It was good to be home, with the long summer holidays of 1954 stretching endlessly before me – surely more than enough time to find my own answers. A plan came to me one night in bed. Perhaps I should look in an encyclopedia for facts about my grandfather. I knew when Ann had found out about our family’s secret – like me, at school – she had had the intelligence to consult an encyclopedia there first. I sat bolt upright in bed in my darkened room – by this time, I had got over my fear of the dark and revelled in having a room of my own after spending term time in a dormitory with a dozen others. ‘Why didn’t I think of the school encyclopedias last term?’ I muttered, as I switched on the bedside light.
Somewhere, a clock chimed three. I slipped out of bed, pulled my dressing gown around me, stuffed my feet into slippers and left my bedroom, closing the door quietly behind me. I crept past Mummy’s room, paused briefly to listen for the muffled snoring contest between her and Gay, hardly daring to breathe myself for fear of alerting the Great Dane. I flitted down the front stairs, past the dining room with its door ajar, allowing moonlight to illuminate the long, tiled passage to the front hall. On I went, not worrying so much about noise now.
During long nights at school, racked with my new-found knowledge about my family, I had often lain awake as my friends slept. But out of those sleepless hours and those less-than-sterling school marks – it had been hard to concentrate last term – I had come to a decision. I would no longer beg others for information; instead, I would do what I did well: I would root, systematically and with the aim of finding as much written information as possible about my strange family.
The door leading to my grandfather’s study was shut and the knob squeaked as it turned. I froze. But the only sounds were the tick of the clock on the mantelpiece and a hiccup from the room’s radiators, as a trapped air bubble burped. Closing the door behind me, I crossed to the desk and switched on the green-shaded desk lamp. Too late, I noticed rectangles of light flood the lawn. I flung the switch, willing the light not to have been seen – even by a patrolling constable. Slowly, I dragged the room’s heavy brocade curtains across the window and waited, apprehensive, before switching the light on again.
I started with the leather-bound set of Encyclopaedia Britannica. The tomes, their spines faded from a rich green to ochre, were displayed in an elegant faux-Regency bookshelf with long thin legs and its single shelf canted back so the volume titles were easy to read. It took no time to prise the first of the more-than-two-dozen volumes free and carry it to the desk. I turned the rice-paper-thin pages. With growing excitement, I came to the word Agape – and stopped, staring at the page before me. The next entry, which I was sure must be Agapemone, was missing. I bent closer and saw where scissors had sliced through the leaf of paper. I turned what was left of the page; Agar was the next entry. I was never to discover whether the cutting out of the entry had been an act of disillusionment, carried out in the traumatic period following my grandfather’s death, or a more recent act of vandalism to prevent a young girl finding the answers she was searching for.
I was very tired during my first week home for the holidays. Even riding Pinto seemed an effort after I had been up half the night. But there was no other time in which to search my grandfather’s study, where surely I would find what I was looking for – whatever it proved to be. But his desk drawers yielded surprisingly little: some old postcards, a hardly used diary with infrequent and mostly indecipherable notations. ‘B from R, Xmas Day, 1913’ was written on the flyleaf of a small, black volume for 1914. Underneath, in a different hand, were penned the words ‘Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto.’ I am a man; I count nothing human alien from me. I whispered the translation as I flicked through the small book.
‘Lovely day. Prayers in Eden 9 a.m.’ was written for the entry on 1 January. ‘Ruth a headache,’ on 24 February.
In April, my grandfather journeyed to Norway, and in June and July, accompanied by ‘Ruth’ and chauffeured by ‘John’ – presumably my paternal grandfather – my grandfather spent a month touring the Continent. By the 17th, ‘Ruth not at all well.’ On the 28th, ‘War declared by Austria against Serbia.’
The entries became increasingly difficult to decipher. Ruth was felled by increasingly frequent and painful headaches. The war gathered momentum – by September the ‘Allies were advancing’ and on 21 October, ‘JVR went up to War Office.’ But life in the Agapemone continued largely unchanged. The Christmas Day entry noted: ‘Prayers in Eden. Dinner at five – sixty present’ and ‘Eden lighted fully by electricity for first time.’
