to typhoid and cholera, both water-borne diseases. Their state is deplored by philanthropy as miserable, by industry as inconvenient. Birmingham wins with a more modest scheme.

  In 1892 it begins. Solid masonry walls will back up the river to form three dams, the head of one reaching the foot of the next, with a submerged dam retaining water. The highest will be over a thousand feet above sea level, its water flowing through a tunnel bored into sheer rock.

  Why object? South Wales is pitted by coal mines. The great magic mountain of Snowdon, where Wordsworth saw the perfect image of a mighty mind feeding upon infinity, is about to be scarred by a tourist railway. Anything can be exploited and sold, water or beauty.

  People too. Like Jane Austen, Agafia is now a product, a brand. Lykova tours have been created round her Siberian hermitage. Do you pay more for a glimpse of the celebrity and her old, old icons?

  A handful of Elan shepherds become construction workers; the rest are evicted without compensation. (Lewis Lloyd sold Nantgwyllt for £140,000, an excellent price.) No one made the fuss that smaller Tryweryn provoked years later when identity politics was just beginning.

  ‘OK,’ says Rachel. ‘After this rehearsal, we really need to do more walking and looking. So, I will ask you what happened to the displaced tenants, then we should move on.’

  Drill down for a tender anecdote. ‘Boys struggled to carry their home’s prize possession, a great oak four-poster bed, up the valley to a neighbour’s house. You can see it now in St Fagan’s Museum in Cardiff. Some found work in Rhondda coal mines, discovering the accent sharper there, repartee quicker. One took to his bed intending to die. Don’t know if he did.’

  Where are Shelley’s revolutionary words when needed? ‘Rise, like lions after slumber … Ye are many – they are few!’

  The ‘peasants’ sleep in their chains. Admittedly, they are ‘few’.

  In short: to benefit Birmingham, seventy square miles of land containing the mansions of Cwm Elan and Nantgwillt, eighteen farms, a school, chapel and shop, riverbank and amphibious creatures beyond mention – water rats, otters, rabbits, badgers, shrews and voles – all suffered rising death.

  ‘Yet,’ adds Thomas, ‘magnificent though it all was, the people of Birmingham in the twentieth century were less served than the inhabitants of Rome in 100 AD. I got this Googling The Times. Reporters used to be educated.’

  14

  Let’s plough on. Talk and walk. Wordsworth composed most of his poetry while moving his metrical feet below his ugly (but serviceable) legs.

  For its time the dam was a massive enterprise. Material and men arrived along a new railway: stones, steam crabs, blasting machines, itinerant navvies – fifty thousand over the thirteen years of building – rough men needing, like an army, to be controlled. To house them, the valley was terraced and a town of wooden huts with tin roofs erected, along with a school (no records except of an evening ‘entertainment’ in which youngsters dubbed Elan Snowflakes ‘blacked up’ – oh dear!) and a hospital for men crushed by great stones, blinded by explosions, drowned by sudden waters – or depressed into madness from harsh labour, the want of drink and women. New arrivals were purified, cleaned and disinfected.

  Cold baths and temperance: as if creating a dam were a religious ritual requiring purity of mind and body.

  ‘Tin Town’ was a model village, an austere type of commune. Bramwell Booth, founder of the Salvation Army and expert on housing vagrants, advised on its making. It’s not of course to our libertarian taste, but there are advantages: the great smallpox epidemic of 1896 never took hold here, under the regime of quarantine and surveillance.

  No trace left now. It was scooped up in a pall of dust and sold to the Ministry of Defence in the Great War.

  There were dams to show for this commune. Nantgwyllt left what? Poetry.

  ‘I guess we’ll be talking about Shelley places soon,’ smiles Rachel. She’s happy to indulge Fran, but those eggs – they still weigh even after coffee and ham sandwiches.

  OK. While planning their destruction engineers and officials lodged in Cwm Elan and Nantgwyllt. ‘I imagine,’ adds Fran, ‘they cared not a fig for Shelley and his dreams. Not being gentry, perhaps they felt out of place and welcomed the vandalism, a deserved lashing out at what they’d not had in class-ridden England.’

  When they chased off Ascendancy landlords, the Irish despoiled the great houses of fitments, velvet curtains and brocaded chairs, mahogany mantelpieces, bed hangings, and lead guttering. You find remnants now in local pubs and cottages. Unlikely here: the evicted were long gone.

  Did the engineers smoke pipes and stare proudly as a little river rose and turned into a bloated brown mass before its sludge settled on houses and farms?

  In 1932 Francis Brett Young wrote a bestselling novel imagining an Elan Valley mansion sinking like the Titanic under water, its five clusters of smokeless chimneys the last to go. In fact, walls were knocked down, so there would be no elegant sinking, just the drowning of a heap of gentry rubble.

  Why? Is there something too terrible about great houses where – whatever you think of the man – a major poet, one of the titans of English Romanticism, stayed and wrote, being submerged intact, water flowing in and out their windows and rooms? Would they, one future day, have tempted an unhinged poetic diver to glide into a sacred space and settle?

  Small remnants of Nantgwyllt’s walls do remain, appearing in the odd drought year. Fran saw the heap in 1976 but says nothing. An odd, hot summer troubling to many people.

  ‘My grandmother lived in a mansion on Long Island,’ remarks Rachel. ‘She had zillions in the bank, but the house rotted round her. She wouldn’t allow in workmen. This drowning’s better than letting a house be abandoned to damp and decay, so it looks like a leper.’

  Thomas notes the zillions. Momentarily puzzled, Fran continues, ‘You see now the point of my Tickell book. Supervising the middle dam, he knew what was here just before the valley disappeared. He was an artist and made sketches of what was about to go under. A pity, he wrote, if it should pass away without a record. Two hundred copies of the book were published in 1894.’

  ‘Less than the print run of Queen Mab.’

  �
�Not a great circulation,’ says Rachel, aware of the gratifying success of her latest short-story collection.

  (Her monograph’s poor sales – despite the good reviews – would have kept Annie mum.)

  Of course, costs overran, hitches occurred. The aqueduct was ready, the filter beds weren’t. Let’s try a little pomp and circumstance.

  In July 1904, their majesties King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra arrived at Rhayader station to inaugurate the Elan scheme. They were met by the Lord Lieutenant of Radnorshire and other county and railway dignitaries, as well as the Lord Mayor of Birmingham. Herefordshire Rifle Volunteers formed a guard of honour, Radnorshire having nothing suitable.

  King Edward responded to the loyal address, pleased that he and his Queen had an opportunity to see their Welsh subjects – more than half a century he’d been Prince of Wales. (Fran’s a signed-up British republican, but pities the Royals going through their dreary routine of greeting trussed-up subjects rendered tongue-tied by a gloved royal hand.)

  Jane Austen nudges her. I made my views known through hyperbole for those clever enough to read me. Remember my dedication of Emma to the Prince Regent? OTT as you would say.

  No comment on King George, though, or were your remarks burnt by Cassandra? Fran whispers back.

  I respected madness.

  A special train dragged the royal entourage between river and road, flag-waving subjects lining the way. At the filter beds locals on ponies watched the inauguration from crags. All went well. His Majesty symbolized peace: great works like this were among the ‘victories of peace’. (Pity his peace hadn’t extended to the Empire, where the murderous Boer War had just ended, or indeed to his nephew’s Great War waiting in the wings.) The royal hand turned a wheel releasing an automatic shutter in the filter beds. Water rose. The Bishop of St David’s blessed the enterprise.