Chapter 3

One of James Herriot’s clients was a Mr Charles Smedley. He lived at Coxwold, a few minutes south of Thirsk. Coxwold is a venerable and relaxing country village full of genteel cottages spread-out with a wide and grassy through-road gently running away with itself. Coxwold possesses a delightful old-fashioned feel. There are no street lamps here and only small tin bus stop signs and a handful of cars outside the beamed bar of the Fauconberg Arms to obstruct the view. Mr Smedley rented Shandy Hall; an ancient gabled cottage on the northern periphery of the village with views over the fields beyond to the White Horse embellished on a hillside. Back in Herriot’s day it was a run down old farmhouse where he would lamb ewes and treat sick calves and bullocks in the out buildings. Today it is a museum to its more famous occupant from the 18th century " Laurence Sterne.

 

Shandy Hall is only open to the public on Wednesday and Sunday afternoons. The remainder of the week it is a living house just like any other. As it should be I believe. With so many writers, along with other famous folk and the landed gentry, all of whose houses are becoming museums, how long will it be before all the houses in England are museums? The inhabitants of England will have to live somewhere else only entering the country to visit a museum.

 

I explained the lack of opportunities to visit the house to the geriatric woman sat in the kitchen as we entered. She had asked us if we had visited before.

      "We’ve passed by a number of times but the place is always closed."

 

She regarded us with her one good eye; the other seemed glazed over forcing on her the look of gentle insanity. At first I thought that she was just having a breather in her rickety old chair. Then it crossed my mind that she was some sort of greeter, welcoming people to Shandy Hall. It turned out that she, along with a handful of others, was a volunteer; Sterne experts telling the story of Shandy Hall and its famous occupant; well, famous if you live in the 18th century. Though whereas the others would impart information, this doddery old spinster simply sat by the window in the oak beamed kitchen seemingly to keep her from getting under peoples feet. Either that or she had forgotten her lines. We made a dash for the exit when another couple entered the room. As we closed the door we heard the old woman ask the same question. I smiled to myself as the reply came.

      "We’ve passed by a few times but it’s always been closed."

 

I was again breaking my rule of not visiting the houses of these writers by whom I was attempting to be inspired. I carelessly tossed the thought in the waste paper basket like so many other of my ideas and moved on.

 

The study was occupied by what looked like the old woman’s husband, but that would mean I would be wrong about her being a spinster. I had not yet cottoned on to the museums way of doing things and thought he was a visitor just having a sit down as well. He was surrounded by such a glorious little space that I wanted to take the entire room home with me. Having evicted the old boy first. Bill Bryson in his book, The Lost Continent, travelled across America looking for the perfect small town. I was now on the look out for the perfect house. And here was my study: a small box room not exceeding eight foot square, wall to wall bookcases, a roaring fire in the winter, a small box window looking out onto a glorious garden, original beams and a comfy chair plonked in the middle. I could see myself with a quill in one hand and a tankard of beer in the other. Pure bliss. I do not ask for much in life. And what do I get? Part share of a pink back bedroom.

 

The old gentleman, in fact, looked as though he came with the room. When he moved I expected the cobwebs to break and huge clouds of dust to fill the air. He seemed very eager to impart his information, as if he was talking to two Laurence Sterne experts. Oh, how wrong can you be?

 

This chapter being about Laurence Sterne I would do well to furnish you with the rudimentaries of his life, or at least who he was since I am pretty sure you are scratching your heads at the name much like I was before this journey began. Laurence Sterne was an Irish curate and writer, humorist and wit, though only came to the art of writing late in life. The first volume of his first and most famous book: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy was published in his forty-sixth year. He wrote other books: A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, The Sermons of Mr Yorrick and The Journal to Eliza, mostly at Coxwold, but it was Tristram Shandy that brought him immediate success and fame. Everyone who was anyone read Tristram Shandy when it was published. James Boswell Dr Johnson’s biographer and closet poet, wrote: "Who has not Tristram Shandy read? Is any mortal so ill bred?" Yet today you would be very hard pressed to find anyone who was even heard of Tristram Shandy never mind someone who has read it. The trouble is Tristram Shandy is not the easiest novel to read. For one thing there is no plot. It is, technically, about the life of Tristram Shandy, though it takes him until the third of the nine volumes to even get born. Sterne was something of a digresser. In fact he almost made it into an art form. He digressed so much the book inevitably became more about the digressions than the original plot, such that it was. He even remarked upon his digressions himself:

 

      "Take them out of this book for instance, you might as well take the book along with them."

 

I have, and no doubt will continue to go off on a tangent throughout this book, but at least you may be fairly confident that I will make my way back sooner or later. With Sterne you are never quite sure from whence you came, and even if you did you have no reason to suppose you will ever get back there again. Sterne had the notion of publishing at least one volume of Tristram Shandy per year till his death. Shandy could have gone on forever. Luckily Laurence Sterne died nine years after beginning his epic journey, depriving the world of more digressions than is good for any man.

