King George VI died suddenly at Sandringham.
Entry in the Agapemone diary for
Wednesday, 6 February 1952
I rarely chose to take tea with the fearsome Emily, but Uncle David had driven Toto into town to get her glasses mended, which she had stepped on the night before, and it was Edward’s day off. I wouldn’t normally have been home from boarding school anyway but for some long-forgotten reason we had been given an extra couple of days’ holiday.
‘Enter,’ commanded the old lady, in answer to my tentative knock.
I poked my head around the door. ‘It’s me.’
‘I can see that.’ Emily sat by her fireplace, wrapped in a knitted shawl, her yellow-white hair minus its hair net.
Steam rose from Emily’s kettle as it boiled on the little paraffin stove. All the old ladies kept stoves in their rooms, even though the entire mansion was centrally heated. (The rush of water into kettles from the tap in the housemaid’s cupboard at the top of the kitchen stairs at precisely ten minutes to four every day was the signal to stop rooting, or climbing over the roof, or whatever other mischief my sisters and I were up to.)
Emily’s Royal Doulton tea service was already laid out on the little gateleg table. On a plate lay what I knew from experience would be very stale arrowroot biscuits. It was stiflingly hot. Perhaps I should have postponed my visit until the holidays, but it was too late to back out now.
‘Would you like me to take tea with you?’ (You never said ‘have’ tea. That was slang!)
‘That would be very nice, Kitty.’
I crossed to the stove and asked whether I should make it.
‘If you would be so kind.’
I knew Emily preferred her tea without milk and sugar, but knew better than to assume. ‘Will you take milk and sugar?’ I also knew better than to say ‘Do you want’ – a very vulgar modern habit.
With tea served to her satisfaction, Emily took a sip and then muttered, ‘Not as good as in your grandfather’s day.’ She sighed. ‘But then nothing is.’
She replaced her cup in its saucer and glared across at me. ‘That was tea: 60 per cent black, 30 per cent Lapsang Souchong and 10 per cent green.’
I thought quickly. Which of her ‘stories’ would be least likely to get her worked up? I was sure I would get blamed if she ended up throwing the china about. ‘What was it like being a nurse in Victorian times?’ I asked.
Emily related the story she had told me many times before: how she had trained at St Thomas’ Hospital in London in the early 1880s. Normally, she loved talking about those days, when she was young, energetic and eager to serve, but today it seemed she wanted to boast about how her nursing skills led her to being asked to nurse John Brown, Queen Victoria’s favourite servant.
‘I thought he lived in Scotland,’ I said. I had heard the story before and still couldn’t work out what was so special about a servant who sounded very rude most of the time. (Now, having seen Mrs. Brown, the film about the relationship between the Queen and her Highland servant, how I wish I had paid more attention.)
‘He was a Scotsman to the core, but he had accompanied the dear Queen to Windsor and caught a bad chill.’
‘How did you get invited to take tea with her?’ I nudged.
‘She wanted to say thank you for nursing Mr Brown.’ She pointed to a small framed photograph of ‘the dear Queen’ hanging beside her bed.
‘And she gave you a signed photo of herself,’ I finished.
‘Hmm,’ said the old lady, ‘at least you know how to pay attention!’
I reached for yet another of the soft and slightly musty-tasting biscuits.
Emily glared. ‘Yes, you may have another, young lady,’ she said repressively, but with a surprising twinkle in her faded blue eyes. She indicated the teapot. ‘Come on, girl. Where are your manners?’
I swallowed quickly. ‘Would you care for another cup, Emily?’
‘That would be very nice, dear.’
* * *
The house was quiet. Ethel’s pantry was deserted. I crept down the dark passage into the little vestibule outside Eden and paused at the huge clipper on top of the roll-top desk. I spread my arms. It must have been at least four feet long. So, this was the kind of ship my grandfather had sailed on. I pulled one of the looping strings. A sail moved. Half-closing my eyes, I pulled another, and another, gradually setting the sails on a different course, as I imagine my grandfather would have done.
I soon tired of this make-believe and quietly let myself out of the double doors leading into Eden’s small walled garden. The sky was blue and the water in the birdbath remained unfrozen, despite the temperature, which hovered just above freezing. I picked a long, waxy leaf from the magnolia tree and began to sail it around the shallow, circular pool of water, conscious of the impatient twittering of songbirds wanting a drink.
