Benefit of Clergy

Recently we were invited to dinner with friends in their lovely old vicarage. It was a cold night but there was a cosiness about the place, echoed by the warmth of our French hostess as she welcomed us through its imposing Georgian portal. This was not to last. Luckily, we hadn’t even taken off our coats before her husband stormed in from the back door, upbraiding her for switching on the heating: ‘You simply don’t understand! Vicarages are supposed to be cold!’ He was not himself the vicar, who now lived elsewhere, but his father had been, and our friend had bought back his childhood home. He knew whereof he spoke.

The incident reminded me of reading about the lean and joyless poet R. S. Thomas, whose Welsh rectories were notoriously stark. Austerity was his chosen aesthetic: he could make a leg of lamb last the family all week in various forms, he eschewed carpets – indeed any soft furnishings – and he considered a mean temperature of minus 18 Fahrenheit perfectly normal. This telling little domestic sketch comes from a favourite book of mine, Deborah Alun-Jones’s The Wry Romance of the Literary Rectory (2013). Jane Austen may have imagined the girlish and romantic Catherine Morland dreaming of ‘the unpretending comfort of a well-connected parsonage’ but you’d be hard-pressed to find any such draught-free establishments in these pages. Certainly not in the windswept village of Haworth, where the vicar’s daughter Charlotte Brontë wrote to her friend Ellen Nussey of the unutterable tedium of her life: ‘One day resembles another, and all have heavy, lifeless physiognomies.’ Yet from such unpromising beginnings have sprung no fewer than eight Poets Laureate. Perhaps the predictable rhythm of vicarage life offered long periods of nothing much to do, and writing seemed a positive option. Not everybody felt the same, of course. My father once said, with an ironic smile, that the Church of England used to boast ‘a gentleman in every parish’ before telling me about some sporting great-uncle of his, a parson who kept a string of hunters in Dorset. On a crisp autumn day, sniffing the air appreciatively, he’d inform his churchwarden that they’d be skipping the morning service: ‘Today we shall settle for Evensong.’ However, a good many of them did choose to write, and some of them are celebrated in this lovely book. It’s a packed field, but perhaps the very oddest family grew up in the Lincolnshire village of Somersby. The Reverend George Tennyson was a clever, disappointed man, violent, morose and given to thunderous sermons and drink. He had, he said, the black blood of the Tennysons, which might have been epilepsy. His imperious wife liked to travel in a dogcart, pulled by a Newfoundland dog, and many of their eleven tall, unkempt children were similarly unusual. The eldest, Frederick, described himself as a person ‘of gloomy insignificance and unsocial mono- mania’, while Septimus was, by his own admission, the most morbid of the Tennysons. It is astonishing, really, that between these two came Alfred, who, although Carlyle thought that he always dwelt in an element of gloom, was to become laureate, Lord and favourite of Queen Victoria. The Chancery of Lincoln Cathedral isn’t exactly a rectory, but it has fostered literary endeavours in its time. The De Waal family were there in the 1970s and, encouraged by their mother, found it a wonderful source of inspiration of every kind. In this, they were luckier than the Benson children, a century earlier, when their father Edward, later Archbishop of Canterbury, was Chancellor. A strict and humourless man, his authority dominated every detail of their lives: he once barged into a room where his wife was working and made ‘some very strong remarks on the subject of the Antimacassars’. For him, everything was an issue of moral importance. Several of his children became writers: Arthur (A. C.) Benson, responsible for many stories and essays, also wrote the words to ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ (the second verse, though never sung in these cautious, post-imperial days, is worth a glance). Another brother, Edward Frederick (E. F.), is now best remembered for the archly comic Mapp and Lucia novels. However, like the Tennysons, the Bensons found the transition from paternal tyranny to the real world too much for them: none of them ever married and there were several bouts of insanity. Vicarage life could, however, be simply inspirational, with no concomitant trauma. Dorothy L. Sayers grew up relatively unscathed in another Lincolnshire rectory, the pampered only child of Oxford intellectuals. She managed to keep her sanity in a land of deeply suspicious Nonconformists, where the waters of the splashily capricious River Ouse rose and fell perilously (and usually after dark), giving a sinister and mysterious setting to several of her excellent detective novels. Rupert Brooke, too, found inspiration in an old church building. Though only the grandson of a vicar, he chose to rent the old