by Susan Hill
‘It is such a joy,’ she writes, ‘to have someone who wishes to sit with you on a sofa and listen to a watch tick.’
It Ain’t Broke
THE BOOK, THAT IS. I know because I just went round the house looking for something to read, and on the way I reassured myself that as the book ain’t broke around here, I do not propose to fix it with an electronic reader. Yes, let’s use the whole word. Let’s tell it like it is. Electronic reader. Something monotonous-looking and made of plastic, is grey and has a screen. Maybe that’s the problem. It’s the screen that worries us. Cinema screen, television screen, computer screen, windscreen. Ah yes, windscreen. A friend of mine used to say that all the problems of the modern world – all of them – could be laid at the door of the internal combustion engine. Well, I blame the screen, too, and although I am not about to give up my own internal combustion engine or what was, for a nanosecond, called the goggle-box, I will stick to paper and print and pages for reading books. If it ain’t broke. Of course, someone wants to persuade us that it is so that they can sell us their device. ’Twas ever thus.
But on my travels round the house in search of just the right book for tonight, I passed so many reasons why the book works as well as it ever did. Tall thin reasons. Huge, heavy, illustrated ones. Small, neat, square hardbacks and pocket-sized paperbacks. Reasons with drawings, with photographs, with colour. Shiny ones. Matt ones. Cheap ones, expensive ones. Chunky ones. Some smell new, of paper and almost, but not quite, fresh ink. Some smell musty. Some have the signature of the author. A few are dedicated by the author, either to one of us or to someone unknown and long dead. Some have pencil marks scribbled in the margin – my own student hand in the Robinson edition of Chaucer, my daughter’s schoolgirl hand in A Tale of Two Cities, my aunts in Middlemarch and Jane Eyre, which she used to teach fifty years ago. Here is a book I bought second-or third-hand which has ‘To Patrick, remembering our days at the seminary’ written in the front. Here is Vanity Fair, with ‘F…k Off’ in red pen on page 146 (not in my writing).
No one will sign an electronic book, no one can annotate in the margin, no one can leave a love letter casually between the leaves. It is true that if I had no books but only a small, flat, grey hand-held electronic device, I would only need a very small house and how tidy that would be with just the small, flat, grey …
But I was looking for a book. I have no option but to find one here, in this house, for this is my year of reading from home and suddenly there is nothing, absolutely nothing, I want to take down and open, to read or re-read. I don’t think the fault lies in the books; the feeling applies to the wardrobe (nothing I want to wear), or the full larder (nothing I want to eat). I daresay very rich people with the private jet standing by have the same problem – nowhere they want to go.
I have even been to the very top of the house, though more for the exercise than in the hope of finding a book I wanted to read because the room that lies beyond the last flight of stairs is the domain of the SP (Shakespeare Professor), and entirely given over to Shakespeare, with a side-serving of his contemporaries. I don’t want to read Hamlet, or Cymbeline, or a learned scholar on the Comedies, Tragedies or Histories. Or I don’t think I do until I get up there and start browsing. Here is E.M.W Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture, which first fired me with an enthusiasm for that age when I was doing A-level history on the Tudors. That tempts me, and so does Conyers Read’s great biography Mr. Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth and one of the academic Shakespeare books – Anne Barton’s Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play – that once sent me off on reading-journeys in all manner of exciting directions. Here is a row of books by my old Professor at King’s, Geoffrey Bullough – Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, eight heavy uniform volumes and a major life’s work of scholarship. Professor Bullough had become very eminent by the time he was teaching my generation of students but took as much trouble with us as he might with a group of his peers, always courteous, always happy to go over something again, always encouraging, a shining example to all those at the top of their game who still have to, and should, spend some of their precious time teaching beginners.
But Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare is not what even the SP would call ‘a reading book’. I come back down to the small bookcase in the alcove outside my bedroom, which contains old favourites, books I often want to re-read, comfort books, and one or two which have never quite found their right place, so are resting on the branches here until they migrate to a more permanent home.
