A typical witch and a life of one's own.

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner.

After I graduated, I lived in a village for a few years. This wasn’t planned or anticipated; but it was excellent. I read Cowper under a tree by the river Ouse, his river; I raised a duck from the egg; I trained a spaniel from a puppy; when my in-laws’ bees swarmed, I broke my vow of non-involvement and put on a bee-suit and helped restore the queen to the hive. My wife and I had one of the great friendships of our lives with an octogenarian who had been a real old-time hunting, shooting, fishing lady: she drank whisky, ate venison, enjoyed having Dickens read aloud, called her dog a bastard when she was disobedient, and kept a good orchard. I was sent up many ladders to pick plums, or rewarded with a dram for chopping and carrying the fire wood.

She sounds, in brief description like a caricature, a “real character”, and indeed she was, with her tufting white hair around which the air was often blue. She used to hide what she called the “deep litter” of her house behind the curtains, kept crates of apples in the otherwise unused garage, and housed her rescue spaniel in the old stables. Many a story she told about the old Squire, who came to church and loudly pronounced that the punch she made for his party was so good it gave him the best night’s sleep she’d had for years, or how she fell asleep on her horse coming home at dawn after a hunting ball. She remembered the village baker, old Copperwheat (no joke, that was his real name) leaving the loaves on the step at night when she was a child. He was not a morning baker. He rose late, cycled to town to place his bets, and made the bread in the evening. The children sat outside eating fresh loaves when their parents were distracted at dinner parties.

Copperwheat’s daughter still lived in the village, still at the old bakery. These women were deep links to another time. Our friend said, quite seriously, that things had got worse three hundred years ago when town ways took over from country ways. She really did believe what Cowper wrote: “God made the country, man made the town.” She wasn’t witchy, though she had that air about her as she crawled determinedly along on two sticks, but she was full of village lore and cures.

The days when she had been young overlap with the days of Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1926 novel about a middle-aged woman taking control of her life by moving to the country.¹

Lolly Willowes does not open with its main events, which we might expect today (all that dreary advice that circulates online about starting as late as possible in the story), but builds in three phases towards its conclusion. It is part of a genre of twentieth-century fiction about middle-aged and older women making or attempting (or forced into) a new start of some description: All Passion Spent, The Enchanted April, The Matchmaker, The Tortoise and the Hare, Excellent Women, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, The Summer Before the Dark, The Bookshop, The Sidmouth Letters. It opens like Sense and Sensibility (the death of the father, the dependence upon the brother, the role of the will: “Her father being dead, they took it for granted that she should be absorbed into the household of one brother or the other.”), and has some glancing familiarity with Dickens (there are descriptions of food that are similar to the shops in A Christmas Carol).² And Warner compares her protagonist to Robinson Crusoe.

Warner’s novelistic virtues are many, and briskly presented. She never uses too heavy a touch as she mocks English manners.

The ball, he went on to say, must take place in winter, for he wished to see Laura trimmed with ermine. ‘My dear,’ said Mrs. Willowes, ‘the poor girl will look like a Beefeater.’ But Everard was not to be put off. A stuffed ermine which he had known as a boy was still his ideal of the enchanted princess, so pure and sleek was it, and so artfully poised the small neat head on the long throat. ‘Weasel!’ exclaimed his wife. ‘Everard, how dare you love a minx?’

It is this tone which made her, later on, such a sharp biographer of T.H. White. I remember, I think, BDM describing it as a tone of “overfamiliar cattiness”, which is perfect in a novelist using free direct style to create sympathy with her beleaguered heroine, as here:

Lolly was twenty-eight. She would have to make haste if she were going to find a husband before she was thirty. Poor Lolly! black was not becoming to her. She looked sallow, and her pale grey eyes were paler and more surprising than ever underneath that very unbecoming black mushroom hat. Mourning was never satisfactory if one bought it in a country town.

Warner uses period touches to give the narrative a sense of its passing decade: “Abroad, and in company, she was not animated.” She marks the time without too much of the overt (as Forster: “Several weeks passed.”) but with a greater or lesser sense of how it is felt to be passing: “Time went faster than the embroidery did.” She makes good lawyer jokes, too: “the law had done a great deal to spoil Henry. It had changed his natural sturdy stupidity into a browbeating indifference to other people’s point of view.”

Warner is also an adept at the sort of authentic bathos that really tells, (not the limpid descent of the traditionally unintentional bathetic we are all so inured to in modern culture, such as when some stirring classical music is used, with an inspiring narrative, to sell a hatchback); she has the tightly controlled manner in which only a deft writer can drop from the heights of a still summer to the inevitability of death:

The bees droned in the motionless lime trees. A hot ginny churchyard smell detached itself in a leisurely way from the evergreens when the mourners brushed by them. The sun, but an hour or so declined, shone with an ardent and steadfast interest upon the little group. ‘In the midst of life we are in death,’ said Mr. Warbury, his voice sounding rather shameless taken out of church and displayed upon the basking echoless air. ‘In the midst of death we are in life,’ Laura thought, would be a more accurate expression of the moment.

