A Walking-Think ~ Shaw’s Corner

Head to walking shoes, John Levett has what it takes to relish Shaw’s Corner. 

The home of George Bernard Shaw, Ayot St Lawrence. Photo: John Levett.

In 1972 I left London and went to live in the small market town of Hitchin in Hertfordshire. I’d taken my first permanent teaching job in Watford the previous year and moving somewhere closer to work was a life-preserving move. For eight months I’d motorcycled the twenty-five miles from south London to Watford & back each day. Falling off the bike at Hyde Park Corner one evening rush hour was the closest I ever got to believing in messages from god. God came in the guise of a Jack Palance figure urging me in the nicest way to get out of town before sundown.

At that time I would have preferred to be moving to Stevenage New Town. As I was a product of the 1945 Labour government, it seemed somehow more heroic and Brave New World, more right-on for a young(ish) visionary teacher who believed with the fever of a Jesuit Stakhanovite in the virtues of education as social engineering. But Hitchin it was. I still had the bike ride to work each day but now it was countryside most of the way. Six months later I passed the driving test, got a car (of sorts), got more protection.

And so it went. By the end of the decade I’d moved schools and for the first time could see green fields from my classroom window. I’d started teaching in temporary jobs on Merseyside and even today I have a quiet regret that I never stayed in Liverpool during the turbulent times in that city in the ‘70s and ‘80s. It wasn’t the centre of the universe any more but for any teacher (and there were multitudes) who carried within them a ‘mission to the city,’ Liverpool was a place to head for. I got used to green fields instead.

The Walk to Ayot. Photo: John Levett.

I got used to Hitchin and Hertfordshire, too. At that time I was a church goer. Not the happy-clappy sort but the church-as-architecture sort. Hitchin was a fine base camp for that sort of thing, close by Bedfordshire, Northants, Cambridge, the Fens and down into Suffolk and the stretch through Clare, Cavendish and the old wool towns of Long Melford, Sudbury and Lavenham.

I got used to Shaw’s Corner as well. For me George Bernard Shaw had fitted into that circle of late- nineteenth-century millenarian trampers through social democracy along with William Morris, Edward Carpenter, Henry Salt, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Eleanor Marx and Annie Besant, whose joint sensibilities and endeavours in favour of civilisation over turpitude and the individual over the magistrate flavoured the search for an ethical and political stance in late youth. I’d also been very influenced by Colin Wilson’s ‘The Outsider’ in an earlier incarnation. Wilson now seems a marginal 1950s figure if not entirely forgotten but I recently re-read his ‘GBS: A Reassessment’ and I got back the flavour of being caught up in his eager interest in Shaw and Shaw’s wild schemes and scheming.

The Shaws moved to the house in Ayot St Lawrence in 1904. Charlotte lived there until her death in 1943 and GBS until his seven years later. They moved there for quiet and absence of crowds but his celebrity brought a change of house name from ‘The New Rectory’ to ‘Shaw’s Corner.’ It became much visited by pilgrims; peace he sought but publicity-seeking was never far away. Shaw’s Corner opened in 1951 to the public and now has most of the add-ons of a visitor attraction—not yet Walden Pond Starbucks but support acts to keep the upkeep going.

What struck me when I first visited in the early 1970s was the certain knowledge that it was exactly the sort of place I was looking for. “I’ll take it,” I said.

I’ve always hankered after the village in shouting distance of the city. Shaw had the same idea: somewhere to write but close enough to a railway station to stay in the flow. Ayot is deep in Hertfordshire countryside and you’d need to be dedicated to find it. It’s best approached on foot across the fields. This June I decided to revisit for the first time in over thirty years.

I took the train down to Hitchin and started walking. It’s about a ten mile walk through the villages of St. Paul’s Walden, Whitwell and Kimpton; it’s the route I used to drive through to work. I walked off the road and trusted myself to remember the footpaths. In Summer breaks I found spots along these ways where I’d sit and start planning out the coming year’s teaching. That day I found the spots again, old woodland too; was surprised as years ago by the Palladian-style church out on the edge of Ayot village.

St. Joan, by Claire Winsten. Photo: John Levett.

