How Sweet the Music

Something rather magical happened to me last summer when, walking along the river path by the Great Ouse in Huntingdonshire, I came across an old iron gate set into a stone wall. A small sign said ‘Visitors welcome’ so I pushed the gate open and found myself in a lovely English garden with some curious details. Ahead of me lay a velvety swath of lawn, edged with a row of dark green yews trimmed neatly into coronation orbs and crowns. Walking further, I discovered more topiary in the shape of giant chess pieces, and rare irises standing tall. Old roses carelessly cast their petals at my feet as I looked up to see a mysterious old house.

If the Manor at Hemingford Grey sounds like something out of a storybook, it’s because that’s exactly what it is. A fictionalized version of this ancient house features prominently in all six of Lucy M. Boston’s Green Knowe novels for children, published between 1954 and 1964 and still in print today. Friends who knew and loved the series had told me about the house’s real-life setting in a village near Cambridge, so it was not exactly a secret. But when I went there for the first time last year, and was invited inside, it really did feel like the beginning of an adventure. Afterwards, to check that I hadn’t dreamed the whole thing, I tracked down a copy of Lucy M. Boston’s Memory in a House, first published in 1973, to find out more. The story of how she made this place her home and her life’s work is as strange and beguiling as any of the fiction she wrote. In 1915, 21-year-old Lucy Maria Wood gave up her Classics degree at Somerville College, Oxford, to train as a nurse. While waiting to be sent out to a military hospital in France, she took lodgings in King’s Parade, Cambridge, where her brothers were studying and her distant cousin Harold Boston was in a training camp. They were a close family, and any free time they had was spent together that summer, messing about on the river and sleeping innocently under the stars. Lucy was a true child of nature and soon fell in love with Hemingford Grey, which she thought of as ‘the most forgotten bit of rural England’, and its shady river where boats could be hired cheaply. In the Prologue to Memory in a House she evokes this peaceful atmosphere beautifully.

As soon as one had pushed off into the river, time was obliterated. These dreamy lethargic meadows and old trees had cast off from the stream of life, as we had in our punt, so that moving over the surface to the lovely sound of the punt pole striking pebbles on the bottom, we were doubly liberated.

She often took a punt out alone and she became intrigued by a sombre old house standing near the riverbank. It looked to her like a semi-derelict Georgian farmhouse, ‘lived in joylessly if at all’, despite its perfect location overlooking a bend in the Great Ouse. ‘I was not to know it was waiting for me,’ she recalled, ‘but as I punted past I gave it a friendly thought. If I lived there I would at least give it sweet briar.’ It would be many years before she saw the house or its tranquil riverside setting again. A few months later she was sent to Normandy to look after injured soldiers, and in 1917 her beloved brother Phil, who had recently become a pilot with the Royal Flying Corps, was reported missing in action when his plane was shot down. Soon afterwards Lucy impulsively married Harold before he was sent to the Front. After the war, Harold, Lucy and their young son Peter moved to Cheshire so that Harold could take charge of his family’s tannery business. Sadly, the marriage broke up in the early 1930s, and Lucy moved to Florence and then Vienna to study drawing and painting and attend the classical music concerts that she adored. But by 1937 war was threatening (‘Mussolini pushed me out of Italy and Hitler out of Austria’), and she decided to return to England to pursue her career as an artist. Her son Peter was by then studying at Cambridge, so she rented a flat on King’s Parade and made plans to spend her days painting there. One day she happened to hear someone say that there was a house for sale in Hemingford Grey. As she writes in Memory in a House, ‘such was the force of the latent past, or the magnet of what was to be’, that she did not hesitate, but jumped in a taxi and soon was knocking at the door of the Manor. ‘I hear this house is for sale,’ she announced breathlessly to the surprised owners. Yes, they confirmed, they were thinking of selling, but they had not yet advertised it. The house for sale that she had heard about was a different one. The coincidence simply confirmed what Lucy Boston already knew: that fate had brought her there that day. She was a divorcée in her late forties, she knew no one in the area, and most of the house was – to put it mildly – unfit for human habitation. There were no adequate drains, all water had to be pumped by hand from a well, and most of the upper rooms were inaccessible. It was ‘ramshackle madness’ from top to bottom, she knew, yet she never had any doubts about taking it on. ‘Looking back now, it is hard to know why I acted with such certainty and passion,’ she writes. ‘It was like falling in love.’ The original Manor had been built in the twelfth century and was possibly the oldest continuously inhabited Norman house in England. Having been assured there was nothing more to find, she and her son Peter finally ‘jettisoned doubt and bought pickaxes’. Over hundreds of years the house had been greatly altered and improved, and it was cluttered with fussy extensions. Lucy decided she would get rid of as much as she could and reinstate the stark simplicity of its Norman structure, ‘a simple rectangle two storeys high with a steeply pitched gable roof’, huge fireplaces, arched arrow-slit windows and three foot-thick walls of Barnack stone. While the house was being restored Lucy spent two years camping in a virtual ruin, with roof tiles off, floorboards up and gaping holes for windows. ‘I was absolutely happy,’ she recalls in Memory in a House. ‘There was blackbird song and tumbling water, rising mists over the old riverbed and the call of owls. The smell of old dust and builders was an essential detail with its own invigorating promise.’ Others were more wary: local villagers called it the Poltergeist House and avoided walking past it at night. Lucy was unperturbed by the idea of ghosts and paid little attention to strange rattles, knocks and thumps. But in her early years there she and others who visited often sensed the invisible, sometimes terrifying, presence of the house. War had broken out by the time the restoration work was completed, and Lucy Boston’s artist friend Elisabeth Vellacott came to live at the Manor and work on a farm nearby. Lucy wondered what she could contribute to the war effort and then remembered that while nursing in a French hospital during the First World War, she had often played her gramophone in the evening for the patients. She had gathered a large collection of records during what she describes as ‘my desperate Continental solitude’, and the Manor’s high-ceilinged baronial hall made the perfect music room. So she acquired a second-hand gramophone with an immense horn, and twice a week airmen from the RAF station nearby would climb the wooden stairs and settle down on cushions and borrowed divans to listen to the music. The room was lit with a multitude of candles, and wooden shutters provided complete blackout. ‘In the interval we served coffee (real) and buns (horrible) in the dining-room, using beautiful jugs and china,’ Lucy writes. ‘Elisabeth and I were always in our evening clothes.’ The timeless music and delightful comfort of the room transfixed the young pilots, who were all too aware that their own time might be very short: during each concert they could all hear above the music ‘the droning roar of our bombers flying out overhead’. Throughout the war Lucy Boston took in evacuees and shared her precious food and lodgings with American and Free French forces. Despite this, her neighbours in Hemingford Grey grew ever more suspicious of her, mainly because she wore an Austrian dirndl skirt (which she found ‘both practical and becoming’) while gardening and she spoke German. It did not take long before villagers decided she must be a spy who was using the concerts to gather information. The rumours reached the ears of British Intelligence, and the musical evenings were shut down. But Memory in a House allows us to hear echoes of those gatherings, evoked too in its black-and-white photographs and Vellacott’s delicate paintings. Better yet, Lucy’s daughter-in-law Diana Boston still shows visitors around the Manor by appointment. When I visited last summer, she led a small group of us into the music room. There in the corner was a gramophone, with the biggest horn I have ever seen. When Diana perched on the steps and dropped the needle on to a record, I understood what Lucy Boston meant when she wrote that this extraordinary room ‘contains the sound whole while allowing it to expand and explore’. How intently those airmen must have listened, and how sweet that music must have sounded.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 87 © Anne Kennedy Smith 2025