In the memoranda section, under ‘Books to read’, my grandfather had noted The Last Shot, written by journalist Frederick Palmer and published by Chapman and Hall, and under ‘To buy’, Our Good Slave Electricity by Charles R. Gibson, plus Rambles Round French Chateaux by writer Frances M. Parkinson Gostling, published in 1911. Puzzled, I laid the tiny volume back where I had found it. The diary’s entries seemed strangely prosaic for someone who believed he was the Second Coming. Where was the record of miracles and healings, or stirring sermons?
Under this diary lay another for 1919. As I picked it up, a page fell out. ‘Very unhappy and dark times,’ was written in my grandmother’s handwriting in the tiny space provided for Friday, 15 August. ‘It is better to die by one blow than to gasp out one’s life by inches.’
The entry continued into the next date:
Oh, help us, Lord; each hour of need Thy Heavenly succour give Help us in thought, and word and deed Oh help us when our spirits bleed With contrite anguish sore And when our hearts are cold and dead O help us Lord, the more.
Puzzled, I turned the page.
Sunday 17th: ‘Capt. J.V. Read here for weekend.’ John Victor Read – my paternal grandfather again. He seemed to turn up everywhere.
Monday 18th: ‘Eight visitors left.’
Tuesday 19th: ‘General society to one with a taste for seclusion is most irritating and wearing, nervous aversion to company.’ Still true 35 years later, I thought.
Replacing the diaries where I had found them, I took myself off to bed as the numerous clocks began to chime four.
The next night, I searched through the piles of postcards carelessly tossed in a bottom drawer. This was more what I had expected: Exeter Cathedral, entitled ‘Exeter Cathedral Across the Nave, Exeter Cathedral Choir and Exeter Cathedral, The Bishop’s Chair’. There was a tinted one of the parish church St Mary and All Saints, Essex, with the title ‘Rivenhall Church’, and a glossy black-and-white postcard of the door of the west façade of Reims Cathedral with the caption ‘The Great European War, 1914’. Underneath, there was a description of how this thirteenth-century door had been ‘ruthlessly shelled and damaged’ by the Germans in their attack on the city. Only one had been posted, and on it was a photograph of the Wye Bridge in Hereford, with the city’s cathedral in the background. On the back was written: ‘Very warm here, all going well.’ It was my grandmother’s handwriting. ‘Tell John we hope to be back in time for him to go home in the C – so he can wait. Much love to all.’
Right at the bottom of the pile was the only other card with writing on the back. It was of a house shaded by a tree in a walled garden and taken from the street. Where the streets intersected, there stood a horse and cart. On the reverse were the words, ‘With your precious one’s love’ in flowery copperplate. It didn’t look like my grandmother’s writing, but who else’s could it be? And to whom was it addressed?
The next night, I abandoned the drawers for the Agapemone diary, which sat on the desktop. According to its printed instructions, this ‘Year by Year’ diary was intended to span five years, for the many ‘who have neither the time nor the inclination to keep a full diary’. But even just a quick look showed it had been used since 1902. And I knew my mother and uncle still wrote in it.
It took almost a week to plough through all 336 pages, partly because some entries sidetracked me and I spent the day pursuing ‘other lines of inquiry’, as police dramas on television put it. I was little the wiser by the time I had finished, as the entries proved a confusing juxtaposition of world events and domestic details.
On 4 May 1912, someone had written: ‘Ordered Claret Bordeaux – comes June 8.’ On the same date, but in 1913, it was noted: ‘Red flag of socialism in Trafalgar Square.’ I turned to 5 May, the day of my mother’s birth – and there it was: ‘Life born 1.30 a.m.’ So Margaret was right about the names! On 8 May 1904, I came across the entry: ‘Sunday. Marriage BR.’ Written beneath it, in my grandmother’s writing, was: ‘1930, 26 years today since the marriage.’
