A Month in the Country by J.L.Carr

My interest in medieval wall paintings grew through regular visits to St. Faith’s Chapel, Westminster Abbey where the east wall is covered by a 13th century portrait of  the Saint, accompanied by the monk who is said to have painted her. However, it was reading a short novel by J.L. Carr that inspired me to seek them out in country churches. A Month in the Country was published in 1980 , won the Guardian Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker. It was subsequently made into a film starring Kenneth Branagh and Colin Firth. It tells the story of Tom Birkin, a survivor from the Great War, commissioned to undertake the uncovering and restoration of a medieval Doom mural in a country church in Yorkshire during the ‘long warm days of August’. It is a simple poignant story of friendship, unrequited love, village life and painstaking restoration.  All too soon, Birkin’s country idyll is over and he is on his way.  J.L.Carr knows his subject well; passion and tension are both revealed behind the works of both artist and restorer, centuries apart. The church is set in fictitious Oxgodby, but in reality the author sets its background in the ‘fields of Northamptonshire’ as he explains in the foreword. Could he have been thinking of Croughton, perhaps, whose 14th century murals were discovered in 1921 and restored in the 1960s?  

A Doom worthy of such inspiration is that at Oddington, Gloucestershire. The village was moved to higher, drier ground after the Black Death, and a new church was built in 1852. By 1860, the church, dedicated to St. Nicholas and enlarged by the Normans, was derelict. Wall paintings, dated 1340, were not discovered until whitewash was removed in 1913 during restoration. An articleinThe Times, written in 1935, calls it ‘one of the most notable representations of the Last Judgement now surviving in the country’. It includes gruesome scenes from hell: grotesque monsters and boiling cauldrons in contrast to redeemed souls clambering to heaven, assisted by angels on the other side often mural. Restoring these works of art, sometimes hidden for centuries, obscured by dust and lime wash must be tremendously exciting. As Birkin explains in A Month in the Country, ‘perhaps you can understand if I explain that, to begin with, I wasn’t sure of what I was uncovering:’

‘It was breathtaking. A tremendous waterfall of colour, the blues of the apex falling, then seethingintoaturbulenceof red; like all truly great works of art, hammering you with its whole before beguiling you with its parts.’

Medieval wall paintings and other superstitious pictures were banned by Edward VI in 1547 and byElizabeth 1 in 1559. Others that escaped, in remote parts of the country, were obliterated less than a century later.

Many have been uncovered and restored in the last hundred years, some as late as the 1970s. In Leebotwood, Shropshire, a medieval painting of Christ and Mary with angels in attendance was uncovered in 1976. The Last Judgement at Blyth, Northamptonshire, probably the work of a travelling artist, restored in 1987, is recognised as one of the most complete medieval murals in the country. 

Some murals have survived intact; others are mere fragments of what might have been such as those at Shorthampton, Oxfordshire. Depictions of St. Christopher and St. Martin at Chalgrave, Bedfordshire are much faded. However, a huge mural of St. Christopher carrying the Christ-child at the 12th century church of St. Mary Magdalen, Baunton, Gloucestershire seems as fresh as the day it was painted, decorated with fish, a mermaid and a ship. It continues to offer protection to those entering and leaving the church, opposite the south door. 

Who knows how many frescoes will be discovered in country churches off the beaten track? only time will tell.

  I love this novella and read it again recently with a book group. I first came across it nearly twenty years ago and it set me off on a trail to discover medieval wall paintings across the country, and later in northern Italy.

Recently I  suffered a shocking and heart-breaking bereavement of a close relative. As I start to read again,  this novel is perfect: it is a sad, wistful story set in a time of hardship and uncertainty; I find its gentle  bleakness strangely comforting.

We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours forever - the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass. 

Murder on Mustique by Anne Glenconner

 I read Anne Glenconner’s best-selling autobiography ‘Lady in Waiting’ on holiday on Nevis a year ago. Although I do not really gravitate towards reading murder mysteries, I enjoyed ‘Murder on Mustique’ as it took me back to the Caribbean during this time of Lockdown when we are not allowed to travel anywhere. We first visited the Caribbean in 1981 and holidayed in Barbados. Since then we have visited Cuba, Saint Lucia, Puerto Rico, Saint Martin, Saint Barts, Antigua, Saint Kitts and the Bahamas. Nevis was our favourite with its historical associations connected to Lord Nelson - his wife Fanny was born there and we stayed on her family’s former plantation. Recently we enjoyed a holiday in Bermuda - in the Atlantic, rather than the Caribbean, but equally beautiful with pristine turquoise waters lapping on to pink sand. We hope to return to Barbados one day, and I look forward to staying at The Cotton House on Mustique too, if that were possible. But for now I can only visit in my imagination, and this novel effortlessly takes me to the island where ‘it’s still so thick with trees and undergrowth it looks like an emerald, resting on a skein of blue velvet.’