Of the ways in which time runs slowly at certain times of the week, faster at others, and the tense springs of expectations that slowly unwind beneath it all, Warner is a great chronicler.

On Sunday mornings Henry would wind the clock. First one and then the other the quivering chains were wound up, till only the snouts of the leaden weights were visible, drooping sullenly over the abyss of time wherein they were to make their descent during the seven days following. After that the family went to church, and there were wound up for the week in much the same manner. They went to evening service too, but evening service was less austere. The vindictive sentiments sounded less vindictive; if an umbrella fell down with a crash the ensuing silence was less affronted; the sermon was shorter, or seemed so, and swung more robustly into ‘And now to God the Father.’

Laura Willowes (known to her nephews and nieces as Lolly) is like Lucy Honeychurch, but instead of a young woman seeking a husband she is a “middleaging lady” on a quest for a life of her own. Lolly Willowes is a quest narrative just like Austen’s novels. Lolly is often in and out of the woods, like Lizzie Bennet at Pemberley (a Regency Sir Launcelot in search of her own grail). No wonder she wants to escape the routine life of her boring brother and his sturdy wife: “It was astonishing what little difference differences had made.”

Warner herself is a fascinating figure: she was a musicologist, historian, novelist, and lived as a sort-of secret lesbian in the country where she kept a copy of the Book of Common Prayer out to read to confused guests. You get a sense of all of this from Lolly Willowes. In the country, Lolly becomes an “inheritrix of aged magic”. Here, too, Warner’s deft touch for juxtaposition and balance produces excellent lines: “Before them stood an old lady, carrying herself like a queen, and wearing a mackintosh that would have disgraced a tinker’s drab.” Whereas at the start of the novel, Laura’s sexuality is hardly hinted, now in the country it becomes undeniable.

Laura liked dancing with Emily; the pasty-faced and anaemic young slattern whom she had seen dawdling about the village danced with a fervour that annihilated every misgiving. They whirled faster and faster, fused together like two suns that whirl and blaze in a single destruction. A strand of the red hair came undone and brushed across Laura’s face. The contact made her tingle from head to foot. She shut her eyes and dived into obliviousness—with Emily for a partner she could dance until the gunpowder ran out of the heels of her boots. Alas! this happy ending was not to be, for at the height of their performance Emily was snatched away by Mr. Jowl, the horse-doctor. Laura opened her eyes and saw the pale face disappearing in the throng as the moon sinks into the clouds.

Lolly’s time in the country doesn’t mean an end to Warner’s sharp social satire either, such as when Lolly’s nephew says: “One has to offer marriage to a young woman who has picked dead wasps out of one’s armpit.” What a joy she must have been to know.

My old lady friend was, as I said, not witch, but in one sense, neither is Lolly, she’s an ordinary sort of woman.

When I think of witches, I seem to see all over England, all over Europe, women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and as unregarded. I see them, wives and sisters of respectable men, chapel members, and blacksmiths, and small farmers, and Puritans. In places like Bedfordshire, the sort of country one sees from the train.

It was Bedfordshire where we lived, where the baker’s daughter and our orchard-keeping friend had become eccentric institutions of their village: women, who, in earlier days, would have been known, no doubt, as possible witches (a custom that was still prevalent, in a gentler manner, in Britain, until the war).

One doesn’t become a witch to run round being harmful, or to run round being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It’s to escape all that—to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to you by others, charitable refuse of their thoughts, so many ounces of stale bread of life a day, the workhouse dietary is scientifically calculated to support life. As for the witches who can only express themselves by pins and bed-blighting, they have been warped into that shape by the dismal lives they’ve led. Think of Miss Carloe! She’s a typical witch, people would say. Really she’s the typical genteel spinster who’s spent herself being useful to people who didn’t want her. If you’d got her younger she’d never be like that.’

1. My friend was born around 1926 but, assuming Lolly continues to live in her village, she would have been an old crone (as my friend would have said) when my friend was a girl.

Fruit and flowers and vegetables were crowded together in countrified disorder. On the sloping shelf in the window, among apples and rough-skinned cooking pears and trays of walnuts, chestnuts, and filberts, was a basket of eggs, smooth and brown, like some larger kind of nut. At one side of the room was a wooden staging. On this stood jars of home-made jam and bottled fruits. It was as though the remnants of summer had come into the little shop for shelter. On the floor lay a heap of earthy turnips. Laura looked at the bottled fruits, the sliced pears in syrup, the glistening red plums, the greengages. She thought of the woman who had filled those jars and fastened on the bladders. Perhaps the greengrocer’s mother lived in the country. A solitary old woman picking fruit in a darkening orchard, rubbing her rough fingertips over the smooth-skinned plums, a lean wiry old woman, standing with upstretched arms among her fruit trees as though she were a tree herself, growing out of the long grass, with arms stretched up like branches. It grew darker and darker; still she worked on, methodically stripping the quivering taut boughs one after the other.

2.