Jutland Cottage

by Angela Thirkell

Genres: Classics; Humor & Satire

Synopsis

'Charming, very funny indeed' ALEXANDER McCALL SMITH

Change is in the air in Barsetshire. The country may have a new queen, but Greshambury has a new rector, Canon Fewling, and a returned prodigal daughter: the beautiful, frivolous Rose Fairweather. But for lonely Margot Phelps, caring for her elderly parents in Jutland Cottage, the future holds little promise - until a group of benevolent neighbours, led by Rose, decide to take her under their wing. With a new tweed suit, a little kindness, and not one, but three, potential suitors, could happiness be around the corner at last?

Jutland Cottage is a witty and heartwarming classic in Angela Thirkell's beloved Barsetshire series.

Release date: April 10, 2025

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 336

Sample

We have at times been accused of putting so many people into our books that no one can remember who they are, in which stricture we entirely concur, as we often cannot remember who they are ourself (or selves). We have often been urged to provide some sort of genealogical chart of Barsetshire families, and several kind and gifted young admirers have even gone so far as to make a rough table of affinities; but, to tell the truth and shame him that shall be nameless, we have allowed matters to get so far out of hand that it is now almost impossible to reconcile the various discrepancies of dates and ages. For this we have no excuse and shall therefore offer two: the first that we find we get just as muddled about generations and relationships in real life as we do in Barsetshire; the second – in the words of The Water Babies – that it is all a fairy story and you must not believe a word of it even if it is true. Those who are at the grandmother stage will understand how completely addled one is apt to be by the generations. A generation is usually considered as thirty years, and if everyone had married and had children at thirty ever since Genesis things would be simple, though even then they would have to have had all their children simultaneously to keep the ranks abreast and seen to it that they all married simultaneously for ever and ever. But children are born with all kinds of intervals between them, and there have been well-authenticated cases in good families where, owing to a fruitful first marriage followed by a fruitful second marriage, children in their early teens have been seen pushing their uncles and aunts about in perambulators.

This brief apologia is only meant to discourage any reader who is kind or rash enough to begin tabulating families and dates, and to beg that kind and rash reader to accept a cloud-cuckooland that has grown in a way by itself. Anyone who has lived in this world knows how confusing it is, and sometimes all we can do is to snatch at some person or some event before the passing moment flies – just indeed as one does in real life. All of which is a prefabricated excuse for the difficulty we ourselves have been having of late with the Leslie family.

To go back to the days before the Second World War to end War, when Mr Leslie and Lady Emily Leslie lived at Rushwater, is like a dream. There they had lived for the whole of their married life when we first knew them. Their eldest son had been killed in the 1914 war, and Martin, his young son, was living mostly in the house he would inherit. Their second, John, was a young childless widower. Their lovely daughter, Agnes, was happily married to Colonel Graham (as he was then), with her growing brood of handsome gifted children, while their youngest son David, rightly stigmatised by his father as bone-selfish, was pursuing his easy-going career of taking jobs and dropping them with facile charm. And in that summer a niece of Colonel Graham’s, one Mary Preston, had spent several months at Rushwater, and in her the young widower had found exactly the wife he wanted.

Curtains have fallen and risen upon changed scenes. Martin Leslie and his golden wife Sylvia now reigned at Rushwater and were filling their nurseries. David and his well-dressed well-bred wife and their young family were much in America or abroad. Agnes Graham, now Lady Graham, had married two daughters young and still had a third in hand, while her three sons were doing and promising well. Of John and Mary Leslie not very much has been seen, for they lived their quiet, comfortable, slightly dull and very happy life over Greshamsbury way where John had bought the Old Rectory, a good late Georgian house standing in its own grounds. A former incumbent, the Reverend Caleb Oriel, whose grandfather, an Anglo-Indian general, had left him a considerable fortune (popularly supposed to have been made by torturing Rajahs and Begums), had put the kitchen quarters and the stabling in excellent repair, and successive tenants had so cared for them that, apart from the fact that the first were too large for these over-taxed days and the second more or less useless owing to a total vacancy of hoofs, John Leslie was able to make the whole place very livable without much expense. Neither he nor his wife had much of what is called taste; but as their taste consisted in having handsome and comfortable furniture, whether old or new, we think they will do just as well as the people who have experimented in wallpapers with feathers or shells, tables made of not quite stainless tubular steel, chairs with no hind legs so that one cannot feel safe even if one is certain that one is, and so-called kitchen units with drawers too heavy to pull out with one hand when the other is covered with flour or sticky with cutting up the dogs’ meat, and with a gift for getting damp inside from condensation that amounts to genius.