‘I’ll tidy your books for you,’ a so-called friend said, coming to the house and declaring that she did not know how I stood it. ‘I’ll categorise them and re-organise them so that you’ll never lose one again.’
How can she not understand that if I let her do such a terrible thing as organise my books, I would never find what I was looking for again? Worse, there would never be any wonderful surprises, as I look for X and Y but, mirabile dictu, find Z, which I thought I had lost years ago. Never the marvellous juxtaposition of a biography of Marilyn Monroe next to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
I was still looking for a book to read. I did not want anything too ephemeral, was not in the mood for humour, needed something sober but not sombre, familiar but with plenty of meat left on the bone. I was determined to make an effort, too, not plump for The Thirty-Nine Steps yet again. I have come downstairs again, to the small room that has changed its purpose in life several times since we came to this house, from younger daughter’s bedroom, to office, to general purpose ‘book and stationery storage room’. I have several times made plans to change it again, into a small reading room, because it is at the front of the house, with a wonderful view. The trouble is that the window is set very slightly too high, so that you cannot see the view when seated; I once evolved a second, or side-plan, to have a carpenter raise the floor up by building a low platform. I have not carried this plan out because the front of the house leans slightly to the left and the floors, of course, with it, making the construction of a wooden platform slightly more complicated than first measurements allow. It can be done, of course. Anything can be done. But it has been relegated to a back-burner job in terms of the household economy – there always seems to be some boiler-repair or dangerous tree-felling or car-brakes job which is more urgent.
The little room has as strange an assortment of books as any other in the house – Medieval Monastic history cheek by jowl with 400 Ladybird Books. Spring makes promises in March. There are a few warm days when it is good to bask in the early sun, but through glass, sitting with a book on the windowseat. When I look up, I see a faint wash of pale green across the poplars and the blue crocuses make fairy rings round the base of the acer trees. Daffodils tremble in the March winds. Walking out is all very fine but sitting to read is still better done indoors.
And here, at last, I find what I am looking for – a book to read. If ever I am in this restless and unsettled book-reading state, I know what will always satisfy, always interest me, always welcome me into the depths of its being. There are plenty of them in the house, some upstairs, some down, but I have found a row of them here, clustered together on the top of a high set of shelves, so that I need the step-stool to reach them.
What I have found are …
… Diaries
PEPYS WROTE HIS DIARY in cypher. Did he intend that no one else should ever read it? Did the Elizabethan Simon Forman, who recorded his sexual exploits, also in code, write only for himself? I know one or two people who keep a diary. Some, they say, are simple accounts of everyday family life, of no interest to anyone else nor intended to be seen by others. They are interesting for the writer to look back on in ten or twenty years. ‘What was I doing on this day in 1980? What did I wear for Mary’s wedding? What was the weather like on Joe’s twenty-first birthday?’ If diaries like these are discovered in two hundred years’ time they will be of interest to social historians, for it is the minutiae of ordinary lives which
get lost far more easily than the records of great events, because people have thought them not worth recording.
There are a surprising number of other people’s published diaries on my shelves and a few that were clearly written with an eye to posterity and publication – mainly by politicians. They are mainly pretty dull, too, though those of Alan Clark are the great exception. Was there ever a politician with more sexual charisma than Clark? Yet I have often thought that he didn’t really like women, and I doubt if he ever loved a single one of the many, many he conquered, except his wife Jane. His diaries are riveting. He had the essential attribute for the great diarist, a clear eye which not only saw but saw through, spotting the giveaway expression, the tell-tale nervous tic, able to guess pretty accurately what went on behind a public mask. Most political diaries reveal so little of the diarist themselves that somehow, as a result, they do not reveal much about other people either. Clark knew and revealed himself – or I think he did – and was very aware of his own follies and failings, weaknesses and wickednesses. I wonder if he knew that his reader could thoroughly disapprove of almost everything he does and says, and most of what he stands for, and yet admire him – like him, even.