I missed Ann, who had left home the previous year. Not because she had ever played with me much, but simply because she was my older sister, whom I admired and looked up to. Margaret was my playmate, despite the five-year age gap, but Ann also represented ‘family’ in a deeply satisfying way. I am eternally grateful to her for her refusal to ever lose touch with her younger siblings, for being the linchpin of our strange and fractured family.
But it wasn’t Ann’s absence that troubled me that chilly morning: my mother had taken the bus into Bridgwater the previous morning and had got a job in the town’s jam factory. A jam factory! ‘All honest work is honourable, Kitty,’ she had chided me. ‘Anyway, beggars can’t be choosers.’ None of my school friends’ parents worked in factories. Then there was the factory’s sickly sweet smell, which would surely cling to her clothes – even though, I had to admit, it would be better than the stink from the cellophane factory, the town’s other main employer.
Was such a drastic step necessary? My home had a faded luxury, which at times verged on the scruffy, but surely we were hardly beggars. Leaving the birdbath to the birds, I wandered through the gardens to the stone balustrade, which separated the formal gardens from the fruit cages, greenhouses and vegetable gardens.
My mother only lasted a week, preferring to work in the town’s bra factory. When she told me, I wasn’t sure which was worse. At ten years old and thin as a rail I had no use for bras, but I would have enjoyed the jam.
My mother and her brothers had been brought up in the lap of luxury, surrounded by those who catered to their every want. Their lifestyles were dependent on my grandfather’s followers cheerfully donating all their worldly wealth to his Abode of Love. And by the 1950s, what had been considerable sums 50 years earlier had all but been used up, with the result that my grandmother and her three adult children had very little to draw on to support my grandfather’s aging followers. The inevitable monetary shortages were met sometimes by wills of the recently departed but more often by selling off land, property, furniture, even the chapel organ. The funds raised were used first to meet outstanding community bills – many a valuable piece of furniture or silver paid our school fees, as well as for the coke which fed the mansion’s huge central-heating boiler. Any cash left over from a sale went towards Uncle Pat’s immediate debts first and whatever remained was divided between Uncle David and my mother – and Uncle Pat again. Eventually, the struggle to make ends meet became so difficult that, apart from reminders for our school fees, my mother simply hid any incoming bills in a desk drawer. Out of sight truly became out of mind.
I had no understanding of the cost of running such a huge estate and certainly no concept of inflation, and what that had done to funds donated up to a century earlier. The appetites of my home’s aged residents were a shadow of what they must have been back in Victorian days when the ladies were in their youth, but most still ate – and expected to eat – heartily. The huge central-heating boiler needed mountains of coke to be fed into its glowing innards each day to warm the huge mansion, which meant hiring someone to stoke it morning and night.
I hadn’t counted on Uncle David as an ally when it came to my mother’s jobs. He too disliked his sister working on an assembly line and did his best to come up with alternative sources of income – none too successful until, one day, he tentatively approached his mother with an idea; one so radical for this closed community that it required a seismic shift in thinking. My uncle had heard of a young couple, Hans and Trudel Lederman, who had a young son and were having difficulty finding somewhere to live. Perhaps they could rent one of the cottages bordering the lower lawns, he suggested tentatively. After all, the North Gate, Mary Howlett’s former home, had already been sold and separated by a sturdy fence. Suggesting someone live within the community, which had always been closed to outsiders, was quite another matter, however.
The Ledermans, my uncle told his mother, were a Jewish family from Germany still facing discrimination, even though the husband was earning good money repairing agricultural equipment and would be certain to pay his rent on time. He went on to say that many members of the young couple’s family had been killed by the Nazis. (I was to learn many years later how Hans and Trudel had made their way to England separately just before war broke out and that Hans had even spent some months in Buchenwald concentration camp prior to escaping to England.)
Granny felt for her saucer and replaced her teacup. She turned in her eldest son’s direction. ‘You have my permission, David, to offer them one of the cottages,’ she said, before murmuring to herself, ‘I know only too well what it’s like to be “different”.’
