

# Something in the Water

# Unreliable Biographies

# By

# Tunbridge Wells Writers

SOMETHING IN THE WATER

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Published by Tunbridge Wells Writers Publications at Smashwords

Copyright © (2015) for individual stories remains that of the named author.

All rights reserved.

While offered freely for personal use the stories in this collection should not be reproduced without the permission of the relevant author(s). All unauthorised commercial use is expressly prohibited. Links for the Tunbridge Wells Writers website, Facebook and Meet-Up pages can be found in the introduction to this book.

Published by Tunbridge Wells Writers

Publications at Smashwords

Copyright 2015

Linda Chamberlain

Carolyn Gray

David Smith

Christopher Hall

Jess Mookherjee

Kate Loverage

Anne Carwardine

Cover image of Chalybeate Spring©2012

Roddy Paine Studios

www.roddypaine.co.uk

Cover design by Simon John Cox

Special thanks to Peppy Scott for suggested changes and corrections.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Tunbridge Wells Writers: An Introduction

FOREWORD by Horace Smith

CHAPTER 1 - Jo Brand by Linda Chamberlain

CHAPTER 2 - W.H.Davies by David Smith

CHAPTER 3 - Sarah Grand by Carolyn Gray

CHAPTER 4 - Arthur Conan Doyle by Katherine Loverage

CHAPTER 5 - Keith Douglas by Jess Mookherjee

CHAPTER 6 - Vita Sackville-West by Christopher Hall

CHAPTER 7 - Vicky Hiccup by Linda Chamberlain

CHAPTER 8 - E.M.Forster by Jess Mookherjee

CHAPTER 9 - Rachel Beer by Katherine Loverage

CHAPTER 10 - Will Storr by Carolyn Gray

CHAPTER 11 - Richard Cobb by Katherine Loverage

CHAPTER 12 - William Makepeace Thackeray by Christopher Hall and Jess Mookherjee

WHO'S WHO by Anne Carwardine

TUNBRIDGE WELLS WRITERS

**An Introduction**

Tunbridge Wells Writers is a small collective of aspiring writers living in and around the much-maligned town of Tunbridge Wells in Kent. We meet once a fortnight to discuss all aspects of writing, to offer mutual support and encouragement, to swap ideas and writing tips, and, on occasion, to work together on group projects like this one. Several of us, in the great writer tradition, also like to take the opportunity to down a few glasses of wine and/or beer, which is one of the reasons we meet in a local pub.

Neither a fondness for alcohol nor residence in Tunbridge Wells are prerequisites for membership of the group, however, so if you, dear reader, have similar literary ambitions but prefer soft drinks or live elsewhere please feel free to join us either in the flesh or through our website or Facebook page which are found -

Here: Tunbridge Wells Writers Website

and on social media: Facebook Page and Twitter

We also promote the group through Meet-Up, where dates and times of upcoming meetings are always available, Meet Up Page

FOREWORD

by Horace Smith

I am delighted to be able to commend to you this short collection of stories and articles about the writers of that most famous of spas – Tunbridge Wells.

It comes as no surprise that there are so many great names, myself included, who are connected to the town but to see them joined in one little volume like this fills me with awe and excitement.

I know what it is to be an aspiring man of letters and so it was an honour to be asked to write this address to you, dear reader. Not my first address, do I hear to you say? Well, naturally you are right. My most famous such piece was penned with my dear brother for that competition for the reopening of the Drury Lane Theatre after it burned down. Our Rejected Addresses was a roaring success with seven reprints in three months. They called it a parody. For myself, I liked to describe our efforts more in the style of the famous poets we were...well, yes, parodying, I suppose, if you must.

It was a relief to me that Lord Byron took no offence since I knew him to be a man of delicate, sometimes wild sensibilities. They say I produced the flavour of his writing so nearly that it was impossible to tell the difference. My dear friend, Shelley, took it in good part and his support must have fuelled the sales of our little book.

It gave me a place in literary history – some achievement for a stockbroker of Tunbridge Wells, I think you will agree. My novels have been rather forgotten which is a disappointment to me; they were rather overshadowed by Rejected Addresses which I hear is occasionally mentioned to this day.

But now, without any further ado, let me introduce this excellent volume from the pens of Tunbridge Wells Writers. I view this little group as my descendants, my children almost, treading the path I took all those years ago, searching for the muse before breakfast and struggling to find their own places in the literary world. Read on and you may find something that will inspire and please you. So many notable writers have Tunbridge Wells in their blood. Some lived here, some passed through and some, like me, died here.

And finally, if I may, a little parody of the modern writer that you will be more familiar with. The list of my works is (so I am promised) written below. You won't find me on Facebook or Twitter but all good antiquarian bookshops will have heard of me

Horace Smith

1779 – 1849

Books: -

The Rejected Addresses

Brambletye House

Tor Hill

Reuben Apsley

Zillah

The New Forest

Walter Colyton
CHAPTER 1

Jo Brand

A Tribute by Linda Chamberlain

Hecklers are a fact of life for a stand up comic – a sort of parasitical support act stealing a laugh at the expense of the person on stage but without the glare or responsibility of the spotlight. According to the average heckler, there is more than enough of Jo Brand to go around. In other words she's a large woman and deserves the abuse being meted out.

To my mind, there isn't enough of Jo Brand to go around. I'm not saying she needs to eat more chocolate and fat up a bit but rather there should be more people like her in the world. She's famous for her lazy style and unpalatable one-liners but if she had a list of things to achieve in a lifetime she could already tick off novelist and script writer. She's co-written the comedy _Getting On_ , winning a Bafta for best comedy actress, and, before she came to our notice as a comic, she was a psychiatric nurse for ten years. Embarrassingly for her, she's sometimes described as one of our national treasures. Yes, that makes her sound like she should be behind glass...or nailed onto a wall in the Tate and perhaps, no one deserves the responsibility of such an accolade. Surely, it's enough that she stands up for all the people who don't give a monkeys about the clothes they wear and is a defender of the downtrodden - racists and bullies being among her favourite comedy targets.

Her life prepared her for the rigours of the comedy circuit. Her story gives some understanding into how she's able to bat aside the heckler's chant of ugly whore or fat lesbian. Worse things have happened to her, you see...some of them in Tunbridge Wells.

A few words slung on stage are not that bad once you get used to it, she says in her autobiography _Look Back in Hunger_. It sounds like the sticks and stones defence encouraged by mothers everywhere. But she's right. There's nothing dangerous about being a stand up although the abuse has to be cleverly parried, she says, as the comic moves onto the next joke. Audiences expect a bit of neat repartee and mostly they want the performer to outwit the voices beyond the spotlights.

Her journey from nice little kid, to nightmare teenager and now award-winning writer is a fascinating one. Early years were spent in South London and the Kent countryside. She was one of three children and had the typical upbringing you'd expect for someone born in the 1950s – much of it was spent playing outdoors but I will fast forward to the moment Tunbridge Wells began to weave its influence on her life. She didn't live in this genteel town, not yet at least, but being a bright girl she got a place at Tunbridge Wells Girls Grammar School.

I mentioned this little-known fact about her to someone I met the other night at a friend's birthday dinner. He was surprised because she makes much of coming from 'sarf London', the place of her birth where she later returned. Politically, she's on the left...well, she's a Labour supporter and is outspoken on issues of equality. Her comic material is known for its lugubrious style and sharp content on attitudes to women. My new friend appeared disappointed about this grammar school connection as if it was attained by cheque book rather than merit.

Joining TWGGS meant Jo spent four hours on a bus every day and wore what she described as the yummy navy and yellow uniform together with a ridiculous felt hat. The bus was a chugging double-decker which stopped at every village between Benenden and Tunbridge Wells. The school was just as you'd imagine with hundreds of academically bright girls from many different backgrounds directed by a group of teachers who ranged from sweet as honey to horrifyingly fierce. Rebelliousness existed there but her account of it might make you smile, especially if you've been through school in 'sarf London'. After a few weeks of the bus journey our girl got into the routine and found hats stayed off until the outskirts of the town. Shocking!

Smoking was added to the mix after a few years – the bravest occupying the back of the bus, coughing and giggling. I think it's safe to assume Jo Brand was among them. I think we can also assume she was responsible for some of the laughter but she's a modest autobiographer and doesn't blow that particular trumpet. Ever.

She seemed to love it at TWGGS. There was a great group of friends, she kept out of trouble and enjoyed her favourite Latin lessons, but it wasn't all rosy. There was some bullying...and not from the girls. There's always one teacher who stands out in most people's memories of school and for Jo this was no different. There was one who appeared to take pleasure in exposing her weaknesses or humiliating her in front of the class. It got so bad that she was reluctant to go to school and eventually complained to her mum who like all good mothers was able to sort it out.

She liked school enough to return there recently for Speech Day. It was a surreal experience, she says. The new headmistress, unlike the one she remembers, was astonishingly normal and belonging to the 21st century. They all sang the school song which Jo had dutifully suppressed and she made an encouraging speech. I wish she had been there when my daughter graduated. We got the lady banker who gave an inspiring address but was a little light on humour. Sorry, but I could have done with Jo Brand that day.

There's plenty of Jo Brand modesty in her remembrances of school days. 'I did OK academically,' she says.

It was whispered that she might get a place at Oxford or Cambridge so I think she might have done a little more than alright. You must remember that there are different goal posts at TWGGS where all the pupils are bloody brilliant. But it was not to be...everything went horribly wrong. The family moved to Hastings. Nothing wrong with that; it's a perfectly nice place but it's not Tunbridge Wells and Jo was reluctant to go. She was sixteen and had to and the resentment stayed with her a long time. She started behaving badly at school, she skipped off lessons heading for the Pier and she acquired a very unsuitable boyfriend.

She writes about that time from the perspective of her adulthood – well, she's a national treasure and the mother of two young children so she understands very well what she put her parents through. I can feel all the rage of her teenage self as she calmly relates how her father angrily burned ALL her unsuitable clothes, how she was frequently grounded and how eventually her mum and dad told her to leave home. Aged seventeen. Her dreadfully unsuitable, drug-taking boyfriend found her a bedsit, so naturally it was occupied on the other floors by a landlady who was dealing dope, a single mum, a Rastafarian playing loud reggae all night and five Korean cooks crammed into the top room.

She probably didn't think so at the time but fortunately she caught Mr Unsuitable Boyfriend in a pub fiercely kissing another girl and took revenge by grabbing the nearest weapon – a full soda siphon – and squirted it at the guilty pair. You see, this is what I most love about the woman. She has a gutsy, knee-jerk reaction to these annoying incidents in life. Some would call it a quick temper but not me, I love it – and then, being an intelligent person, she makes a quick dash for safety. This is all written about with such dead-pan delivery that you can't help but admire her. Her book is peppered with accounts of her wading in, intervening or even throwing a punch before legging it. Very funny.

Perhaps this was one of the low points of her life; she certainly needed to pick herself up. 'A list of everything I had lost because of this man-boy flashed through my head,' she says in _Look Back in Hunger_. Her home, her relationship with her family, her security and her academic future were damaged but she had the strength to move on by hiring a van, packing up her stuff and getting out of Hastings while her duplicitous love was in London.

Returning to the Tunbridge Wells where she had felt so comfortable, she soon got another job, this time in the famous Pantiles. Her description of the place is brilliant – 'A historical pedestrian shopping street beloved by the Regency mob, which had a spring at one end where the dodgy-of-health would fill up bottles with water and hope that necking the stuff would make them better.'

She worked in a pub and the couple who ran it became a second mum and dad to her. She shared a flat with a gay friend and retrieved some security in her life, eventually feeling confident enough to get what she described as a grown-up job working in a Barnardo's children's home. Challenging? Oh, yes. There were eleven kids in the house with various emotional problems. There was no washing machine for a while - it had to be done by hand - and thanks to one child regularly jumping from bed to bed and pissing on the other kids, there was plenty of it to do. The couple who ran the home were nice enough, she says, but sometimes went away for the weekend leaving Jo, or her friend and colleague, in charge. If she needed to go shopping for food she had to take all eleven kids with her, but trying to stop the shoplifting and eating was a task beyond human endurance.

Jo was about nineteen and enjoying the job in spite of the difficulties. She had found herself a bedsit in a leafy Victorian street and partied as hard as she worked. With a group of friends she would drive out to country pubs or go to Tunbridge Wells' premier nightclub, the Tropicana. One night, after a fancy-dress party, she came home very drunk and, having run out of money for the electric meter, she lit a candle and put it by the bed. No awards for guessing what's coming. She fell asleep. Ah, but she woke up and put out the smouldering blanket that had fallen on the flame. She fell asleep once more...only to wake up much later feeling extremely hot. Had she listened in physics, or not been pissed out of her head, she says, she wouldn't have lifted up the mattress for a good look because of course it burst into flames. The curtains quickly followed, the TV exploded and she rushed to a neighbour for help.

Tunbridge Wells is a quiet town and this was high drama, so naturally the fire brigade came quickly, charged through the bay window and put out the flames. But Jo had lost what little she owned – a guitar, her clothes and a collection of records. She was eventually taken to the home of a friend in her nightdress and a charred overcoat. A dim view was taken by the couple running the Barnardo's home of her taking the next day off work. The inevitable row followed and she walked out...so once again, my heroine hit rock bottom with no possessions, no home and no job. She phoned her mum...good call, who rushed to get her and take her home. There are two heroines in this story and I've become rather fond of Jo's mum – the sort of woman you want in a crisis. Her positive influence is often mentioned. She showed her daughter that women can do anything they want and Jo cites this as one of the reasons she felt determined enough to do stand up even though it was a male-dominated arena.

However, I'm getting ahead of myself - psychiatric nursing first, ten years of it no less. She spent most of it at the emergency clinic of the Maudsley Hospital rising to become a senior sister. She was good at the job. I don't know this because I was there, or because she tells me so in her autobiography...she's modest, remember, but there's a tremendous feeling of warmth emanating from her as she writes about that time. Her respect for her patients is enormous and, as she says mockingly, 'nothing appalling in terms of injuries or damage to the place had ever happened on my watch'. For example, she tells of the time she stepped in to run a nursing home for a friend of her mother's. She became very fond of a young man who was brain damaged in a motorbike accident and, through frustration, was a difficult character to manage. He would lose his temper but all you had to do was get out of the range of his wheelchair and the problem was sorted.

Most nights he went to the pub in his wheelchair but one night he returned at midnight, flanked by two policemen who had caught him breaking the speed limit thanks to a very long hill back to the home. The police didn't press charges and once they had gone Jo and the culprit had a really good laugh about it.

Trouble came mostly from the way she dressed. She calls herself a scruff bag, hates shopping and admits that even if she makes an effort to look smart the effect is ruined once she's spilt food down her front. Complaints were made by hospital managers but they backed down when she threatened to resign.

The lure of the comedy circuit was calling to her all this time and eventually she took the plunge and did a five-minute stint for charity at a night club. It went so badly that it's a wonder that Jo Brand's name is known today. She was extremely nervous; the audience was pissed and so was she. As soon as she stepped on stage someone shouted, 'Fuck off, you fat cow!' She began to struggle through her material and the heckler, unbelievably another comic, continued the litany of insults. After a couple of minutes she walked off but thankfully was too drunk to feel humiliated. Men have been shouting such things to fat women for years, she reasons, and it's extremely boring if you're on the receiving end because you've heard it so often.

Interestingly, she says psychiatric patients are better at heckling than audiences. They can twist the knife once they've plunged it in and she felt that if she could cope with the drunks and schizophrenics who came to the Maudsley she could manage a bit of fatty bashing in a club. But why do it? What are the rewards? Jo says they are huge. Humour, she says, knits people together and gives them a great night out; laughing releases chemicals that make us happy, and for her there is nothing quite like standing in front of a crowd she's won over against the odds. Her favourite comedy targets are Tories, racists and bullies but she likes to get a few self-mocking jokes in first to save anyone else the trouble.

Her big break came on Saturday Live, a TV show in the eighties that launched countless alternative comics, including Harry Enfield and Stephen Fry. The alternative comedy circuit followed and eventually her act became established. More TV; more success. Then there are her novels which owe so much to her nursing experience, and then her beautifully written autobiography. But she's always a little self-mocking. Take this story that she shares in the second part of her autobiography – _Can't Stand Up For Sitting Down._ She's backstage and passes a member of the audience who tells her how good the show was. All's going well until he says he liked that she did the whole act with balloons stuffed down her front. That was a bit of a deflating compliment when there wasn't a balloon in within a mile of her. Still, it could have been worse.

Books:

A Load of Old Balls: Men in History

A Load of Old Ball Crunchers: Women in History

Sorting Out Billy

It's Different for Girls

The More You Ignore Me

Look Back in Hunger. The Autobiography

Can't Stand Up For Sitting Down. The Autobiography – Part 2

**CHAPTER 2**

Down and Out in America and Kent

(A personal encounter with W. H. Davies)

by David Smith

Leisure

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs

And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,

Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad day light,

Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at beauty's glance,

And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can

Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

Many people know William Henry Davies as the author of the poem _Leisure_ , which introduced him to a whole new audience in the 1990s, some fifty years after his death, when used in an advertising campaign for Center Parcs Holiday Villages. My own introduction to his work came some two decades earlier in my first or second year at secondary school in Tunbridge Wells when, aged eleven or twelve, I discovered a battered copy of his _Autobiography of a Super-Tramp_ on the trolley of books at the back of my English classroom. I can be confident about my age and year, because I walked out of school shortly afterwards and refused, despite the best efforts of my family and the local authority to 'encourage' me, to go back.

I don't know if it was part of the curriculum back then or just something that happened in my school, but the book trolley was part of an enforced reading programme that took up half an English lesson once a week on Monday afternoons. Pupils could bring a suitable book from home or borrow something from the trolley, but either way we were expected to read, quietly, for around half an hour while Mr Moore, our form teacher, got on with marking homework. I had no difficulty with the reading, but I struggled hugely with the 'quietly' part of the deal, and would usually spend these lessons in isolation in the hallway outside of the classroom, or, if my behaviour had been particularly bad, sitting on a chair outside the headmaster's office.

