Jean Spendlove

Renhart Gittens has asked me to write about myself, for his collection of village people, and to show how I come to be in Helmdon and to feel part of it.

The population of Helmdon has changed greatly in the last thirty years, and not chiefly by birth and death, so that people I may know quite well have not known me long. I have taken for granted they have no curiosity which they can’t satisfy by simply asking me. Renhart seems to think I’m wrong there, so here I try to put the matter right. Much of what follows is old knowledge in Helmdon: all may be known to someone.

I was born in Wainfleet - where William came from who founded Magdalen College. My father was the last head of the Magdalen College School there. My mother was a Yorkshire woman, youngest daughter of a village schoolmaster. My other grandfather was an army schoolmaster. The Magdalen school closed in 1933 and my father became first head of Skegness Grammar School which replaced it, where in due course my sister and I went - a small co-educational country grammar school, a happy one even for the head’s children. Margaret my sister went into nursing trained at King’s College Hospital and worked more than thirty years in Canada.

I went on to Lady Margaret’s Hall, Oxford. I enjoyed university immensely. I had been studious at school and followed Margaret‘s games example a very long way behind her. At Oxford I rowed for a couple of terms, and helped to make up a novices’ four which went down with all hands by Godstow lock. But chiefly it was the work I enjoyed, and friendship with people of like interests, which was new to me. Not that my friends were historians like myself. I read and attended lectures in other people’s studies, went to a fine range of amateur play productions, became much at home on the Cherwell, talked for hours, and had a go at independent research. Although I was a disappointing finalist, I got chance to go on to do a B.Litt. (the most junior research degree tested by thesis), and worked on a mid-eighteenth-century House of Commons under Sir Lewis Namier, that brilliant central European Jew who revolutionized the history of the unreformed English Commons. His method was to study the institution through the lives of all its members. I have begun to study the Helmdon electors of that time by the same method.

I would have liked an academic career but got no further than finishing my B.Litt. during a two-year tenure of a tutorial research studentship at Royal Holloway College. After that I could find no new opening that satisfied me and in the September I was unemployed. I can’t remember how Hillcroft’s advertisement came to my notice, but I applied, was interviewed, and became in a couple of days an unpaid resident tutor doing enough tutoring in English history to pay for my board and lodging. I stayed four years, finally doing a paid nine-tenths week, resident, tutor in English history and political theory, and librarian and publicity secretary. The remaining tenth of my week was supposed to be used for my own research, but the intended life and letters of Henry Pelham has never progressed further than transcription of some of his numerous letters in the British Library. Those four years influenced me in other ways.

My intention to teach was largely because it was the family trade and the chief way an historian could earn a living. Hillcroft’s principal took me by surprise when she interviewed me by asking why I wanted to teach. I recognized my desire to influence people, and that this might not be simply by teaching them history. Hillcroft was (and is) an extraordinary college wholly residential then, providing a year’s liberal education to women over twenty, either just to enrich and empower them in their lives and work, or to prepare them to change that work by going on to train to do something their previous education hadn’t enabled them to train for, or even shown them they wanted to do. At that time most went on to teaching or social work, but nowadays they go on to almost anything. Hillcroft had profound influence on me. I discovered the amazing eagerness of very mature people to learn even from a novice in her twenties; I lived with women whose experience was fundamentally different from my own; I learned to regard my own education as a rare privilege that I had “earned” only by following my bent at the public expense, and to see in other women’s experience of Hillcroft not merely greater sacrifice and effort with smaller sympathy from families and employers, but a more transforming excitement. A gathering of former Hillcroft students moves me to greater admiration of women’s achievement and sheer quality of humanity than does a similar gathering in an Oxford college. I began to be concerned more with whom I taught than with what I could teach.

I left Hillcroft chiefly because I disliked the publicity part of my job (I’m not happy advertising even things I believe in), and there was no hope of exchanging it for more teaching because excellent non-resident tutors were well established in the only subjects I could have undertaken. In adult education, the only work I might get included the public relations I disliked, and organizing, whether for a university extra-mural department or the WEA. So I took a post in a school, Chipping Campden Grammar School, which was of much the same size and character as Skegness Grammar School when I had known it. I wasn’t very good at this job, except with children who would trust me enough to tackle their work my way. They did well, but some others did very badly. Listening to me might be interesting enough but didn’t get people through O-levels. When Chipping Campden was going comprehensive, I sympathized but resigned, because I knew myself incapable of teaching children with less aptitude than the more able Grammar School stream. For a term I was unemployed, except for a very interesting six weeks editing questionnaires for Lord Franks’s Commission of Enquiry into the University of Oxford. Then I got a job teaching history at the Manchester College of Commerce.

