Letter

Alas, the summer is nearly over. This week the shop has returned to normal opening hours; next week the book group re-starts (on September 6th), the new Persephone Quarterly goes out (on the 7th) and our four stalwart ‘envelope-stuffers’ will come and ‘do the foreigns’ (on the 12th).

It is Emily who is chained to the office desk, I am still away. We are staying on a farm in one of the most magnificent parts of England, in Somerset, on the edge of the Quantocks a few miles south of the Bristol Channel. As we drove out of Taunton, round the ring road, past Tesco’s, we felt doubtful. But only a few miles on, across hills, down unmarked lanes, along a stony track, we came to the cottage (once a granary) nestling against a seventeenth-century farmhouse. It is a magical spot in the valley that helped to inspire some of the best lines in ‘Kubla Khan’, five miles from Nether Stowey where Coleridge lived.

No one comes here because the track is a dead end (unless the postman arrives today with the proofs of the November endpapers) yet we feel incredibly safe, almost cherished, perhaps because people have been living here safely for five hundred years and we have a wonderful sense of all the people who have been here before us. (No, it can’t have been so much fun without access by car or without antibiotics or in the snow…) The door of the sitting room goes out onto a lawn, and beyond the low wooden fence are the sheep, the cows, the horses, the combe, the hills. I have put my computer by the door (I am finally finishing a book) and Chris goes for walks and sits in a deckchair reading (Madame Bovary, since you ask, as magnificent as ever; Emma, which is not - apologies to all Janeites; Spain’s best-known living novelist, Javier Marias).

It turns out that the owner of this farm, Janet White, who has lived here for forty years, has written The Sheep Stell (1991) about her life as a sheep-farmer. Here is her description of first seeing the house:

The long low sandstone farmhouse and barns were tucked
into the hillside amid a patchwork of meadows and
hanging oak woods. A stream glinted in the valley
bottom, twisting its way down from the high heather
moorland at the head of the combe… We drove down the
lane through a hamlet of thatched cottages, past a tiny
church perched on the hillside, then deep into the
combe to find another lane leading back upstream. The
narrow road tunnelled between overhanging trees and
ended by a bridge at the bottom of the rough
farmtrack… A magnificent wisteria grew up the front of
the house and, to the rear, was a cobbled courtyard
with fig trees and the gargoyle of an old man spitting
out water into a stone trough. [On the hills]
buzzards wheeled overhead on two-edged wings, wild red
deer lurked in the oakwoods and hill ponies browsed on
the high moorland. The quiet combe contained
everything I loved; water, grass, trees, birds, animals
and wilderness.

It seemed appropriate that we were here on ‘Betjeman Day’ on Radio 4 yesterday, and then watched Dan Cruikshank’s programme about him in the evening. Betjeman would so heartily have approved of this farmhouse. Yet, what the programme emphasised was that Betjeman was not an old fogey; he approved of modernism in its place. For the next few weeks, every time I come out of Euston tube and walk across the dank, depressing piazza I will mourn the Euston Arch that could so easily and so magnificently have been moved there.

Finally, may I commend Penelope Lively’s marvellous book A House Unlocked, about her grandmother’s house just over the hill from here. I am looking forward to having a Somerset talk with her when we meet at the Cheltenham Festival on October 9th – at 4pm she and Salley Vickers will very kindly and loyally be talking about some of their favourite Persephone books. I too am allowed a couple of choices. This will be difficult, rather like someone wandering in off the street in Lamb’s Conduit Street and asking which my favourite book is. I love them all! But for Cheltenham, inspired by the lovely EDGE review of a title in ‘the incredible series from Persephone Books’ I may choose The Home-Maker

Nicola Beauman
Lambs Conduit Street
30 August 2006