I was a somewhat unruly child, or, as my family more succinctly put it, 'bloody mental', and I found being quiet or sitting still pretty much impossible. This was in the days before Ritalin had been created or the term ADHD had been coined and many years before Asperger's Syndrome or high functioning autism were widely recognised, so 'bloody mental' as a workaday diagnosis seemed pretty accurate all round. One thing that could keep me quiet, briefly, was something good to read, but my idea of a good read at that stage in my life would usually have been a _Mad_ magazine, a wildlife encyclopaedia, or one of Geoffrey Willan's _Molesworth_ books, and they were conspicuous by their absence on the shelves of the reading trolley, which was usually filled with old guff like Zane Gray westerns, Jack London novels about wolves or sled dogs, and the collected works of Arthur Ransome. I would start one of them with the best of intentions, but it wouldn't be more than a dozen or so paragraphs before my eyes wandered from the page and my mouth forgot it was meant to be closed.

I don't know what it was that drew my attention to _Autobiography of a Super-Tramp_ but it certainly wasn't an exciting cover illustration on the dust jacket, which I remember as being either pale green or blue and very understated. Neither would it have been the prominently displayed paratext offering 'an introduction by George Bernard Shaw', which, had I known who Shaw was, would have probably put me off for life. I suspect it might have been the recommendation of Mr Moore, who was unorthodox enough in his teaching methods to have earned my grudging respect and who had previously pointed me in the direction of a couple of books that were less bad (in my opinion) than most of the books the school system seemed intent on forcing down my reluctant throat. In any event, something did draw my attention toward _Super-Tramp_ , and by the time I got to page three, where Davies admitted to repeated truancy and street fighting (having already confessed to a more than healthy degree of fondness for beer and other alcoholic beverages from 'a very early age'), I was already starting to like the cut of his jib. As I read more I found myself identifying increasingly with the driven, under-controlled, ne'er-do-well presented on the page, and, I suspect with hindsight, with his 'imbecile brother', whose strange behaviour and literal responses to verbal instructions seemed to mirror many of my own social faux pas.

One of the things I enjoyed most about the book was its honesty. I had read few, if any, autobiographies up to that point and it was a revelation to me that people might write openly about shoplifting and theft (for which Davies was arrested and prosecuted at the age of thirteen, receiving a dozen strokes of the birch in punishment) and other nefarious behaviours. I did not approve of the things I was reading, but I was fascinated by them, and I also remember being particularly struck by Davies' confession that he found schoolwork easy but was too lazy to apply himself. It seemed strange to me that a clearly intelligent and, in the context of the times, privileged child would behave as Davies did, and this was perhaps the first time that I found my very black and white (and stereotypical) views of the world being challenged. Davies, quite clearly, was not a wholly 'bad' person but neither was he conventionally 'good', and that seemed hugely relevant to me.

Davies was born in 1871 in Newport, Monmouthshire. He was the middle child of three. Following the death of his father in 1874 and his mother's remarriage the following year he was left, along with his siblings, in the care of his paternal grandparents. The early chapters of his autobiography detail his childhood with them, his sporadic attendance at school and his early criminal career. Unable to apply himself to school or work he moved to Bristol at the age of twenty, adopting an alcohol-fuelled lifestyle for the next six months that 'was sufficient to wreck the brains and health of any man beyond recovery...'

He returned from Bristol to his childhood home on receiving news of the death of his grandmother. With both grandparents dead (his grandfather had died several years earlier when Davies was fourteen) Davies moved in for a time with his mother and step-father, but this quickly became problematic and, restless as ever, he soon moved on.

Using money from his share of his grandmother's estate he bought steerage passage to America, sailing in July 1893 for the 'new world' he had been hankering to explore since his early teens. He spent the next six years there, occasionally taking on seasonal labouring work to fund his drinking sprees but for the most part living as an itinerant 'hobo'. It is recollections of these years that provide the bulk of material found in _Super-Tramp_ : anecdotes and adventures that totally captured my child's imagination and kept me enthralled, and uncharacteristically quiet, for hours.

It is perhaps typical of Davies' exuberant nature that he could not wait until docking in New York to express his excitement and love for his new surroundings. After meeting a fellow traveller who had already visited America Davies wrote a letter home on the very first day of his outward voyage, describing, based on his new friend's recollections, his arrival in America and 'the difference between the old and the new world'. His intentions were purely practical – he did not want to waste a minute writing a letter once he actually arrived – but he realised shortly after passing on his fictional account for posting that it would reach his family several days before he was scheduled to dock and would bear a totally unrelated postmark.

True to form, once Davies did dock he rapidly grew tired of New York and set off to explore some of the other states. Heading for Connecticut, where his travelling companion from the ship had friends, he hoped to find employment, but having arrived in the middle of an economic depression he was quickly disillusioned. Not wanting to be a burden on his Connecticut hosts he walked out of their shared apartment as soon as his money ran out, leaving all his possessions, save for the clothes on his back, behind in compensation for his week's lodgings. That same evening, sitting on a bench in a park, he met and befriended a 'notorious beggar' named Brum, and the pair set off to 'beat' their way to Chicago. This was the beginning of Davies' career as a hobo, and, benefiting from Brum's expert tutorage ('begging was to him a fine art, indeed, and a delight of which he never seemed to tire'), he would spend the best part of the next six years travelling around America, living on his wits as 'a lazy wretch with but little inclination for work.'

_Super-Tramp_ is rich with anecdotes of Davies' life as a vagrant and beggar and of his occasional forays into paid employment (he travelled home to England several times during this period, working his passage on cattle boats as a watchman). Whether describing 'A Tramp's Summer Vacation' in Long Island or winter months spent in a Michigan jail – a reciprocal arrangement assuring the local marshal continued employment and those arrested for vagrancy warmth, shelter and three square meals a day – the simplicity of Davies' prose belies the scope of his writing, which paints a vivid picture of a vast landscape encompassing the sky-scrapers of major cities, the empty prairies of the badlands and everything else in between. _Super-Tramp_ even functions in places as a training manual for would-be vagrants, offering advice on when, where and how to beg effectively, as well as suggesting appropriate lines of merchandise for hawking when begging fails to provide the necessities of life.

Davies' tramp around America came to an abrupt halt in the spring of 1899, when, after a brief return to England, he set out for North America to seek his fortune in the Klondike gold rush. Attempting to jump a night train in Ontario, Canada, he lost his footing and was dragged along the track for several yards before losing his grip and falling. When he tried to stand a few moments later he found he could not, and on examining himself in the darkness discovered that his right foot had been severed at the ankle. After lying in shock for several minutes he was found by a track repairman working on the line who ran for help. Davies was then carried to the nearby station, where, embarrassed by the attention he was attracting, he took out his pipe and started smoking to calm his nerves, an act that 'caused much sensation in the local press.'

After two operations and a period of convalescence lasting around five weeks Davies began making arrangements to return home to Wales. 'All the wildness had been taken out of me,' he subsequently wrote, 'and my adventures after this were not of my own seeking.'

Whether of his own seeking or not, Davies' adventures once back in England proved every bit as interesting and unorthodox as his travels in the United States. Initially returning to his grandmother's cottage, which was held in trust, he took stock of his situation and concluded that with most regular forms of manual labour now a closed door for him he would have to rely on his intellect to make a living. To this end he turned to writing poetry. 'I was [...] determined that as my body had failed, my brains should now have the chance they had longed for...' he wrote, picturing himself returning home at some future point '...not with gold nuggets from the far West, but with literary fame, wrested from no less a place than the mighty London.'

Taking nothing but the clothes on his back and with less than two pounds in his pocket he travelled to Lambeth, taking lodgings in the first doss house he found, where he was allocated bed number forty-five in a shared dormitory. Thanks to his grandmother's estate he had a small income of eight shillings a week, which, living frugally in a charity-run homeless shelter, just about provided him with the necessities of food and clothing he needed to pursue his literary ambitions.

Davies was convinced that literary fame would be his within the year, and was deeply shocked when his first poetry submissions earned him nothing but rejection letters. Over the next two years he wrote prolifically, setting himself weekly targets on a variety of projects he felt confident would ensure his success. As the rejection slips continued to pile up he devised all sorts of schemes to realise his ambitions, including writing to 'several well known philanthropists' requesting sponsorship to enable the vanity publication of a small collection of poems. When this early attempt at crowd funding failed he used the last of his savings to get two thousand copies of a trio of short poems printed, intending to sell these single-sheet publications door-to-door at a price of three pence per copy. This, he believed, was the most practical way to realise the twenty-five pounds profit he needed to publish his book. The scheme, unsurprisingly, failed miserably, and after weeks of trudging the streets without making a single sale he set about burning his work, 'taking care...' as he put it, '...not to save one copy that would at any time in the future remind me of my folly.'

Davies did, of course, eventually realise his ambition to become a respected poet and writer, but not before returning to a life on the open road. After applying for a street pedlar's licence and setting himself up with a stock of pins, needles, buttons and shoelaces he set off 'to hawk the country from one end to the other', intending to save every penny until he had a nest-egg big enough to fund another period of writing. This plan was scuppered almost immediately when he discovered that his entire stock of saleable items had been rain damaged while he was sleeping rough. Instead of hawking for a living he was forced to return to begging, teaming up with a 'gridler' who taught him, quite literally, how to sing (badly) for his supper.

Splitting his time between the open road as a tramp and the charity hostel in London where he wrote, Davies eventually managed to raise the money needed to fund the publication of his manuscript. Despite his previous failure to raise money from sponsorship he sent copies of his books out to 'respectable gentlemen' hoping that they would send him money by return. They didn't.

Ironically, it was Davies' career as a tramp rather than his efforts as a poet that initially brought him to public attention. Having sent copies of his book to a number of local newspapers, hoping they would print reviews, he was approached by reporters who were more interested in the contents of his cover letter, detailing his impoverished circumstances and his unorthodox lifestyle, than the poetry itself. This led to the publication of several articles that brought him and his work to the attention of publishers and critics who were able to help him reach a wider circulation, one of whom, Edward Thomas, helped to set him up in a rented cottage just outside of Tunbridge Wells.

As a schoolboy I had no idea when reading _Super-Tramp_ that its author had prepared the manuscript for publication just a few miles up the road from where I was sitting. A few years ago, tired of borrowing the only battered copy of _Super-Tramp_ available from the Kent Library Service, I tried to buy myself a copy on the internet, and it was then that I discovered Davies' local connection in an article I found online detailing his post-tramping days. Davies lived in Kent between 1905 and 1914, firstly as a houseguest of Edward Thomas in Sevenoaks Weald and then in the tiny two-roomed cottage that Thomas rented on his behalf in Egg Pie Lane, Hildenborough. Moving from there, he took temporary lodgings at a number of addresses in and around the Tunbridge Wells / Weald area before moving back to London.

With hindsight, I believe that local connection may well be the reason why such an unlikely book was sitting on the bookcase at the back of my English classroom in the first place: that it was a donation from a local private library or house clearance, preserved by the school library more by luck than judgement. The boy I was would have found that local connection fascinating, and the adult reader I am still does. Who knows, as I look out of my bedroom window, with its view over the Weald, I could be looking at the very landmarks – the fields, the woods, the streams – referenced in the poem _Leisure_ , and when I walk the country lanes around my home I could be walking in William Henry Davies' footsteps. I like to think so, and I like to think that I will always be able to find the time to stop and stare. After all, what is life if we don't find that time?

Of course, nothing – not even the delights of Tunbridge Wells and its environs – could keep Davies in one place for very long, and even after his marriage in 1923 he remained a restless, nomadic spirit. Immediately after his marriage he moved from London to East Grinstead and then back to Sevenoaks again before moving to Oxted in Surrey. From there he moved to Nailsworth in Gloucestershire, where he lived in a series of no less than five different houses over a period of around ten years. His wanderings ended forever in the last of these, 'Glendower', when he died, at the age of sixty-nine, in September 1940.

[Author's note: whether prompted by the growth of the internet and the e-book boom, renewed interest in Davies as a poet, or more commercial concerns like copyright issues, there are now several editions of Autobiography of a Super-Tramp in publication, including the excellent Kindle edition, priced at £2.99, I used for referencing while writing this personal recollection.]

CHAPTER 3

Sarah Grand

by Carolyn Gray

Preface

While I have been researching the life of Madame Sarah Grand, and while I know some of the history of Tunbridge Wells, this story is a flight of fantasy based on the facts I know, and with lots of extra things added. If I had found a diary that Sarah kept, I would have just copied a chapter out of that... but instead you will need to read how Sarah's life was, via my head.

'Madame Grand! Watch out!' The colonel moved to one side of the path in front of the Calverley Park houses as Sarah Grand whizzed past on her bicycle, long skirts tucked up out the way of the bike chain. Now in her fifties, Sarah still retained her younger, slim figure; one of the benefits of cycling, she felt.

Exiting the park through Victoria Gates, she was soon at the shop run by the Tunbridge Wells branch of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies. She leant her bike outside; any scallywag that tried to steal her bike in the 1910s would get a sharp cuff round the ear from anyone passing. Sarah was well liked in the town, despite only moving here thirteen years before. Her daily route from her house in Grove Hill to the shop was known by many. She would open the shop before the other ladies came, then return home to write before lunch.

This Thursday morning in March she was daydreaming as she unlocked the door and went into the Crescent Road building. Horses and carriages were moving around outside the Calverley Hotel, and now and again some of the poor people from Hervey Town walked past. It was a very mixed area, but Sarah was hoping the four Strange sisters would walk past with their governess. She thought it was super that a leading Tunbridge Wells family should have the surname Strange, everyone would think she'd changed her writing style to Dickens if one of her characters was Mr Strange... For her real name was not Madame Sarah Grand. She had been born Frances Elizabeth Bellenden Clarke, and when she had married at sixteen she had resented the idea of becoming Mrs McFall. Sarah Grand was her name for her new life as a writer, living on her own means, a 'New Woman' just like the ones she wrote about.

The daydream was broken by Mary entering the shop. Mary's mother owned a ladies' milliners in the High Street, and one morning each week Mary was allowed time off from their shop to help at the NUWSS shop. Mary was a clever young lady, and like many others couldn't understand why she should work hard, but not be allowed to have her say by voting. As she constantly reminded her mother, 'We pay tax, but we have no say in how it's spent!' and Mrs Brown was happy to let Mary have an extra half day off to help keep the peace in the shop and flat.

They said their hellos and good mornings, but Mary always hoped Sarah had time to stay and maybe tell a story from her past. Mary's whole life had been spent in Tunbridge Wells, the shop, funfairs on The Common, walks up the Wells Hill to the New Town – but Sarah – Sarah's life had been incredible! Tales of her husband's work as an army surgeon in the Far East, living in London with her stepson, of her holidays writing in France, lecturing on women's issues in America, it was all worlds away to Mary. More than that, Sarah's only son was an actor, and had also changed his name from David Archibald Edward McFall to Archie Carlaw Grand. How glamorous! Although he was married and living in London, the stories that Sarah often told greatly entertained Mary. When she went home to the quiet flat, to spend lonely evenings with her mother, Mary treasured her dreams of Sarah's and Archie's lives, weaving her own exciting thoughts around the tales.

But she sensed something was on Sarah's mind this morning, and she was right.

'We need to start thinking about the upcoming census,' Sarah said. 'If we are supposed to be clever enough to fill in a form telling people where we live, we must be clever enough to put an x on a ballot paper. So, no vote, no census? But what shall we do? There's a meeting tonight and we need a plan. I wanted to go home and write, but I think I need to spend my time on this.'

Sarah cycled back to Grove Hill. The housemaid, Florence, had completed the morning chores, and she was aware of Lucy, her cook, in the kitchen starting work on the luncheon. Sarah's study looked over the north of the town, up to the ridge of Mount Ephraim, but since she had taken on the house in 1902 the shrubbery opposite had been replaced with The Grove Bowling Club. Luckily today it was quiet outside, no click clack of bowl on bowl... Sarah took to a comfy chair rather than sitting at her desk. Her desk was full of papers where her 'New Women' lived, arguing and fighting for their rights to be independent, recognised as people in their own right, have the same sexual freedoms as men, earn money and... have the right to vote.

There seemed to be two popular options for the census. The form could be defaced as a form of protest, or the ladies of the house could disappear for the night. Both could mean the protesters facing prison or a fine. Was it going to be a worthwhile protest for Tunbridge Wells to take on? Was there somewhere safe in Tunbridge Wells for them, or should they join other protesters in Maidstone and London? Vice-president Amelia Scott and her sister Louisa were happy to fill in their form.

'No one will listen to us just by us making a fuss about the census,' complained Amelia. 'If you want to make a protest, you will need to chair that meeting.'

Sarah considered it. She had been fighting her whole life, from her childhood on the east coast of Ireland, watching the wind and waves battling, her parents battling, her whole life she had wanted to be heard. In her marriage, which had seemed an ideal way to gain independence from her family and schooling, she had suffered under the controlling mind of her doctor husband. Travelling around the world had been an eye-opener, but left her with no special time or space to be herself. No longer a child, she had merely become a wife, not a person. Her husband did not want her to have a voice, an opinion, for anyone to pay attention to her. She wondered if anyone would pay attention to ladies not being at home while a census was being carried out. Making a mark to say, 'I refuse to fill this in properly', that was more defining; but then, it would make it easier to trace those people, to fine or imprison them. Sarah needed her money, and her time to work.

Maybe it would be easier to be at home, to add your name, and be counted. To say to the future – I AM LIVING HERE BUT LOOK – I CAN'T VOTE!