I stayed in Manchester, living in Sale, for five and a half years. During that time the College became Manchester Polytechnic, abandoned its work for external London degrees and set up its own degree courses under the Council for National Academic Awards. (What an old chapter this now seems in the history of education.) I helped to design, teach and examine the first such general arts degrees. It was interesting but often frustrating. The arts department was led by the linguists of the old commerce department, and staffed below by young men and women who wanted university work; and the relationships were incurably unhappy, without the mutual respect to get the best out of both sorts, or to forgive mistakes. They were the chief reason I chose to leave, more to blame for my weekly migraines than the pressure of work by itself.

I had a positive motive too, however. From a child I had enjoyed making stories. After I left Chipping Campden I began a novel, which I abandoned as quite impossible to work at while I was full-time in Manchester. It was to have been a social fantasy about the sheep-like reasons people have for either following or rebelling against social trends, and it was recognizably of the 1960s. Now my aim was historical novels. Ten years or so earlier I had first felt that I could see in my mind and feel in my emotions the people of the past, when I was reading a letter from the Lord Chancellor’s younger son to his father, I think about a fire at Lincoln’s Inn. (I still find manuscript very evocative of a writer.) So I decided to leave Manchester, and make an attempt to write historical novels for my living. I was in a better position to do that as a result of my time in Manchester. Eighteenth-century Parliamentary affairs would have been a dead subject for anyone but a Trollope; but the polytechnics had lately got so far towards university values as to give their staff some time for research, at least by concentrating their teaching in four days a week. The University professor was my old special-subject tutor, and I consulted him for a topic. He set me loose in the collection of French Revolutionary newspapers in the John Rylands library. I never solved the problem he offered me, to explain a manuscript newspaper sent from Paris to a lawyer in Rennes, in Brittany, from 1775-1793; but I did get interested in affairs in Rennes on the eve of the French Revolution of 1789. In 1968, the Rennes Law School’s share in inaugurating the French Revolution was an arresting subject.

I gave notice, sold my house, and sought a small country property I could buy for cash and live cheaply in. My parents lived then in Worthing. Sussex was far beyond my means, so I looked for a house not much more than 100 miles from them, between Oxford and Northampton where my closest friends then were. If I had delayed two years, even this area would have been too expensive - and utterly impossible now. I came to Helmdon only just in time.

I knew the village only as the place where an agent had a property for sale. The house and garden were both smaller than I wanted, but I liked the feel of it, not the less for its having been empty nearly a year after being partitioned from its neighbour, without being decorated. The little garden was a wreck. There was nowhere for a car and no room to grow vegetables. But Mrs Bull had already got Geoffrey Gulliver’s agreement to a car parked in the yard at Hill Farm, and Will Ayres would pass on his allotment in the Nursery. I fell for these arrangements, got the house surveyed, cut the price accordingly, and purchased. This was Hillcrest, 54 Wappenham Road. I moved in in August 1970, a fortnight before my belongings. My father had looked at it and agreed to like it, and visited to help me prepare it to live in. He scraped the cellar floor, I remember, and also sat too briskly down one night on the old camp-bed and went through it. He was seventy-eight then.

The plan to earn my living by writing has never come off. Any financial balance of my writings has always been a loss. I understand how one can not pay income tax. I knew now I could not write while in full-time work, so I wanted only enough work to eat. At first I made do from refunded tax and some chores for friends. I lived very barely for some years, and still grow my vegetables and fruit, and bake my bread. Any paid work meant keeping my car, and so did research in Oxford. I undertook my first WEA course in 1971 (having to learn to teach a group mostly over seventy), and I did census work that year too, and in 1981. I continued to teach for the WEA, and for Leicester’ s Adult Education department, as requested - an insecure livelihood. In 1973 I began to tutor one course for the Open University, and had that more secure fee for over twenty years. In the seventies I did some invigilation at the Warneford Hospital too. All the candidates were under some kind of stress, but their psychologist was on call all the time. All I had to do was to sit quiet, for six hours a day, so I got on with my own work and earned easy money.