Set in 2002, the author’s familiarity with the island (owned by her husband years ago) let’s her invite the reader into exclusive private villas dotted around the island, Basil’s beach bar and the Bamboo church. The story is partly autobiographical - Anne Glenconner becomes Lady Vee Blake, her husband Colin Tennant, Jasper. But when a young woman is murdered fiction takes over...

I look forward to reading more of the adventures of Lady Vee and Detective Solomon Nile on the trail of ‘who done it?’But I look forward even more to visiting the island, less menacing, I hope,  in reality than in fiction.

The sun is sinking behind the horizon and I almost think I catch a flash of emerald green on the sea’s surface - but no. Mustique looks absolutely beautiful, a home from home, and my heart is full of gratitude as I hurry down the steps to greet my friends.

That’s a relief.

The Children of Green Knowe by Lucy Boston

First published in 1954, this is one of my favourite children’s stories. I have visited the beautiful old house in Hemingford Grey several times with its exquisite garden leading down to the river. The story was adapted for television a long while ago, and visiting the house brings the story back to life: the old chest containing Toby’s coat and sword, Alexander’s flute, the rocking horse, Linnet’s birdcage and a little Japanese wooden mouse are all items left behind by the children died in the Plague, who return to befriend Tolly, staying with his grandmother for Christmas while his parents are abroad. 

Over the fireplace hung a large oil painting of a family, three children and two ladies. There were two handsome boys, wearing lace collars and dark green silk suits... and a little girl holdings a chaffinch, and beside her on the ground was an open wicker cage.

They all had large dark eyes and all their eyes seemed fixed on Tolly. If he moved to the side all the eyes moved after him.

As they rested there, tired and dreamy and content, a woman’s voice began to sing very softly a cradle song...

‘It’s the grandmother rocking the cradle, ‘ said Mrs. Oldknow, and her eyes were full of tears....while four hundred years ago, a baby went to sleep.

The house is beautifully eccentric:

There were vases everywhere filled with queer flowers - branches of dry winter twigs out of which little tassels and rosettes of flower petals were bursting, some yellow, some white, some purple.

The room seemed to be the ground floor of a castle... its thick stone walls were strong, warm and lively. It was furnished with comfortable polished old-fashioned things as though living in castles was quite ordinary.

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

First published in 1949, I love this fictional memoir of a teenage girl living in eccentric poverty in a remote Suffolk gatehouse before the War.  It is such a cosy and humorous read from the start as the heroine, Cassandra, sets the scene: 

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining board, which I have padded with our dog’s blanket and the tea-cosy.

I love all the characters but my favourite is Stephen Colly: He has lived with us ever since he was a little boy - his mother used to be our maid, in the days when we could still afford one, and when she died he had nowhere to go. He grows vegetables for us and looks after the hens - and does a thousand odd jobs - I can’t think how we should get on without him. He has always been rather devoted to me; father calls him my swain.

When Miss Marcy, the librarian, calls round to chair an ‘Enquiry into the Finances of the Mortmain Family’ everyone’s income is written down as ‘nil’ apart from Stephen who will contribute his  25 shillings a week’s wages from working at Four Stones Farm, leaving him time to still work for the Mortmains in the evening.

Stephen is such a kind, honourable soul, and his ‘fair and noble’ good looks enable him to go to London  to model for photos,  and later to star in silent films. He saves up his earnings to buy Cassandra a small potable wireless for her birthday, only to be upstaged by her wealthy American friend Simon staying nearby who sends a a wireless and a gramophone combined with a blue record case to match. Nobody ever had such a glorious present. 

‘Yours has a real wooden case,’ I told him, ‘with such a beautiful high polish’.Oh, I was sorry for him! After all the months he had been saving up! I ran after him and, from the top of the kitchen stairs, I could see him staring at his little brown wireless. He turned it off, then went out into the garden with a most bitter expression on his face.

‘Oh, Stephen!’ I cried, ‘ It was a much bigger present from you. Simon didn’t have to save - or work for it.’ 

‘No, that was my privilege,’ he said quietly.

I love the description of Stephen’s room ‘in the  bit of the kitchen  where the hen-roosts were; father turned it into two two little rooms which Stephen and his mother had - hers is just a store-room now’.

...the narrow window was almost overgrown with ivy and the whitewash on the wall was discoloured and peeling off in flakes. On the chest of drawers his comb was placed exactly midway between a photograph of his mother with him as a baby in her arms, and a snapshot of me - both in aluminium frames much too large for them.

But it is Simon who has won Cassandra’s heart by the end of the novel. 

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