*****

She returned home from the meeting and sat in her drawing room. Feelings at the meeting had been mixed, and Sarah wasn't the best person to chair a meeting. Her mind always wandered, always had wandered. She saw things in people and situations, in surroundings and moments, that no-one else saw. Stories, rhymes, phrases formed in her head without any help, and she often had to pull herself back into the real world. Just as two ladies were arguing over hiding away or spoiling the census, Sarah's head had been in her current story. _Adam's Orchard_ was going to be the first in another trilogy, and she really should be finishing it, not worrying about the 1911 census. Grove Hill was a big house, with two servants, and the money from the last book was running low. Someone had suggested to her she should endorse a product and gain money from advertising: Sanatogen Health Tonic was one company who had paid her money in exchange for her photo and name. How many more advertisements could she take on for some easy money? Her childhood had been poor, she had worn her brother's hand-me-downs, she had not been afforded proper schooling till her mid-teens as she was merely a girl and she did not want to be poor again. Stories had always lived in Sarah's head, and she had to put them down onto paper as much as she had to eat, drink and breathe. Using them to earn money, to share her thoughts with the wider world, that was a bonus.

Sarah wrestled with the thoughts in her head, fighting themselves as everything around her fought. There was no unanimous thought for the ladies of Tunbridge Wells in the NUWSS, it was going to be each to her own, and all the time Sarah was undecided. If she wrote her life story, if she looked at herself from above, she would write angry words on that census form. But she was scared. All her life God had looked over her shoulder, from Northern Ireland onwards, the badness balanced by the Bible. If she was really good, she'd be at home, fill in her census, add her servants' names, signed and delivered. She'd sit down and eat her dinner, go to bed, be there on the night. But, she hadn't always been really good either... So, all the time she came to the thought of going away, somewhere, or hiding, somewhere. In a house with so many rooms, if she just sat in the attic, could she be forgotten about, the missed pair of stockings in the washing pile? She dreamt of the darkness, remembering a game she had played with her sister when they were young, hiding away from everyone else. Sitting in the dark, with all the noises of the house around her, comings and goings, what would happen that evening, would there be disturbances outside? Was it a day to protest? Grove Hill was a quiet place on the edge of the town with Banner Farm behind them, her neighbours mostly other ladies all living on their own means: would anyone notice if she was hiding? Again, her mind played through several versions of the day, of things that could happen, different people knocking on the door, visiting, conversations the neighbours would have at the front, conversations the servants would have at the back. Would mice scuttle over her feet, spiders and cobwebs brush her face? Would rain smatter on the roof, or winds whistle around the corners? Was the discomfort she'd suffer on that evening worth the statement that would be made by the half-filled census form?

She considered the other options open to her that would not be available to so many other women. She could pack now and head to France, stay in a small village, enjoy the warm weather and settle down to some writing. Or she could make the long journey to America, where she had lectured several times already on women's rights. Certain states in the USA had already enfranchised women, but for many there was still a battle. But these escapist options were only available to Sarah, by taking one of these would she be selfish, disloyal to the many ladies in Tunbridge Wells who listened to her words at their meetings?

What if she were to spend the time travelling, to visit one of her two stepsons, or to her own son, Archie, and his wife? Her eldest stepson, Chambers, was only six years younger than her, and had lived in Hammersmith with her when she first left David. However she and Chambers had fallen out eight years ago, he was now married and living in West Kensington and Sarah didn't like his wife, Mabel; it would be a drastic desire not to be registered on the census that would see her travelling to Chambers and Mabel. Crawford was also married, and in Ireland with Annie. The stepson she had seen the least, and a return to her home land again; it seemed desperation to consider this trip.

Sarah liked a time of quiet before sleeping, and so gave up thinking and retired to bed, and like her three-year-old self when she was called Frances and lived in Ireland, prayed to God for help.

*****

Sunday the 2nd April 1911, census day. It's a cold day. All around the country forms are carefully filled in, name, age, occupation, place of birth, nationality, years of marriage, how many rooms in the house; it's a more complicated form than ten years previously, and a form for each household, left to be filled in by them, whereas previously the enumerator had written all the details. Schooling for all has changed the enumerator's job.

The world is changing, Britain has headed out of the Edwardian era, the Labour Party is becoming an active part of politics, speaking up for the poor, and taking a lead in women's politics where the Liberals failed, an element of war is looming. Telephones and electricity are coming into people's homes, cars on the streets, planes in the skies.

Sunday in Tunbridge Wells was still a quiet time, governed by church and promenading, with the Common seen as the seaside of the town. There were now cinemas and bandstands to entertain the growing population. Visitors would come by train from London and send postcards home: 'Having a lovely time!' Many who came this weekend weren't expecting such cold weather.

*****

Thursday morning was the third day of 'The Snow in April'. Tunbridge Wells balances itself on a hill, with the famous well at the bottom, and layer upon layer of town above. The challenge of cycling in the snow was beyond Sarah, so she walked to the shop. Everyone huddled in warm clothes, trying to be cheerful, when they knew it should be spring, there should be blue skies, warm sunshine and blossom on the trees. Sarah remembered moving from Ireland to Yorkshire when her father died, and how beautiful the green of spring was.

Mary lived at the bottom of the hill. Sarah wondered if she would bother coming in, with the steep walk involved. But Mary was a cheerful girl, and soon appeared in the shop, stamping snow off her feet. She smiled at Sarah and greeted her with 'Votes for Women!' Sarah laughed, and realised what a burden the past week, since she had last seen Mary, had been, worrying if she had done the right thing with her census paper.

'Oh Mary, if only everything was that easy!' sighed Sarah.

Mary took off her warm clothes, and they both sat down to chat. Sarah remembered her times in her marriage, constrained by the un-said rules put in place by her husband, of the lack of female company; and as the two ladies, from such different backgrounds, sat inside the small shop, she counted the blessings of her new life.

*****

Epilogue

Women do finally get the vote in the United Kingdom - in 1918 for ladies over the age of 30 who met minimum property qualifications, and in 1928 to all women over the age of 21. Many women are missing from the 1911 census, but by being invisible there is no way to know how many were! A few did spoil their papers, and some of these are preserved, including Violet Tillard from Tunbridge Wells who was living in London in 1911. Others in Tunbridge Wells filled in their papers properly, but there are some ladies who are absent...

It's not for me to say where Sarah was on the evening of the 1911 census. In 1911 and 1912 she is listed in the _Pelton Street Directory_ as living at 10 Grove Hill. But for that property the _Census of England and Wales, 1911_ , contains blank spaces for the first five entry lines. Line 6 is for Lucy Rogers, 35, single, Cook Servant Domestic, born in Ticehurst, Sussex. Line 7 is for Florence Burclett, 26, single, House Parlourmaid Domestic, born Earl's Court, London. A house of 14 rooms, occupied by two servants! In the 1901 census Sarah had been living at The Grey House, Langton Green, with her stepson Chambers Haldan McFall, her son Archie Grand, step granddaughter Elizabeth, and three servants. But in 1911 Archie was married and living in Hammersmith, and she's not on his census, or that of stepson Chambers in London, or stepson Crawford in Ireland, or with Elizabeth.

Sarah often lectured in America, and went abroad to write, often to be in a warmer place for health reasons. But we are unsure if she was abroad, or hiding as a political protest.

Sarah wrote eight books between 1888, just before she left David, and 1922, not long after moving to Bath. Once in Bath she seems to have stopped writing. While there she assisted the Mayor for several years, before finally retiring to Wiltshire, where she died in 1943. Three books were published during the time she lived in Tunbridge Wells: _Babs the Impossible_ , _Adam's Orchard_ and _The Winged Victory._

*****

_Thanks to Tunbridge Wells Museum for the 'Inspiring Women' exhibition, and the website_ www.womenshistorykent.org _for introducing me to the life of Madame Sarah Grand while she was in Tunbridge Wells._

I would also like to thank Alison Sandford MacKenzie for her additional research sent to me half way through my writing!

CHAPTER 4

Memories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of Windlesham Manor

by Katherine Loverage

Having moved in 1909 to Crowborough, East Sussex, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had a house built for himself and his wife which he named Windlesham Manor. He then set about employing staff. Commissioned especially for him and his family, he renamed the house'Swindlesham', as he felt that the builders had over-charged him for modifications later on.

These are a few of his staff's memories of the time they worked for him.

William O'Donnell - Chauffeur

I came to work for Sir Arthur in 1910 as his chauffeur. He would sit quietly in the back of the car as I drove him to the station to get the train to London. He went to London an awful lot. If we did a longer journey he would tell me stories about his adventures. My favourite one was about when he bought a car without ever having driven one before. Can you imagine that? In 1911, he took part in the Prince Henry Tour, an international road competition organised by Prince Henry of Prussia to pit British cars against German ones. What an amazing time he must have had! Sir Arthur paired up with his wife, Jean, as one of the British driving teams. He told me that she loved to be driven fast.

They used to drive the cars around Brooklands racing track. I had a go a few times just to warm the car up for him. Later his sons had cars made like racing cars. It was just as well there weren't so many cars on the roads then or they would have frightened a lot of people.

He also told me a story about investing in a motorized bicycle. He had gone up to London to try and promote it. One street in London was cleared for him to give a demonstration. He told me the street was lined with photographers, reporters, and onlookers. The engine had started well, they said as he pedalled off, but the wheels got caught in a tram line and Sir Arthur came right off. He told me he'd never been so embarrassed in his life.

Mary Taite - Typist

I was one of Sir Arthur's typists. Sometimes he would stick the 'Do Not Disturb' sign on the door to his study and one of his shorter stories would be written by lunch time. I know the stories about Sherlock Holmes were exciting and his readers adored them, but he did write other things: poems and articles.

I was quite surprised when the Sherlock stories started to phase out and he became quite absorbed by spiritualism, sometimes writing night and day. In fact _The Edge of the Unknown_ had an account of a spiritualist encounter at Groombridge Place.

Sherlock Holmes was far from being Conan Doyle's own favourite character and was killed off in 1893 but that was before my time. It was so exciting when Sir Arthur resurrected him ten years later after public demand and a bit of monetary persuasion. I loved working on those books, and some of them have bits about this area in them.

Mavis Beany - Maid

I was employed at Windlesham Manor as a maid. Most of the time, my work was to keep the house clean and tidy, making up the fires and helping cook in the kitchen.

There were always lots of people coming in and out of the house. One day some film people came, and made a film of Sir Arthur talking about all sorts of things, like the origins of Sherlock Holmes and his spiritual interests. When the film was released in 1929 we were all taken up to see the film in London. It was a very good night out. Not long after that they made a record of the interview and it was played quite a lot.

Quite often in the evenings, after supper had been cleared away, people would come for spiritual meetings. They took place in the old nursery, I don't know if it was haunted but I never felt scared.

Stanley Brown \- Gardener

I came to work in Windlesham Manor's garden as Head Gardener, would be around 1916. It was a very happy and friendly household to work in. We went to London twice, one was to see the film _The Lost World_ in 1923 and the second time was to see a play called _The Speckled Band_ ; I don't remember the year.

Sir Arthur used to come into the garden and walk around with me, discussing flowers. One day he asked me if I had seen anything odd in the garden. I told him not especially. He then went on to tell me that he was convinced there were fairies in the garden. He was so convinced by the Cottingley Fairy photographs, the famous 1917 hoax. He even spent a million dollars promoting them and wrote a book, _The Coming of the Fairies_ (1921), on their authenticity. I did look hard for fairies but I never saw any signs of them.

One year Sir Arthur decided to order some stones for his garden as long as he could supervise the digging. The quarry man agreed. Whilst he was choosing the right stones he found a footprint like a large bird print. It was a foot or more across. In fact it was an iguanodon footprint which still exists in Tunbridge Wells Museum I think. Not long after this I think that he wrote _The Lost World_.

Ernest Grainger - Defence Volunteer

On the approach to the First World War, Conan Doyle wanted to raise awareness of the dangers to Britain from submarine warfare. He wrote a short story called _Danger_ although I understand that the Imperial German Navy appreciated it more than we did at home.

Conan Doyle enlisted me along with a fair few other men to be local defence volunteers. He managed to advocate the formation of other companies around Britain. Not long later the War Office issued the Crowborough Company with the first certificate to authorize an organization. Number 184343 Private Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and myself Number 184344 Private Ernest Grainger both served with pride.

You know, on a still day you could hear the guns at Flanders even though they were 120 miles away.

Lady Conan Doyle established a home here in Crowborough for Belgian refugees. She played her part in the war too.

Susan Smith- Housemaid

I was one of the last housemaids at Windlesham Manor. Sir Arthur was still travelling but in 1929 he did his last Psychic tour of Holland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway. He was in great pain by the time he returned. I remember Michael, my husband, telling me that Sir Arthur had to be carried ashore. He had Angina Pectoris, and was bedridden after the tour.

His last adventure was on a cold spring day in 1930. He went into the garden. My husband found him lying on the ground, one hand holding his heart and the other holding a single white snowdrop.

A few months later Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died on Monday, July 7, 1930. He had come downstairs and sat in his chair. His family was around him. His last words before departing for 'the greatest and most glorious adventure of all,' were addressed to his wife. He whispered, 'You are wonderful.'

He was buried here in Windlesham Manor gardens under the roses. Following his death a séance was conducted at the Royal Albert Hall. Thousands attended, including his wife and children. We didn't go, but we understand that a row of chairs were arranged on the stage for the family, with one left empty for Sir Arthur. Even though he did not appear, there were many people in the audience who claimed they had felt his presence amongst them.

**CHAPTER 5**

GHOST: Keith Douglas

by Jess Mookherjee

My ghost hovers in a Normandy field and rises with the memory of mud and gunshot.

It can see my mother taking my hand and walking with her in Dunorlan Park.

It points at Hebe as we linger at the fountain to the youth I will never be.

I want to fire at that statue, to shoot her down but my ghost is no soldier of self-pity.

My ghost still holds my small gun with its sights on the battlefield of Alamein.

I feel blood pump into my camouflage again and shout a war cry to the tedium of eternity's fight with me, because I am not alive.

My ghost remembers those dandelions filling the hungry earth along with soldiers' teeth.

It was my time to kill and kill until in just one second I was still,

beside a ditch where a tree has filled

My body with angry leaves. My ghost knows that forever will pass like this,

with nothing but the day of days, hour of hours, nothing but time to kill and whispers,

'How easy it is to make a ghost'.

Douglas described his poetic style as 'extrospective'; that is, he focused on external impressions rather than inner emotions. The result is a poetry which, according to his detractors, can be callous in the midst of war's atrocities. For others, Douglas's work is powerful and unsettling because its exact descriptions eschew egotism and shift the burden of emotion from the poet to the reader. His best poetry is generally considered to rank alongside the twentieth-century's finest soldier-poetry.

Born:January 24, 1920, Tunbridge Wells, Kent

Died June 9, 1944 : Invasion of Normandy.

Selected Poems (Keith Douglas, J.C. Hall, Norman Nicholson) (1943)

Alamein to Zem Zem (1946), reprinted 1966

Collected Poems (Editions Poetry London 1951),[7] reprinted 1966

Selected Poems (Faber 1964)

The Complete Poems (Faber & Faber 1978), reprinted in 1987, 1997, 2011

Alldritt, Keith. Modernism in the Second World War ISBN 0-8204-0865-4

The Letters of Keith Douglas edited by Desmond Graham (Carcanet Press,

2000) ISBN 978 1 857544 77 0

CHAPTER 6

Vita Sackville-West

by Christopher Hall

She first got the idea on a gloomy winter evening whilst skimming through messages. It was a Sunday and as usual she inhabited a spot by the fireplace, fiddling with her phone and an open _Sunday Times Magazine_ on her lap. Her phone buzzed again and her husband looked over from watching the first episode of a new TV mini-series.

'I don't know how you follow it with that going off every five minutes,' he said.

'Trust me. I'm following the story but so is half of Twitter,' she replied.

Her husband rolled his eyes and returned to watching the screen. A natural lull descended into their lives as the action cut to the adverts. She hadn't been tweeting about the new mini-series, or at least not entirely. Firstly she'd been responding to someone who'd been venting about stay-at-home mums. She'd bounced some sexual innuendo around with a young guy she occasionally recognized at the butchers but then so had several other young sausage lovers. Then she'd got embroiled in a debate over the frankly unrealistic dialogue from the female lead character. She knew that to any other person it might seem normal to rest after a tiring couple of days entertaining in-laws but Josie Watts wanted to head off the collapse of the week, a collapse that felt total and vast. It felt as though it had been coming for a while. She was searching for nothing less than a resurrection. For ten years she'd been married and had two beautiful young daughters to show for it. Her life had become a series of endlessly revolving status updates involving:

Getting woken up by children

Getting them to do what they were told

Getting to work

Coming home from work

Preparing a family meal

Listening to her children

Listening to her husband

Listening to the news

Bed and a book.

She'd blogged humorous variations of these events from time to time and many mildly grumpy friends on Facebook chipped in with sympathy.

'But who's listening to me? And why should they?' she thought.

As she looked around at the books that occupied the shelves she remembered how much she once knew and it reminded her of a haunting fear she'd had about turning into Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina. It had started out as a joke but as soon as they'd transplanted themselves to a Victorian semi in a quiet road in Tunbridge Wells she saw what might come but ignored it, enjoying the first spring of family life. She saw others dodging their way through a life of clichés but never herself. The clichéd life was something that happened to other people and yet somehow it had come about by stealth. Not being keen on melodramatic mothers she had kept her head down and got on with it. Between juggling her job and picking up the children she leapt at every opportunity to speak to the world, not in another language but through any other medium.

Her husband looked across at her and smiled anxiously. She smiled back to reassure him.

'Shall I make a drink?' he said.

'Yes. Why not? Camomile please,' she asked. While he was out of the room she inserted her earphones to listen to Vita speak about the pleasures of walking through leaves.

'It's the expression Through Leaves.....it shouldn't be difficult to explain what we mean by this... simply, the small but intense pleasure of walking through dry leaves and kicking them out as you go... and if you can crush beechnuts underfoot at the same time then so much the better but beechnuts are not essential....this expression has extended itself in my family to include other meaning; for instance it's very 'through leaves' to run a stick through iron railings....'

