Charlotte Moore’s family have lived at Hancox on the Sussex Weald for well over a century. Hancox is a large, rambling house, and the Moores are a family who throw nothing away. Charlotte Moore still cooks on a 1934 Aga. Every drawer and every cupboard bulges with letters, diaries, receipts, even cheque book stubs. Moore has pieced together this chaotic archive to construct the history of her family. It is a complex but riveting story.
Hancox was bought in the 1891 by a 23-year old spinster named Milicent Ludlow. Both her parents had died, leaving her with independent means. Milicent’s mother, Bella, was a member of the Leigh Smith family, who were descendants of an 18th century banker named William Smith. Though the Leigh Smiths were cousins of Florence Nightingale, they didn’t quite cut it socially. They were illegitimate — the five children of a rich Smith by a working-class woman whom he never married. There was also the worrying matter of the ‘family taint’. Bella Leigh Smith suffered from insanity after the birth of her first child. When her third child was born, she went mad for good. Charlotte Moore discovered the diary of Bella’s husband in a suitcase in the attic, and she uses this to reconstruct in painful detail the story of Bella’s illness. Bella was cared for at home by her husband, and she died of TB aged 42. One of her daughters also grew up to become manic depressive.
The family survived these tragedies partly because they were wealthy. The Leigh Smith brothers didn’t need to work for a living. One brother, Ben, was a Victorian gentleman-explorer who went on five Arctic voyages which he paid for himself: old William Smith must have left a vast amount of money. Crucial to the family dynamic were the aunts. The Leigh Smiths specialised in strong-minded aunts. There was Aunt Anne (Nannie) Leigh Smith, an aesthete and artist who lived in Algiers with her devoted friend Isabella. Today they would be labelled as a lesbian couple but, as Moore wisely says, the Victorians just didn’t ‘go there’. The best aunt in Charlotte Moore’s saga is Barbara Bodichon. Her French husband, Dr Bodichon, a physician with a penchant for nudism, was so weird that no one could understand why she married him (Moore diagnoses high-functioning Autism). Barbara was fat, outspoken, bossy, feminist and kind. Childless herself, she took a mothering interest in the younger generation. It was Barbara who spotted the talent of the junior doctor, Norman Moore.
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