 

Once again we extricated ourselves with dignity and decorum: we sneaked off when someone else came in forcing the old man to start his spiel from the beginning. Moving through the elegantly wood-panelled dining room painted a pale green, we had a choice of rooms, in one of which a guide was attempting to divulge the plot of a book which, he explained was a book within a book and challenges the readers perception. Very Shandian. I recognised the book as If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italian novelist Italo Calvino. I had read it a long time ago and only vaguely remembered the plot, such that it was. The fellow he was talking to had no idea what he was talking about. I kept the information to myself as I knew that if I butted in to this conversation the guide would undoubtedly bore me to tears with intellectual learnings from the book and attempt to furnish me with questions; the answers for which I neither had nor cared about. We moved swiftly on.

 

Our final guide was a middle aged woman who imparted her information in a generally informative fashion. Which you can take as meaning she did not bore me to death, but she certainly tried her best. It was only when she asked us if she had shown us ‘the wall’ that I started getting a strange feeling of Deliverance, though I had failed to notice a banjo playing boy on the porch as we entered. Perhaps granny in the kitchen had a banjo tucked away under her petticoat. None of these people were, in most respects, sane. They were telling the general public who walked in through their door all they knew about a man who wrote, to modern sensibilities, incomprehensible material, half of whom had never ever read anything by Sterne, the rest had never heard of him. Most people who visit museums do so as a kind of diversion, something to do to keep the children amused or somewhere to hide out of the rain. The rain had not stopped all day as we found out having looked around the gardens and spent most of the time hiding amongst the lavender and spare bricks under the porticos.

 

I was going to reply "Yes, I believe it is surrounding us", to her wall question but before I could she deftly opened a wooden panel in the wall to reveal a section of the original wattle and daub wall. I must say it was rather interesting, I could even see some feathers sticking through. I was nearly fascinating for the first five seconds. Then she started talking about it in great detail and I went to sleep. There was another couple in the room and we waited for the woman to focus her attention on them, since the man looked overly keen on listening to what she had to say, the fool, before we escaped and left the house to the Partridge family and went to look around the church.

 

The church is noteworthy only for its octagonal spire though to be honest we just went to look for Laurence Sterne’s grave just to see if he was turning in it. And find it we did; both of them. Sterne has what must be a unique claim to fame: he was buried three times. Upon dying of tuberculosis in 1768 in London he was buried quite without incident and without mourners as the story goes. Some time later medical students dug up several bodies to use as biology dissections, having run out of frogs, presumably. One of the students recognised Sterne’s body. I am not going to attempt to wonder how they recognised it, I dread to think. So they gathered what they could of him and reburied him with as much reverence as they could muster. Two hundred years of relative peace passed before, in 1969, the graveyard he had been just getting comfortable in was due to make way for a multi-storey car park or something equally as pointless. So his bones were dug up a second time and this time brought up to North Yorkshire and laid to rest at Coxwold where he now lies outside the church walls looking out over the country fields. The two headstones were interesting by their opposing styles. The new headstone outside marking his grave bore just his name, dates and occupation of writer. The older slab of stone was much more prosaic with words as if Sterne himself was having one last stab at the stream of consciousness style he made his own.

 

I have no idea why, but another book written in the mid-eighteenth century came into my thoughts as I sat looking over the churchyard. Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that the books were in anyway similar in style because they are not. However they were both joining forces in my head to create a character based novel whose seed was being sown here in Coxwold. Tom Jones is an uproarious novel based on the fortunes of the character of the books title. The one thing which similarized both Sterne’s and Fielding’s books was the authors intervention. Whereas Sterne simply took over his book, Fielding interjected his with what he called a bill of fare of what was to come and talked to the reader directly as if chatting to an old friend, or, indeed, a new one. I liked the idea of relating to the reader rather than simply telling a story. Both books in fact use this trick and as I sat I pondered on using it myself. I also liked Sterne’s use of chapters. To him a chapter was treated little more than an extension of a paragraph. Volume One alone contains twenty-five chapters in fifty-eight pages. To my mind this creates an easier reading style and makes a book " even one as deviated as Tristram Shandy " much quicker to digest. This being the soundbite generation, who could argue that it wasn’t a good idea.

 

There was one big question I had to ask myself: was it still possible to write a novel in the style of either Tristram Shandy or Tom Jones? These books were over two hundred and fifty years old. How on earth could I write a book in this mould and make it relevant to a 21st century readership? I didn’t think Tristram Shandy could be written today. Like I’ve said, I hardly think people even read it today never mind attempt to write something similar. But I didn’t think simply copying someone else’s style was the answer I was looking for here. Perhaps all I could achieve on this journey was to check out as many different styles as possible and find elements from several to suit me. I already knew my novel would have to be humorous since I have great difficulty in taking anything seriously. I liked the idea of engaging the reader personally, but whether that would fit my novel remained to be seen.

 

At last, I felt like I was making strides. I had an idea for a story, though I didn’t have an ending or a plot to work around it at least I was off and running. I also had the beginnings of a style though whether that style could better all those that were to come only time would tell.

Reviews

[PaperHearts]

Finally! A new chapter! :D I can really feel your book coming together, and I think that it's progressing at a really nice, steady pace. I like your tone in this chapter, and the way you describe certain things, for example, the guide; 'Which you can take as meaning she did not bore me to death, but she certainly tried her best.' is a very funny, relatable line! I also like the ending of this chapter, as I can really relate to the excited feeling you get when you finally have an idea for a story! Another captivating chapter! Nice work,
~PaperHearts