I thought of my father’s mother, a bustling, competent but sharptongued woman, and remembered meeting a school friend’s applecheeked grandmother, who was like something out of a storybook. I gazed at the blind old woman before me, who wore clothes long out of fashion and was never without her veil. Yes, my granny was certainly ‘different’.
* * *
For years, I had longed for a playmate my own age. It would be nice to have someone to boss around, even if it was a six-year-old boy. But I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of strangers in my private playground.
It was summer when the Ledermans moved in. I was flying through the air on the swing hung from a branch of the cedar on the upper lawn when I saw Mummy picking her way towards me through the tangle of weeds and grass. Walking beside her was a small redhaired woman and a man who looked just like James Mason. Between them walked a small red-haired boy.
‘Come and meet Mr and Mrs Lederman and their son, David,’ my mother called.
I scraped my sandals through the dirt to slow myself and jumped off the worn wooden plank with what I hoped was amazing athleticism. Wiping my hands on my jodhpurs, I stretched out a hand first to the man and then the woman. ‘How do you do?’
‘It is very good to meet you, Kitty,’ said Mr Lederman in a German accent I recognised from films shown at the local cinema. As he spoke, I caught the glint of a gold tooth. ‘This is David,’ he said. ‘Say hello, David.’
The boy scowled shyly up at me.
‘Hello, David.’
‘We hope you will come round and see us,’ said his wife. ‘Perhaps you like to watch television?’
I had longed for a television set. Violet and Olive Morris, ever in the vanguard of any technological advance, had one in their East Gate home and occasionally invited me to sit with them in total darkness and watch the flickering screen. But it just wasn’t the same as having one of our own.
‘You’ve got a television?’
Mrs Lederman smiled and nodded. ‘As soon as we’re unpacked, you must come round and watch it with us.’ She glanced at my mother. ‘If that’s all right, Mrs Read?’
‘As long as she doesn’t make a nuisance of herself,’ said Mummy.
A nuisance of myself is exactly what I made during my remaining years in the Agapemone. Almost every evening I was home, I would make the short journey across the lawn, bang on the Ledermans’ front door and be admitted to their snug little home. I wasn’t the only one, I was to find out years later. The Ledermans had barely moved in when a newspaper reporter, the first of many, came knocking at their back door, which opened on to the back lane. ‘He tried to get a scandalous story out of me about a revolving bed and the high jinks the old people had been up to. I knew nothing about the sect, but he didn’t believe me, offering me money, so I gave him short shrift,’ Mrs Lederman recalled. ‘Looking at all the old folks on Zimmer frames and crutches, it seemed a most unlikely situation.’
Hans and Trudel Lederman became my lodestar when it came to families. I had no idea how a normal family operated. They taught me. Even more importantly, they offered me friendship and affection. One night, we watched a television programme together about the terrible tragedy of the Holocaust, in which many of their relatives had died. It was graphic and the details leapt off the screen to envelop us in its chilling grotesqueness. I was horrified and wondered, as we gazed silently at the pictures of piles of skeletal bodies, what my hosts were thinking. Were they watching in fear of recognising a face? We didn’t talk much that night but watching the programme in their company built on the belief I was subconsciously forming, that discrimination of any kind is deeply damaging and never justified.
I also learned about hope. How out of the ashes of their personal tragedy had risen a new family. Mr Lederman had a stepsister who was my age and whom he said might one day come and visit. Crossing the patch of lawn to the side door to my home that night, I found my mind in a jumble of emotion.
* * *
Uncle David had been away at sea for some weeks, so when I heard he was due home the evening after I arrived back from school for the holidays, I was delighted. He could be impatient and cross, but I knew he loved us dearly.
But this evening I was in for a surprise. Uncle David’s Rolls-Royce swept up the drive just as Mummy was beginning to worry. Behind the car growled a motorbike, which screeched to a stop at the front door. A young man, clad entirely in black, alighted.
‘Joe is staying the night,’ my uncle explained to my mother. Joe was a member of the ship’s crew, he said, who was on his way home.
