To be fair, I suppose he is having a go at precisely the sort of mundane work that so offended my grandmother, and at least he eventually concedes the existence of women, but the tone is insufferably patronizing. I suppose Miss Pesel needed the endorsement of academia, but in fact her own handbooks are most scholarly in their attributions and explanations, while being briskly instructive.
And now I see the source of my grandmother's inspiration. I look at illustrations of work done under Miss Pesel's aegis and the familiar identifying qualities of my grandmother's creations spring out at me. There are the robust central cross motifs, the scrolled borders. There are the neat squares with a central eye, the smooth double lines. And there above all are the shaded backgrounds and the subtle palette.
Colour is crucial in Winchester work. My grandmother's palette was principally blues, often with a buff background. But the blues run across a whole spectrum so that the effect is soft and melting, while the background too is worked in different shades, giving it depth and interest. She also used a rich plum fading into pink, sometimes combined with the blues. The wools were expertly dyed and came from some specialist supplier – I do remember the sensuous quality of those little hanks of pure colour lined up in her workbox, a swathe of cherry, rose and salmon, a peacock range from indigo to sky blue. The base was coarse linen hessian and always to hand was the sheet of squared paper to which my grandmother constantly referred – the architect's design on which she had worked for weeks before ever picking up the needle. Winchester work is counted thread work, in which each stitch is pre-ordained. It derives from the English tradition of cross-stitch design as used in samplers. Miss Pesel was an authority on seventeenth-century samplers and her initial venture into the style that was to blossom into the full glory of Winchester work took their angular motifs and turned them into abstract designs. This first flowering produced the cushions and kneelers for the Bishop of Winchester's private chapel in Wolvesey Palace, for which she formed and supervised the Wolvesey Canvas Embroidery Guild.
She ran a tight ship, I would imagine. No messing. No flights of individual fancy, and limited tea-breaks only. I warm to Miss Pesel. She seems a Gertrude Jekyll-like figure, one of those steely, industrious, inspired early twentieth-century women who beaver away and revolutionize an entire activity. Gertrude Jekyll affected the gardening habits of two generations. For the initiated, Miss Pesel's enlightened skill meant that church kneelers could never be quite the same again.
From the Golsoncott gong stand to Miss Louisa Pesel, by way of tree-worship and a good deal else. But the central matter of this chapter is the ambivalent position of the established churches, as the new century gets under way. They are hanging on by a toenail, as institutions, but we are reminded of them wherever we look. It is hard to be out of sight of a church or chapel, whatever it may be doing today to earn its keep. When my grandchildren were small I used to entertain them with that hand game: ‘Here's the church and here's the steeple, Open the doors and there's the people…’ But the people are not there, and like as not the doors will be bolted against larceny. There must be plenty of children in the country today who have seldom or never set foot inside a church. In 1999 Dr George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, spoke of Britain having an ‘allergy to religion’. He was addressing an audience of clergy assembled to analyse the Church of England's Decade of Evangelism, a campaign which had apparently been tough going. ‘We are a society oppressed not by lack but by surfeit, not by strife but by ease,’ he told them, calling for a fresh approach to the mission which would engage with contemporary culture. He was correct enough in identifying the problem as one of social disengagement. And perhaps accurate also in implying – whether deliberately or not – that piety thrives on deprivation and discord.
St Bartholomew's, Rodhuish, may not make it far into the twenty-first century as an operative place of worship. The Churches Conservation Trust will acquire further clients, and the estate agents a satisfactory supply of beguiling conversions. But the physical reminders of what once was are inextinguishable. It is all still out there in the landscape: faith, hope, charity – bigotry, oppression, persecution.
The Woman in White and the Boy on the Beach
When I was mooching about the Somerset lanes as an adolescent, waiting for life to begin, I saw Golsoncott as a place where nothing ever happened. I thought of it fondly, but reckoned that it was elsewhere that things went on and that in due course one would go forth to elsewhere, with all that that implied. And so I did, but in due course also Golsoncott became a retreat, a haven when rather too much was happening, the stable element in an unreliable world, a kind of Jamesian great good place. You could know that it would always be the same, year by year. Absence of event was now the treasured aspect.
During the seventy years of the family's occupation of the house no one was born there. Three people died: my grandfather in 1941, my grandmother thirty-four years later, and finally my aunt Rachel. Events of a significant kind. To a fifteen-year-old, things happening means a bit of Sturm und Drang in daily life, and Golsoncott was indeed fairly immune to that. One calm rural day slid blandly into the next, with only the weather serving up any potent kind of change. And even that interference with prescribed routine was sternly resisted: family ethos was that you ignored weather and simply did what you had intended to do. You went for a walk in the rain; that was what raincoats were for.
Looking back, it seems that the sunlight through the wisteria spattered the veranda tiles in exactly the same way in 1995 as it did on my arrival from Egypt in 1945, a footstep on the boot-scraper sounded exactly the same over five decades, the latch of the kitchen-garden gate struck the same note. The place stood still; people came and went and grew and changed, elsewhere all was sound and fury. True, but a profoundly deceptive truth. In fact, what the place was doing was secretly recording, bearing witness to the events that apparently passed it by, turning itself into a signifier for the century. All the things that did not happen here were nevertheless being taken down and held in evidence. One day, the place would speak with tongues.
