Jeremy Makes a Stand

They left the wood, crossed the River Garth, and came out on to moorland. Here, for the first time Jeremy smelt the sea; the lanes had been hot, but here the wind blew across the moor, with the smell of sea-pinks and sea-gulls in it. The grass was short and rough, the soil was sand . . . Jeremy’s excitement grew. He knew now how every line of the road would be . . .

I’m not sure how old I was when I first read Hugh Walpole’s Jeremy, but I think I was 9 or 10, for I had just gone away to boarding school, and I can remember the stab of longing that that description of the Cole family, on their way to their annual holiday at a seaside farm in the West Country, gave me. Exiled in a red-brick prep-school on the flat and muddy coast of the Bristol Channel, I dreamed with a desperate, nostalgic homesickness of the Devon lanes and cliffs and sandy beaches I’d left behind, and the sound and smell of the sea – the proper sea. The school holidays couldn’t come soon enough, and I knew exactly how Jeremy felt. I understood how Jeremy felt about most things, and coming back to him all these years later he still seems entirely real and solid to me, and the trilogy of novels in which he appears just as magical, though sadly, like many of Walpole’s books, they are barely remembered today. It’s a pity, for I can’t think of a better account of growing up, capturing with great psychological subtlety as they do both the ecstatic, here-and-now happiness of being young and the miserable isolation of it too. It’s the morning of Jeremy’s eighth birthday, in December 1892, when he’s first introduced to us, ‘a small, square boy with a pug-nosed face’ sitting up in bed in his father’s rectory in the cathedral town of Polchester, glorying in the thought that there are sausages for breakfast, and that now – by prior agreement – he has the right to sit in a particular wicker chair in the nursery that has hitherto been the preserve of his pretty but infuriating older sister Helen – an assumption that inevitably ends in tears. Helen is not the only trial in Jeremy’s life. There’s their nurse, the Jampot, so nicknamed because of her shape, with whom Jeremy is engaged in perpetual hostilities; Mrs Cole’s sister Amy, the proverbial pinched and critical spinster aunt, thrown on her brother-in-law’s charity and living at the rectory; and Jeremy’s younger sister Mary, a delicate, brainy, bespectacled 7-year-old – ‘as plain a child as you were ever likely to see’ – whose dog-like devotion to Jeremy, touchy possessiveness and tendency to bore him by reading aloud he finds difficult to bear. And there’s the Reverend Herbert Cole, a good but unimaginative man, ‘an excellent father in the abstract sense’, but too preoccupied with his parish to allow of real intimacy with anyone, whose stern Victorian attitudes are often in conflict with the free spirit of his determined young son. On the plus side of Jeremy’s life, however, are his placid and affectionate mother; her painter brother, Uncle Samuel, a rebel much disapproved of by the rest of the family who, like Aunt Amy, has somehow fetched up in the Cole household and never gone away, and who, during the course of the three books, becomes one of Jeremy’s greatest friends and allies; and last but by no means least, Jeremy’s closest companion, Hamlet, a stray mongrel likewise taken in – at Jeremy’s insistence and against his parents’ better judgement – who plays as important a part in Jeremy’s life as any other character in the books. And there is Polchester itself. Walpole conjures up the atmosphere of the old town and the way it seeps into the small boy and stirs his imagination, with its great shadowy cathedral, second-hand bookshops, clerical conferences and traditional Pauper’s Fair. Small cathedral towns are very seductive, as we know from Trollope’s Barchester. As a child I loved the feeling of being drawn into this safe, reassuring world, and as an adult I was captivated by Walpole’s vivid evocation of it.

Today was of a hard glittering frost. The sun, like a round red lacquer tray, fell heavily through a faint, pale sky that was not strong enough to sustain it. The air had a cold, sweet twang of peppermints in the throat. Polchester was a painted town upon a blue screen, the Cathedral towers purple against the sky; the air was scented with burning leaves, and cries from the town rose up clear and hard, lingering and falling like notes of music. . . ‘Three’ struck from the Cathedral clock, as though it were calling ‘Open Sesame’ . . .

Walpole is a brilliant storyteller, but there is more to him than just storytelling. Every episode in the books reveals something about Jeremy: the never-to-be-forgotten fight he has at Miss Maddison’s annual children’s party with the Dean’s stringy, superior son Ernest – surprising himself at the personal affront he feels when Ernest is rude about Aunt Amy, for whom Jeremy normally has little time; the exultation when he slips away from home one glorious afternoon and rides the roundabouts at the Pauper’s Fair, dazed by the romance of the fairground, knowing that he’s going to get into trouble later on but not caring. In one transfixing scene Jeremy confronts God, on a dark and stormy winter afternoon in the rectory’s deserted conservatory, when his mother is desperately ill and barely expected to live. Jeremy has, that morning, heard his father preach on Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac, and he decides there is nothing for it but to try to strike a bargain with the Almighty. ‘It was as though some bully, seizing his best marbles, had said “I’ll give you these back if you hand over this week’s pocket-money!”’

Grimly, his legs apart, his eyes shut tight, as they were when he said his prayers, he made his challenge. ‘I’ll give you Hamlet if you don’t take Mother’ – A pause. ‘Only I can’t cut Hamlet’s throat. But I could lose him if that would do . . . Only you must take him now – I couldn’t do it tomorrow.’ His voice began to tremble . . . He said again: ‘You can take Hamlet. He’s my best thing. You can – You can –’

There’s a mighty clap of thunder, and when Jeremy opens his eyes, Hamlet has disappeared. In that second of frantic unreasoning terror, Jeremy ‘received a conviction of God that no rationalistic training in later years was able to remove’. Minutes later Hamlet creeps ‘ashamed, dirty and smiling’ from behind a stack of dusty flowerpots. It’s a wonderful stroke of comic bathos. But Jeremy has made his stand. Jeremy and Hamlet and Jeremy at Crale take Jeremy to public school. At the end of his first term he’s longing for the holidays – yet, as so often with moments of great expectation, they’re an anticlimax. Hamlet barely acknowledges him, his sisters irritate him, his father’s authoritarian attitudes make him feel defiant. Home and its constraints bore him yet, at the same time, he begins to see his family with new eyes. When bumptious, well-off Uncle Percy comes to visit from New Zealand and patronizes his brother, Jeremy realizes how vulnerable his father really is. Having wrestled with a moral dilemma over keeping for himself a book he’d bought as a present for Mary, he and she begin to become real friends. The books have a moral dimension which is somehow deeply satisfying. And Walpole has a knack of putting his finger on the way people work – how, for instance, the right word from Uncle Samuel, who sees Jeremy for who he is rather than who he ought to be, can change his nephew’s inner world from dark to light. By the end of them I was entirely in love with Jeremy, who is clearly going to be a stunner and generally make a success of things. There’s just a hint of the future in the description of his brilliant partnership on the rugger field with a boy called Steevens:

In later years, when the Cole-Steevens combination was England’s hope at half-back for five successive years, Jeremy sometimes looked back to that afternoon and saw himself – small, filthy, plastered with mud, standing on that misty field . . .

And that’s where we have to leave him, among the misty playing fields of Crale. But I longed to know more of what happened to him. How did his friendship with Riley, the silent, charismatic boy whom he worshipped at a distance, finally work out? Did he make it to the First Fifteen? Did he become Head of School? I bet he did.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 20 © Hazel Wood 2008