The 1970s were the years in which my life in Helmdon was formed. I made my frugal living, and spent long hours at my own work, both the research and the writing. I completed the first version of a long novel, which no publisher was interested in. I wrote a short one about one of its minor characters and got Fabers interested, but not interested enough. At first I had said I would try this life for five years. Five years by no means established me as a writer. However, the educational world had ceased to expand, and I had interrupted my work record for too long: I was no longer employable. But I had not the least desire to go back.

I acquired some different sorts of experience. My sister was in Canada (I never saw her from 1958 to 1972), and for most of the time I was virtually an only child to care for our parents. My mother was already behaving strangely when I came to Helmdon. She became worse, and my father broke under that strain in 1976. My sister came at once when I phoned her. We packed up their house, found care for our mother in Northampton, and our father came to share my little house here. Our mother died that Christmas, and our father continued with me until he died in Brackley Hospital in April 1978. Those were years of work and stress, with occasions of quiet happiness, and left their aftermath. One practical consequence was Margaret’s decision to find a retirement home for herself in Helmdon, and she bought the Hawkinses’ former home in Field Way and its two small neighbours, then still occupied by Miss Prue and Bert and Kate Humphrey. That was in 1977 when old village property, if not much modernized, could still be bought for less than the price of a good Worthing bungalow.

Another personal change in the 1970s was because I gave way to the plea of a friend to take over her retired guide dog. It was a pity my father had already died, because he would have loved her company. She didn’t live long, but she convinced me that I wanted a dog that would be really my own. So I acquired Nimbus in 1980 - three parts black Labrador, and largely untrained at six months. I needed Mrs Wibberley’s wisdom to make her the excellent friend she became. Having a dog alters one - makes field walking part of daily life instead of an occasional response to the weather and the countryside, and makes one a different range of acquaintance. I put Nimbus down with grief in 1995, and now have Fallow, pure mongrel and another protégée of the RSPCA. I have become a doggy person.

Meanwhile my reason for buying a house in Helmdon rather than somewhere else has quite gone. The Oxford friend, from college days, moved to Swansea in 1975, and retired thence to Newport, inconveniently far away from here, though our friendship is as strong as ever and I keep the interest and insights I learned from her into literature and theatre. My friend in Northampton was one of my Hillcroft students. She died suddenly in 1981, because she proved allergic to one ingredient of an anaesthetic. She was wanting to move here, and lies near my father in Helmdon churchyard. My life owes her not only great happiness and great grief, but an enlargement of my experience. She was a social worker of wide and warm sympathy. Also her family included three blind people who became friends of mine, and deepened my undergraduate interest in blindness. I owe them much of the understanding I spent on the girl Louise in the short novel I published in 1982. Both these friends were basically serious but capable of merrier frivolity than I am. Their absence has probably left me more apt to seem merely serious.

Thus my reason now for living in Northamptonshire is that I want to live in Helmdon. I have in fact moved house, in 1983, to next-door-but-one. My father’s death and my friend’s led to my little house getting too tight for me, my work and belongings. When both my sister’s two extra cottages had become vacant, I paid her a small price for them, got Alan Watson to convert them into one, and now live next to her part-time home, and grow my vegetables in her garden. But I have more than family reasons for my feelings about Helmdon.

When I first told my parents I planned to give up my job and try to write, they were horrified. In particular, my father felt that I was wasting my education. That had been largely at public expense. My writing and whatever part-time work I could get would need education; but it was true that I had had a very privileged one and had not paid for it. I had not paid even in subsequent useful employment, because I had worked full-time for less than ten years; and at Hillcroft I had spent nearly half my time on administration and library work for which I wasn’t qualified and didn’t need to be. So I took my father’s point, though not in the career sense in which he chiefly meant it. I therefore resolved to make myself useful and my “self” includes the rigorous training of my mind, though not its precarious familiarity with one or two centuries of history. I had a few other serviceable aptitudes: my mother’s domestic training was commonsensical and adaptable; Guiding and my father’s Heath Robinson style made me an independent though rough handyman; I can drive; being a Guider and then a school teacher gave me some experience of young people, though I had hardly any experience of little children; I was fit but not athletic - I could swim better than I could play any game; I can sew a little, draw a little, paint a little, and am musically useless; I can type, inaccurately, and check other people’s proofs much more reliably; I am articulate on paper and in speech; I am not squeamish about dirt; I have lived for thirty years on much less than the national average income so that I have not developed expensive tastes, though I buy books and pictures which other people do without; I seldom feel bored. But I have found much to learn.