It began with Vita. If she couldn't yet see a way to resurrect herself then she chose to begin with someone else. At the Book Group Vicky had typically got her oar in first:

'Did anyone see the article on the Bloomsbury Group in the Mail this weekend? No? Ok, well it was mainly stuff about their....er...hopelessly confusing sex lives. A bit of wife and husband swapping. Some nude pictures of them rolling around in meadows. It all looks a bit dated now. But it got me thinking about the next book. Have we read anything by them? It's just a suggestion, you know, I'm easy but couldn't we read Virginia Woolf next, you know, _Mrs Dalloway_ or what's that other one?' she said.

'Oh God, don't get me started. As long as it has a good story. I don't want any more of that pretentious rubbish we had to read last year,' added Trish.

'Yep, lesson learned. Don't believe the Booker hype. Has anyone seen the film _The Hours_? Meryl Streep? Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf? I thought that was brilliant and it was on TV again just the other day. I was only thinking of Virginia Woolf, no particular reason but I read that she writes really well about women,' Vicky went on, 'I mean I'm happy to go with anyone else's suggestions?'

'What about Vita Sackville-West?' Josie suggested.

'Oh God no. Save us from Sackville-West,' said Alison.

'You want to know what I sink?' said Helene, 'Bloomsbury as zis big reputation but what for? When you are making a comparison with Andre Breton and Surrealism, then it's nothing. Surrealism was more revolutionary and was more influential as an artistic movement. I sink Bloomsbury was for ze aristocracy, a kind of game, a few experiments but not a serious movement. Alors, but OK, I am happy to read Virginia Woolf and see what 'appens.'

'OK, that's agreed then it's probably a 'NO' to Sackville-West,' said Vicky, 'between now and next month can we all have a think about which Bloomsbury writer we want to read? Could you tweet me your choices?'

Josie had encountered much of Sackville-West's and E.M.Forster's work at Oxford. One of her professors of literature, who was less constipated than the rest, owing mainly to having acquired a sense of humour about books, had set her the task of researching the role of social class in literature if only to 'have something interesting to talk about at sherry parties.' So she had aimed for the most toffee-nosed looking bitch she could find; and that was Vita and became obsessed as much with her personality as her novels. She was never invited to said sherry party or even a cocktail party and wouldn't have gone even if she had been. Too proud and poorly connected to know when and where these gatherings took place she hung around with the other state school undergrads at the pub. One night she'd wandered back arm in arm to a girl's room at St Hilda's and had fallen asleep with her. Nothing much else had happened but she had enjoyed the comfort of cuddling up to and kissing someone who cared for her that night. Was that the influence of Vita? Oxford is not for shrinking violets, she recalled.

The following weekend she set up a Twitter account in Vita's name. At first she thought it might be fun to play another role. The thought she might be able to get back to that youthful, intellectually voracious woman she had once been appealed to her but not entirely for reasons of self-improvement. With the exception of Alison no-one in the group seemed to have any idea of who she was talking about. She felt ignored and it made her feel sorry for Vita. She deserved better. She wanted to see if it was possible to seduce the group; to make them into Sackville-West converts. Under the hashtag _forbidden love_ she began:

She died in 1962, her obituary referred to her as novelist, poet and gardener in that order

Obit. made much of fame for having affairs rather than literary output. What would you prefer to be remembered for? #loveaffairs#forbiddenlove

Using my National Trust to go in search of VSW#nationaltrust#sissinghurst#vita

Sackville-West gardening still revered here at Sissinghurst as the embodiment of order and planting

Beautiful view from the top of tower at Sissinghurst gardens. Pic.#nationaltrust

Sissinghurst tower, solitary writing cell for VSW. See her typing away like a medieval queen held prisoner.#vita

The 'atmosphere of psychiatry clinic and posh brothel' Roy Campbell #sissinghurst#vita

'The more one gardens the more one learns; And the more one learns the more one realizes how little one knows.' #vita

Pic of Vita Sackville West. THAT look. #vita

Wonder what she made of the end of Chatterley ban in 1960? #vita #dhlawrence

She rattled off over thirty about Vita in the first twenty four hours. It made her feel as though she had given the account a suitable bed from which to grow. After a week she began following a host of randomly chosen people, some from the vicinity of Kent and others as far away as Nantucket. It wasn't long before she began to attract followers and the occasional retweet. She had selected a black and white image of Vita which might have easily been lifted from an early edition of Vogue. That face, sometimes described as a devilish mix of masculine and feminine, dominant and submissive was her disguise. Josie often felt a small pang of disappointment with how her own face appeared in the mirror which could quickly escalate into a big pang of disappointment if the hastily applied make-up didn't quite sit right. But would Vita have cared for such things? The first member of the Book Group she followed was Helene. A day later it was Alison. She decided to put Karen, Rachel, Trish and finally Vicky on the back burner. Only Helene and Trish followed her back.

One day she tweeted some more links and details about Roy Campbell, the South African-born poet, and his wife Mary Garman who had stayed at Sissinghurst in the 1930's. Vita had met the couple at a village post office and invited them for dinner. Mary seemingly fell for Vita and they began an affair that aroused the full indignation of the deceived husband.

The seduction of a wife. Biographical detail on Vita's love affair with Mary Garman. These letters are beautiful.#vitasackville

C.S.Lewis said to Roy 'Fancy being cuckolded by a woman!'#vita #bloomsbury

Some called her a seducer. Love is decent no matter how often and to whom it is given.#vita#woolf#bloomsbury

'What would Helene make of that?' she wondered, 'Knowing her she would be singularly unimpressed. But comparisons to Proust's prose style would probably set her off.

Vita was like an English Proust, her style at once rich, flowing and precise. #vita#proust

Increasingly Josie wasn't quite sure whether her original mission was enough. She had embarked upon something without thinking very clearly about other possible destinations. The excavation and resurrection of someone people had forgotten about was on her mind but that now seemed too timid. No it was victory for Vita that she wanted. Since becoming Vita she had begun to feel a deeper and more sympathetic respect for her. She had also begun to feel as though something of Vita was rubbing off in her own life, coaxing her to feel more confident about prolonging her eye contact with people, touching them when she felt like it, keeping her counsel when she felt under stress.

Virginia Woolf 'Should you say, if I rang you up to ask, that you were fond of me: If I saw you would you kiss me? If I were in bed would you' #vita

She started to receive replies. To her surprise she attracted the attention of D.H.Lawrence.

He tweeted a reply: _'She was true to her instincts like a lion is true to hunting and eating meat.'_

'She moved in on women like a bird of prey. Pity she wasn't a man.'

She didn't know whether to feel validated by the attention or annoyed. Vita, may have been ultimately true to her instincts but that didn't make her a ravenous animal. Nor did her desire to consummate her loves make her a female man.

She tweeted back: _'If she had been a man she'd have been a far better lover than Mellors!'_

_'Aye, she might have been,_ ' came the reply, _'she loved the feel of soft fur on her lips!'_

She didn't dignify this with a response. But aside from D.H.Lawrence there were others; women mainly. Some were creative types; an art historian, a painter, a primary school teacher. Others were young lesbians looking for something or someone, perhaps a role model. Occasionally a restaurant or café in the area would become one of her fans and she followed any and all of them back without hesitation. A week went by and she began to attract followers of an altogether different class; Jane Austen was followed by F Scott Fitzgerald.

But none of them were like Lawrence.

'Bloomsbury. Bah! An upper crust sewing group making tapestries of their dead ancestors.'

She couldn't help it.

'Do you believe any life to be more authentic than another Lawrence? Class has nothing to do with it.'

'I'm afraid it has everything to do with it. That lot dipped their toes into love. All talk and no real passion.'

She tweeted back:

'Passion? I wrote from my own experience of sex and was banned in 1923 long before you conceived of your Chatterley.'

He responded with:

'What use is it to write about love if you don't write about it properly? All veg and no meat.'

But Josie had the last word:

'I can assure you that carrots and cucumbers are more versatile plants than you imagine.'

'It would have been a pleasure to have introduced them to you if you'd let me.'

The next day she checked her account. She had harvested more followers; the count had been creeping up gradually every day until she had hit just over fifty. Suddenly it had jumped to a hundred. Helene was also following her. Vicky had retweeted her comments on Virginia Woolf and this had attracted the attention of one or two members of the Book Group. Tania had joined in:

'Wasn't she married and a lesbian? Would like to read something of hers even if just the letters. Could be interesting.'

So had Trish:

'Re: Virginia. Still think of her as depressing head case. Would prefer to read something that we can all relate to.'

Later that evening, in the spot-lit atmosphere of her square kitchen Josie circled around flicking between cook books and social media sites, remembering to join the discussion as her other alias @josephinejane

'And Vita's relationship with Woolf. How about the experience of finding another woman attractive? Can relate on some level.'

_'Speak for yourself dirtbag ;) It's men only for me.'_ came Alison's reply

_'You just haven't seen the woman you like yet! '_ added Helene.

_'Vita Sackville-West had this tremendous charm over people. She could make people fall in love with her,'_ added Josie.

She re-sent this under the guise of her Vita account and then followed it with a direct quote from Vita.:

'Suppose Orlando turns out to be about Vita; and it's all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind - Virginia Woolf.'

'Josie, Josie. Hey. Yoohoo!' came the voice of her husband from the bathroom.

'Sorry, yes!' she said looking up from her phone.

'I've bathed the kids. Do you mind if they get a story from you this evening?'

'I'm busy cooking at the moment darling. Do you want to do it tonight and I'll take over tomorrow.'

She heard a gruff murmuring from upstairs and the heavy footed stomp of a thwarted adult male.

Hurriedly, she jumped up from the sofa and dashed to the kitchen to chop some onions and garlic. Then she opened the fridge and took out a pack of meat. 'Oh, Lawrence,' she thought, 'what would you think of me?' Once she'd got the minced beef sizzling away in a pan she returned to her phone.

She was still dithering about when she received a direct message from @Orlando1610.

'Hey! Love what you're doing with the Vita thing. I'm doing my thesis on her. Would love to meet up. DM me for a coffee.'

She could hear her husband wandering about upstairs again and clumsily thumbed a reply on the keyboard. She skimmed through Orlando's profile to establish that she was normal. Her photo hinted at a woman in her thirties, Irish looking with pale skin and rolling auburn hair. She was pretty, she thought. Her tweets offered other hints.

'I love the girl in the new Dior advert. Such a sweet face. Makes me want to swoon.'

She didn't have long so she rushed into a reply.

'Yes, would be nice to meet another Vita. I'm becoming as much a fan of her life as her books.'

She slipped the phone to one side but couldn't resist checking it again after giving it less than a minute.

'What's cooking hun?' asked Jonathan. She imagined Vita slipping her long arms around her waist and kissing her neck gently. She felt the hair on her neck tingle all the way to up to her scalp.

'Something quick. A bit of chilli with some salad,' she replied.

'How was your day?'

'Okay. How was yours?'

'The usual.'

She hesitated over meeting. It was difficult to find an opening in her religiously observed timetable. Jonathan and the children were such an integral part of her life. They had plans for almost every weekend for the next ten months. It wasn't as if she couldn't do things alone or that she was restricted by her husband but she felt underhand about concocting a cover story. So she invited her to the Book Group and was thrilled that she said yes. Orlando1610 was local and seemed up for accompanying her. She said she'd only just moved to the area a few months ago and was eager to make some new friends.

'Thank God for that,' she thought, 'I can breathe more easily.'

She still felt a kind of thrill when she read through some of @Orlando's tweets:

'Served by a beautiful young trainee in the shoe shop today. Don't want to embarrass her but she blushed so gracefully when I asked about boyfriend.'

And:

'Hubby is not happy with me. Had too much to drink and flirted too loudly at the party tonight. Ooops!'

_'What have you done? Hubbs usually exaggerate in my experience,_ ' she replied.

'Nothing really. I just like to hug and kiss people. Touching people is my way of showing them I love them. xx'

'How very much like Vita in my opinion. A woman who wanted to love and be loved is not so unusual.'

When she returned to her alter-ego's twitter account she felt a duty to support Orlando.

As Vita she tweeted,

'What fun for you and what fun for me. You see, any vengeance that you want to take will be ready in your hand' #Orlando.

'Mary Garman on the book 'Vita darling you have been so much Orlando to me that how can I help absolutely understanding and loving the book.'

'Vita speaking in 1955 about the novel Orlando and its origins

Later than day at the sacred hour between tidying up the kitchen and climbing the stairs to bed she joined Jonathan on the sofa in the lounge.

'Who you texting now?' he asked as another graph and a death toll appeared on the TV screen in front of them, 'You missed it. Jeremy's just had a real go at the ambassador for Syria.'

'Mmmm,' said Josie as she checked her phone. 'No-one. I'm just catching up on my Twitter news.'

'Oh. The alternative news. How goes it?'

'Surprisingly, it's more cheerful.'

She looked back at her phone and continued browsing tweets, status updates and photographs. Vita's followers had now peaked at around three hundred. She was proud of her achievement. To have reached this level of interest in only two weeks had exceeded all her expectations. It had exceeded the number of people following her account. Most of the Book Group had been hooked in and she was satisfied that she had at least resurrected some interest in a local writer, forgotten by all except academics and history buffs, but which still glimmered in her soul as a reminder of all that was lost and loved in her Oxford days. The time had come to nominate her book. It was too much to ask that everyone vote for one of Vita's novels. She didn't expect that. She opened a fresh page in her email account and typed her suggested title to Vicky. She looked at it for a while, toying with whether she should reveal something of her online alter-ego, but decided to reveal all at the next meeting instead. She clicked send. The work she nominated was _All Passion Spent._

On a cold evening in February, at the book group's first fortnightly meeting of the month, Josie was the first to arrive. Looking forward to the arrival of Orlando she had fished a suitable mix of Edwardian-style boots and a fedora hat and scarf from her wardrobe. She moved slowly to the bar, where she was greeted by the handsome young bar manager.

'Good evening Madam. What can I get you?'

'A glass of house red please,' she said, 'Just a small one.'

'Coming right up. Shiraz OK for you?'

She smiled broadly and nodded, bringing her handbag up to the bar to gather up her purse. Before she had time to fish it out she felt the touch of a delicate hand on her wrist.

'Vita?' said the woman next to her. Josie looked into her eyes.

'Orlando?' she grinned.

'Nice to meet you,' she said, beaming with delight and she leaned in for a kiss. Josie kissed her on one cheek and was taken aback when she realised that Orlando waited for her to kiss the other. She was slightly thinner and smaller than she had expected. Her face was framed with beautiful strands of auburn hair tucked behind a black beret.

As the barman brought over her glass she stopped Josie from opening her purse.

'Can we have two please. I'll get them.'

'But you needn't do that. Honestly. Let me get them.'

'No, let me,' she said, 'Thank you for introducing me to the group. I feel like I know some of you already.'

'Shall we get our real names out the way first? I'm Josie.'

'I'm Sarah. Which novel did you vote for by the way? I hope I'm not going to have to read any E.M.Forster by the way. I can't stand the guy.'

'I voted for one of Vita's novels it won't surprise you know.'

'I hope it was _All Passion Spent._ '

Josie nodded.

'I knew it. It forms part of my thesis on middle age and gender. I won't bore you with the details. I wish to god I'd never started it now. I'd really love to get your views on Vita. Do you think she was polyamorous if such a thing exists?'

'I think she may have been or at least been capable of it.'

'Well that's the impression she gives. A polyamorous romantic though.'

'Aren't we all? She was a tender hearted thing despite what they said about her. I think she was loyal to one love at a time. First Rosamund, then Violet Trefusis in her youth. She needed to love her companions and befriend new ones as they came along.'

Trish rolled up alongside them as they were talking.

'Oh, don't tell me. You're talking about this Bloomsbury stuff. I really haven't had a chance to vote. Isn't that terrible of me?'

'Very. How could you?' interjected Sarah.

'I'm the bad one of the group. Nice to meet you. I'm Trish and you must be....sorry. I hate forgetting names,' said Trish.

'Sarah, don't worry.'

They were soon joined by Vicky and Helene, Alison and Caroline, Yve and Sophia.

'You know I don't mind admitting that I was extremely nervous about coming here tonight. You all seem so sophisticated.'

'We try and fail,' said Helene with a sigh.

'But try as we might we're only as good as our last glass,' added Alison.

'OK, everyone, I think you've already got acquainted with our lovely new member Sarah,' said Vicky in opening up the meeting. 'Before we get down to it I got all your votes in for the next book we're going to read. Let me run through them. 'She pulled a clutch of papers from her bag, print offs of emails from the group, _'Orlando, Orlando, All Passion Spent, Howard's End, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, Orland-ho_ and finally, _Or- land- o._ So _Orlando_ it is.'

'Oh God,' said Trish, 'do I have to?'

'There's a film of it if you want to take a short cut,' whispered Josie, who was sitting next to her.

She had failed in a sense. A novel written by Virginia Woolf but inspired by Vita's personality had won out and no-one seemed to know how or why. She would weave Vita into the discussion when they'd all read it. For now she was satisfied that a new friendship was forming. She forgot how it had happened exactly. She couldn't remember if the exact moment of intimacy had been there from the beginning when they were both disguised as Vita and Orlando but as she made eye contact with Sarah she seemed to smile back as if in complicity with a fellow conspirator.

It was like walking through leaves.

CHAPTER 7

Vicky Hiccup

by Linda Chamberlain

Aspiring novelist Vicky Hiccup writes regular emails to her husband while searching for a location for her next self published eBook. She has always been overshadowed by the successful writer, Victoria Hislop. Both live in Kent and went to Tonbridge Grammar School but Hislop's first novel, _The Island_ , sold more than two million copies and won the Richard and Judy Summer Read competition. Hiccup's debut might have sold a few copies had she not faced such problems with her grasp of the English language – a weakness caused by a bout of scarlet fever in the sixth form. Hislop probably doesn't remember Vicky, whose strength at school was needlework. One of them might be suffering from professional jealousy.