In 1941 my grandmother was at work on her sampler of Golsoncott. Elsewhere, other things were going on. The row of stylized embroidered evacuees posed at the bottom of her canvas; in London, the bombs were falling on their homes. In June, Hitler's armies invaded Russia. On the far side of the world, in December, the Japanese attacked the United States fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hong Kong fell. Throughout 1941, in the deserts of north Africa, the Libyan campaign was in full flow. The following year, Rommel's tanks would be rolling eastwards; my mother and I would become a part of the British exodus to Palestine in anticipation of the possible probable, indeed fall of Egypt. My grandmother must have thought much about us, but already I hardly remembered her. My aunt Rachel was in London, sorting out evacuee families from Stepney, sketching the blasted landscape of London in snatched moments work notes for future paintings and dashing down to Golsoncott for a few days when she could. My grandmother must have embroidered and gardened, just as she always had, but with a sense of the world smoking beyond her horizon.
Golsoncott rode out the war and the whole century. An easy ride, one may think. But the shadows are around – the long shadows of what happened in other places. One of these is there on an August afternoon of 1933, brushing across the swing seat with the awning, on the Golsoncott veranda. Another old photograph: my grandmother sits in the middle of the seat, with a fair-haired teenager on one side of her and my young mother on the other. I am present – a five-month-old baby on my mother's lap. Behind the seat, leaning over, is a sharp-featured boy of around thirteen. A dark girl, slightly younger, sits at my grandmother's feet. My grandmother and my mother are gazing at me – statutory baby-worship for the photo opportunity. The other three children look politely bored.
There is someone else seated in a basket chair, slightly apart from the group on the swing seat. A woman in a white dress – neat pointed face, dark hair with a centre parting. S
he is turned away from the rest of us, detached, pensive, one hand resting behind her head, her legs elegantly furled.
This is Mary Britnieva, born in St Petersburg in 1890. Two of the children – her two – were born in Russia during the Red Terror. Her husband was killed by the Bolsheviks.
When Mary met my grandmother she was a widow in her early forties, extremely hard up, struggling to provide her children, Tsapik and Maria, with the kind of upbringing and education they might have expected had history not picked off their father and wiped out the family wealth. Her father was British, a St Petersburg diamond merchant called Charles Bucknall, himself born in Russia, who amassed a considerable fortune during his thirty years of trading in the Russian city. He was a member of the significant British merchant and industrial communities in Russia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unusually, he married a Russian girl – Antonina Pavlovna Mikoulova-Ananevskaya. The expatriate community on the whole kept a stern hold on their British identity, so such a liaison was something of a departure and, equally, may well have been looked upon with some misgivings by Antonina's aristocratic landowning family.
That pre-Revolutionary British community in Russia can be conjured up still from the pages of the 1914 edition of Baedeker. St Petersburg: pop. 2,075,000 – which includes 2,100 Englishmen, 11,200 Germans and 2,400 Frenchmen. Women entirely omitted, one notes, or, more probably, subsumed into that total. And the support system of this British (a more appropriate term, since there was a large Scottish element) expatriate society is meticulously entered. The Clubs: New English Club (for Englishmen and Americans), the Imperial Yacht Club (for the high aristocracy and diplomatic corps), the English Club (for the nobility and high officials). The four English-speaking doctors. The English booksellers: Watkins. And P. Botkin & Sons, Nevski 38, suppliers of tea.
The St Petersburg British community was larger than that in Moscow and stemmed from the end of the eighteenth century, by which time it already numbered around 1,500 – shipbuilders, naval and military personnel, engineers and doctors, craftsmen. As the administrative and diplomatic centre of the Russian Empire, St Petersburg condescended to Moscow, being perceived as sophisticated and cosmopolitan where Moscow was commercial, industrial and deeply Russian. But it was in Moscow that the Smiths held sway, a family of enterprising Scottish boiler-makers – their story told by Harvey Pitcher in his book The Smiths of Moscow, A Story of Britons Abroad, the climate of that time also marvellously evoked by Penelope Fitzgerald in her novel The Beginning of Spring. The Smith factory flourished for a couple of generations, valiantly adapting to economic circumstances and the exigencies of the political climate. The Smiths have left an abiding legacy: they introduced their Russian workers to football (partly in a bid to divert their attention from vodka) – today it is Russia's most popular sport.
It is fascinating to contemplate with the wisdom of hindsight the trajectories of utterly disparate lives that will one day intersect. In the years before 1914 my grandmother was bringing up her young family in St Albans, secure in Edwardian England. Fifteen hundred miles away, Mary Britnieva was a girl in St Petersburg. Back then, this unlikely conjunction of lives and persons would indeed have seemed improbable. For my grandmother, Russia must have seemed a place a long way away that was nothing much to do with her. Mary Britnieva, although half English, had grown up in Russia, spoke French within the family and Russian to everyone else and presumably saw her future as firmly located in St Petersburg. But barely twenty years later, there they are together in west Somerset on an August afternoon. History had stepped in, exerting its inexorable control. Mary Britnieva had drawn the short straw.