Ten days later, on 18 May, the entry for 1936 read: ‘Dear Katie passed away suddenly, age 84 years and 10 months.’
From the way people talked of this Katie, I had never imagined her to be as old – I calculated she would have been 104 if she had still been alive now. I decided to see if I could find a photo of her and so the following afternoon I searched through a faded green-suede-covered photograph album which lay among the sheet music in the dining-room piano stool.
I found one picture taken somewhere on the upper lawn. There was a group of about 25 men, women and children standing or sitting near what looked like linen-covered picnic tables. I was beginning to recognise faces easily after all my recent practice, even without the names, which, in this case, had been painstakingly written underneath. There was Toto, elegant in a wide-brimmed hat and Edwardian dress, seated at the end of one table, facing the camera and holding the reins of a donkey. On the donkey’s back sat my uncle David, aged about ten and dressed in what was surely fancy dress: a cloak and hat under which he waved an enormous ostrich feather. Next to him stood Uncle Pat, who would then have been about eight, I calculated. He wore what looked like a white lacy dress and bonnet, and held a long whip and a stuffed toy in his arms.
On the other side of the group, I spotted my bearded great-grandfather, Charles Stokes Read, and near him a young Waa in a high-necked pleated blouse. I counted up the figures until I came to the one who must surely be Katie. She was standing next to my veiled grandmother. Katie’s thick dark hair had been piled up above her heavy face, which looked older than most of the other women’s in the picture. Almost as old as my great-grandfather, I speculated, even though her hair was not white like his. But her face was as lined, with those telltale rifts running from her nose to the corners of her mouth. In her arms she cradled a dark-haired girl of about five – my mother. She was leaning into Katie’s shoulder, staring out at the camera almost as if she feared it.
But of all the entries in the diary, it was the one about my grandfather’s death which puzzled me most. Not the entry itself; that was clear. On 20 March 1927, my grandmother had written, ‘Our Dearly Loved and Very Precious Belovèd left us – in the flesh – after five weeks’ suffering. Present R.D.P., Dr. M Frode, Douglas, Katie, Phoebe, Dora, Mabel, Waa, Millicent (12).’
It wasn’t even the notation ‘R.D.P.’ I found puzzling – surely Ruth, David and Power – although I did wonder why my mother didn’t seem to have been present. Was 16 thought too young? The names Douglas, Dora, Mabel and Millicent didn’t mean much either. It was as I began leafing through the entries for the days following my grandfather’s death that I realised something was missing. A good proportion of them stated how so-and-so had been ‘laid to rest’. So why was there no mention of my grandfather being ‘laid to rest’?
‘It was such a terrible time,’ Waa told me, when a few days later I asked her about my grandfather’s death. ‘We couldn’t believe he was gone.’ She told me again of the despair my mother had felt. How her sadness had led to clashes with her mother, whose grief had manifested itself in anger, especially toward her daughter. And how, at last, Toto had stepped in and offered to take my mother on a trip to her own relatives in the United States.
But it was years before I learned the details of my grandfather’s bizarre funeral, conducted by one of the few remaining male members of the community, who wore a frock tailcoat and white bow tie for the occasion. And it would be even longer before I found what I considered proof that my grandfather had abandoned belief in his own Messianic claim – if, indeed, he ever had it – as demonstrated by the earthly will he left bequeathing all his worldly goods to his three children and their mother!
Bert Harris, who lived in the village and worked for the local undertaker, had been directed to make my grandfather’s coffin. He told us how Belovèd had been laid to rest in an elm shell lined with white buttoned satin, padded with swan down and decorated with a mauve silk trimming. The shell was then lowered into another shell, this time lead-lined, and the whole thing fitted into a panelled-oak coffin with oxidised-silver fittings. The grave was lined with red camellias.
