March 1960
This fascinating and unusual book is an account of all that the author could discover about the Hermit of Great Canfield in Essex, who died on January 17th, 1942, at the age of eighty-four. The author was eighteen at the time that Jimmy Mason died, and his family lived in a house called Sawkins at Great Canfield that had belonged to the Mason family. Everybody knew that Jimmy lived in a hut he had built in the middle of a home-grown wilderness a mile across the fields from Sawkins, as they also knew that Jimmy was attended by a brother, Tommy, who lived in a hut nearby and bought Jimmy’s food for him. The village gossip and a few newspaper articles claimed that Jimmy has spent sixty years in this manner, seeing almost nobody excepting his brother occasionally, and an old woman whom the Rector had sent to look after the two old men, and that the reasons for this were a cruel father and/or the fact that Jimmy had been jilted at the age of twenty-four by a woman variously called Daisy, Susie or Fanny Bell.
The author’s consuming interest in Jimmy began a few days before the hermit died: the pipes at Sawkins were frozen and he went up to the attics to look at the water tank. There was a large mound of debris that had accumulated from bats and sparrows, and in kicking it he came across what proved to be Jimmy’s diary - written in a long narrow account book. The diary opened by announcing that ‘this book was bought by Fanny on the November 15th, 1894. She hung it on the fir tree on Saturday, November 17th, 1894.’ It went on to remark that if its author should be poisoned at last, the book would explain everything. The writing was in pencil, wild and scrawly - like copybook gone to seed; the diary stopped in 1897. At the time of writing, Jimmy was already spending most of his time in his hide, beside which there was a pond: he used to throw apples, cherries and walnuts into the water for the children who played there, although they obviously never saw or spoke to him. Fanny was often remarked upon. ‘She came on the grass, looked across the pond and said goodbye several times. So good did did seem. Then she wispered goodbye so tendre and went off...’ After nightfall, Jimmy crept out and left presents for her in a basket, which he either hung in a fir tree or left on a rail at the front gate. Eggs, apples, honey, shillings and pennies, walnuts, cherries, flowers, rabbits and radishes, and often letters: they were put out at nine o’clock and were usually taken by twelve.
This is the matter which started Mr. Trevelyan upon his search for understanding Jimmy, which is most brilliantly conducted and, except for reminding one a little of Symons’s The Quest for Corvo, is unlike any other book which I have read. One of its most fascinating aspects is that in the course of this search, a picture of nineteenth-century village like is uncovered - elaborate, but unvarnished, with a veracity which rings mysterious and true, a composition of behaviour both more natural and more eccentric than we are likely to meet with today. This is the chief charm of the book, which Mr. Trevelyan has never spoiled, and although many times in his devoted search the plot of Jimmy’s nature seems to thicken, it always dissolves before too firm a grasp of the available facts.
He was ‘religious’ but not a mystic; extremely frightened of and censorious about people, although he loved giving presents and was long-suffering about the children who racketed round his pond throwing stones to provoke his further generosity. He kept bees and prayed, and rabbits ate out of his hand. His voice was educated and his spelling freakish: ‘Gertram, Ednere and Erbete’ are three of the people in his diary, and it was Tommy, frequently described as ‘gagging deadly spite’, who so faithfully protected and guarded the hermit until he died.
Mr. Trevelyan has clearly taken an enormous amount of trouble with this book, but he had produced something so unusual and so full of interest that he should feel his pains entirely justified.