One of the worst plights of the twentieth century has been to be Russian – at any point. They fought in the Great War with the other Allies. Then came the Revolution. Then the Civil War. Then the Red Terror. Then the Second World War. And beyond all this there was Stalin: Siberia lay in wait, and the gulags. Those of us who have spent most of our life in a politically stable country in peacetime can only look back in horror. And in ignorance. This is a dimension of distress that is barely conceivable.
In 1984 I went to the Soviet Union, as it then was, as a member of a delegation of six British writers sent by the Great Britain-USSR Association to have talks with representatives of the Soviet Writers' Union. Before perestroika, before glasnost. We spent six days in Moscow, sitting round an immense table, hemmed in by all the paraphernalia of international exchange – simultaneous translators, TV cameras, overwrought organizers rushing hither and thither. By day, we discussed such matters as traditional forms of narrative, the role of the short story, fictions of provincial life and so forth, sternly resisting provocative attempts to draw us into a political dialogue. The visiting team addressed the subjects on the agenda, each speaking for the five minutes allocated by earlier agreement; our hosts talked about anything that came into their heads, at entirely unpredictable length. I understood for the first time why delegates at international conferences emerge looking dazed and haggard; it is simply that they have been exposed to the Russian style of debate.
In the evenings, we were wined and dined. Interminable meals punctuated by toasts: they toasted us, we toasted them, desperately scraping the barrel for further toast proposals – peace and friendship, literature, language, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, the chef responsible for this excellent dinner… Usually these occasions took place in hotels or the sumptuous headquarters of the Soviet Writers' Union (next door to the original of the Rostov mansion in War and Peace) but on a more relaxed occasion we were invited to the home of one participant Soviet writer. A small apartment in a shabby block bedroom, sitting-room, bathroom and a passage that incorporated the cooking facilities. This was relative luxury – he was a favoured figure and accordingly privileged. We all squeezed in somehow. We ate, we drank, we toasted. And we Brits felt humbled, looking around furtively at the ugly, utilitarian furnishings, at all the evidence of making do, getting by. But what I remember best is the coffee cup. A pretty flowered bone-china cup – nineteenth-century, by the look of it. Just one, amid a hotchpotch of cracked and mismatched crockery. Our hostess was sitting next to me – I admired the cup. She told me that it had belonged to her mother: ‘It is all that she had left from her home, after the war. Just that. Nothing else.’
One coffee cup. I thought of households elsewhere, the world over, crammed with the bits and pieces that sift down from generation to generation. The chairs and tables and rugs and pictures and knick-knacks that conjure up other times and other places and people no longer alive.
One coffee cup.
Mary Britnieva came into my grandmother's life because she was staying one summer with her sister Agnes who had rented a house in nearby Washford. My grandmother, hearing of this interesting alien ménage, invited the children up to Golsoncott for tea. Maria managed to fall into the rose-garden pond (most visiting children did, sooner or later), was dried off in the bathroom and returned to her mother with ecstatic stories of the green bath and the lavish garden. They visited again, and again. Their mother came too. And so it all began – an association between the two families that would continue unto the third generation.
My grandmother and Rachel seem initially to have been mesmerized by the Britneffs – principally by their exuberance and volatility. They became frequent long-term visitors at Golsoncott, Mary's Russian mother by then included. ‘One used to hear them having splendid rows and throwing plates at each other,’ Rachel would say appreciatively, years later, making a comparison I suppose with her own more sober home life. Golsoncott plates? Or is this a memory of the émigré enclave in London in which they lived and where she certainly visited them?
My grandparents took over financial responsibility for Tsapik's education. Britneff family history has it that they also funded the unsuccessful action which Mary's father brought against the King in the High Court of Justice in 1930 for the recovery of cash and jewellery deposited by him with the British
Embassy in Petrograd in 1918, for safekeeping by the British Government. Some £58,000 in Russian notes, with jewellery and precious stones worth a further £58,000. A considerable fortune. Bucknall v. the King, before Mr Justice Horridge, in the King's Bench Division. The Times report is full of impenetrable jargon about demurrers and bailment and much invoking of the Indemnity Act of 1920, but laced with mentions of a locked leather bag subsequently found open and empty, behind which smokes the reality of that time. What had happened was that ‘the Embassy premises were forcibly entered by persons claiming to be representatives of the Soviet Government’, during which episode the valuables went missing. Charles Bucknall held the British Government responsible for the loss of his property; the Government denied liability, and won.
During the 1930s Mary Britnieva published two books about her experiences before, during and in the wake of the Revolution – One Woman's Story and A Stranger in Your Midst – substantial parts of both having been written at Golsoncott. The books were enthusiastically received and for a while she enjoyed a certain celebrity. Her account of the raid on the British Embassy at Petrograd in 1918, of which her brother and sister-in-law were eyewitnesses, attracted particular attention. The naval attaché, Captain Cromie, was shot by the Bolshevik intruders. And elsewhere in the building, someone was hastily helping themselves to the contents of that leather bag.