I met him when I was, rather inappropriately, making a BBC film for a series about Shakespeare, and the producer had rented Saltwood Castle, where he lived, as his father, Lord Clark of Civilisation, had lived before him. It’s an oddly homely castle, not large enough to be intimidating, and it was a good, if slightly incongruous place to film a programme about Othello. There are always hanging-about times when making a film, and during one of them I went for a walk about and met Alan Clark – our host, as it were, unmistakeable, handsome in the craggy and cruel way that felled so many women, and, unlike his castle, pretty intimidating. He asked what I was doing. I said I was waiting for them to call me for the next shot. He asked how long that would be. I said I had no idea. It might be two minutes or half an hour.
‘Bored?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Go and count the tortoises.’
I’d noticed one or two but when I did as I was told I discovered dozens about the castle grounds, some still as stones and easy to mistake for one, some lumbering quietly along a path or across the grass. It was fun. I don’t remember how many I counted but by the time I got back to report, Clark had disappeared anyway.
His diaries never fail to amuse, divert, interest, throw light on this or that and their author is good company – less intimidating than in real life, too.
The Reverend Francis Kilvert would not have been intimidating. Here is the hardback set of his diaries in three handsome volumes originally published by Jonathan Cape, dust wrappers intact and lurking in a small bookcase in a dark corner. It is there because the bookcase holds tall books, but then, so do others and Kilvert deserves a better home.
It seems likely that he wrote his diary with one eye on posterity, because it is so carefully composed and the descriptions of the country, the seasons, the weather, the daily round of a clergyman, are set down with an exactness and a poetic touch that are unusual in a very private diary. There is probably no better place to go, than these beautiful diaries, to discover the countryside of the Black Mountains and the life of the people there, in remote villages and farms, as it was in the nineteenth century. Much has changed there now, but the hills themselves have not and nor has the atmosphere in these places on the English–Welsh border – some find it spooky.
Kilvert was a fellow spirit with Lewis Carroll, another Victorian clergyman susceptible to the charms of little girls. He describes the beauty of a string of them, the bright eyes or the dark hair or the flashing glances, whom he saw as he walked for miles, visiting schools, farms, cottages. Once, he admits that he walked ten miles merely for a smile from one of them, with whom he was in love. How sad that he and Carroll would now be called paedophiles; they were innocent men both, and devoutly Christian. Neither would have harmed any child and their frustrations must have been immense.
Kilvert led an active social life among the local squirearchy, and gentry, too, as well as being a conscientious parish priest, and eventually he married, only to die of peritonitis a few weeks later.
I have found a great many riches over many years of reading his diaries, introduced to them as I was by their original editor, William Plomer. I borrowed something from Kilvert, too, for my novel In the Springtime of the Year, about a young woman whose beloved husband of a year is killed by a falling tree. When the person I had been going to marry died suddenly, and I wrote the novel as an act of both love and of catharsis, I derived a great deal of comfort from Kilvert, and his evocation of landscapes, of country ways and the Church’s year soaks the book. Much of it was transmuted, as such things always are, but I borrowed directly from one scene he describes so wonderfully.
But now the customary beautiful Easter Eve idyll had fairly begun and people kept arriving from all parts with flowers to dress the graves. Children were coming from the town and from neighbouring villages with baskets of flowers and knives to cut holes in the turf. The roads were lovely with people coming and going and the churchyard a busy scene with women and children and a few men moving about among the tombstones and kneeling down beside the green mounds flowering the graves. I found a child wandering about the tombs looking for her father’s grave. She had found her grandfather’s and had already dressed it with flowers. The clerk was banking up and watering the green mounds not far off and I got him to come and show the child where the father’s grave lay. He soon found it, for he knows almost every grave in the churchyard. And then I helped the child to dress the long narrow green mound with the flowers that remained in her basket …
More and more people kept coming into the churchyard as they finished their day’s work. The sun went down in glory behind the dingle but still the work of love went on through the twilight and into the dusk until the moon rose full and splendid. The figures continued to move about among the graves and to bend over the green mounds in the calm clear moonlight and warm air of the balmy evening …
(Later) as I walked down the churchyard alone the decked graves had a strange effect in the moonlight and looked as if the people had lain down to sleep for the night out of doors, ready dressed to rise early on Easter morning.
