A Visit to Cholmondeley

It is sixty years ago since first I visited Cholmondeley Castle. Coronation year. My Uncle Arthur had landed a dream job – butler to the Earl of Rocksavage (later to succeed to the title Marquess of Cholmondeley) – and with it went a magnificent flat in the Castle itself. My auntie, uncle and cousin moved in early in 1953 and soon my sister and I went to stay there for the first of some very memorable holidays.

A couple of weeks ago I went back with Margaret, my wife, and for me it was a truly special occasion. Of course, I cannot take her round the flat because the Castle is not open to the public, but we were free to roam in the park and the gardens. We timed our visit perfectly – the azaleas and rhododendrons were in magnificent bloom and latogether the place was looking more splendid than I had seen ever seen it before. All credit to Lady Lavinia, Dowager Marchioness of Cholmondeley whose vision it was to restore and extend the gardens and open it all to the public. And I have to say how grateful I am to her late husband for employing my uncle as his butler. Without that I would never have known this super place.

 

 

That’s the main thread of my personal Cholmondeley story: came here as a kid in 1953, loved it and have done ever since. There’s another thread woven in with this one but it will have to wait until another time.

 

On our way to the Castle we stopped at Bickley Church. I wanted to spend a little time in quiet reflection beside the grave of my Auntie Betty and Uncle Arthur. Two very special people. 

And that's the churchyard cat who is always there to welcome visitors.

Leaving Gilead Reviewed

It is always gratifying to receive a good review so I was rather pleased when Maria Beltran of the Readers Favorite book reviewing website had this to say about Leaving Gilead:



Susan Ridley feels she is different – she does not quite feel that she belongs to her family with its highly traditional Christian background, and she feels trapped in it. So when Tom Sparrow falls in love with her, they both try to maintain their friendship. This is despite Ridleys’ disapproval of outsiders as dictated by their religion. When Tom is set to go to university, Susan tries to follow suit against her family’s wishes, and pushes on with interviews that she passes. However, she does not push through with university, and Tom does not know why. Thirty years later, Tom returns and buys the old Ridley’s house when it appears in the market. Another young lady named Melanie is interested in the house and they both come to an arrangement. As the story continues, Tom discovers the truth hidden in its outbuilding and begins to learn what happened to Susan Ridley many years ago.



We do not choose the families we are born into, and “Leaving Gilead” is a heartbreaking story of an individual’s fight to assert oneself. The story is set against the backdrop of a very conservative society with irrational beliefs. What does one do with one’s dreams when everything seems to be against one’s favor? Although the situations in the book seem bleak, “Leaving Gilead” is also a story of courage and perseverance. It is a tale of how much a person can endure in paying the price to earn freedom. It is a very touching story written in Robert Crompton's engaging writing style. One cannot help but empathize with the main protagonists and marvel at the narrowmindedness and hypocrisy of some of the characters. This is because the plot is well-defined and the description is vivid. This novel is also an eye-opener and readers will not be able to put the book down once they read the first few pages.



Reviewed by Maria Beltran for Readers' Favorite

Why was Jean-Luc here?

This  is Blakemere in Delamere Forest, recently "rewetted" in a major scheme to  restore ancient peat bogs to this ecologically  important area.

A lot of this area was drained nearly a couple of centuries ago in an attempt to increase timber production. It is said  that the drainage work was carried out by  French prisoners of war from the Napoleonic war - something I never  knew  anything  about as a child at Delamere many years ago. When I heard about it years later  it set my story-weaver's mind in motion and before long I  had the makings of a sub-plot for  my  next novel.

That next novel is  now my present work and Jean-Luc Anquetil has grown into a nearly real character.  So I've been  doing  a bit of reading  around  the subject. Where were those prisoners held or billeted? How much opportunity would they have  had for a measure of freedom, if any? I've searched through Francis Abell's "Prisoners of War in  Britain 1756 - 1815" (1914) And I've drawn a blank. Nothing. There's a similar story about French PoWs building stonewalls  in Snowdonia but the  general  opinion seems to be  that this is very unlikely because work  that could provide income for British  workers would not be given to PoWs -  though  there are some researchers who think  it may have been possible.

The nearest parole  towns to Delamere were Whitchurch in Shropshire and Ormskirk in  Lancashire. But PoWs were confined within strict limits of the town. So what do I do? I could move this bit of the novel a few miles away to Whitchurch and  put Jean-Luc into a different situation  there. On the other hand, I can still see him in the forest - and this is where Helen lives with her father and  their animals.
So why is he there? My "research" seems to have taken  a different  twist.

