Low life | 20 June 2019 | The Spectator

I walked in out of the rain, dripping, and sat down beside the fire on the primitive high-backed settle. ‘Is this OK?’ I said to the guardian. ‘Yes, you’re allowed to sit on the furniture, none of which is original,’ she said. She was a small woman in her fifties, radiating an attractive combination of reverence and humility. The log fire smoking quietly in the fireplace was a wonderful, essential touch, I thought. The slow tick of a grandfather clock and the rain squalling against the windows emphasised the silence of the cottage parlour. The cob walls, painted the colour of diluted pig’s blood, were a yard thick. There was also a dresser, an oil lamp, some plain old wooden chairs and a small round table. On the table was a violin. I consciously shut my mouth to prevent me from stupidly asking the guardian whether it was the actual violin Hardy had played as a child.

Instead (for this was why I had come here today), I tried to capture the scene his poem ‘The Self-Unseeing’ conjures in my mind and moves me every time I read it. In the poem, Hardy the poet is inspecting the ruins of this, his childhood home, from some point in the distant future. There, he points out, is the old stone floor, ‘Footworn and hollowed and thin’. And there is the ‘former door/ Where the dead feet walked in’. On which side of the fireplace had his beloved mother Jemima sat ‘Smiling into the fire’, I wondered? And where exactly, I wondered, had Hardy the child stood, ‘Bowing it higher and higher’? Hardy sees his family singing here in the parlour, and himself as an ecstatic child, playing his violin.