The fields of my useful learning include firstly my teaching, which was done over a wide area. WEA and OU students have different objectives, but both kinds of people are infinitely various - some chiefly want to be stimulated and to discover, and others to achieve high grades; some are uncritical from humility and others from idleness; some are learned and experienced and others ignorant and ill-taught; the apparent sophistication of some hides triviality of education; some are disabled, some socially deprived and others socially aspiring; some have sensitive vanity and others too little confidence; they are men and women of all ages and from all walks of life. I have had room for many mistakes, and made some friends.

The village itself was a field for learning about people and about this changing community, how it saw itself and how it functioned. When I got work on the 1971 census I was allocated to Helmdon as if having six months’ residence here did not matter though it was out of order. It was not agreeable to two or three people and two were never easy with me. But I also got to know many people I shouldn’t otherwise have met, and got told a lot of unnecessary but useful details other people knew, about who was related to whom - an early warning against talking about neighbours. I was enlisted for a few years on to the committee of helpers and visitors of the Fellowship of Retired People, and came to see myself short of tolerance and tact in committee but interested in the people I visited. I learned that I didn’t know enough about communicating with some - it was progress to recognize my ignorance.

I sometimes seemed to get through to the people least like myself -Bessie Walker, for example, whose picture of herself suggested a primitive rusticity scarcely to be expected in the twentieth century. Yet when she came to occupy the old people’s bungalow across the road from Hillcrest (where she had running water indoors for the first time in her life, and an electric cooker she never learned to use, because though all but blind she was more at home cooking on the open grate) she came to trust and rely on me, without suspecting me of passing any judgment on her ways. Her very trust made her death in 1982 deeply distressing to me. She had been ailing and failing more and more, and took to her bed, tended only by her kind neighbour May Ayres. May felt unable to nurse her safely, and I persuaded Bessie to accept hospital care. No doubt mine was not the most authoritative advice she got; but she seemed to be heeding me and I saw her become convinced. I visited her in the Horton, and saw her clean and cared for, hospital-style, and I provided for some small needs. Then I went off to pay a promised visit in the north. But hospital had proved to be a shock Bessie could not recover from without more friendship - it was an appalling invasion of her privacy and denial of her dignity. She refused to eat or drink, and so died, at about the time of my return. She had made no will, and had no known relations. We neighbours consulted about the funeral. My sister fetched her ashes from Leamington, Reg Batchelor showed us where her sister had been buried, and the Baptist pastor buried them there, waiving his fee. Then the District Council sent a skip, and the contents of Bessie’s home were emptied into it. Maud Peart begged one of the geraniums from the living-room window-sill and restored it to life: I still have some descendants of it.

Geoffrey Gulliver persuaded me to take on the Parish Clerkship in 1974, when its £20 a year was some incentive. I learned useful lessons in that job too, not just in administration but in people: Eric Humphrey as an experienced chairman with a capacity to let things be decided by inaction; old Jim Jessett, a former secretary to the Reading Room, who could never see that what he thought fair was not necessarily what the law prescribed, but who had an amazing memory for the precise lines of ancient drains; Ruth Ipgrave’ s independent and intelligent conduct of the arrangements for the Parish Council to take over the Reading Room trust. Some of the business was interesting to know about, so after I gave up the clerkship in 1980, I allowed the proper interval and became an elected member, which I still am. But as clerk I had begun to get the hang of village change as it was happening under my eyes, and to think about it in the light of reading such wise observers as M.K.Ashby, whose Changing English Village, on Bledington, (1974) I read and reviewed. I began to dabble in local history. There was some outdoor work I enjoyed too. As clerk I serviced the trees and footpaths committees, and helped to make the village’s response to Dutch elm disease.