Shaw’s Corner was busy. They stage his plays there these days—St. Joan was in rehearsal; a coach trip was in train. When I first visited there, access was restricted to the downstairs living and study rooms; now the first floor has been opened, more of Shaw’s knick-knacks and photography are on display and the ‘servant’s quarters’ of kitchen and scullery spruced up. A museum room has been created next to the bedroom and bathroom—visitors expect more these days.

Whenever I’ve visited the gardens of ‘The Great and The Good,’ I rarely think them good enough. I associate gardening with abandon—things wild, incongruous, impossible, heroic failures. I have trouble with neat and trouble with half-way houses. I never believed that the garden was central to Shaw’s enterprises apart from giving the space to walk, which is what Shaw and Charlotte used it for. The plantings are no great shakes but the two features that make it are the sculptures and the pathways.

There are two small sculptures by Troubetzkoy and, in a dell, one of Saint Joan by a local sculptor, Claire Winsten (her husband Stephen Winsten wrote a remembrance of Shaw in 1952 & she designed the gates to the now-derelict old St. Lawrence church at Ayot).

Path for a walking-think, Shaw’s Corner. Photo: John Levett.

A garden for the walking-think makes great sense—it’s a right-brain walk, the sitting-think is left. Whenever I walked around Ayot in the past, I often finished up planning my ideal garden and the walk was always part of it. I wanted a woodland walk that opened out to a rise overlooking wheat fields. I would have an extensive rose garden, delphinium borders, Monet iris walks. I would need a potting shed, a geranium house, an alpine house, a herb garden. There would be a paved area for troughs beside a sun house. Within a walled area I would grow vegetables and sweet peas. My writing (the traditional five-hundred words before breakfast, maybe in a Shaw shed) would pay for the upkeep of the plot.

I forgot the ‘Cottage Garden’ phase. This derived from the Woolf’s hideaway at Monk’s House in Rodmell on the Sussex Downs. This would be the down-sized life: still the rose garden and the sun house but a more contemplative pattern of life—more artisanal than on the previous pattern of gardening on the industrial scale. I’d be writing poetry and the odd (or oddly) crafted essay—a Laurie Lee-Lytton Strachey mélange.

Recently I was invited to contribute to an exhibition on William Morris ‘News from Nowhere Revisited’ at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow. This reminded me of another ‘garden-what-I-will-make.’ This was close to the Monk’s House phase but more full-on Gertrude Jekyll-William Robinson (a painting by Marie Stillman of Kelmscott Manor perfects the idea). That would have been about the time of a reprint of E.P. Thompson’s biography in 1976. The Marxist-gardener/the gardening Marxist—politics, theory and gardening—irresistible. And he had rivers at the bottom of his gardens, something I’d always left out of my planning—summer evenings in a skiff.

Garden at Shaw’s Corner. Photo: John Levett.

All of the gardens I’ve built have always had elements of the larger ones, and I’ve never stopped the planning and the planting of just one more bit of an imagined garden. A few days ago I was sitting in the garden of a friend. It’s not far from the centre of Cambridge and shrouded by trees (she grew a eucalyptus tree there which takes some doing). We always talk gardens and she was reflecting on how it’s getting a bit much and difficult to keep up and then off we went into the ‘Planning-the-garden-for-the-run-in-to-death’ phase, both of us. It’s what gardeners do.

Or is there a time when the gardner says, “That’s it. This is how it is. This is how it stays.” But even that’s a bit of planning; maintaining the status quo takes some doing. I’ve been spending a lot of this week in some summer pruning of the ramblers on the warehouse wall. This year was their best ever but keeping ‘best ever’ means maintenance, keeping them open, leaving space, taking more out than you think you should. (All bets are off with Félicité et Perpétue. There’s nothing to be done with it. I could cut it to root level and it’d still colonise like a rain forest.)

I was at a cactus show a couple of weeks ago. Every time I see those things I’m amazed. Same thoughts with every show I go to—“I could start with two or three on the kitchen window sill. See how they go. Maybe raise some in the potting shed.” I’ve got what it takes. Take too much attention for Shaw.