Hi Grottie Bottie

In a rush. Only time to say I got here safe. Sorry I was ratty but you know what I'm like before a research trip. You were right. Sod the Aegean. I had some good holidays, tax deductable if my books start selling, but finding a bit she hasn't squeezed all the drama out of was a waste of time. What did she want to write about lepers for anyway? I mean, do we know anyone who's had it? Pattie thinks her husband had a touch but it was just another cold sore and we both know why he gets them.

You'll never guess where I am. Alright, here's a clue. I'm staying with a friend and we're hanging out in some places I haven't seen since school. OK?

Hi Grot

Are you sulking? You haven't emailed me back. Listen Babe, I was a bit harsh about the beard – don't take any notice.

Have you worked out where I am? I'm not telling, alright, but don't say Dover. I don't want the sea in the next one. There's no point filling a book with the grey Atlantic when she's got all that sparkle and sunshine in the Greek Islands. It's easy to write a great beach read in a place like that – no wonder Punch and Judy chose it. I wish you hadn't called them that. Now I can't get it out of my head. If I did my next one as a print book, Richard and Judy might notice it. Can you imagine me getting their names muddled?

Another clue, right. Our home county. That's all I'm saying.

Hey Smooth Cheeks

Pattie let slip that she saw you, so I know. You've shaved. I don't know why since you know I'm away for at least a week so you could hardly make me sore if we're not together. You're in the dumps and so now you're not emailing. I know I said you were trying to look like her oh-so-famous husband but it didn't suit you. Didn't suit him either but that's her look out.

OK – another clue. You'll laugh when you find out how near I am. It's famous for its water but it's not on the coast. Got it?

But that's given me an idea. My book! I could call it _The Inland._

Hi

I'm glad you emailed. You had me worried. Yeah, you're right. I'm with Pattie. In Tunbridge Wells. Nah, don't come and see me. You'll put me off and I've got to do this. Right? Now can you see why my idea would be so good? _The Inland_ \- and I wouldn't be riding off her back because hers was _The Island_ and that's completely different. It must have been easy for her to get all that bloody pathos on the page since Greek history is full of it but I'll be able to do the same for this place.

Listen, I've got to go. Pattie wants to go shopping again. How did you know I was staying with her? Sometimes I get the feeling you two are talking about me behind my back.

Hi

This is weird. Pattie wants me to give you a message. Could you see if one of her earrings is in your car? She thinks she lost it the last time we all went out. Yeah! A year ago! She thinks I never hoover the car.

She gave me a present yesterday. It was _her_ latest. So I had to smile and pretend that I'd get it signed when I saw Victoria next; like I see her for coffee all the time. _The Thread_ – that's what it's called. Daft title. Not enough about sewing really, not a knitting needle in sight. It's about Thessaloniki – full of Nazis and earthquakes. She was good at those things at school.

Hi

You're right; I should write about the things I'm good at. My very own mini series. Yeah, I like it. Needlework though? It's been done.

Tunbridge Wells on the other hand is hardly ever the location for a good read. And yet so much has happened here. Three bombs dropped in Calverley Park in just one Zeppelin raid in the war. I'm not kidding and I know no one died but there were a load of broken windows. Then there were Suffragettes...or did they come first? Well, anyway, I'll be able to really practise my poetic descriptions.

Hi

Pattie says you found her earring. I know because she was wearing both of them, you idiot. I asked her about it and she stuttered and said you must have posted it to her. What? Before I even mentioned it to you? She must think you're psychic. It's great being here because I can get a lot of work done while she's out in the evening. Terry is away and so I've got the place to myself.

I thought I might write some stuff about the waters here. I mean centuries ago people came for their holidays and drank it by the bucketful hoping for a bit of a cure. It was the trendy place to be in the 18th century. Or will people confuse my work with hers? You know, a bit too close to the leper idea? Nah, it's not like people have to stay in Tunbridge Wells. There's a train station, for God's sake.

Hi

Had a bit of a chat with Pattie last night and you know, I think she's playing around while Terry's away. Another woman can tell, honest. I could smell it on her. Well, at least, aftershave that she wasn't wearing when she left to go out! Thought I knew the smell, not sure.

Wrote two pages last night. You'd have liked my bit about the angry women burning down the cricket pavilion. Well, I'd have got pissed off never being allowed to play and always having to make the tea. I'd have been with them and joined the Suffragettes and thrown myself under a horse.

I think I would have managed two and a half pages but Pattie came back. Singing she was. Oh, got it. I know what she smelled of. 'Le Male'. Funny 'cos you wear that, don't you?

Do you think if I changed my name to Hislop my books would sell more? Perhaps I should go on a writing course. Pattie suggested it. Which is funny because she's never shown any interest in my work before. What do you reckon?

Victoria Hislop books: -

Not For Me, I'm Russian

The Island

The Return

The Thread

Vicky Hiccup's debut novel is sadly no longer on line. She hopes to finish

_The Inland_ very soon...

CHAPTER 8

E.M. Forster

by Jess Mookherjee

EMorg4

I was not progressing well. Piles of unread and unopened books and DVDs sat idly around me: _Howards End_ , _A Passage to India_ and _England's Pleasant Land_. I had re-watched _Maurice_ – but in truth I was getting stuck with trying to find any connection between Forster and Tunbridge Wells.

I continued to surf the net on my iPad. Google adverts plagued me. 'Talk to authors living and dead - download app.' My eye kept being drawn to the small advert and I stupidly clicked it. My screen stuck for a moment and then Google shut down. As I reopened Safari I could see another note from Skype asking me to accept legal liability to download an update. Again, I didn't think much and just instinctively clicked it.

This time Skype opened up with a funny whirling, whooshing sound. On the left hand side of the screen were a whole list of names that I couldn't recognise, strange sounding words in a language I didn't understand. I wasn't sure what I was looking at. I was acutely irritated, filled with a vague panic and powerlessness coupled with a desperate need to fix this problem even though I knew it was essentially pointless.

Scanning down the left hand list there was a word that got my attention: EMorg4. I made a face and clicked on the link. There was that Skype hiss and fake phone buzz. The name icon went green and I suddenly realised that this was one of those stupid pretend apps - about as pathetic as downloading animal noises. I sighed. I felt secure in that I knew now what had happened. The buzzing continued and then a crackle of static, and a note flashing up saying 'no video connection available, audio only.' More static and buzz, then an answer.

'Er, hello there.'

The voice was pretty strong and clear, clipped, refined and English.

'Hello?' I shouted into my iPad.

This is brilliant!' the voice exclaimed.

'Hello, who are you?' was all I could think of saying.

'It's me, Morgan! Is that Jess? I got an alert from the web that you were looking for me.'

'Who are you please – is this a school project?' Again, I'm not sure why I said that. Everything happened so quickly that it was all I could think of saying that seemed to have any plausibility. The voice laughed.

'No it's Morgan - I'm making contact. You have clearly triggered the right gateway – somehow. We have wanted this application to work for some time.'

I now realised I was in the presence of some idiot hackers and I thought I had better sign off pretty sharpish before they got hold of all my bank account details.

'Jess, it's pretty hard to explain all of this on Skype – perhaps we can meet in person?'

I don't know why I didn't sign off. I suppose I was in awe of the cheek of this hack/internet groomer or whatever he was.

'Shall we meet at the Grecian temple on the Dunorlan estate tomorrow evening at 7.30? You must wait until exactly 7.30 and then go inside the temple, I will be there. But take your technology in case of problems.'

I signed off, so did the voice. I sat feeling a mixture of bafflement, fear and a kind of shameful anger – the kind of feeling you get when you know you are being conned but you are also walking right into it.

I then spent ten minutes trying to delete the app. After being unsuccessful I thought of rebooting my iPad completely, but I felt exhausted and just lay down on the sofa and opened up my Kindle app and started to read Edward Morgan Forster's biography.

As I read about his early life in Stevenage, Hertfordshire in the late 19th century a flush of nausea came over me. Some bloody hacker has taken over my iPad and knows everything about me! They must know I'm researching E.M. Forster – they are probably monitoring everything I'm doing. I shuddered. I wanted to throw the iPad against the wall. Either that or absolute madness has set in. That was it, I had succumbed to psychosis. I then remembered that the very fact that I had thought I might be mad, meant it was more likely to be computer hackery. I shut the offending machine down and went to get myself a drink.

I went lo-tech. I had printed out some articles and short stories of Forster's and thought I should wade through these. One caught my eye: _The Machine Stops._ I read through it and was mesmerised. Forster would have been 20 when he wrote this story in 1909, just around the invention of the aeroplane or the car. This story could have been written in the 1960s and gave me an eerie, hallucinatory sense of unease. The story was set in a future where people sat isolated from each other with only small flat screen devices for company. But through these small machines they could communicate instantly with each other, they could have music brought to them, minute by minute entertainment. They could discuss ideas with others. The story tells of a society that is run by a machine feeding people information. People don't even know they are not living in the real world, they think the real world is contaminated. Then the machine breaks. It's a story like no other from that era, far better than H.G. Wells. It also made me think about something a friend told me about studying Forster at school.

'I was angry with him, because he seemed to be saying that nothing mattered, we were all hung up on the details of life and all that really mattered was our connection to each other – well I was a teenager and wanted to believe that things did matter – of course as I got older I realised he was right – but I will never forget feeling angry with him.'

I went to sleep thinking I might pop along to the park tomorrow to see what kind of hacker I was up against. I thought I would take my dog just in case of any funny business and although my dog was no Rottweiler I thought he was some protection.

I was busy the next day. I was in Tonbridge all day at my office overlooking the Medway and I couldn't help thinking about the poor young Morgan in his horrible school across the road. Every morning I saw this small army of schoolboys, tomorrow's world leaders they all looked like, smart, blazered and confident. All day I couldn't face opening my iPad.

That evening I took the dog to Dunorlan Park. This park had been the brainchild of Henry Reed and the Victorian landscaper Robert Marnock, who was so interested in the harmony of man and nature and land. He had designed the Grecian temple, with its statue of Hebe, the handmaiden to the gods and goddess of youth, to face the new moon at 7.30 precisely. I knew this because my birthday was on the spring equinox and I had stood at the temple last year and seen the new moon rise. Hebe had been stolen a few years ago and the temple was now locked and dishevelled.

As I walked up the avenue past the fountain with the dancing girl I could see a faint glow from the temple and started to feel a bit apprehensive. My little dog, getting overexcited, ran fast up the hill. As I reached the temple, just before 7.30, I wondered if indeed I was mad or perhaps had suffered a mild stroke.

It was 7.30 and I heard the door click, I pushed the temple door and inside was a beautiful tiled terracotta, purple and green swirling interior, with a beautiful shining Hebe taking centre stage. Sitting by the far window, a little in the shade, was a handsome young man in Edwardian clothes, languidly smoking a cigarette. Tall and pale with a small clipped moustache, he had a delicate and kind face. He saw me and his eyes lit up with fervent excitement.

'My God, Jess!' He yelled and thumped his hands to his sides as he stood up. I just stood and watched, my eyes wide and frozen.

'Who are you?' I answered, but he looked exactly like the old pictures of Morgan Forster I had seen in his biography.

He came towards me jauntily, happy, shining almost. I saw he was shaking his head in amazement.

'So we got it to work! Hah! Amazing, absolutely amazing!'

I too was shaking my head. My dog had taken an enormous liking towards him and was wedged between his feet in ecstasy.

'Jess, we don't have long, this effect only lasts about an hour and I'm not sure yet how it works. I know that if you have your telephone on it lasts longer but we don't have the phones so we can't amplify...'

I wanted to know who the 'we' were that he spoke about – and he said he simply didn't have time to explain but that they were a group of writers. I was baffled. I would go to Pembury Hospital in the morning for sure.

'Relax, relax, let's talk. You want to ask me questions and I want to answer them. I have been too silent about the Tunbridge Wells years, I never spoke about them and even at my death I found it hard.'

'OK... Look, I mostly want to speak to you about... How the bloody hell is this happening? And if you're from the afterlife, is there a God? And a million other things. I'm sorry but the plot of _A Room with a View_ isn't the biggest thing in my consciousness right now.' I was a bit freaked out.

'Yes, well I'm afraid we can't go into that, no time, literally no time.' Then he laughed strangely. 'Suffice to say technology will save us all someday – look Jess, it's a quirk in randomness, things collide and well... Where there are unstable systems that exploit randomness well, we can surf them. I suppose I can't really explain any better. I'm a writer not a mathematician so I'm limited. But as writers, our leaps are in concepts so the scientists need us to create the randomness.'

'I really don't know what you are talking about,' I replied.

'Jorge Luis Borges wrote a story about a man who stumbled upon a house of the future, he met a man who showed him paintings of the future – he could only see some faint splodges of yellow and the future man told him that was because the colours of the future could not be seen in his time.'

'OK.' I sat down on the window sill. He was still excited and now stroking my dog who was licking his hand.

'How was Tunbridge Wells for you then?'

'I hated it, venomously. Truly and utterly hated it. It was a vile, stultifying and average place. It was never full of the really wealthy, just those small time moneyed men who were insecure and needed to bolster what little they had into some pathetic sense of class.'

He grew drawn as he described what was clearly difficult for him.

'When I was a small boy, day boy at Tonbridge School, I left the school early one day and came into this park. It was still being formed then. As I was walking around a man, much older with whiskers, made me masturbate him. I remember just thinking, 'How does he know I'm queer? I'm only a small boy.' Anyway, he didn't hurt me any more than that, but he thanked me and walked away. I was new in the area, mother just having moved to Earls Terrace in Tunbridge Wells, but somehow I found my way back to school and thought I should write down this experience.'

'I knew I was homosexual, but I knew also it was quite wrong to molest a child. I was quite certain of that, and quite certain also that I had been cruelly taken advantage of and my mother was to come and get me and take me away back to Stevenage.' He paused. He talked with the air of a much older man, a man who has understood his biography in the context of his own life.

'I wrote to my mother, she came to the school and they...' He began to laugh quite manically. 'They investigated... They sent search parties out to look for the molester. They paraded men in front of me. They questioned me for hours. They were hysterical about their reputation. This gave the other boys terrible ammunition against me. In the jungle of childhood I was isolated and hunted down. I kept my secret sex diary, where I catalogued my growing understanding and experiences of my sexuality. Understanding it to be socially abhorrent but to me quite normal. This gave me a sense that the world was a veil of idiocy and superstition and fear covering up love and yearning and intimacy. That everyone was scared. So the bastards at Tonbridge made my life a living hell here. I was bullied mercilessly and matter-of-factly. They enjoyed making me feel different and fearful. But I was never frightened of them, just appalled. Nothing of any forward volition could come from these people and as soon as I could I left.'

I was listening amazed by this voice from the past.

'Do you like it here?' he suddenly asked me. 'You are a foreigner, an outsider too?'

I thought for a second and sighed.

'Well things have moved on quite a bit really, and it's really quite nice and friendly now. I tend to think people do just want connection at the end of it – that's all we have – each other, and it's an easy place to live so I don't particularly feel an outsider, though it helps to have a nice little dog to break the ice.'

We both laughed, thrilled at our small connection as I watched my little dog sit lovingly at Morgan's feet. He stroked Georgie absent-mindedly.

'I stopped writing novels because I could not bear to pretend that I was anything other than homosexual, it angered me to the core that I could not say who or what I loved. I stood for free speech, yet nothing was free. I refused to write any more. Why should I?'

'What about your short story – the one about the machine?' I asked him, wondering if that was why we were here together.

He smiled at me.

'We are the machine now. It's further even than I could think. There is only connection – nothing more, and when the point of randomness through small petty inevitabilities comes crashing into creativity, story and invention, then we might be onto something big.'

I liked him. He was not as so many men are; a man of his time. He was a man out of time. A free thinker. A gay man who could not declare being so until 1974, yet he stood for the freedom of D.H. Lawrence to publish _Lady Chatterley's Lover_.

'You must have loved Oxford!' I said, 'All those freedoms.'

'No, my only freedom came from travel – moving from one place to another, one time to another, I think that is freedom. When you no longer want to move, search your soul, and search it deeply, are you still moving in your soul?'

He watched me curiously.

'Time is running out – tell your story, tell my story, fantastical as it seems. It is a small part of this place.'

And I walked away, back down the avenue leaving Morgan behind – and watching the small sliver of the new moon rise before me. I was thinking about technology, about creativity and truth and another interpretation of _A Room with a View._ I returned to Tunbridge Wells where perhaps we are no longer so 'hideously behind the times'.

CHAPTER 9

Rachel Beer

The First Lady of Fleet Street

by Katherine Loverage

The warm shafts of spring sun light fell across Elle's face; she wrinkled her nose and opened her eyes very slowly. Just for a moment she was disorientated, and then she remembered she was in her new bed. She closed her eyes again and tried to visualize the large 12th century house that was now her new home. Chancellor House stood on Mount Ephraim in Tunbridge Wells; this was now her home town.

The house had character and charm, being so old, the floor in the bedroom felt as though it was running down hill. Elle sat up and swung her legs out of bed, she walked over to the small window, pressing her nose against the small panes of glass. She looked out over an immaculate and formal garden, at the back there were large trees, which reminded Elle of the woods she used to play in when she was a young child.

A cold shiver ran up her spine and the warm air suddenly had an icy feel to it. She turned her head in the direction of the cold air. There on the edge of her bed sat an elderly lady, Middle Eastern in appearance. Her dress looked Edwardian; it was very fine with touches of lace. Elle's heartbeat quickened, she looked around the room. She could feel her skin prickle. She closed her eyes and opened them a second time. The woman was still there. Her first thought was to run but she held her breath, calmed herself and as she began to breathe again the words came out quietly.

'Can I help you?' she asked, unsure as to who the woman was and how she had come to be sitting on her bed.

