Ghosts in my House. Time Past & Time Present
Surroundings can inspire you, not just the beauty of breathtaking places like the Black Mountains but your everyday surroundings. The walls always hold secrets of what they witnessed before. My home is an old semi-detached cottage in suburbia, on a busy road. You can feel its age and I knew there was a mystery in the mortar somehow.
When we arrived here, over twenty years ago now, I had found a child’s pencil writings in a hidden corner of my airing cupboard. It warmed me to think that a small child had secretly left their mark there, perhaps for someone to find? I’m not sure why but I had felt that the cupboard was likely constructed in the 1970s and so assumed that the little writer had inhabited it then.
Fast forward twenty-four years and I had just lost my job. I decided to put one of my children’s stories onto paper while I had the chance. I sat in my calm, green-painted study wrestling with the possibility that I couldn’t bring my extinct creatures to life, that I wasn’t good enough. As my mind meandered, a text lit-up my phone. It was from Katy, a friend and colleague from Disney days decades before. Our boys had been good friends when they were little and she’s a great friend to me. She was sending me a picture of my house from an article on Facebook. As I read down, a familiar name emerged, Geoffrey Tandy. I’d seen that he and his family had lived at Hope Cottage in the 1930s and 40s when I’d made a first attempt to explore the history of the house, just after we’d moved in. But I didn’t know who he was and I didn’t know about his close friendship with TS Eliot. I stopped and told myself not to get excited. TS Eliot almost certainly wouldn’t have been here. How strange to be sitting here after all this time, to discover such secrets.
TS Eliot was a prolific letter-writer and so I feel lucky that through his letters, I have come to know the Tandy family and can know that Eliot spent quite a bit of time here, leaving his slippers behind after one Christmas visit. How tantalising that Geoffrey was a curator at the Natural History Museum, a place where we’ve been long-time members and visitors. Perhaps it is where my first childhood fascination with Dodos and extinct animals began? Starting from the museum’s own, somewhat ‘cobbled-together’, Dodo exhibit. Like many other people, I’ve probably stared at that Dodo for hours over the years.
The biggest thrill for me so far though, was when an internet search yielded a letter from Alison Tandy to Old Possum (Eliot’s nickname). The letter offered up pictures from her imagination, of Eliot’s cats, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer. The writing was unmistakable with its ‘kisses’ and ‘hugs’ symbols and I recognised it immediately. They were exactly those symbols etched inside my airing cupboard. A child from the 1930s not 1970s as I had once imagined. Eliot had written and dedicated his famous Cat poems to Alison (along with the children of a few other of his close friends).
Image courtesy of the T. S. Eliot Estate
I guess at this point, I could have slipped into inertia through knowing that my little rhymes would not be anywhere near as good as the great Poet’s work but somehow these discoveries inspired me and I pushed on and didn’t dwell on inferiority. His kind voice spoke to me through his letters and somehow he wasn’t the inaccessible titan I’d studied as an undergraduate. I read of his own feelings and doubts; and I saw his playfulness. The green walls of my writing room comforted me with their secrets and every so often another little gem would surface… like discovering a picture of Eliot’s writing desk online (painted by his wife, Valerie, to match his study walls). Valerie had given the desk to a young Karen Christensen in 1987 when she was employed to help edit and collate Eliot’s huge collection of letters. Now the desk sits beautifully in her New York home…. and I saw that the shade of green was an exact match for my own walls.
Photo of Eliot’s desk in Karen’s farmhouse home in Philmont, New York, 1991. Courtesy of Karen Christensen. https://karenchristensen.org/more-about-t-s-eliots-desk/
My study today
In taking this photo of my study now, I have only just noticed that the map above my desk is of Somerset, 1645, by John Blaeu. We bought this on a whim, many years ago in a little map shop in Sherborne (another significant Eliot place). Eliot’s ancestral village of East Coker has been staring me in the face for years, unnoticed. It is there in the bottom right-hand corner, just above my eyeline! I have also discovered my own 18th century ancestors from the Yeovilton area, nearby; and I believe Doris Ellis, who would become Polly Tandy and mother of Alison, also had Somerset roots.
Somehow I feel that this adventure of discovery is just beginning and I can’t wait to find out more.