‘It was a beautiful job, although I say it myself,’ he told Ann and me during a tape-recorded conversation in the 1980s. ‘It was the sort of thing that was done for kings and queens. I often wished I could have a photo of the coffin. If I’d had a mind, I could have made £100 from one of those reporters!’
He told us how he and the undertaker had outwitted the crush of journalists that had gathered outside the Agapemone the moment word of Belovèd’s death had leaked out. ‘We took the coffin out of the back door of the workshop, up through the garden, across the lane, through the wall and into the Agapemone. Then, when we had taken it in and everything was dealt with . . . we got old Joe Court to open the gates and we walked out with the webs, the trestles the coffin had been standing on – with all the accoutrements for a funeral.
‘I bet they thought, “How did they get that thing in there without us seeing them?”’ he chuckled. ‘They wouldn’t have known about the door.’
Bert told us how our grandfather had been laid to rest facing west – facing his congregation, who, like most people, were buried facing east. But, most of all, Bert endorsed what Waa had told me all those years previously: that the entire community had been devastated by their leader’s death.
‘It was the fact that he had died . . . a lot of them believed in it and then for it to suddenly have been all dashed. They must have felt dreadful.’
So confused, in fact, the grave had been left open for a full 24 hours after the funeral service. ‘Which wasn’t quite normal!’
* * *
I was beginning to lose enthusiasm for my search. I didn’t even know what I was looking for, except that it had to be what I wasn’t being told. I hadn’t ridden my pony in at least a week and it was showing in his thickening girth and recalcitrance.
One morning, I was summoned out of bed by my mother and told to get over to the Ledermans as soon as possible. Pinto, no doubt bored by his lack of exercise, had done a bit of exploring on his own and had got himself stuck in our tenants’ bathroom. He had wandered into the small ground-floor room early one morning, after the door to the outside had been left open. But once in, he found he couldn’t get enough purchase on the slippery tiles to back out. It took Edward and me the best part of an hour to coax him from the house. It took me another hour to clean up the mess he had left behind. The incident taught me to temper my curiosity and I spent the next few days riding him through the surrounding lanes. But eventually there came a rainy day and I decided to explore Jericho once again. It had suddenly occurred to me the little Davenport desk, which stood on its own in the tiny attic room, could well yield some information.
And how right I was. Initially, however, I was disappointed when I raised the lid of the little desk. It seemed merely filled with a jumble of old sketchbooks, railway timetables and blank sepia postcards of obscure cathedrals. But as I rummaged, I spied a bundle of blue envelopes with telltale red-and-dark-blue airmail borders. The date stamp of the top letter was smudged, so I pulled out the sheets of flimsy blue paper and began to read:
My darling Lavita, How I long to hold you in my arms again and . . .
I scanned the endearments, which sprang from the page, and began to redden. I glanced at the signature at the bottom of the letter: ‘Your ever loving Polo.’ I had stumbled on my father’s love letters to my mother. Even though I hadn’t seen him since I was four, I knew his writing well from the birthday card and cheque he always sent me.
Ashamed, yet strangely stirred by the letters, I read on. I had been taught never ever to read someone else’s letters, but I had never seen anything like these; not even, I noted, the ‘dirty bits’ in the Bible, which my school friends and I read out to each other after lights-out in the dormitory, or in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which a friend had secretly removed from her grandfather’s bookshelf and smuggled into school the previous term. I wondered how anyone could write such letters and still get divorced. Eventually, I crept away, not daring to return for a couple of days.
It was a member of the Kitchen Parlour who unwittingly came to my rescue. The woman had woken the previous night to find it had rained so much that the bucket that stood permanently on the attic stairs catching water from the ever-increasing leaks had nearly overfilled. Would I empty and replace it? This time, I turned my attention to the four small drawers on each side of the desk – at least I thought there were drawers on each side, then a knob came off in my hand and I realised the drawers on one side were fake. The top drawer of those on the other side wouldn’t open either, until it gave way under my determined pulling and shot out to reveal a set of bone knitting needles, balls of string, a pair of tiny elbow-length gloves of the softest yellowing leather and the ubiquitous bezique cards.