The woman said nothing, but sat looking very sad. As Elle made a move towards her she disappeared. Somewhat disturbed she pinched herself; had this been a dream? Had she actually seen anyone at all? She patted the bed where the woman had been sitting. There was nothing there; Elle decided that in actual fact the woman had been just a figment of her imagination. She climbed back into the bed. 'Just ten more minutes,' she thought to herself, closing her eyes and enjoying the warm sun on her face once again.

When she awoke for the second time Elle was definitely alone. She dressed and hurried downstairs, opening the door into the spacious kitchen. Mrs Greet smiled and invited her in.

'Did you sleep well dear?' she asked as she continued to look down at the cooker.

'Like a log,' Elle replied. 'Something smells lovely.'

Mrs Greet indicated to her to sit at the large oak table. 'Cooked breakfast OK? What would you like?' and she handed Elle a knife and fork.

Mrs Greet was her landlady. Elle guessed she was in her early fifties with her ashen blonde hair pulled back into a pony tail, her reading glasses perched on her head, and over the top of her clothes a striped butcher's apron which was immaculately clean.

'I'd like everything that you are cooking, thank you. Oh and could I have a cup of coffee too?' Elle replied and sat down.

'Of course dear, milk and sugar?' And she placed these on the table before pouring coffee into a large mug.

'Have you lived here long?' Elle asked as she sipped the steaming coffee.

'Many years, my husband's family bought it in the 1930's,' she replied, serving Elle's breakfast. 'You look very pale dear, are you alright?'

'Yes,' Elle replied and stroked her face as if she was trying to put the colour back into her skin.

'Are you unwell, you look so grey? It's as if you've met a ghost,' she said.

'Did an old lady live here then?' she asked trying not to mention the possibility that she may have just encountered a ghost.

Mrs Greet laughed. 'Ahh you have met our ghost then. You must have seen our Rachel?' she asked.

'Your Rachel, she's a ghost then not a guest?' Elle asked as she continued to eat.

'That's right, Rachel came with the house, she's a ghost. Very unsettled but harmless,' she replied.

'Oh, so I did see her then?'

'Yes, if you saw her sitting by your window, dressed in Edwardian clothes then that's Rachel. She was the most amazing women then. She could tell you a thousand stories. Do you know she was the first female editor of a national newspaper?'

'Wow, that's amazing, that's a bit of a good omen for me, just as I am about to write my first piece for the local paper. Do you think she would speak to me?' Elle could hardly believe she had just suggested interviewing someone who wasn't alive any more.

'You can certainly try; it's a little unusual isn't it? An interview with a ghost.' Mrs Greet handed her a small book. 'This is all there is about her, the only book there is, however it's a starting point,' she said and went back to the sink and started to wash up.

Elle read the back of the book and flicked through the inside, stopping at photographs. There were several she recognized as Rachel. She had been desperately trying to think of a suitable starting point to prove to her editor that she was capable of writing an interesting and relevant piece.

She took the book and made her way back up to her room. After taking out a pen and notebook from her bag she sat down on the bed, picked up the book and started to read it.

It was as if Rachel was waiting to give her an interview. This time, she appeared to be sitting on the window seat, which overlooked the garden.

'Hello Rachel,' Elle said nervously, after all it wasn't every day you had an audience with a ghost.

'Good morning,' the ghost replied.

'I am Elle, Elle Stead.' She went to hold out her hand and quickly retracted it, realizing that speaking to a ghost is one thing but touching is impossible.

'Hello Miss Stead, you come from a long line of journalists,' Rachel replied.

She looked at Rachel more closely, an elegant lady, her dark hair piled on her head, her neck displaying the most exotic necklace, but for an Eastern Indian lady she definitely bore a Jewish nose.

'Yes, there was an editor with the name of Stead, a long time ago,' Elle answered and sat on the edge of the bed.

'Indeed there was, he wrote, if I remember rightly, for the _Pall Mall Gazette_ , and I had more than one encounter with him. It was when I was an editor he told me that to know the inner working of a journalist meant you needed to impress readers with a sense of influence, to find out what people are about, to do and recommend they do it. The public would then be impressed with your sagacity,' she replied placing her hands on her lap.

'So you are Rachel Sassoon?' Elle asked and picked up her pen, 'May I take notes and ask questions?'

'Rachel Beer, I will correct you, I was born Rachel Sassoon in 1857, my father was David Sassoon and he ran Sassoon and Company, who imported silver, gold, silk, spices and cotton among other things. We were one of the wealthiest families of the 19th century; indeed, my father was known as the 'Rothschild of the East'. He was a remarkable man. He was an Indian Jew; he had fourteen children, of which I am one. My father died when I was nine. And yes you may take notes. I was born in Bombay.' She spoke with distance in her eyes. Her voice softened as she looked back on her early life.

'So how did you come to meet Stead?' Elle asked.

'When I first started as an editor on Fleet Street that was in 1894.....' her words trailed off.

'So how did you become an editor? That was not the usual thing then for a woman to do,' Elle said, hardly taking a breath.

'Well, it was thanks to my late husband, Frederick Beer. I will tell you how I became an editor. Frederick's parents were Jewish like mine, but Frederick was christened in the Anglican Church when he was eleven.' She smiled, 'As was I until just before we married in 1887.'

'So was that in Bombay?' she asked.

'No, we moved to England in 1869, it was different then.'

'When Frederick and I got married it was the union of East and West. I was baptized so that when the day came that we would be parted, I would be interred with him in the Beer Mausoleum in Highgate in London,' she said and tears stared to slowly roll down her face.

'I'm sorry; I've disturbed your memories,' Elle wanted to comfort her, 'Would you rather we left them asleep?' she asked.

'No my dear, it was a long time ago,' she replied, 'Frederick was a dear man who I adored. In 1894 he bought me _The Sunday Times_ and I became the first woman editor.'

'He bought you a copy of _The Sunday Times_ and from that you became an editor, was a job advertised then?' she asked Rachel.

'Oh no,' Rachel laughed, 'he actually bought me the whole paper, lock stock and barrel. From owning it I then became editor.'

'That's amazing, so you were in Fleet Street?' Elle was in complete awe.

'Yes, 46 Fleet Street, I did not go to university, and I could not get in any of the men's clubs, so I set out to do something different, to make the English public interested in what happened outside the borders; foreign affairs should not be ignored. I set about changing the paper, I added the horse training reports, we had articles about taking holidays and different holiday destinations, I added the feminine touch, reporting on fashion and sometimes fashion tips for men...'

Rachel drew breath for a moment.

'I also used the papers to raise profiles on affairs that I thought were important like the pay and conditions for the working man, I advocated for the right for women to vote, the paper was a good way to support the Suffragettes and for women to have their voices heard.'

'One of my greatest exclusives when I was editor of _The Observer_ was the admission by Count Esterhazy, that he had forged the letters that had condemned an innocent French Jewish officer, Captain Dreyfus to Devil's Island. The story that we wrote provoked an international outcry and it led to the release and pardon of Dreyfus. As a result of this, Esterhazy was court-martialed.'

'You really were quite a modern woman. It must have been the most amazing feeling to help Captain Dreyfus,' Elle said, entranced by Rachel's every word.

'It was wonderful, it was at a time when women were not allowed to vote and there was anti-Semitism across Europe.'

'Were there other papers with female editors?' Elle asked.

'No there were female journalists, not editors, oh except for _The Observer_ of course. Then in 1896 my beloved Frederick became too ill,' she replied; there was a sad look on her face again.

'What was wrong with him if you don't mind me asking?'

'They thought it was syphilis, he then became paralyzed and mentally ill. I nursed him myself,' Rachel replied.

'Goodness, that was an undertaking, so who took that role on then? She must have been as influential as you,' Elle said.

'I did, I wrote them both, I kept _The Observer_ in the traditional manor that Frederick had run it. I didn't own _The Observer_ but _The Sunday Times_ was mine. It was hard work, doing both of them and caring for Frederick too, some nights I hardly slept.'

'So, did you do that for many years? People must have been in awe of you!' Elle stopped; her pen had run dry so she took a second pen from her bag.

'I see you write in pen with paper, do you not use a typewriter?' Rachel looked at Elle's hands.

'No, I find with pen and paper, it is far more connecting; I like to feel what I write.'

Rachel laughed, 'I did the same, and my hands were always covered in ink. No one really understood that a typewriter deprived the user of writing more calmly but gliding your pen across the paper the perfect connection. Now where were we?' she asked Elle.

'Ummm, you were telling me about Frederick being ill.'

'Oh yes, well before that in 1900 I was elected as the Vice President of the Society of Women Journalists, but I made a point of presenting myself as just the editress of _The Sunday Times_. It was year later my darling Frederick became very ill, I tried to keep his spirits up but he left me just after Christmas and was buried with his parents in Highgate, I never saw him again.'

'How terrible. I am so sorry; you must have missed him desperately.' Elle felt a wave of sadness wash over her.

'It was so hard to write after that, I tried really I did, but in August that year, I just could not any more and that is when my life completely changed, my family hurt me very badly. You see when I married Frederick I was no longer a Jew, my family ostracised me, my brother Joseph and nephew Siegfried were the worst.' Rachel hardly stopped for breath, her words came out at such a pace, Elle found it hard to keep up with her pen.

'Firstly I moved from London, to be near my sister-in-law Theresa. That was in 1904. Then I eventually moved here to Chancellor House, Tunbridge Wells which was a modern holiday resort, you know, with a spa. I now became withdrawn, Joseph got the doctors in and before I knew it I was found of unsound mind. I was too weary and downtrodden to act; I missed my husband so much. The grief was too much to bear. I had three nurses and a personal assistant; at least I stayed in my home and wasn't committed to a mental asylum. But my papers were sold; I don't know where the paintings went.' She took a deep breath and let it out very suddenly.

'After a year, I started to feel a bit better. The family took me hunting at Eridge Place, and I got involved in town life.' Her face now looked a little more relaxed.

'So you started your life again?' Elle asked.

'Not really, I just made the most of it. I remember in 1915, the start of the war, I helped the local hospital, I was a major benefactor, you know there was a ward named after me. I arranged fancy dress competitions and concerts at the Opera House. Then I had musical evenings and Shakespeare plays in my garden. It was wonderful and it was there that I met Ben Greer, his great grandson lives here now.

It was then that Siegfried, my nephew, who was an unpleasant man, was overheard saying how desperate he was to obtain my wealth. I did not die that quickly, at least he had to wait twenty years before I decided. How callous can a family be?' she asked, it was a rhetorical question. 'Then I died, that was 29th April 1927. Actually that's 85 years ago, almost to the day. You do realize I am a ghost don't you? I wasn't allowed to write a will and now I am stuck here for all eternity, waiting and wondering and retelling my story.'

Elle didn't really understand what was she waiting for, she put down her pen.

'Why?' she asked.

'I am not with my husband, look I'm here alone and not at peace.'

'Where is he then and more to the point where are you?' Elle was really confused now.

'Well he's in Highgate Cemetery and I'm somewhere in Tunbridge Wells. I wasn't allowed to be there with him. I am on unconsecrated ground, not even named,' she replied, her head nodding as she looked downwards.

'What do you mean?' Elle was very confused.

'You know what they put on my headstone?'

'No,' replied Elle.

'Daughter of the late David Sassoon. There was no mention of Rachel Beer. I am just the daughter, not even a wife.' The tears flowed freely now down Rachel's face. Elle was almost embarrassed, she looked at her and Rachel started to fade away.

The interview was over, Elle opened the book that Mrs. Greet has given her; there at the back were two obituaries from the papers Rachel had edited.

_The Sunday Times_ , her paper in 1927, was then 32 pages long, yet not a word had been written about the passing of Rachel. Two weeks later within an article Mr. O'Conner had belittled Mrs. Beer, saying, 'she had made something of an ass of it,' indicating her editorial skills.

_The Observer_ mentions her as 'one-time proprietor who took an active interest in public affairs.'

No wonder Rachel felt that she was unwanted. It didn't seem she was bitter about her family abandoning her, that they wanted her wealth or even that her journalistic and editing career hadn't really been recognized. Further reading indicated to Elle that another female editor in Fleet Street didn't happen for another eighty years. Rachel Beer had been one of a kind. So passionate about her beliefs that she pushed the glass ceiling for women. All she needed now was peace.

Elle couldn't move Rachel to Frederick's resting place, but she knew the very least she could do was to find Rachel's resting place and put a new headstone on it. She wrote on the bottom of her note pad.

Rachel Beer, Wife of Frederick Beer, 1857 to 1927, Daughter of the late David Sassoon.

She placed her pen on the page and looked up. 'Thank you,' she heard whispering around her.

Elle knew that was Rachel thanking her for her kindness in finding a way to stop her roaming and to be at peace with Frederick. Elle also knew that this was the very start of her career and what an amazing first story it would be, including the burial site. She had a lot to do, but today she was just going to enjoy the conversation she had just had in her first ghostly encounter.

Bibliography:-

First lady of Fleet Street: A Biography of Rachel Beer by Yehuda Koren and

Eilat Negeve.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Beer

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books

CHAPTER 10

Will Storr

or 'Interviewing the Interviewer'

by Carolyn Gray

Literary careers can start in the strangest of places...

Tunbridge Wells Forum opened in 1993 as a local, independent music venue, run by a group of friends, in what had been the 'rest rooms' on Tunbridge Wells Common. The rest rooms were built just before World War Two, on the site of an old forge, and the building is one of very few on Tunbridge Wells Common, due to an Act of Parliament passed in 1739 which protected the common against building encroachment.

The reason I know all this is because last year I wrote a piece for a local magazine all about the history of the site (known as Fonthill) and in particular the history of The Forum. A friend, Mark Randall, lent me a pile of old music fanzines, which he had worked on from 2001. They contained listings, reviews and chat about The Forum. The early fanzines were called _SPieL_ but the bulk of the pile were called _Blam!_ and they were very helpful for my research, uncovering some famous names who had played gigs at the Forum early in their careers.

This year we were talking again about the fanzines, and the fact that there was a third one that no-one could remember the name of. Mark mentioned Will Storr. Mark said that Will had worked on the fanzines before him, and suggested I Google 'Will Storr' to see what he had done after the fanzines...

A little bit of Googling revealed Mr Storr was doing quite well for himself following his early fanzine journalism. I emailed Will through his website contact, to see if he could remember the name of the third fanzine. Not only did he remember the name of his fanzine – _Fiasco_ – he also agreed to an email interview about being a writer from Tunbridge Wells...

As our email interview progressed I became aware that I was trying to interview the interviewer... We managed to cover Will's time in Tunbridge Wells, but time and his work was against us, and I have compiled the epilogue myself from online information.

CG: I moved to Tunbridge Wells in 1992 just before The Forum was setting up, but are you a born and bred Tunbridge Wellian?

WS: I moved to Tunbridge Wells when I was about five and was a regular at The Rumble Club, the Forum's predecessor, in my early to mid-teens.

CG: I've heard about The Rumble Club, that it was a group of people rather than a venue, putting on gigs in different places, but quite often using The Satellite Club in Grosvenor Rec. How did you become a regular?

WS: I just went to see the bands and drink Strongbow (and Amaretto if I was feeling fancy). My era was when the organisers were settled at what was The Winchester Club - which is now Thorins.* Suede played there (I seem to recall their fee was £80) and I remember loving an amazing trippy rock act called Dr Phibes and the House of Wax Equations. I was always up at the front, pissed, with two other guys, Steve and Austin. One night I got punched in the nose by a member of a band called The Longhaired Lovers. I even played there. My band was Sonic Rumblehammer. We only existed for a week - we formed at the beginning of a school half term, wrote 'songs' until Friday, and then played that night. You can imagine what we sounded like. We advertised ourselves on our posters as 'from Seattle'. I was working Saturdays in the TW record shop Longplayer, at the time, and I felt a twinge of guilt when I actually saw someone say, 'Wow! From Seattle! We should go to that!'

I got to know those involved at the club - Jason, Mark and Dave who edited _SPieL_ at the time. Dave asked me to write a rock column for _SPieL_ (or maybe I asked if I could write one - that seems more likely) and he eventually handed over the editorship to me. After a while _SPieL_ became _Fiasco_ , for some reason. I can't remember why - _SPieL's_ a much better name. Anyhow, I was editing a Forum-centred fanzine on a monthly basis for at least a couple of years. We'd put out 2000 every month - that was the limit of my photocopying budget - and they'd be gone in a week or two. _Blam!_ emerged as an official Forum production after a bit, but we carried on regardless. _Blam!_ is a bad name for a fanzine, now I come to think of it. It makes me feel less bad about _Fiasco._

I've looked at some old _Fiasco_ covers, in issue 6 we were boasting of being the ONLY guide to what's going on at the Forum. By issue 13 we were boasting we were INDEPENDENT (ie. of The Forum), so _Blam!_ would have launched by then.

CG: Had you been interested in writing before writing for _SPieL_?

WS: I'd always been interested in writing, yes. I started a school magazine called _The Groover_ which was full of gossip and frequently got me into trouble.

CG: So, a bit of a 'what happened next?'

WS: I stayed at school to do A-levels but failed to do any work. I think I got one E or something (which was quite apt). I worked full time at Longplayer for a few years, then worked at a record company called Pinnacle, first in sales, selling singles into record shops, then in marketing. I was doing the fanzine throughout this time, living in Tunbridge Wells and then Tonbridge, and I saw an ad in _Loaded_ magazine (this was the late 90s, before its descent into Page 3 hell) asking for fanzine writers to send in their mags for potential work. I happened to be doing my monthly mail-out when I saw this so popped one in the post to them. They called me up and sent me on assignment to Sound City, a Radio One music festival in Liverpool, then 'on the road' (for about two days) with a boyband called Five... I had to do all this by taking holiday from Pinnacle, which quickly ran out. I told _Loaded_ I couldn't do anything more for six months. I think the editor there called me a bastard or an arsehole or something. They eventually found me a job as staff writer.

