Sir Tom Stoppard, who died last week, never wrote a memoir, but he did sort of speak one. Just over ten years ago, he told me that he and his new wife, Sabrina Guinness, had become tenants of an old rectory in Dorset. I asked him if he would therefore speak as guest of honour at the AGM of the Rectory Society, a fan club for existing and former clergy houses which I invented in 2005. The AGM always takes place in a central London church, and in 2015, the year I invited Tom, it was held in the Queen’s Chapel beside St James’s Palace. Beyond expressing a tepid wish that speakers make some small reference to the society and its purposes, I never specify their subject. Years before, I had persuaded Tom to give a lecture about liberty, in support of a Telegraph campaign called ‘It’s a free country’, so I knew for certain that he could speak as well as he wrote, but I had no idea what he would say.
He began by describing briefly his memory, as a boy, of moving into the old vicarage in Ockbrook, Derbyshire. As soon as he saw it, ‘I said to myself, “This is more like it”, though I would have been hard put to it to explain what “it” was like’. Then he took us back – to his birth, as Tomas Straussler, in Moravia; his Jewish family’s escape from Nazi persecution to the works of Bata, his father’s shoemaker employers, in Singapore; the Japanese bombing of the boat containing young Tom as it fled Singapore for Bombay; the death of his father, killed in another boat, almost the last to leave Singapore; young Tom’s four years in India and his mother’s marriage to ‘Major Stoppard of the British Army’, which brought the family to Southampton on a freezing night in 1946. His stepfather got a job with Firth Brown, the Sheffield firm that invented stainless steel, and the family moved between various houses in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire.
All this, said Tom, was part of what he insisted was his ‘charmed life’ and his ‘transformation into someone who is English’. Without wishing to disparage his native Czech language (‘or, for that matter, Swahili’), he said that to be ‘educated into’ the English language was ‘a glory and a touch of grace for someone who happens to be a writer’. And just as he was ‘educated into’ English, so was he educated into England, unlike (as he did not say) most English writers, who take the place for granted. The ‘it’ which the rectory was ‘more like’ was, I think, an idea of England.
Tom’s England of the 1940s and 1950s was provincial, almost pastoral. In a village alleyway was a cottage containing the ‘ladies’ tailoring business’ set up by his step-grandmother in her widowhood, opposite the butcher. If you passed under an arch out of the alley, you descended to a stream with voles and water rats and other ‘Wind in the Willows-y’ creatures. The boy Stoppard also frequented his step-great-grandmother’s small farm and ruined mill, ‘a world of chamber pots and thunder-boxes and paraffin lamps’. ‘I cannot tell you,’ said Tom, ‘what a nice way it was to become English’, the most important word in that sentence being ‘become’. He had arrived with ‘no particular conscious affiliations’. But now they took hold and became, he said, his equivalent of the domain inFournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes. The architecture and ‘even more, the country itself, imprinted itself upon me’. At his shambolic prep school in a decayed former stately home, he delighted in ‘this amazing liberty which was allowed us between lessons’. ‘I discovered England all at once, and I’m jolly glad I did.’
Aged 50 and famous, Tom was returning south from Scarborough and decided to look in upon his childhood haunts. He found his grandmother’s tailoring shop ‘vandalised’, the farm and mill ‘gentrified’ by an assistant chief constable, and a huge carpark which had forced the stream into a culvert beneath a traffic overpass. The domain had been lost. This provoked Tom to the nearest he got to politics, a subject on which he was usually elusive: ‘There is always a tension between our desire to conserve and our need to progress.’ Both are real and valuable, ‘and yet I know myself to be a conservative’. The way he pronounced that last word emphasised the ‘conserve’ part of it.
And then, just married (for the third time) in 2014, Tom became ‘the very, very pleased tenant of a rectory’. He told us he loved the name of the village, Tarrant Gunville, because it sounded like that of a Victorian actor-manager (‘Sir Tarrant Gunville!’). He loved, too, the late-18th-century rectory itself, which stands near what remains of Eastbury, ‘once the third largest house in England’, 600ft long, but of which nothing remains save the kitchen and stable block. The upkeep of the house sat like an incubus on the shoulders of its owners. Eventually, the 2nd Lord Temple, living full-time in Italy, sent word to his steward, Doggett, that he should knock down the subsidiary parts and sell off the stone. Firmly believing his master would never return, Doggett knocked down the main bit too, and sold the stone to his own profit. One day, however, as he sat in the Bugle Horn inn, word came to him that his absent master had just been spied descending from the London coach at Blandford. The unjust steward went back to Eastbury and shot himself. This dramatic history seemed to make Tom even happier.
Eastbury, as Tom explained, was built by Vanbrugh, and the rectory Tom and Serena inhabited is partly constructed from the stones sold at the great house’s ruin. What he was too modest to say, but I decided to mention in my vote of thanks, was that Vanbrugh was a playwright as well as an architect. I sense how much pleasure that link gave the great playwright of our own time, rounding off his charmed life. It was fitting that we made Tom Stoppard, in succession to Debo Devonshire, the patron of the Rectory Society.
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