Byronic Legacy

Newstead Abbey Park family house in many acres of private woodland.

My mother wrote a modest memoir, pencilled in her beautiful copperplate hand, titled Recollections. She commented that Newstead “held a secret,” adding that “the walk to the Abbey was short. It was in the same grounds as my parents’ home. I remember how absorbed Seán became with the whole atmosphere of the place — very intent.”

I knew little concerning Byron’s life when I was a child, and would not trouble to read a biography about him until I was nineteen. Yet I recall the poet’s name cropping up in hushed tones when I was still quite young. It did not take long for an awareness to develop of the family connection, albeit one that was to remain firmly in the cupboard where Byron’s skeleton nevertheless rattled from time to time, despite the bloodline’s illegitimate origin. Unlike today, such things were not considered at all appropriate for dissemination. Hence much caution was in evidence about the Byronic legacy my mother and I had inherited. In those days it would remain a topic unmentioned in company, and even in private it was to be a mysterious family legend.

By the time I had my first complete work published (as opposed to contributions I had made to anthologies edited by other authors) there was no question in my mind that the book would be dedicated to the memory of my illustrious ancestor Lord Byron.

Not unlike the poet’s early work Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, my first complete work in print became an immediate bestseller. My mother recounted in her Recollections:

“Newstead held a magic for me. Seán loved it too. He went about the grounds with my brother, Colin, who had a tree house and a gun. Dad only allowed Colin to have a gun because the poor rabbits were dying in agony from myxomatoses. I was given a book of English poetry by my father. Seán picked it up and out of the one thousand one hundred and fifty poems chose Byron’s She walks in Beauty to read. I don’t think Seán even knew the connection between Lord Byron at that time.”

The longest absence from Newstead as a child was the period spent in Canada where my parents sought their future and fortune overseas. “I heard some lovely reports about Montreal, which I related to Allen,” my mother recorded.

“These little stories fired our imagination and we decided to go. Seán was aged three. Allen went first by air. Seán and I stayed at home until three months later when we were passengers on the Aquitania from Southampton to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Allen had been in Toronto for three months, but we settled in Montreal, a beautiful city built around a mountain topped by a cross. This seemed significant to me at the time. I had collected crosses for years. The highlight of our day was to take the bus to St Catherine’s Street where we would have a chocolate éclair each with a beverage. Weekends would find the three of us walking up the mountain or visiting the lake. It was all very pleasant, but our future in Canada was really doomed from the start as many things were not what we had been used to in England. The accommodation left much to be desired, and Allen discovered that work was in short supply. So back home we came on the Ascania, a much smaller version of the Aquitania, which proved to be a smelly little ship. We docked at Liverpool and from there we sailed to Dublin where we stayed with Mr and Mrs Berry. He was the keeper of DublinCastle.”

The rickety and foul-smelling tug called the Ascania should have been scrapped years before we boarded it, and almost certainly was soon after our arrival in Liverpool. This was in marked contrast to our time at Dublin Castle as a guest of the Berrys. In the previous century the spectre of a frail gazelle of a girl of medium height, in Regency clothes, flitted down the corridors with large, enquiring eyes brimming with tears. She occupied the shadowy places I now found myself wandering. I would write her biography one day, and it was published in the saddest year of my life. My biography of Lady Caroline Lamb was the last book my mother would read before she died.

My mother and I after returning to England.

Within a couple of months my parents had left Ireland, and once again I was amongst the familiar scenery of our beloved Newstead Abbey Park. Soon after my fifth birthday, however, I began attending Hungerford School in north London, and visits during holidays were all that now seemed possible. My mother’s Recollections continued:

“A lovely city, Dublin, but it held no future for us, so we came back to England via Dunleary to Holyhead, staying in Nottinghamshire. Allen went ahead of me to London. Seán and I joined him shortly after to find temporary accommodation in Highbury Hill. Then we found rooms in Holloway, followed by the Mansions where we had a porter and cleaner. I recall how eager Seán was to read and write, and he made fast progress. Seán had talked at a very early age. It was when he went to school that we noticed the early signs of his originality. He was different, always different from others, and he had a way with words from the start. He was also very perceptive right from his first year. He seemed to read one’s thoughts and feelings.”

  

Visits to Newstead nevertheless continued on a fairly regular basis. It was in the Abbey’s vast collection where I discovered a pencil portrait of my Dublin Castle phantom: a quarter-length drawing of a pensive young girl with slightly downcast eyes. Mesmerised by the elfin creature, a window seemed to open within my subconscious mind to rich colours lit by candelabras stuffed with melting candles, heavy brocades and tapestries, exquisitely decorated harpsichords, sombre paintings in large frames, dark oak furniture, and reverberating, melodic strains from another time. Amidst all this appeared a ghostly female with rosebud lips, fawn curls and large, sad eyes.