The second drawer proved to be full of legs from assorted dolls, a blue square box of very musty sugar lumps, which even I couldn’t bear to try, and yet more Voice of the Bride hymn books. The bottom drawer also jammed when I tried it. I squinted through the gap and glimpsed a sheet of heavy paper, which I freed with one of the knitting needles. It was a thick legal-size sheet folded in four and wrinkled and torn where it had been trapped. I smoothed it out and read the immaculate copperplate writing at the top of the facing fold: ‘11th March, 1915. Statutory Declaration of Edward Trevor.’
The paper crackled as I unfolded it:
I, Edward Trevor of Bridgwater in the County of Somerset, solicitor do solemnly and sincerely declare as follows:-
1. That I was present with Fanny Davis of Four Forks Bridgwater, aforesaid and saw Ruth Annie Smyth lately called or known by the name of Ruth Annie Preece and residing at Four Forks near Bridgwater aforesaid sign seal and as her act and deed in due form of law deliver the deed herewith annexed and marked with the letter ‘A’.
‘A’ was another long, stiff sheet of paper with the words ‘Deed Poll’ in flowing script at the top. I spread it on the floor and, holding it down with my elbows, read of my grandmother’s change of name in 1915. I read it again. And again. And a third time.
I returned to the first sheet and continued reading:
2. That the name Ruth Annie Smyth set and subscribed to the said deed or instrument as the name of the person executing the same is of the proper handwriting of the said Ruth Annie Smyth and that the names Edward Trevor and Fanny Davis set or subscribed thereto as the persons attesting the due execution thereof are of the respective proper handwriting of me the said Edward Trevor and of the said Fanny Davis.
And I make this solemn declaration conscientiously believing the same to be true and by virtue of the Statutory Declaration Act 1835.
Beneath was the signature of Edward Trevor and a Mr Barrington, commissioner for oaths.
I sat back on my heels. Uncle David had been born in 1905, Uncle Pat in 1908 and my mother in 1910. So why didn’t my grandmother take her husband’s name until 1915?
A shaft of sunlight illuminated the statutory declaration and deed poll documents spread across the warped linoleum. It was a full five minutes before it struck me. Could this mean my strict grandmother – who ruled my home with a rod of iron and whose word was law – had never been legally married to my grandfather? Ridiculous! I had seen the entries about their marriage in the Agapemone diary. This was too important to ask Waa about; too terrifying to face my grandmother with; and too important to ignore.
* * *
I waited until the tea ritual was out of the way – Granny had a bad cold, so had kept to her bed. Tea had instead been taken in the downstairs drawing room. ‘Come in,’ called my mother, in answer to my nervous knock.
She was sitting in an armchair by the unlit fire, a gin and tonic in her hand. Uncle David was pouring himself a whisky from the heavy cut-glass decanter on the sideboard. He turned towards me.
‘Granny wasn’t ever married to my grandfather, was she?’ I blurted out.
My uncle set the decanter on the silver drinks tray with a thud. ‘Who told you?’
‘A girl at school,’ I lied. ‘Is it true?’ Neither replied at once. They didn’t have to, I knew by their expressions. But I had to hear it. ‘Is it true?’ I repeated.
‘Yes, Kitty, it is,’ said my mother.
‘Why?’
‘He was already married,’ replied my mother.
‘What do you mean, he was already married?’ I asked. And then, thunderstruck, ‘He was a bigamist?’
‘No, Kitty, there was no legal marriage. He didn’t commit bigamy,’ replied Uncle David, turning away to splash soda into his glass. ‘But he might as well have done,’ he muttered beneath the hiss of the siphon.
‘But,’ I began. I pointed to where the maroon diary lay open on my grandfather’s desk. ‘It says he married in there.’
My uncle’s eyes narrowed at my slip. He opened his mouth to speak. My mother hushed him. ‘It was a marriage . . . in the eyes of everyone here,’ she told me quietly. ‘But it wasn’t registered. That means it wasn’t legal.’