CG: I've read your bio on your website, but for anyone who hasn't - it seems that the posting of _Fiasco_ fanzine to _Loaded_ magazine was the start of an amazing set of travels. What has happened in the years since then?

WS: I went from _Loaded_ to _Arena_ magazine - now closed, but it was the forerunner of _GQ_ \- then I moved to Australia, where I went freelance and began writing for the broadsheet newspapers over there. In 2010, I returned to the UK. I now write for the supplements here - _The Guardian Weekend, The Sunday Times Magazine_ and so on. I've also written two non-fiction books and a novel.

Epilogue

An article Will wrote for _Loaded_ magazine led to his first non-fiction book, _Will Storr Versus the Supernatural_ (2007) in which he meets many people and visits many places connected with 'ghostly' goings on. He then wrote a novel, _The Hunger and the Howling of Killian Lone_ (2014) which was put on hold while researching his second non-fiction book, _The Heretics, Adventures with the Enemies of Science_ (2014), both books then being released within months of each other at the beginning of this year.

His work as a journalist has seen him reporting from the refugee camps of Africa, the war-torn departments of rural Colombia and the remote Aboriginal communities of Australia.

He has been named New Journalist of the Year and Feature Writer of the Year, and has won a National Press Club award for excellence. In 2010, his investigation into the kangaroo meat industry won the Australian Food Media award for Best Investigative Journalism and, in 2012, he was presented with the One World Press Award and the Amnesty International Award for his work for _The Observer_ on sexual violence against men. In 2013, his BBC radio series _An Unspeakable Act_ won the AIB award for best investigative documentary.

In June 2014 he attended the summit in London, hosted by British Foreign Secretary William Hague and UN Special Envoy Angelina Jolie, on ending sexual violence during war. Will spoke about the male survivors, as featured in his 2011 _Observer_ article.

He is also a widely published photographer, whose portraits of LRA (Ugandan Lord's Resistance Army) survivors have been the subject of an exhibition at the Coin Street Gallery in London's Oxo Tower.

His TV credits include RI:SE, Channel 4's 100 _Worst Britons_ and _Gonzo TV_ for Five _._

This year, to accompany the _Heretics_ book, Will has talked to several 'Skeptics in the Pub' groups, including the Tunbridge Wells group. It was a pleasure to meet him

Details of his books and articles can be found at www.willstorr.co.uk

or follow him on twitter @wstorr

CHAPTER 11

Richard Cobb

by Katherine Loverage

Written as an opening to Richard Cobb's _Still Life_ this quote sums up not just Tunbridge Wells in the 1920s but also Tunbridge Wells as we may well see it today.

'The town is never over-run with trippers, nor are its streets ever defiled by the vulgar or the inane. Its inhabitants are composed, for the most part, of well-to-do people who naturally create social atmosphere tinged by culture and refinement...

'On its outskirts are many houses of the kind that attract those members of the aristocracy desirous of change of scene after the ceaseless social duties of the London season. Thus it may be taken for granted that when London is 'empty' in the society sense, Tunbridge Wells is at its liveliest and best..'

Between the 1920's and 1930's Richard Charles Cobb lived at 5a Grove Hill, Tunbridge Wells. As he said himself the house was 'back to front', the 'front' of the house facing onto Claremont Road and the 'back' Grove Hill. Born in 1917, Richard Cobb had a style which was unique and his interest in places and human nature made him a genius among post-war British historians. Born in Essex and educated at Shrewsbury School and Merton College Oxford, Richard spent his childhood holidays in Tunbridge Wells.

Later in life he went on to write _Still life: Sketches from a Tunbridge Wells Childhood_ (the sub-title is important) which was first published in 1984. It won the J.R. Ackerley Prize for Literary Biography in that year. It is a classic among middle-class memoirs. For those who live in and know Tunbridge Wells, his insight into different roads and memories of shops and people come alive. Having read the book, I can now wander around the very places that he writes about and almost imagine Edwardian life.

The book opens with his memories of the approach to Tunbridge Wells by train. If I close my eyes for just a moment I too can visualise his journey. In his own words 'the station faced backwards, and was at two levels, so that passengers from London were greeted by the Traitors Gate of the two smoky stairways as much as to say: 'just let this teach you not to come here again', a point reinforced by the effort of having to drag every article of luggage up some 25 feet.' And as he quite rightly points out, it was, and is impossible to see any of Tunbridge Wells from the train as it arrives at the station from either direction through a long tunnel.

Richard seemed to enjoy his time in Tunbridge Wells and when he returned to school he had many fond memories which he used to prolong his sense of being on holiday. One of these was Toad Rock at Rusthall on which he carved his name with a pen knife (which may still be there) to leave behind his presence. Equally he would keep his bus and cinema tickets when returning to school so he could reconstruct how he had spent that particular day.

His description of his mother's house (in which his father had a room but is barely mentioned) is detailed to the point where you can almost smell the lavender bags in her chest of drawers and imagine him taking a half crown to The Compasses or Yeoman's (which is now the Black Pig).

As Richard points out, between the ages of 5 and 6, Tunbridge Wells provided him with a perpetual, self-renewing voyage of discovery of which he never tired, a voyage in which there was mostly a single traveller; himself.

His book reveals that Tunbridge Wells was and still is middle class in character. Although he said that he had little memory of politics he writes about the local headquarters for the Conservative Party not because of politics but that it had been the house which Thackeray had lived in, whilst writing _The Newcomes_. He also wondered why it should actually be in Tunbridge Wells. He writes of tennis and bridge clubs and the poetry society which met in an upstairs room over the far end of the Pantiles which he attended as an adolescent looking for pretty girls.

As for school life, Richard's parents opted to send him to private school, the only options being Rose Hill or Eversley. They chose Rose Hill with its uniform of pink and pale grey with pink piping around the blazer. At the age of 12 he was sent to the Beacon, Crowborough, then a boarding school. The reason for being sent there was that he needed to learn Greek in order sit a scholarship to Shrewsbury. Richard felt the real reason was that Rose Hill was thought to be 'the wrong school.'

This would sum up the rather harmless snobbery and pretentions of this prosperous community. There is hardly a location in or around Tunbridge Wells that Richard doesn't write about that is linked to his memory. From the thatched shelter on the common near the Spa Hotel, which was linked with the plays of George Bernard Shaw, to Eridge Park which he saw as exploration and adventure, to the lower road towards Groombridge of which he says, " the vegetation was my idea of the Russian Steppe, to the Road to High Rocks seen as 'Gothic gloom' or the footpath to Forest Row as Alpine exhilaration.' This part of the book is so descriptive, if you close your eyes you can imagine yourself there, transported into a time which is almost forgotten.

Having read his book of life sketches I have myself walked around Tunbridge Wells with fresh eyes, looking for the houses he describes, the war memorial, the station and various parks. As I looked I could imagine an excited young boy in 1920 living and exploring Tunbridge Wells, full of mischief and adventure. It was a place he felt safe in and one he felt should be cherished and remembered as well as a place full of wonder and discovery.

CHAPTER 12

To Thackeray and Back

by Christopher Hall and Jess Mookherjee

{Letter addressed to W.M. Thackeray from Charles Dickens}

24th April 1858

My dear Thackeray,

What good fortune it was to stumble so gamely into your company at the club last Thursday. I pondered so intensely on the nature of our meeting and mused that I must not pass the opportunity to contact you. Let us not, good fellow, leave our friendship to chance any longer.

I will also thank you, dear Thackeray, for the choice of Cognac and my enthusiasm for our meeting was fuelled only in part by that great spirit.

Truly business is booming, books are being commissioned and some money is being made. I'm most keen to write something of sensitivity and depth on the revolution and your heady world view would be as bright a tonic as the Cognac we shared together.

So I am naturally desirous that you and I meet and discuss in more detail the great swathes of history that are happening all around us. Will you come to Rochester? I hear you have taken some refuge in Kent. My daughter tells me you are spending some time in Tunbridge Wells taking in the spa air.

Affectionately yours,

Dickens

{Letter addressed to Charles Dickens from W.M. Thackeray}

30th April 1858

Dearest friend,

I cannot tell you how delightful it was to hear from you. No, it was more than that. It was as restorative as the good tonic you mentioned in your letter. I have been in the countryside for no more than a week now and nature has already conspired to give me a feverish cold. When I received your letter I had been in the lowest of spirits but now I find your reminder of our conversation has revived me. Yours is a voice that speaks cheerfully from the page and I already feel heartened by the prospect of a reunion.

Could it be, my friend, that you took some of my advice too much to heart? The Garrick Club can be a strange arena where truths are uttered as falsely as lies and lies as truths. May I recommend that for your enterprise you also write to our mutual friend Carlyle? He has a vast bibliographical memory and I am more than sure that he can direct you to some excellent source materials for your next subject. I was speaking half in jest when I mentioned Scott had already conquered the world of historical romance. The man is not to be toppled from his mountain.

I will be staying in Tunbridge Wells for a while until my daughters join me. My plans take me to Dover and then to Paris to visit my dear wife. Why not join me here? I would like it very much if you could accompany us to France. You know that Anne is very fond of you and eager to hear of your next work.

Yours,

W.M.T.

{Letter addressed to Thackeray from Dickens}

5th May 1858

Dearest Thackeray,

Excuse the tardiness of my writing. Nothing could have improved my spirits more then receiving your kind invitation to your place in the country. I accept. When shall I come? I am most eager to get away from here as soon as I can for some peace and quiet. My friend - I hope you will forgive my need to confide in you. I am most weary sir. This past few weeks has been pitiful. There have been pressures from the publishing company, from the financiers and from my own wife.

A certain young woman I chanced upon in Drury Lane has been most persistent in my thoughts and in my pocket. This acquaintance has, as you can imagine, left me needing the company of gentlemen for my thoughts are giddy and in need of your steadfastness. My ideas for the French book are racing about in my head. I wonder if you can invite our good friend Carlyle as I would like also to take some of his interest in the issues I am to raise in the novel.

I am distraught, dear Thackeray. Sometimes I feel you are my only friend and supporter. I received a great snub from that - how do you use that word - SNOB - Trollope at the Garrick only last week. We almost came to blows and I swear, sir - if he continues to call me Mr Popular Sentiment - I may not be responsible for my actions. I feel sometimes only you and I are in full unity about the terrible elitism that is stifling this society. Is it my fault, dear Thackeray, that I am blessed with an energy and appropriate ardour of my disposition to show the plight of the ordinary man!

That ludicrous petticoated Judy, Eliot, has been scurrilously writing that I am a mere Pigmy compared to her truer accounts of society. I have been trying hard to think of a suitable bumptious character to call Mrs Screever and have a mind to base it on her. I know, I know, Thackeray - I hear your modest voice in my head at all times, smiling and laying salve to my inner fever. But these small slights by those who should otherwise be my friends only add to my grey hairs and my high colour.

Save me, dear Thackeray.

I look forward to enjoying the air with you - and our mutual friend also?

Do write very swiftly.

Your good friend,

Dickens

{Letter to Dickens from W.M.T.}

11th May 1858

My dear friend,

What has come over you since my last letter? You are more successful in your art than any man I know and yet? What can I say to appease your distress except that I have acquired a highly developed intuition for hysteria when I see it and you are not so far gone, my dear Dickens. I read reports from the physicians in Paris that my poor wife has been tearing her hair out over imaginary wrongs. She rants and pummels the door and begs to be let out so that she can chase some imaginary watchman away. Is that not what a little criticism represents, an imaginary wrong no more and no less a figment of the writer's imagination than his plots and characters. A little less tearing out of the hair and rubbing the furrowed brow if you please. One has so few of the flowing locks left these days. Take another tonic before you start to lose any more and remember that it's not the critics who applaud the play but the gallery.

As you know I have some painful memories of what may happen to a man's heart when he sets himself at something that falls short of his hopes. I trust this young lady you refer to is enriching your sensibility as much as she appears to be sharpening your pen. Take care, dear Dickens. You are not Aaron's rod. You can't be expected to swallow every other serpent that comes your way. As I write I see a young girl approaching the table with what looks like a side of beef that no Englishman can resist. The heart is treacherous. The stomach however is a more reliable organ.

Please do come as I am fully recovered and intend to move on to Dover soon. I have equipped myself with a hamper of delights from Fortnum and Mason, including, amongst several of your favourite wares, a jar of apricots in brandy.

Yours as ever,

W.M.T.

{Letter to W.M.T from Dickens}

17th May 1858

Oh my dearest Thackeray,

How you comfort me. I read again your Vanity Fair and I believe that young vixen I wrote to you of to be a veritable Becky Sharp. She is clever, undoubtedly, voluptuous certainly, even wanton - thankfully, but without a moral compass, my Thackeray. She has given me much but taken so much. However I hear your steady, quiet voice in my ear as I write, and though it reddens my cheeks to hear it - you rogue, Thackeray, certainly my hair will not last with this intensity of adventure. You have a good thick head of hair my friend, long may it last. Oh to live in dulcet times as you do. Though I feel the strain of sadness about you, friend. I would invite you to romp in the Garrick with me but I am mindful of our madness.

Ah, my friend, we writers can purge our lusts and rages with our pens, talk to our inner voices of bedlam and lunacy and all within the confines of these inky pages. What power we hold. I have delayed enough, I am coming to Tunbridge Wells to stay with you. Please invite Carlyle, our friend. I have read his work on the French uprising now ten times. I must get his (and your) thoughts on my take on the revolution. There is a violence in me Thackeray, a war that burns. I am like France, and I see you as good England, sir, amiable and safe. What a revolting prospect don't you think? I'm determined to make the 'tale' a true masterpiece, if only to send up those who dare to mention Popular Sentiment.

Sir, I beg you again two things. Firstly - please use your not insignificant influence to arrange a meeting with our friend Carlyle. He seems to continuously lose my correspondence. And second my friend, do not tear your life in two. Poor Isabella, lost in her madness, is also lost to you so leave her and start again as I am. I am for changing the order. Why should we not have what we deserve? Are we not men?

The war in me wages on, I look forward to your peaceful kingdom in the Kentish Weald.

Your friend,

Dickens

{Letter to Dickens from W.M.T}

20th May 1858

My dear friend,

I trust you are keeping well. On the subject of your companion, I hope for your sake that she is more a cross between little Nell Trent and Nancy than my Becky Sharp. Is she an orphan perhaps? I hear stories that orphan girls are often taken with older gentlemen as they are invariably looking for a mentor that the father might have been. Beware, my friend. Thank you for asking after Mrs Thackeray. How, may I ask, is your dear wife holding up?

I wonder if you had time to read my new work, The Virginians? I am hopeful it will go down well with our American friends. I am planning a reading tour there and would welcome your support. As for Carlyle, he very rarely ventures out of his house, let alone London. I will write and see what I can do.

Yours,

W.M.T.

{Letter to W.M.T. from Dickens}

23rd May 1858

Dear Will,

Forgive me for pressing you on this matter but I am most eager. Please could you continue to solicit our friend Carlyle on the matter of procuring the works I requested on the French question and any comments on my proposed work on the subject.

Yours in anticipation,

Dickens

{Letter written to Thomas Carlyle from Charles Dickens}

23rd May 1858

My Dearest Thomas,

I wonder if you have received word from our mutual friend Will Thackeray requesting a suitable bibliography on the subject of the Revolution? I am most anxious to receive the fruits of your wisdom on the subject of my forthcoming novel. Do you not think that A Tale of Two Cities is a title most apt for the differences between our national biographies? I eagerly await your response and the opportunity to visit you and your clever wife Jane to discuss this imposing subject at greater length.

Yours sincerely,

Charles Dickens

{Letter addressed to Thomas Carlyle from W.M. Thackeray}

30th May 1858

My dear Tom,

I see from The Times that Palmerston is up to his old tricks. If a vile stench emanating from the Thames is all it takes to remove our legislators from Westminster then perhaps the common man should reflect that to obtain the vote is needless when the influence of his digestive system can easily bring the government to its knees. I must confess that my courage failed me and I could stomach it no longer and have withdrawn to the countryside to escape this abject suffering of my senses. How is your nasal passage enduring in the circumstances? I trust that you are not overwhelmed by the stench in Chelsea although your proximity to the river tells me that you might.

I am in correspondence with our mutual friend Mr Dickens on the subject of his latest venture into the world of literature. He intends to compose an epic story set during the Revolution in France. Would you be willing to join us in Kent to declaim upon the subject? I will of course provide you and your lovely spouse with my very best hospitality. Or at the very least, as I know you are busy, would you point Dickens in the direction of the best literature on the subject?

Yours,

Will

{Letter addressed to Charles Dickens from Thomas Carlyle}

4th June 1858

Dear Will,

What the Dickens? Again? He has already written to me on this subject.

You tell that excitable Anglo-Saxon hermaphrodite that nothing short of being dragged by the quadrupeds of hell would tempt me to assist in this facile project of his. The Revolution cannot be tamed for the English readers of his so-called weeklies. I suppose he intends to reduce the collapse of an entire social order to a faux-French nobleman uttering the moral platitudes of a country parson? Or perhaps a cheerful street urchin will be deployed to carry messages for Robespierre? I see him conjuring up a blind beggar on the corner of the Place de la Revolution whose complaints remind us that the poor are always with us?

Do the nation a favour and tell him to discontinue. I know you agree with me on his style. On second thoughts, if it's not possible to stop this deluge of nonsense we should consider building a dam. There are more than sufficient volumes in the London Library on this subject to effect a blockage. I'll see to it that he receives them.

I wish you well, dear Thackeray. I hear that upstart Yates has written a review of your latest work. Do not fret my dear Will. He is an ass. Send my best wishes to Dickens and tell him I will send him some serious history.

Yours,

Tom

{Letter addressed to Charles Dickens from W.M. Thackeray}

7th June 1858

Dear Charles,

By some strange oversight on Carlyle's part he has sent me your books which were delivered to me in Tunbridge Wells. This provides us with the perfect excuse for entertaining you here as we had originally planned where you will be able to pick up your books. I wonder if, in Tom's confusion, a letter addressed to me has been sent to you by mistake. If so, please do bring it with you.