Momentary glimpses of Romanticism’s haunted realm where the flickering, wavering image glided in step to echoes from a tinkling, distant spinet, offered somewhere I would visit throughout my life thereafter — a primitive form of time travel.  The identity of my apparition became soon became apparent. It was Lady Caroline Lamb.

Caroline’s husband was Secretary of Ireland in 1827, two years after their separation, and he would have stayed at Dublin Castle for long periods of time. This was three years after the tragic death of Caroline’s fatal passion Lord Byron. She had stayed at the castle prior to when her husband, William, became Secretary. He almost certainly accepted the post because he could not bear to watch her suffering any longer in the wake of the terrible news about her lover Byron. It would destroy her in the end.

My psychic portal grew faint as childhood innocence itself gradually eroded over the years, but later in life I renewed my acquaintance in becoming the biographer of Lady Caroline Lamb. Lord Brocket invited me to Caroline’s country residence in Hertfordshire, Brocket Hall, and Lady Brocket entered into a correspondence where she told of the haunting at the Hall. In February 1992, Lady Brocket wrote of “a woman in the Ballroom” when she was playing some Chopin on the piano.

Frédéric Chopin ― my mother’s favourite composer ― and mine. How memories are stirred whenever the sound of his music fills the air. Each visit I made to Chopin’s tomb at Père-Lachaise in Paris, I would invariably discover freshly cut red roses on the grave ― lovingly placed by a mysterious admirer.

My mother playing some Chopin on the piano at our Newstead home.

When we arrived in London from Ireland, having settled in a first floor flat in Islington, my father ordered a rosewood piano to be delivered. It remained with my parents to the end. On this instrument my mother would continue to play the music of Chopin in those early days. When we removed to the Mansions, where Fred the porter and Alice the cleaner were part of the fixtures and fittings, the piano followed. Its final destination was the house my parents purchased within a short walking distance.

The children at Hungerford School adored my mother. They called her “flower face” because of the curls around her constantly smiling face. She was at her most beautiful during this period and attracted many admiring glances — yet she remained ever childlike and innocent, charming everyone along the way, to the end of her life.

Despite the transparent naîvety that never left her, my mother led the way and made things happen. She wanted a child. My father was less convinced. When we returned to England from overseas, my mother would be the one to discover and organise each  of our homes. It became apparent to me in later life that she earnestly wanted me to find the romantic fulfilment that she felt she had been denied all along.

Some years I won a national poetry competition with To Nature ― On Autumn:

                                                ’Twas down a little country lane

                                                Leaf-strewn, in coloured hue,

                                                That to my memory will remain

                                                The joy I found in you.

                                                Sweet whisperings from a brook nearby,

                                                Sad notes of birds’ late song,

                                                Filled my heart with an ecstasy.

                                                Dear Peace, for you I long.

                                                When back amid the noise and pain

                                                Of daily toil and strife,

                                                Locked in my heart that country lane,

                                                Brings reality to life.

Notwithstanding the influence my mother had on these three verses, Newstead Abbey Park had provided for me the brook and nearby country lane. My mother had much older memories. When she was very young and her parents had moved from Derbyshire to an idyllic setting at Wollaton, a brook ran along the bottom of the country lane where their house was situated. She often spoke about her first home. Newstead, in many ways, would magnify its joys and aspects ― adding acres of woodland and more besides. After the Newstead property and its acreage were sold in the early 1960s, my grandparents lived out their remaining days in a house built for them on land purchased at Wollatan Park. The haunting of their home by a cold presence that apparently manifested as a spectre, allegedly causing my grandmother to fall down the rockery one evening, precipitated this final move. She lay undiscovered for some hours before her husband returned. Presentiments of doom and disaster seemed to intrude her everyday existence thereafter and she never properly recovered.

Newstead was to become for me a symbol of all that belonged to the old world that was already irrevocably, moment by moment, slipping away. More than anything my mother wanted me to find real happiness; something that was always just out of reach for her. This is reflected in the lines I would write in a novel published some eight years after her death.

“The world we once inhabited has gone. … This is your time and your world. Find happiness in it, if you can.” So tells Mina Harker to her son, Quincey, in Carmel, my sequel to Bram Stoker’s gothic masterpiece Dracula. Yet it could have been my own mother speaking. Her world was fast disappearing as two catastrophic wars heralded the quick demise of a cultural identity and spiritual destiny that had lasted two millennia.

Today that England, and much that made it the most wonderful place on Earth, has all but disappeared. Nobody regrets its passing more than do I.