In these very pleasant surroundings three sons had been growing up. As we have known them since they were at Southbridge School, we shall continue to call them Major, Minor and Minimus, though as a matter of fact they were called Henry (after John’s father), John (after their own father) and Clive (after a Preston uncle who was killed in the 1914 war). All three boys had been at Southbridge School, rather to the surprise of the county who said ‘Why not Eton?’ though not aloud in John Leslie’s presence. Not that he would have minded in the least, but he was not a talker except with his wife and sons and his near relations and saw no reason to discuss his choice of school in public. We think it was partly a strong county feeling (for Southbridge School was, as a former grammar school, as old a foundation as Eton) and partly a kind of tribute to his father, who had for many years been a governor. Henry, or Major, had now gone to Oxford with an exhibition. Minor and Minimus were still at Southbridge; and Minor, who had climbed everything in the county, including the great tulip tree in the Palace grounds and the very nasty spire of the School Chapel, was now also considering Oxford with a view to the spire of St Mary’s; while Minimus, who had no head at all for heights, was considering the Royal Air Force on the grounds that if that didn’t cure him of feeling giddy then nothing would, and also, we think, because his uncle, David Leslie, had been a temporary flier during the Second World War to end War. To the young Leslies Uncle David, in spite of being a not at all so young married man with an increasing and delightful family, and two paths of baldness from the temples which made an appreciable yearly progress towards the back of his head, remained a figure of romance – largely because he always arrived unexpectedly, usually by air, and never stayed more than a night at that.

At the moment when our chronicle begins to continue its well-meaning but eccentric (in the scientific sense) way, it was a nasty cold day in early February. But in the Old Rectory all was pretty comfortable owing to the excellent central heating which would heat pretty well anything and the supply of wood from the Gresham estate. Mr and Mrs John Leslie were having breakfast with the heat at full blast and a good fire and not feeling in the least too warm. Indeed a great many of us, owing to the years of fuel and food shortage, will be like Harry Gill and our teeth (though we have not earned our fate as he did) will chatter still; and not to be warm enough is a state which leads us to hope for hell unless we can be authoritatively assured that heaven has a good reserve of whatever fuel it uses, with the rider that if people like Aunt Cecily – who comes into the room in mid-winter merely to say ‘What a fug! I don’t know how you can bear it!’ and open the windows wide – is in heaven too, we shall strike.

As with all England and indeed with a large part of the world (except those whose breakfast-time is much earlier or later owing to geography), the chief, the governing, obsessing thought of every day was: ‘How is the King?’ A monarch, selfless, dedicated to his people’s service, taking the heavy burden of kingship which had come to him by default, had been desperately ill. If the prayers of an Empire, spoken or unspoken, formulated or only emotionally felt, could save a life, that life was saved a million million times; but the answer to prayer as we would have it is not always given by one whose mysterious ways are not to be foreseen by us. At least the bulletins of His Majesty’s health had been more reassuring of late and he was now in his country home, the Norfolk squire, shooting and walking among his own people.

‘I think it is so nice for His Majesty that he lives in Norfolk,’ said Mrs Leslie to her husband. ‘It feels so safe.’

Her husband said, ‘Why safe, or at any rate why safer than anywhere else?’

‘Because,’ said his wife, ‘of Liverpool Street.’

John Leslie put down his cup with almost a bang.

‘And what on earth has Liverpool Street to do with it?’ he asked.

His wife, whom many years of happy married life had not entirely accustomed to the general denseness of husbands, smiled in a gently superior way.