I was impressed. How generous of my uncle. And how Christian for an officer to grant a mere rating a bed for the night. I stared at our hirsute tattooed guest as he and my uncle took their seats at my grandmother’s dining table. I longed to ask Joe if he had sailed round Cape Horn (I was heavily into adventure stories at the time). But before I could summon up the courage, my mother shooed me off to bed, reminding me Margaret was due home from school the next day.
‘If you don’t get a good night’s sleep, you’ll be too tired to enjoy your sister’s company,’ she reminded me.
Over the years, an informal tradition had emerged. The morning after Uncle David arrived home from sea, Mummy always allowed me to carry up a cup of tea to his bedroom, so he could sleep in. But the following morning, when I presented myself to my mother ready for my chore, she had other ideas. ‘Uncle David is sleeping in this morning and doesn’t want to be disturbed,’ she said.
‘But I’m not going to disturb him. I always take him a cup of tea after he gets home.’ I suddenly remembered our guest. ‘I could take the sailor one, too.’
‘That’s very kind of you, Kitty, but not today,’ my mother replied, giving no hint her decision was to protect me – and perhaps herself – from my inevitable questions had I been faced with the sight of two grown men sharing a bed. It was years before I would realise the situation – and marvel at my mother’s quiet and tactful action.
* * *
I loved to lie on Eden’s parquet floor, watching the dust dance in the sunlight streaming through the top of the chapel’s arched windows where the shutters didn’t reach. I would breathe in deeply, filling my lungs with the stale air heavy with the whiff of musty books and sawdust, which fell in tiny piles from the worm holes in the rows of upright chairs. Each chair had a little box fixed to its back in which a copy of the Agapemone hymnal, Voice of the Bride, lay ready – but never to be used again. Mixed in with the dust and must was the faint but distinct smell of damp. I had discovered a discoloured patch of wall in the little spider-infested room behind the pipe organ, where I also found a pile of volumes of my grandfather’s sermons.
‘I am my Beloved’s and His desire is towards me,’ I read as I flipped through his sermons, which were printed privately in 1927 following his death, entitled ‘Extempore Addresses, Given during the years 1925, 1926, and 1927’:
She comes up from the wilderness of the world, from the trammel and the stress and the strife and the noise of the world; she comes up from the world leaning on her beloved, utterly dependent, hopeless in herself, but absolutely at rest, without fear, without doubt, without any uncertainty, she comes up from the wilderness leaning on her beloved and every moment nearing home.
‘Yuck,’ I muttered as I replaced the book back on the pile.
One day I came across a couple of old newspapers tucked away in the bottom drawer of the desk, including a black-bordered copy of The Times, dated Friday, 19 November 1852. The stiff cream-coloured pages crackled as I spread them on the floor and read about the state funeral of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington. Tucked inside was a small pamphlet, entitled ‘The Little Book Open: The Testimony of Br. Prince concerning what Jesus Christ has done by his Spirit to Redeem the Earth’. I had heard the old ladies sometimes talk about ‘Brother Prince’ and assumed this must be another name for my grandfather. ‘No, Kitty, he wasn’t your grandfather,’ Waa had told me when I’d asked her. ‘But, like your grandfather, he was a very wonderful man.’
The pamphlet told me little when I flipped through its pages of overblown language. I cast it aside. Little did I realise then that, 100 years before, it was this little privately printed booklet, more than any other publication, that had set the seal of scandal on the home in which I was growing up. And it was years before I was to learn that Henry James Prince had been the founder of the Agapemone and that he had claimed to be a messenger sent by God to herald the Second Coming!
Ellen was one of the few people encouraged to enter Eden periodically, where she stirred the layers of dust settling on the heavy gold-leaf picture frames, the rows of hardback chairs and the Lalique vase set on a table next to the organ. The only other visitor was a Mr Mountford, who lived in the gatehouse and played the huge and valuable Willis pipe organ every week, until it was sold to a Roman Catholic church in Bedminster.
Watching these comings and goings, my sisters and I soon learned that the key to the chapel’s arched-glass entrance door was hung on a hook high up on the wall of the chapel’s small vestibule. It wasn’t long before Margaret and I had invented several ways to pass a rainy afternoon, one of which involved sliding up and down the parquet floor of this ornate chapel-cum-Victorian living room. Over the years Eden had become the perfect indoor playground, one we kept to ourselves, suspecting that those in authority over us would be scandalised by such a profane use of what had once been the spiritual heart of the community.