It was this sort of practical work that occasioned an insight I cannot date exactly but can place on the ground. I was walking along the brook between the level crossing and the bridge, I think in summer. Suddenly I felt myself “free” of Helmdon, in the sense in which someone might be made a freeman of a city, because his place in it and service to it were acknowledged. No one was awarding me the freedom of the village: it was an accolade I made to myself. But that was the form of words that occurred to me to express my great contentment that I lived in Helmdon, and a consciousness of putting down roots. Yet I think it was before Helmdon became the place in which I had lived longest, so it was no later than the mid 1980s. This experience must influence my attitude to Helmdon, and to its changing people. The people who like living here don’t all live here as fully as I feel I do. That isn’t just if they are newer, because not all are. Living fully in Helmdon requires living not only with all kinds of its people, but also with its natural setting and the work of the land. Some, even people with children, never go into the fields, though the paths are some of the best in the area. I heard of one woman who said to a farmer’s young daughter that she wished he would stop the cattle from coming up to the top of the field behind her house, because the smell was offensive. Many people never walk even through the village, not even along the pavement outside their own houses, and their children seldom walk to school. Their consciousness of their environment comes from a view from home or a car, and a bit of the sound-track, but nothing has been gained from the sensations of foot or hand. However friendly they are to their neighbours and sociable in their habits, they are not free of Helmdon as I feel myself to be. On a road or path anywhere in the parish, any time of the day or night, I feel free to come and go as one who belongs.

Voluntary work to pay for my education has not been confined to the village. My dead friend and a disabled former OU student were links to membership of the South Northants. Council for the Disabled in its first years, and I became a helper in the water when the Brackley Dippers began as a swimming club for the disabled in 1984 - and still am one, though I go less often than I should. It isn’t easily combined with other voluntary work, because bodies which serve more than the retired have their meetings on Saturdays. The WEA is governed by committees of its members. I joined the WEA in consequence of the Rector (Mr Thompson)’s call on me when I was moving in, and I’ve served that way in Helmdon branch and the Northants. Federation, but much the longest and still in District committees, which meet in Cambridge; and for some years I’ve been on the Standing Orders committee responsible for the business of the biennial national conference. Locally I represented the WEA and other voluntary providers on the governing body of South Northants. Adult Education, throughout its existence from 1991 to 2000, chairing its beginning and its ending, and the rest of its life as vice-chairman. That responsibility is no mark of confidence: I was regarded as having more leisure than most governors, and more experience of adult education.

In the last few years, my time (and more than weekend time) has been competed for also by the church. I was brought up as a member of the Church of England and have never felt inclined to leave it, but until 1987 was merely a church attender and communicant. That year, Roger Caldwell made one of his rare and diffident calls, and asked me to consider acting as churchwarden. One instructive memory of that is Edith Shellard’s remark, “I am glad you’re going to be one of us.” It was the first time I had thought of the church in any place as a finite, recognizable community one could become “one of”. I see the sense in which it is such a community; but I warmly deny that the concept is sufficient: the church, anywhere, should never think of itself as finite. I don’t suppose Edith saw it that way, but only seemed to.

Being churchwarden led me into weekly attendance, and to attempt many tasks I’d not taken on before, from peering for cracks in masonry to sweeping among the pews. A lasting responsibility and labour has been in the churchyard. I have begun and failed to complete its survey and the mapping of the burials; I was party to Christine Duke’s design of a cremation burial area, with teak seat, view of the church, and informal, semi-wild garden, and unmarked but exactly recorded burials; and I have done an inadequate amount of gardening also, not only on my father’s and my friend’s graves but in the extension. I was parish clerk when Sue Lidgley insisted the Parish Council must acquire land for an extension, over twenty years before anyone needed to be buried in it; I became churchwarden about the time the land should have been transferred from the Parish Council to the church, found out twelve years later that it never had been, and at last watched the Bishop of Brixworth consecrate it in the summer of 2000. That is a matter of more labour yet with fork, shears and trowel, weeding, trimming, planting. One responsibility in the churchyard that gives me much satisfaction is helping mourners to decide on plots for the people they have lost, and to feel comfort in the beautiful openness and peace of our churchyard. I am glad to live where burial can still be a focus for the unity between the living and the dead, the past and the present of both families and communities. Reg Batchelor spoke after my own heart when he said that he had been happy working the long years and hours he had worked in the churchyard, because there he was ‘‘among his friends’’.