The best way to know Kilvert and his world is to read the three volumes from beginning to end, chronologically, and then to dip in and out over the months and years, getting to know this shy, passionate, intelligent, sensitive, conscientious man and the people he served, the countryside he walked until he was familiar with it, in all its moods and seasons. I scarcely know of a better bedside book or a finer companion.
I cannot now remember how I first came to know William Plomer, poet, novelist, Kilvert’s editor, publisher’s editor, friend of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and librettist for the three church parables set to music by Benjamin Britten. But I remember him and many of our meetings, vividly. He was one of those people who probably showed a different persona to every friend, and he was full of contradictions which made up an enigmatic whole. He had led a wildly varied life, from his youth in South Africa onwards – but the most incongruous thing I know about him is that he edited several of Ian Fleming’s early James Bond novels, when he worked for Jonathan Cape. Anyone less like Fleming, or Bond, or suited to the world of Bond, than William it would be hard to imagine, yet Fleming counted him as his close and most loyal friend and collaborator. William was a dapper man, rather formal, kind, shrewd, with a fund of excellent stories. All of that concealed a promiscuous homosexual, and one with a curious home life. He lived in a small bungalow in suburban Sussex, with a European wartime refugee who kept house, but he was frequently away, on Kilvert business – he was founder, leading light and President of the Kilvert Society for many years, he was a fine poet and he gave many public readings, he travelled abroad, he wrote, he lectured, he read, reported on and edited books for Cape, he reviewed.
He was often in London
, where I had some jolly lunches with him at his favourite French restaurant off Leicester Square, Chez Solange. He was a generous host, enjoyed classic French cooking and once told me that he liked to push the boat out now and then because he ate ‘rather frugally’ at home. I grew extremely fond of him; he was a tactful and wise confidant, a fountain of sensible advice which was proffered but never imposed. His novels were interesting and perceptive and he portrayed women particularly well, but these have dated and it is as a poet that he deserves to be remembered (though I rather doubt if he is). But the many lovers of Kilvert owe him the greatest debt of all, for his dedication to editing, publishing and promoting the Diary far and wide. Without William Plomer we would not have the joy of Kilvert on our shelves at all.
I think the greatest satisfaction of reading published diaries is that of being admitted into other people’s worlds, of living in their houses, knowing their friends, accompanying them on their travels – and at the same time being party to their views of it all. It is like plunging into the imaginary world of a novel and yet satisfying in a rather different way – one I have not yet quite managed to put my finger on. The other side of that coin, though, is a sense of being a voyeur and that is more troubling the closer the diarist’s lifetime is to one’s own. I do not feel an intruder into Kilvert’s world because both he and those about whom he writes are so very far away, and all of them dead. And Kilvert is almost always gentle and generous in his portrayal of others, as his Christianity bade him be. There is the occasional sigh, the occasional ironic aside, but, in general, he is accepting and forgiving even as he portrays people so clearly – and that in itself is no mean feat. I have not found many other diarists of previous centuries of such interest, though the charms of Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne are manifest. But they are specific. One reads White for his observation of the natural world, within and beyond his own garden, for the weather and the birds, the plants and the tortoise. Some people read Parson Woodforde because they find lists of what someone in the eighteenth century ate and drank – a prodigious amount – of absorbing interest, which I do not. A dull diary, that one.