So, when I decided to ask a school friend to stay for a couple of weeks one holiday, and one day it was raining, it was to Eden I turned when I had run out of other ways of amusing my guest. (Little did I appreciate, back then, how eagerly these invitations were sought by those friends’ parents, curious to learn what lay behind the high stone walls of the notorious Agapemone.)
We had already exhausted my version of snakes and ladders. The old ladies had no idea they were involved in this game, as they slowly went about their daily tasks, emptying hot water bottles, filling tea kettles and accomplishing the myriad small tasks consuming daily life for the old and infirm. The aim was to make our way from the western end of the mansion to the baize door leading to Granny’s End without being seen by any of them. In this I had the advantage, for I knew if we met Toto all we had to do was be absolutely silent because she couldn’t see us. With Emily Hine, we had to be both silent and invisible to avoid detection, as this fierce old lady’s five senses were all in good order. If either of us was spotted by these unsuspecting participants – usually with a polite ‘Good morning, young lady’ – it was back to the starting point to begin our journey all over again. However, I did have the sense not to involve my friends in another game which Margaret and I played: knocking on the old ladies’ bedroom doors and then running away before they could get to the door and see us.
Pam, the first friend of several I invited to stay, was like me: skinny and tall for her age. She was also good at games, beating me in our endless matches of croquet played on the uneven upper lawn. Pam was also clever academically and a natural leader. Other friends included Diana, whose head for heights rivalled Margaret’s. Unlike my sister, I had never possessed either a head for heights or an antenna for looming trouble. After one of Diana’s visits, my mother threatened to refuse permission for any more friends to stay. Diana and I had been caught on the roof. Then there was Lesley, pretty and feminine, who came from a ‘normal’ family, a rarity at our school, which was the refuge of many children from dysfunctional backgrounds. Lesley’s parents were happily married and ran a shop in Bridgwater.
But on that particular rainy afternoon with Pam, after all the old people had departed for their nap, we silently walked along the twisting, gloomy passage, past where my mother was resting, past the pantry where Ellen was having a quiet post-lunch cup of tea, to the chapel vestibule. I climbed on the little carved chair by the doors and reached up for the key.
‘Are we allowed in here?’ whispered Pam as I hopped down, inserted the key in the lock and flung open the stained-glass door.
‘Not really,’ I replied airily. ‘But we often go in!’
My friend stared in awe – at the long, vaulted room with its arched windows; the rows of upright chairs with little boxes attached to their backs. And then wide-eyed at the incongruous scarlet sofas and whitewashed walls covered with oil paintings of cattle in gloomy Highland landscapes, framed in heavy gold leaf. ‘Wow,’ she whispered.
She took a tentative step forward towards the three shallow steps leading down to the far end, where a black and gold table stood on a raised dais. Her eyes widened as she saw the huge ornate stand, carved in the shape of an eagle with the Bible resting on the bird’s outstretched wings.
‘Olive, one of the old ladies you met at lunch, carved that,’ I said.
I led my friend to the upright chairs, where we sat and wriggled, so I could illustrate to Pam how the rush seating made patterns on our thighs. She removed a hymn book from the back of the chair in front of her, opened it and glanced through its pages, wrinkling her nose in disgust before replacing it in its little box.
‘All about love and brides,’ she sniffed. I was glad I hadn’t told her about my idea of taking one back to school so we could sing the hymns in chapel.
Next, Pam turned her attention to the rectangle marked out in dark wood on the floor in front of the dais. ‘What’s that, Kitty?’ We scampered down the steps to stare at the gold plaque set near the far end of the rectangle.
‘It’s where my grandfather is buried.’
Pam leant forward, her long black plaits hanging. ‘He’s actually buried here? Like in Westminster Abbey? Like Henry VII?’
I nodded. Neither of us had ever been to Westminster Abbey, but we had studied Henry VII in history the previous term, so we knew where he was buried.
‘Is it real gold?’
I had impressed Pam! This was going well. ‘I think so.’
‘What does it say? I.H.S. or is it J.H.S.?’