The administrative work of churchwarden was not something I enjoyed, any more than administration years ago at Hillcroft, and I never did it well, because I am too ill organized and forgetful, too apt to procrastinate. In 1995 I resisted the Rector’s Christmas thanks with some expression of discontent, and of feeling depressed at having ended my work with the OU. He suggested I trained as a reader in the church. I pointed out that I was well over age; but it came about. A reader is a lay person trained to take services, (but not celebrate Communion), to preach and teach, and to do some pastoral work. I was licensed in May 1998, to serve in this benefice of Helmdon with Stuchbury and Radstone and Syresham with Whitfield.

All these various activities in voluntary work have grown up from my intention to undertake service to pay for the education that might be thought wasted by my giving up full-time teaching. But what about that work (also, as it proved, unpaid) of writing, which I wanted to exchange for full-time teaching? The bread-and-butter work always had to go on, at least until I drew my old-age pension. For long spells, writing has been suspended, time and again. Every year the combination of OU teaching and the kitchen garden has made me leave my own work during the spring and summer, and then I struggled hard in the autumn to recover the reality of the imagined and reconstructed world in which my story is set. Bereavement dried up my power for longer; but out of that dryness I built a bridge back to writing by rewriting that first long novel. It is a long time since I gave up expecting that a publisher would be interested in what I write. I had published the short novel about blind Louise myself. A former Hillcroft student sent it to the BBC, and Woman’s Hour serialized it - no doubt seeing the fitness of a blind girl’s own story being transmitted by sound. The rewritten long novel in which she had been a minor figure I finally published myself, in 1989, the second centenary of the setting of the story - on a minute scale, in photocopy of the typescript hand-bound in my self-taught fashion, to make it available in local public libraries. By then I had got going on the sequel of both these books, and that is still far from finished. In fact I have not decided definitely how it will end.

The work has developed. My research has become more searching; and to my mind that has made the story I can write much more interesting. I began in those newspapers in the John Rylands library in Manchester, and when I came here used the large collection of pamphlets published in Rennes in 1778-9, on microfiche in the Bodleian. I went on to the archives in Rennes. The fund of documents on the French Revolution is truly awe-inspiring. The French are natural bureaucrats and this was the first era of bureaucracy at a popular level. That must have been nastily entangling to live in, but it left a rich trail for the historian. Most of my characters are people who really lived, though obscurely, with at most a local importance, and I find their names in lists, reports, registers, dockets, etc., etc. From these glimpses of their activity I can put together pieces of life and character, and guided by that and by my understanding of what took place in the time and city, I create my characters’ personalities and relationships. The chief exception is blind Louise herself, an imagined girl in a real family and city, at a time when blindness interested the sighted as deprivation of liberty and equality.

But since I first wrote Louise’s story, I have exploited one source which has proved very rewarding indeed - the materials most familiar to family historians. French parish registers of baptisms, marriages and burials, before civil registration began in 1792, are much more interesting than English ones. They are signed by all who attended who could sign and chose to do so. Signatures are fascinating, just as faces are. They age, and vary according to the health and sobriety of the writers. Family entries with such signatures across twenty or thirty years provide all sorts of clues to the history of a family besides its births, marriages and deaths - its loyalties and ruptures, its friendships, and even its business and property may be suggested. From this I can construct the setting of my central figure, Emmanuel-Marie Gérard.

From various sources I have discovered things about him which I would never have ventured to invent for him, when I chose his name thirty years ago from a printed list of young Patriots who demonstrated in Rennes in January 1789. He was a mature student - a wine merchant and an official of the guild of commerce before he graduated in law, and an official of his parish, follower of Professor Lanjuinais and parishioner of Lanjuinais’s brother before the professor became a founder of the Jacobins and the leading reformer of the church; he was elected a captain when the first national guards were formed, was in charge of the Rennes detachment sent in January 1790 to pacify rural disturbances beyond the forest of Paimpont, where peasants were killed, and seven weeks later he married the niece of one of the demonstrators he interrogated, who bore their son thirty-nine weeks after that. Thus my chance-picked young man bridges law and trade, and his marriage joined provincial capital and isolated hamlet. Families were all-important networks, and in the city Emmanuel’s spanned almost the whole range of situations and attitudes on the most divisive issue of the Revolution, the relations of church and state. In the country his wife’s family and connections ranged from illiterate farmers to a rural elite of lawyers.

