Trafalgar Day

It was strange being at Jane Austen's House on Trafalgar Day. Of course Jane and her mother and sister were still in that difficult nomadic period in 1805; they didn't move into the cottage until 1809. (Edward, what were you thinking of? How could you have let that go on so long?)
But sitting in the cottage and in the garden, seemingly so far away from everything, I had a sense of what it must have been like waiting for news, hoping for the letters that didn't arrive, and then came along in threes, the dreadful wait to know if loved ones were still alive.
A neighbour of ours, Bob, used to spend most of his time sitting outside his front door, waiting for visitors who didn't arrive, and calling out to passers-by "Been shopping? You'll never get rich that way!" and from under an umbrella "Nice weather - for ducks!" From late summer his refrain was "Everybody knows when my birthday is - it's Trafalgar Day!"
Do many people still know when Trafalgar Day is? I think Bob quite often had to add "21st October, of course!" I expect people had made more of a thing of Trafalgar Day when he was young.
Bob collected maritime memorabilia, prints of warships and clippers in gilt frames, ships in bottles, brass things... I think he had been in the merchant navy during the war.
I can't remember making him a birthday cake, but he'd start hinting about Christmas cakes in early November, so I always made him one of those. One year I used proper royal icing (not the sort that you just roll out) and recklessly used raw egg white. Afterwards, I spent weeks worrying that I had poisoned him and that forensics would soon be onto me (raw egg...old people...salmonella). I think that salmonella can take a few weeks to manifest itself. Some months later he did get ill, and he died not long after that, but from cancer. After Bob died, his son finally arrived and threw the nautical pictures and ornaments in a skip. Who would want those old knick-knacks?
It's strange, the things people keep and the things they throw away. My family has far too much stuff. At the moment we keep things by default.
I imagine that some of the things in the Museum were kept because they were Aunt Jane's. Some probably survived by accident, whilst some things, of course, were deliberately destroyed. Some things might take on a significance after the owner's death that they never possessed when he or she was still alive.
Different things entrance me each time I walk around the Museum Here is a lace collar...this teapot was probably given to Cassandra on her 60th birthday...Frank carved this box...this is Jane's very own pelisse - beautiful silk in autumn colours - I wonder why it is so well preserved - maybe she didn't like it and that is why it survived. Or maybe she didn't wear it much - or maybe it was newish and she never had the chance to wear it. It's beautiful - I long to touch it, but it's locked away behind glass.
Bach home, I feel like throwing stuff out. I should be sticking to the rule more - beautiful or useful, beautiful or useful. I'm not planning on dying soon, but I certainly wouldn't want to leave behind a cupboard full of plastic lunchboxes with mismatched lids.