I didn’t know. I.H.S. stood for In His Service and J.H.S. were my grandfather John Hugh Smyth-Pigott’s initials, but I wasn’t sure which was engraved in the gold.
‘Your family must be awfully rich.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I hedged. I thought of the fuss over the chequebouncing incident. I thought of my mother’s having to get a job. It was time for a distraction.
Grabbing two cushions from the moth-eaten sofas, I threw one at Pam, shouting, ‘Let’s race.’ Running to the back of the chapel, I called for her to follow before plonking myself down on my cushion just in front of the organ bench. Using my arms and legs, I began to propel myself forward as fast as I could. Pam was soon in hot pursuit. Faster and faster we slid, down the wide aisle between the chairs and bumping down the three shallow steps.
‘First one to touch the dais wins,’ I yelled as I rounded the edge of grandfather’s grave and slid toward the dais. A quick glance over my shoulder saw Pam heading for the Bible stand. I reached the dais just as Pam rolled off her cushion to avoid crashing into it. She lay there staring up into the eagle’s eyes.
‘You look like its prey,’ I yelled.
Pam began to wave her arms and legs as she squeaked like a frightened mouse. Soon we were both rolling with laughter on the floor.
‘Kitty!’ came a voice. ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’
My mother stood in the doorway. Her hair was all mussed and she had no lipstick on, signs we had woken her up from her afternoon nap. And if we had woken her, we could have also disturbed Granny. We could be in serious trouble.
‘Just showing Eden to Pam.’
We scrambled to our feet, hiding the cushions behind our backs. Pam stifled a hiccup.
‘And who gave you permission?’
‘No one.’
‘Put those back where they belong.’ She was pointing to the cushions. ‘And don’t let me catch you in here again.’
That was as cross as my mother ever got and even that anger arose because of her concern that the old ladies would be very upset if they found out my friend and I had been playing in Eden. For the old ladies and probably for my mother – especially my fierce grandmother – Eden must have been a place of precious memories of happier and more secure times. It was certainly not an indoor playground.
Looking back, I realise my mother most likely had little energy left for anger. By 1952 all she could look forward to was her continuing daily struggle to keep the estate going until the last of her father’s elderly followers had died.
As for the old ladies with whom I grew up, surely they could never let themselves believe that they had been deceived by my grandfather, even if, for some, disillusion stalked their darkest hours – as I believe it did for Emily. To have given up their lives for a spurious belief was a lot to acknowledge – and regret. But overall, Belovèd still seemed to stand tall and charismatic in their minds and emotions – even as recently as 20 years ago people who had known him still spoke of my grandfather with affection.
As a child I did not know enough to ask the old ladies the questions I wonder about now. Did they still cling to the hope that the time for Belovèd’s recognition as the Messiah had not yet arrived? Or were there regrets because their Son of Man had been rejected by the world for the second time? Or, worst of all, had their belief in my grandfather long since died, leaving them to live out their lives in his crumbling community? But whatever their secret fears or worries, I believe the Abode of Love’s elderly took comfort in the one promise Prince, and later my grandfather, had fulfilled: providing an earthly paradise, albeit an increasingly ramshackle one, where their every want was catered for.
How could my mother even contemplate leaving these vulnerable old people in the lurch? It was mainly on her shoulders that the well-being of these gentle and eccentric old ladies rested. No, her ambition was not for herself – it was too late for her, even though she was barely in her 40s – it was for us, her daughters. She desperately wanted to prevent the stigma that had haunted her life from blighting ours.
It was only gradually that I began to sense this. At first, it had seemed more hinted at than real, like the ghost said to haunt the long upstairs passage. But someone had thought we were ‘peculiar’; we seemed rich but weren’t. And why were all these old people living with my grandmother anyway? I was growing increasingly puzzled.
But my fascination with Eden never left me. As a teenager, grappling with the confusion and embarrassment that followed my discovery of the truth about our strange home, I found comfort in its moth-eaten serenity. I used to spend hours there, daydreaming my family was ‘ordinary’, and lived in a council house and washed in the kitchen sink. And it was Eden, which looked like a place of worship yet at the same time seemed more like a drawing room, which encapsulated the apocalyptic millenarian religious sect which lasted for just over a century before fading into oblivion.