vicarage at Grantchester and made it his own. Although the church clock never stood at ten to three, being permanently stuck at 7.45, after his early death his poetry inspired by the place became an elegy to the lost England of the imagination. He read Paradise Lost to friends from the high branches of a chestnut tree, and apparently also liked to hang upside down in a poplar – to dry his hair, he said, after a swim. He deserves his place in this excellent book. Like Brooke, John Betjeman was not a vicar himself, but his name immediately calls to mind a sepia pastoral idyll. Young and newly married, he and his wife moved into an inspiringly beautiful old rectory in rural Berkshire and promptly removed its only bathroom, leaving them, quite cheerfully, with no water, no light and no heat. According to Evelyn Waugh, they would ‘put on their Jaeger combinations on September 1st and keep them on . . . until the second week of May’. There’s a story that John dared to ask Penelope’s father – Field Marshal Philip Walhouse Chetwode, 1st Baron Chetwode, 7th Baron of Oakley, GCB, OM, GCSI, KCMG, DSO, GCStJ – how he would like his son-in-law to address him. There was a pause before the old soldier decided, then: ‘Field Marshal will do.’ However, he had bought the rectory for them. After his first Christmas there he declared it to be like living in the Dark Ages: ‘lav plugs don’t pull and the bathwater keeps running out’. Unsurprising, really, as water had to be fetched daily from the village pump. Some literary vicars are disappointingly cheerless. Andrew Young used to spring visits on his Sussex parishioners, standing with his back to their fires, drinking their whisky and departing without saying a word. Similarly, R. S. Thomas found parochial visits torture: one suspects the feeling may have been mutual. ‘How I have hated you, for your irreverence,’ he wrote of his small, unlucky flock and their ‘sweaty females’. He never remembered people’s names and had what is described as an unreconstructed attitude to children: chilly in home and heart. In marked and glorious contrast, Sydney Smith was the most genial and benign of men, considering it a great luxury to keep his wife and children laughing for two or three hours a day. Even when banished from society London to a remote Yorkshire parish, he made the very best of it despite, as he remarked, having 300 acres to farm, not knowing a turnip from a carrot and being twelve miles from a lemon. The parsonage was a hovel, so he built a new one. Always hands-on, he bought some oxen to haul up the materials. There were two pairs, but Haul and Crawl couldn’t cope with the muddy tracks, and ‘Tug and Lug kept fainting and had to be revived with sal volatile’. When it was finished, he was overjoyed – and broke. Yet his hospitality was undimmed, and his house became known as The Rector’s Head, an equal to any inn on the Great North Road. The polar opposite of a snob, Smith devised all kinds of schemes to help the poor in his parish. In his capacity as Justice of the Peace he refused to sentence minors and he set up a medical dispensary in the rectory, supplying many of his own remedies, with names like Heart’s Delight, Rub-a-dub and Up-with-it-then. Convivial and cheerful, he was nonetheless a wise and thoughtful man. To an over-serious dinner companion he remarked, ‘Do not assume that because I am frivolous I am shallow. I do not assume that because you are grave you are profound.’ His writing abounds in memorable, pithy advice. ‘It is the greatest mistake of all’, he wrote, ‘to do nothing because you can only do a little. Do what you can.’ Smith abhorred hunting and shooting, siding instinctively with the poacher against the landowner. I thought of him the other day when, on our way back from a jolly morning at the dump, we decided to stop for a Guinness. It was a pub we don’t often frequent, which once enjoyed the reputation of being the roughest in England, haunt of smugglers and highwaymen, but it has acquired a veneer of respectability in recent years. There was a blazing fire and a couple of armchairs either side of it, and we settled in comfortably. On the wall hung a small, framed piece of newsprint, commemorating James Hardin, a curate who had lived in the village at the turbulent turn of the eighteenth century. A fairly deep search of the web that afternoon revealed a gentle and thoughtful chap, who loved the countryside of the Sussex Weald and the people who lived here. When shepherds set traps to catch wheatears for food, he would release the birds – but leave coins in their place. A considerable, if now virtually unread poet, his subject is often a glorious celebration of the landscape and its people. It seems likely that very few people know of this lovely fellow, but many of our political leaders could bear in mind a particularly apposite couplet:

Keen are the pains advancement often brings. To be secure, be humble; to be happy, be content.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 83 © Sue Gaisford 2024