Yew Berries

Yew Berries
There are yew trees in the garden. They are older than the crucial two hundred years, so they would have been here. Recently somebody found a key hidden in one of these trees - a very old key - but nobody knows what it was for. It didn’t fit any of the doors. Could there be a secret door or a box hidden somewhere?
At the moment the yews are gorgeous, studded with sticky carmine berries, which fall to make the flagstone paths treacherous to visitors, even those with the most sensible shoes. Upstairs in the Museum is a pair of wooden pattens - not Jane’s - though she would have had some just like them. I wonder if they would give protection against slipping on yew berries. I’ve just read an article that says that bright red lipstick is in this season. Yew berry red would be a lovely shade, though probably not for someone (like me) with yellowish skin tones.
Celia, the Museum gardener, is one of the people that I most want to meet. There is still lots out at the moment, but I suspect that this is a garden where there is always lots out. Jane Austen’s mother worked in the garden, and it used to extend far beyond the beech hedges and soft brick walls of today. Jane’s brother had a shrubbery planted so that the ladies could take an appropriate sort of exercise. Jane described herself as a “desperate walker”; this must have been one of her methods of composition, of finding the space to think. Her walks took her far beyond the shrubbery. Visitors today will take a turn in the garden and take photos of each other against the perfect backdrop it provides.
Sometimes I like looking at those plant catalogues that fall out of the Sunday papers. I imagine that if I did buy one of those “instant border - colour all year round for just £19.99” sets, and that if I managed to plant everything in the right place, and if it all worked and the promises came true, my garden might look like the Museum’s garden. (Of course it would have to be an “instant border true to the gardens of the early nineteenth century” set.) My reality is north-facing, hen-ravaged patch of mossy lawn. Perfect gardens don’t belong to slapdash gardeners.
Professor Kathryn Sutherland gave a lecture here earlier this month. The subject was Jane Austen’s manuscripts. One of the many things I learnt is that there are two types of writers: programmatic (who spend ages planning and sketching) and immanent (who will spend a long time thinking, but then will get it all down on paper quite quickly). Jane Austen seems to have been one of the latter. Knowing that there are these two acknowledged types is quite a comfort. I’ve always felt a bit of a fraud and rather slapdash, as though I don’t work hard enough at planning individual chapters and scenes, and don’t do enough experimenting with structures etc. etc. I do tend to think a lot and then get it all down on the page quite speedily, though prior to much editing of course. I suppose that one could still be an immanent writer who is slapdash and bit of a fraud, though...
I shan’t tell my creative writing students that I also learnt from Professor Sutherland that Jane Austen’s perfect, precise punctuation wasn’t all her own work. She had an editor, William Gifford, whose hand can be detected, transforming her manuscripts (which consisted of pages smaller than A5) into the polished works that we know today. Some scholars and critics have regretted that some of her manuscripts have survived, revealing some of the idiosyncrasies of her spelling and punctuation, but the genius, the unique voice is there on the tiny pages - perfect and never slapdash.

School Days

The journey from Southampton to Chawton for a feeble non-driver can take almost two hours. I suspect that it doesn't feel much slower than when Jane Austen made the same journey 200 years ago, but I am absolutely not grumbling. I have what must be one of the loveliest jobs in the world. It is up there with being the keeper of that tropical island, though I don't get to stay the night.
Last week it poured, but today, Monday 12th October, it's golden and lovely. There are crushed walnuts on the village pavements. Mondays are usually school days, but today there are no school parties.
On one of my first days, the school party was from an independent school for girls from near Chichester. Last week it was from a big secondary school near Southall. The students explore the house and garden then don white cotton gloves to handle nineteenth century artefacts, parasols and so on. If they are Grade Four or above they may play the piano. After lunch there is the walk (in Jane Austen's footsteps) along the road and up to the big house owned by her brother Edward. It is amazing how slowly teenagers can walk. Louise, the Education and Collections Manager, stops them just before Chawton House comes into sight to tell them that they are about to experience their Pemberley Moment ("So what first attracted you to millionaire Mr. Darcy?"). And then they are struck by the contrast between Jane's life (shared bedroom where the fire wasn't lit until the last weeks of her life etc. etc.) and her brother's.
Up at the big house there is dancing. The students are given lovely sprigged empire-line dresses (some wear them over their jeans and hoodies) or frock coats made of a gorgeous velvety moleskinny material. I'd always imagined that the men's clothes would have been itchy. With a mixed school there is a lovely moment when the girls emerge from the grand dining room where they get changed and meet their partners with much giggling and a few sharp intakes of breath from the boys. Some girls will always want to be boys and wear the frock coats instead.
Louise says that whatever the school, there will always be a group of Lydia Bennets. They will always be in a certain position at the bottom of the grand hall by the window, and they will always fall about squealing and giggling.
Eventually the music stops, and the costumes are returned to the huge cupboards in the servant's corridor. The students meander back down the hill to the 21st century where the coaches and minibuses are waiting in the village car park. (And by the way, I'm told that all visits are fitted to the appropriate key stage of the national curriculum.)

New Writer in Residence

This is the first time Jane Austen's House Museum has had a writer in residence - it's very exciting!

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Come and visit her in person at the museum on a Monday or Wednesday.