Yours truly,

W.M.T.

{Letter written to Thackeray from Dickens}

8th June 1858

Thackeray,

Where once I called you friend I am now most redolent and seething in my disdain to even call upon you.

I enclose in this missive the communication from that galumphing toad Carlyle that I am sure you did not mean for me to see. I understand from this that you both, from your gentrified and lofty positions, applaud those that would crow 'Mr Popular Sentiment' as the sales for my novels rise.

My face is black sir, black as the night at this betrayal and lost friendship. I see now that I am merely a source of society tittle-tattle for you and your coiffured gentlemen of leisure. How piqued you must be that I am the master of my own life's novel and not the stooge in a character play of your making.

You will not undo me sir, nor your high nosed comrade Carlyle. You can hang with him in the rafters of obscurity while my little popular books sing out from history. I tell, sir, the tales of people and I will not rest until I have told your tale sir.

What other betrayals are set against me? Only today I have heard a rumour that I am with Ellen, the young actress. Only you, sir, knew as much. I warn you, Thackeray, to keep your counsel and vex me no more. I have in my pay a young reporter called Yates - always on the look-out for a bumptious toad to bring down. Who feeds this new breed of hungry vipers of journalism I wonder?

I warn you not to spread any further vitriol. As for Carlyle, may his pompous tomes of historical analysis feed him and his family well. The public will vote for their music hall renditions of the unfortunate, consumption-ridden proletariat in time and his weighty epithets will be consigned to dust.

Oh we were friends, sir, in my heart you always had a room to rest and find relief. Now this blood-stained club will not admit you.

What the Dickens indeed sir, for you like your Wealden homestead will be ever green and unchanging. I will keep my estuaries and my city and proceed, sir, into history itself.

Good day to you.

C.D.

{Letter to Carlyle from Thackeray}

12th June 1858

Tom,

Please see the enclosed. I fear there has been a terrible misunderstanding.

W.M.T.

P.S. Could you feed him more volumes on the Revolution? It may take his mind off things.

P.P.S. Perhaps Jane could invite him to Chelsea?

P.P.P.S. What the Dickens?

On 12th June 1858 an article appeared in the periodical _Town Talk_ written by a young journalist named Edmund Yates criticising Thackeray in person as 'cold and uninviting' allowing for 'no surface display of emotion'. 'His writings never were understood or appreciated even by the middle-classes; the Aristocracy have been alienated by his American onslaught on their body, and the educated and refined are not sufficiently numerous to constitute an audience; moreover there is a want of heart in all he writes.'

Thackeray made a formal complaint to the Garrick Club of which both men were members. Yates was asked to apologise for the article, which he refused to do and was subsequently erased from the club's membership in July 1858. Charles Dickens voted against the motion to compel Yates to apologise and resigned his seat at the Garrick Club following the expulsion.

In a pamphlet printed for private circulation in 1859 Yates lays out the sequence of events. He clearly states that although Dickens was his advisor in the Garrick Club dispute Dickens had nothing whatsoever to do with the content of the article published in _Town Talk_.

_Charles Dickens began serialisation of_ _A Tale of Two Cities_ _in 1859 which has gone on to sell over 200 million copies worldwide. It has subsequently been made into seven films, numerous television adaptations, radio plays, several musicals and an opera._

_William Makepeace Thackeray's_ _The Virginians_ _, set during the American War of Independence, was published in 1857. The print-run of 20,000 for the first editions was subsequently reduced to 13,000. Thackeray was originally promised £300 per unit, but the disappointing sales resulted in this being reduced to £250. He is still best known for his internationally famous novel_ _Vanity Fair_ _(1848)._

_Thomas Carlyle's_ _The French Revolution: A History_ _is still regarded as the book which changed the face of historical writing and is still widely admired and criticised in academic circles for its approach to narrative history._

WHO'S WHO

by Anne Carwardine

Horace Smith (1779 – 1849)

After Horace Smith, poet, novelist and stockbroker, died at Tunbridge Wells in July 1849, an obituary in _Gentleman's Magazine_ recalled the public's reaction to the book he had written jointly with his brother James and for which he was best known. '[London] was in ecstasies of delight, and its sale was almost unparalleled'.

In 1812 the management of the Drury Lane Theatre held a competition for an address to be recited when the theatre re-opened following a fire. They received over 100 entries, many referring to a phoenix rising from the ashes and all of poor quality. This inspired brothers Horace and James Smith to write and publish _Rejected Addresses_ \- the words the most popular poets of the time would have written had they entered the competition. Their parodies were so successful that the book was praised by Byron, and Walter Scott was convinced that he had actually written the piece attributed to him.

Smith moved to Tunbridge Wells from Brighton shortly before his death. He had lived in the town previously for a short period in 1825, when he wrote _Brambleteye House_ , a story of cavaliers and roundheads set in a real-life ruined manor house near Forest Row. The book sold well and attracted tourists to the property, some of whom took bits of the building away with them as souvenirs.

Jo Brand (1957 \- )

When she was six Jo Brand's family moved to the village of Benenden and between the ages of 11 and 16 she travelled 25 miles by bus each day to attend Tunbridge Wells Girls' Grammar School. In her 2009 autobiography _Look Back in Hunger_ Brand wrote of the school:

'[It] was pretty much as you might imagine. Many hundreds of educated young ladies from a variety of backgrounds, all marshalled and directed by a group of mainly single women in their forties and fifties, some of whom were extraordinarily sweet and others storm troopers in tweed'.

Brand lived in Tunbridge Wells for a brief period when she was 19, after which she worked as a psychiatric nurse for ten years, before moving on to be a stand-up comedian and TV personality. Her career as a writer began in 1994 with _A Load of Old Balls: Men in History._ Since then she has written a number of novels (including two that drew on her nursing experience) and two volumes of autobiography.

Rachel Beer (1858 -1927)

As editor of _The Observer_ from 1891 and _The Sunday Times_ from 1893, Rachel Beer promoted a range of causes, including women's suffrage, workers' rights and the British Empire. In 1903 she moved to Tunbridge Wells in unhappy circumstances. After her husband Frederick died of tuberculosis in 1901 she suffered a breakdown. She had been estranged from her family for marrying outside the Jewish faith, but at this point they stepped in. Fearing that she might give her fortune away to charity, her brother Joseph Sassoon had her declared insane and moved her into Chancellor House on Mount Ephraim, which he leased for her.

However, Beer's time in Tunbridge Wells was not all spent as an invalid or recluse. An obituary in _The Kent & Sussex Courier_ following her death in 1927 said 'the town has lost a friend and benefactress, for during her twenty-four years' residence in the town she had made philanthropic work a hobby, and was beloved by a wide circle of friends......during the war she devoted her energies to hospital work in Rusthall...interested herself in hostels for the nurses....[and] financed many entertainments for the nurses'. The article also referred to her fondness for music – she organised theatrical entertainment at her home – and for animals – she often attended local meets of the hounds. Although her grave would describe her only as 'Daughter of the Late David Sassoon', at her funeral it was covered with a profusion of flowers, including forget-me-nots and rosemary, her favourites.

W.H. Davies (1871 – 1940)

In February 1907 literary critic Edward Thomas rented a small cottage on Egg Pie Lane in Hildenborough on behalf of Welsh poet William Henry Davies, who lived there and elsewhere in the area over the next seven years. This was in contrast to the locations Davies had stayed in previously, which included an American jail (a source of free board and lodgings), the Canadian gold fields (where an accident led to one of his legs being amputated) and a series of London dosshouses.

Prior to his residence in Hildenborough, Davies had already written _The Soul's Destroyer_ , a volume of poems. _The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp,_ a frank and lively account of his experiences, was published in 1907, the same year that he moved there. His next publication, _Songs of Joy and Others_ , published in 1911, was a collection of poems which drew on his past experiences and included his poem _Leisure_ , with its familiar opening: 'What is this life, if full of care, We have no time to stand and stare'.

E.M. Forster (1879 – 1970)

In 1893 Edward Morgan Foster started as a day boy at Tonbridge School, his widowed mother having moved to Tonbridge so that he could attend the school. He later claimed that this was an unhappy time in his life. In his second novel _The Longest Journey_ , written in 1907, the central character Rickie Elliot describes his old school in a manner that may have reflected Forster's own experience. 'There was very little bullying at my school. There was simply the atmosphere of unkindness, which no discipline can dispel. It's not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts'.

A claret-coloured plaque on the wall of 10 Earls Road in Tunbridge Wells commemorates the fact that Forster lived there from 1898 to 1901 (although he was a student at King's College Cambridge at the time and would only have been home during holidays). The town features briefly in some of Forster's writing. In _A Passage to India_ Miss Bartlett says to Lucy Honeychurch, 'I am used to Tunbridge Wells, where we are all hopelessly behind the times' and Reverend Beebe recalls Lucy's 'dangerous' piano playing at a talent show in the town.

Sarah Grand (1854 – 1943)

In 1898, following the death of her estranged husband, novelist and women's rights campaigner Sarah Grand moved from London to The Grey House in Langton Green. She lived in the Tunbridge Wells area for the next 22 years or so. In a contribution to magazine _T.P. Weekly's_ series on where to spend a holiday, she wrote:

'For good air, quiet for rest or work, and a town and neighbourhood of remarkable beauty, I know of no place within easy reach of London to compare with Tunbridge Wells. And as a holiday resort for people of literary tastes, or for the jaded literary worker, I should say again, Tunbridge Wells'.

Through her writing Grand aimed to break 'the conspiracy of silence' on issues which affected women and to portray educated, independent female role models. By the time she moved to Tunbridge Wells she had written four books. The best known of these was _The Heavenly Twins_. Its subject matter (double standards and the spread of syphilis) made it difficult to publish, but it went on to become a bestseller. Her views on women's issues led her to become an active member of the local and national campaigns for women's suffrage. In Tunbridge Wells she was president of the local branches of the National Council of Women and the (non-militant) National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies.

Victoria Hislop (1959 - )

In a 2009 interview for BBC Radio Kent Victoria Hislop identified the area between Sissinghurst and Tenterden as her favourite part of Kent and, more questionably, the Assembly Rooms in Tunbridge Wells as her favourite building in the county.

Hislop grew up in Tonbridge and attended Tonbridge Girls Grammar School. Having studied English at Oxford and worked in publishing and journalism, she embarked on a career as a writer. She has written four novels, whose sun-drenched Mediterranean settings are very different from the leafy green Kent countryside around her home in Sissinghurst. They include, Granada, Thessalonika, Cyprus and the island of Spinalonga (off the coast of Crete).

Keith Douglas (1920 – 1944)

Keith Castellain Douglas's residence in Tunbridge Wells was a brief one. On 24th January 1920 he was born at a nursing home on Garden Road. His mother had spent most of her childhood near to Tunbridge Wells and his grandparents still had a house there, but Douglas's first home was at Cranleigh in Surrey.

When the Second World War came, Douglas was posted to North Africa, took part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy and was killed by mortar fire close to Bayeux on 9th June 1944. He left behind a collection of poems depicting a world far removed from his birthplace.

'But by a day's travelling you reach a new world

the vegetation is of iron

dead tanks, gun barrels split like celery

the metal brambles have no flowers or berries

and there are all sorts of manure, you can imagine

the dead themselves, their boots, clothes and possessions

clinging to the ground, a man with no head

has a packet of chocolate and a souvenir of Tripoli'.

Vita Sackville-West (1892 – 1962)

Vita Sackville West's Kent connections are well-known, from her birth at Knole (the house she could not inherit because she was a daughter not a son), to the garden she created at Sissinghurst, which continues to attract hordes of visitors. When she died her ashes were stored in an inkpot and interred in her family's vault at the church of St Michael and All Angels in Withyham, East Sussex.

The Kent countryside provided inspiration for Sackville-West's 1926 poem The Land, in which she wrote:

'The country habit has me by the heart,

For he's bewitched for ever who has seen,

Not with his eyes but with his vision, Spring

Flow down the woods and stipple leaves with sun'

Sackville-West never 'got over' the loss of Knole. _The Edwardians_ , one of her best known novels, is set mainly in Chevron, a country house inspired by her childhood home. The fictional version is described as 'a medieval village with its square turrets and its grey walls, its hundred chimneys sending blue threads up into the air'.

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 – 1930)

By the time he moved into Windlesham Manor, close to Crowborough, in 1907 Arthur Conan Doyle had already published three Sherlock Holmes books, as well as other novels and numerous short stories. This was where he wrote the final Holmes novel, _Valley of Fear_ , which was serialised in _The Strand Magazine_ in 1914-15 and featured Groombridge Place, under the name of Birlstone Manor.

Conan Doyle was an enthusiastic spiritualist, participating in séances at Groombridge Place. He was also a political activist and vehement opponent of the suffragette movement. In April 1913 members of the WSPU (the Women's Social and Political Union) were suspected of burning down the Nevill Cricket Pavillion on Tunbridge Wells Common. A meeting was held at the Great Hall to condemn their actions, at which Conan Doyle spoke out in strong terms, describing the suffragettes as 'a disgrace to their sex'.

Will Storr

Will Storr's time in Tunbridge Wells included working at a record shop called Longplayer, performing (for one week only) in a band called Sonic Rumblehammer and editing _Fiasco_ , a fanzine which covered music at The Forum. This last helped him get a job as a staff writer with _Loaded_ magazine. He has since gone on to a successful career as a freelance journalist and as author of two nonfiction books and a novel. In 2014 Storr returned to Tunbridge Wells to talk to the 'Skeptics in the Pub' group about his book _The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science._

Richard Cobb (1917 – 1996)

A 1996 obituary of Richard Cobb in the _Independent_ said that he believed 'a historian should get inside the threshold, step beyond the door and write about private people and private places'. Cobb took this approach in _Still Life_ , his account of a Tunbridge Wells childhood, and in other books on Paris, his relatives and an Irish schoolfriend who had murdered his mother.

In _Still Life_ , first published in 1984, Cobb recalled the town he knew in the 1920s and '30s and more especially its residents. These included characters such as Dr Rankin ('Little Jack'), who was four foot tall and drove an adapted Rolls Royce, and the Black Widow, who wore a moulting black fur round her neck, carried a man's umbrella and had an uneven black moustache.

As an adult Cobb lived in Paris, where he studied by day and visited bars and brothels by night, and Oxford, where he was a popular and unorthodox university teacher; in his late sixties he would lecture at Worcester College with a pint of beer perched on the lectern.

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811 – 1863)

William Thackeray, who had visited Tunbridge Wells as a child, made a return visit in 1860. By this time he was well-known as the author of novels such as _Vanity Fair_ , _Pendennis_ and _The Newcomes_. He stayed at the house on the edge of the Common which now bears his name and wrote an essay entitled _Tunbridge Toys_ for the new _Cornhill Magazine._ In it he described the Common in glowing terms:

'I stroll over the Common and survey the beautiful purple hills around, twinkling with a thousand bright villas, which have sprung up over this charming ground since first I saw it. What an admirable scene of peace and plenty! What a delicious air breathes over the heath, blows the cloud shadows across it, and murmurs through the full-clad trees!'

However, in the same essay Thackeray was dismissive of the town's occupants, as viewed on the Pantiles:

'There are fiddlers, harpers, and trumpeters performing at this moment in a weak little old balcony, but where is the fine company? Where are the earls, duchesses, bishops, and magnificent embroidered gamesters? A half-dozen of children and their nurses are listening to the musicians; an old lady or two in a poke bonnet passes, and for the rest, I see but an uninteresting population of native tradesmen'.

The Contributors

**Carolyn Gray** is interested in history, art, music and writing, and while it could be a case of 'jack of all trades, master of none', she says she has particularly enjoyed all aspects of _Something in the Water_ and will carry on dabbling in Tunbridge Wells life.

**Christopher Hall** writes novels as well as short stories. He set up the Tunbridge Wells Writers Group in 2010 with the aim of creating a social network for writers to meet and inspire each other to keep at it. He also enjoys collaborating on literary projects like this one. He moved to Tunbridge Wells in 2000 and remains there to this day.

**David Smith** is Tunbridge Wells born and bred. He acknowledges feeling increasingly disenfranchised in his hometown with every passing year. Reflecting on _Something in the Water_ (if you'll forgive the pun), he finds himself wondering if the famous writers featured in the collection might share his sense of loss were they to return here. It's not so much that the town has lost its identity, he feels, but that it has evolved into a parody of itself. Ironically, but perhaps inevitably, he attests to feeling more _Disgusted_ every day...

**Jess Mookherjee** is a poet and writer of short stories. She has recently published poems in the _Kent and Sussex Poetry Society Folio_ and in the magazine _Dark Matter_. She was co-creator of the Lipshtick: poetry oracle which can be found at lipschtick.co.uk. She has lived in Tunbridge Wells for five years.

**Kate Loverage** was born in Tunbridge Wells and has lived in the area most of her life. She did try to get away for a few years, however she returned knowing there is huge inspiration in the town. She likes nothing more than having coffee in one of Tunbridge Wells' lovely cafes, watching the world go by and using what she sees to include in her novels and poems.

**Linda Chamberlain** has been a journalist most of her working life. She's been a horse rider for quite a lot longer and when she's not typing away on her latest manuscript it's because she's off on that horse again! _The First Vet_ is her debut novel and combines her love of drama with her passion for horses. She lives in Sussex with her family and two four-legged friends who feature largely in her popular 'naked horse' blog.

**Anne Carwardine** has a particular interest in the history of Tunbridge Wells. She has recently launched a blog Tunbridgetales.com on the town's history and is working on a non-fiction book about some of the town's past residents.

THANK YOU

A big thank you from the Tunbridge Wells Writers for downloading and reading this collection. If you enjoyed our book why not leave us a review and check out some of our other free ebooks below.

Also by Tunbridge Wells Writers

The Auditoury Project

A Picture is Worth 1000 Words

Fright Night