The silence swelled like a balloon. My mother glanced across at my uncle in silent appeal while he dabbed at his forehead with the silk hanky he kept in his cuff.
‘So that means you are . . .’ I raised my discovery hesitantly.
‘Bastards!’ my uncle interrupted harshly. ‘Yes. And if you think you’re hard done by, Kitty, you should try growing up a bastard!’
It was then I remembered another diary entry dated 11 November 1930. It was in my grandmother’s handwriting. ‘David to Somerset House for his birth certificate for passport; a difficult time for him.’
‘Is that why none of you ever went to school?’ I asked.
My mother nodded. ‘No school would have us.’
‘Weren’t you lonely?’
‘Often,’ my mother replied shortly.
For the first time since coming to live in my grandfather’s Agapemone, I felt I was being told the plain unvarnished truth. Not half-truths, not white lies. Emboldened, I asked, ‘Who was my grandfather’s wife then?’
‘Her name was Catherine – you’ve heard us talk of Katie,’ said my uncle.
‘We all loved her so very much. In fact, you are named after her,’ added my mother.
I was named after my grandfather’s wife? Who wasn’t my grandmother. Her name was Ruth and I lived with her. It was this Katie, whom I had never met because she had died before I was born, who had been his wife!
My mother told me how Katie had also been present at the ‘marriage ceremony’. How she had attended the christenings of her husband’s children by his spiritual bride. And kept the Pigott part of her husband’s name, allowing Ruth the other half.
‘Didn’t Katie mind . . . about Granny?’
‘She never seemed to, Kitty,’ my mother said carefully.
‘Katie was the most wonderful woman,’ added Uncle David.
‘I asked her once if she had ever been married,’ added Mummy. ‘I was about seven, I think.’
‘What did she say?’
‘She smiled and said, “I was once, dear.”’
What hidden depths of sad acceptance are contained in her reply? A careful lie, designed not to hurt or confuse the child of her husband’s mistress? The selfless act of a truly, good woman? Or one who had come to terms with her reality? And who, despite whatever private demons she wrestled, eventually reaped some reward in the love and affection she inspired in others, including her husband’s children. And even his spiritual bride – judging by the sad entry in my grandmother’s handwriting in the Agapemone diary for 18 May 1936: ‘Dear Katie passed away suddenly, age 84 and 10 months.’
This upright, moral woman remains an enigma. Was she so devout she took her promise to ‘take thee, John Hugh Smyth-Pigott, to be my wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse’ literally? Or was she, like so many Victorian novels would have us believe, secretly relieved when he ‘set her aside’? Or perhaps she truly believed in this charismatic man.
And why did such a charismatic young clergyman, who had women literally falling at his feet, choose her? She wasn’t good-looking like him. But she did possess a grace and a charm which attracted people to her. Was it precisely those qualities that attracted him and led to love, which died when he realised she would never bear him the children he longed for? Certainly it was her choice to continue to make her home in the Agapemone after she had been usurped by my grandmother. Letters from her sister offering her a home were produced in evidence at my grandfather’s ecclesiastical trial in 1908 after he was charged with immorality. His trial, held in Wells Cathedral, Somerset, resulted in his eventual defrocking.
It took a couple of weeks before my uncles and mother felt comfortable enough to allow me to take tea with my grandmother. Even then, they chaperoned me. But they needn’t have worried. I was far too scared of making my fierce grandmother ill to raise the subject. Besides, I found myself mesmerised when in her company by my efforts to reconcile this strict old woman and her position as my grandfather’s spiritual bride.
‘You’re very quiet, miss,’ Granny had remarked sharply, as she drained her second cup.
Three pairs of eyes swivelled, like interrogation lights, toward me.
‘I’ve got a bit of a headache, Granny.’
‘Nonsense, girl. People of your age don’t get headaches. Get out of the house. Go for a walk. Get some fresh air.’
‘Yes, Granny,’ I replied meekly.