Crompton's Mule

Despite appearances to the contrary, I have just put up a new blogpost. It's on the new blog which I've started as a kind of spin-off from my current novel. Now I have the perfect displacement activity - I can go and tinker with Crompton's Mule and make out that what I am doing is fleshing out the character of Freddie Whitaker for my novel.

Snake oil works better than prayer

Freddie Whitaker has spent most of his career teaching biblical studies in a theological college training people for ministry. Sometimes he thinks he has been wasting his time, especially when students suggest, as they so often do, that serious biblical study is all very well in Cambridge but has no place in the local church. Little wonder that more than a century of biblical scholarship has barely begun to find its way to ordinary Christian believers.

Extreme fundamentalism persists but so far as debate about belief is concerned, it sets up straw men. We criticise the silliest manifestations of fundamentalism but to very little effect. It’s the us and them thing. We are not like that. We’re mainstream. We’re sensible If you are heard as directing you attention to the sectarian fringe, the message which the mainstream will pick up will always be, You just carry on exactly as you are.

Once in a while Freddie wonders whether he should finish off his career with a spell back in a local church where he might be able to be heard among ordinary believers. But really he couldn’t face it. He would much rather go back to the classroom and teach physics. Fat chance there is of that.

A serious issue drops in front of him when Beresford Hall, a partner college, invite Rev Jessica Renshaw the church’s Healing and Wholeness Officer to address them and to preach during Holy Week. The problem for Freddie is that Jessica gives respectability and credibility to what is at bottom harmful. She is a long way removed from the healers who are celebrated on the fringes of the church and who offer miracles to the faithful and astound the medical profession. For Jessica, true healing lies in the peace of mind that comes from the wholeness which Christ gives when we surrender ourselves and our ailments to him.

This may be well and good as far as it goes, Freddie suggests, and if it were to be promoted as prayers for comfort in the face of suffering then he would probably have no quibble with it. But to offer as healing outside of the circles in which this specialised vocabulary is current, is to offer healing which doesn’t happen. Healing which doesn’t involve getting better. And that is not what people will come looking for. It offers false hope and sits squarely alongside all the false therapies that do no good.

If he had left it at that, he might have got away with it. But he added a story from when he was an undergraduate physics student suffering from severe sinus headaches. A friend gave him a remedy to try. It was a green oily liquid. You put a couple of drops in the palm of your hand, rubbed your palms together and then cupped them over you nose and inhaled. A powerful vapour of mixed aromas and ammonia seemed to work quite well. The liquid? Snake oil. So Freddie, inevitably, was characterised as the clergyman who said that snake oil works better than prayer.

Freddie takes over...

..where Martin left off. In the opening of my first novel, Bunderlin, Martin Latham, an academic historian and the novel’s finder out of what was going on, was writing a paper. He had been dabbling with it for a long time, too long. But Martin was a ditherer, the kind of guy to whom things happened rather than the sort who was always in control. So it was never clear whether he ever finished that paper.

I cannot criticise Martin for being a ditherer – at least not so far as that paper is concerned. Because when deciding what it was to be about, I hit upon one which I had begun and tucked away again to give me time to write my novel. The Pre-Maccabean Origins of Proto-Daniel. Daniel is a book of the Bible, one which is a happy hunting ground for those who like to find hidden indications of the date of the second coming of Christ. Something to treat very warily, of course, and with utter circumspection. Maybe I should return to it and complete it.

In the meantime, however, Frreddie Whitaker, one of the leading characters of Whitaker’s Basin, principal of a small theological college in Cambridge, has fallen foul of church politics. He asks embarrassing questions but, worse, he supplies embarrassing answers. What questions? What answers? I wonder if perhaps I will let him find Martin Latham’s finished paper and work on a revised gospel to go with it. Something like my own Gospelof Eleazar. If he were to preach a Christmas sermon and an Easter sermon based up that, I don’t think his church career would last very much longer. Just what I need. For Freddie, I mean. I retired a couple of years ago.

Progress?

Sometimes when writing, the outcome of a day's work can be a reduced word count. And I'm not thinking solely about when editing for tightness removes unnecessary verbiage. Today I was pondering how tackle the next chapter of my novel, the one which introduces Freddie Whitaker as a major  viewpoint character, and it became quite clear that it would work far better if I were to scrap the chapter which I have just written.

My previous chapter began with Judy arriving in Cambridge to spend a week of her Easter break at Radcliffe Court, the college where her uncle is Principal. My new chapter, the one which I shall begin writing tomorrow, opens with Judy arriving in Cambridge... But this time we shall see it all through Freddie's eyes as he picks her up from the railway station and begins to confide in her in a way which he cannot  with his own family, something of the  church intrigue that has led to his unlooked-for retirement.

So was the previous chapter wasted effort? Not in the least. It goes into my growing folder of notes and episodes which build up the background and the characters of the story.