Here I have the historical bones and the already created personalities for a story that fascinates me. But when do I pursue the research (vital parts necessarily in Brittany), and commit my mind to the writing? From the spring when I began the reader training until my next attempt to pick up even the book reading, over four years passed, emptying my memory and starving my sense of the reality of that scene over two centuries ago. Now, I have partly digested some new material. I have teased out of a reticent report on the incident in which Emmanuel himself helped to cause casualties some inferences about Emmanuel, who wrote down part of it and was concerned in what it related. After an intensive fortnight in the Archives in Vannes I have worked out from a thick pile of photocopies from parish registers how the woman he decided to marry was connected to a network of other figures mentioned or the witnesses named and signing. I begin to see what sort of marriage she entered into with this intrusive stranger, and what difference his choice of wife might make to his political stance, as town and country, and secular and Catholic attitudes became divided even to the point of civil war …

Once I am thinking about the affairs of Emmanuel and Louise, and Rennes and those small villages, my interest runs away with me. But it is reasonable, if people wonder why I gave up full-time teaching before I was forty, to show them something other than rebellion against regular work. My commitment to what I call “my own work” is, after all, the only defence conscience can permit against demands on my time, because of that accusation that I have not done what I was educated to do. Actually, in many other cases, I would deny that university education is wasted on people who do not do professional work - such as women who sacrifice professional fulfilment and prospects to occupy themselves with their children. Nowadays, it’s not a sense of guilt which keeps me committed to my main voluntary work, the church and the WEA, now that I am well into normal retirement age.

By that measurement I was elderly when I took on my fresh and demanding responsibility in the church, setting myself to acquire new understanding and new skills. It is not enough to feel I should make this effort because I had a privileged education I hadn’t paid for. My reader training was yet another spell of privileged education and I didn’t pay fees for that either. So why did I do it? Such a call is a personal matter, and one cannot explain it to convince others. But I think also I have a consciousness of having gifts (perhaps a tendency to exaggerate their extent and significance). I believe our gifts are given us to use, and that they will wither unused. The parable of the talents has always had great force for me. Certainly, I enjoy using my abilities, and my capacity to learn. There’s also the compulsion to teach, which marks me as born of teaching stock - an irritating characteristic, I know. Even my desire to write includes that desire to influence people, which I first put a name to when I was interviewed at Hillcroft. English people commonly repudiate the necessity, ever, for revolution, because they have not experienced a society in which admitted evils have no remedy, and I still want to enable English people to enter into the dilemmas of reformers faced with the choice between failure and the coercion of an opposition they see as a minority’s vested interest, and even as foreign interference.

The belief that there are things you can do towards and for other people, and things you should try to do, shouldn’t be laid aside at any age. It is part of our humanity. When Hannah Haynes went finally into professional care at Culworth, in her mid-nineties, it was because she was limited to a wheelchair and one person could not safely move her for her sleep or comfort. But she found in a nursing-home a service she could still render: she lived with her door always open, so that she was open to the endlessly reiterated life-stories of fellow residents who had lost their capacity to care about anything else. Her patience to listen, and to repeat gentle reminders of other things to think about, made her a resource there until she died, at ninety-eight. It was a privilege and a pleasure to visit her.

So there you have me, according to my own version. Some people think I am academic, and perhaps they think me more academic than I ever was. Some find me brusque and argumentative; but I am less confident than I seem. Some reject me as an old maid - and there’s no denying that fault. But I have several handles, and if one doesn’t fit your hand try another. I’m not very easily shocked, though I value what is right. I am very ignorant about sport, and TV, and cult personalities, but I’m willing to talk about anything, even these things or things that may distress us to dwell upon, and such unspeakable matters as God and sin and death. I once stood at the corner of Church Street discussing the weather with Mrs Willie Humphrey, for want of knowing anything else to talk to her about. “Whatever the weather,” I said, “we can’t change it, and we shall have to like it or lump it.” “No!” she retorted with great emphasis. “We shall have to like it.” What an example she set me, to exploit my argumentativeness. If when I meet you, I try to make you remember the sunny days, surely that is not a bad thing?

Jean Spendlove

2001