‘If,’ she said accusingly, ‘you think, John, you will see that Liverpool Street was simply built to keep people out of East Anglia.’

Her husband said that might be, but it was the only way of getting there.

‘Exactly,’ said Mrs Leslie, ‘so one has to use it. But just think of it, John. To begin with, it’s all in the wrong place. I mean it isn’t where you think it is.’

Her husband said it rather depended where you did think it was, to which his wife replied that it was always farther round the corner than you thought. John Leslie said it depended where you thought the corner was.

‘I don’t,’ said Mrs Leslie. ‘But it always is. And it is so dark and banging and so many platforms and so many trains going to places one doesn’t know that used to be country. And London goes on for ever and ever. Besides, they have stopped that nice little real country line that goes from Bishop Stortford to Braintree and turned it into a motor bus. And the dirt! I’ve got to go to Barchester this morning. Are you coming?’

Mr Leslie said he had to go and see Francis Brandon on business and would like to accompany his wife, and they might have lunch at the County Club, and he thought they ought to ask the Brandons to dinner as Francis had been really very useful to him about some investments and his wife was so charming. Mary Leslie, to whom her husband’s will (and a very kind and just one, we must say) had been law almost from the day she had first seen him, agreed to this and went away to see the cook for, thanks to good county roots, they always had a staff of sorts, and so long as good-will reigned in the kitchen its employers were willing to meet it more than halfway, so that what with tradesmen and an old gardener and the odd man (who was also in the proud position of being the village idiot and could take an egg from under a hen without ruffling her feathers or her susceptibilities and could charm warts) and the postman and the old keeper from Greshamsbury Park and anyone else who happened to be about, the yard outside the back was, as John Leslie’s brother David had so truly remarked, not unlike ‘Bolton Abbey in the Olden Time’. And if there are readers who do not know this picture, or rather the engraving of it, usually framed in a peculiarly hideous light-brown wood of concave shape lengthways (if we make ourselves clear, as we almost despair of doing), we can, like Miss Fanny Squeers, only pity their ignorance and despise them.

So the Leslies went about their various businesses and then drove into Barchester and left their car in the Close. This was strictly illegal, but the Chancellor of the Diocese, Sir Robert Fielding, had a good many visitors on ecclesiastical business; and as John Leslie was a churchwarden and had known the Fieldings all his life, he was considered as privileged and acted accordingly. The Close was almost empty of people. The Leslies walked round to the stone archway and out into the town. As they had to pass the White Hart, John said he wanted to have a word with Burden, the old head waiter. The hall was empty. John looked through the glass door of the dining-room and, seeing Burden there, went in. The old waiter was arranging glass and silver (so-called) on a table. John knew he was rather deaf and did not wish to startle him, so he went round to the other side of the table. The old man looked up with a face so altered, so stricken, that John was alarmed.

‘What’s wrong, Burden?’ he said very gently.

‘Haven’t you heard, sir?’ said Burden.

‘What?’ said John Leslie. ‘Nothing wrong, I hope, Burden?’

‘His Majesty, sir,’ said Burden. ‘It was on the wireless, just a moment ago. I didn’t know what to do, sir, so I came in the dining-room. These forks want cleaning. He’s gone, sir, God bless him,’ and the old waiter applied himself again to rearranging the silver and cutlery, but his hands trembled and it was obvious that he didn’t know what he was doing.

‘Do you mean the King is dead?’ said John Leslie, quickly assuming, as we all do, a kind of mask or shield of incredulity against news of disaster.

‘In his sleep, sir, like a baby,’ said Burden, and even in the shock and grief of that moment John could not help reflecting how inapposite the comparison was, for babies – we are thankful to say – are far more apt to wake and yell than to slip from a night’s sleep to a lasting sleep.

‘Are you sure?’ said John, uneasily hoping that it was all a bad dream, willing to snatch unreasonably at any respite from what was ineluctably before him – and before the whole Empire.

The old man nodded his head, blew his nose on a large red-spotted handkerchief and went on with his work, but he did not see very well and dropped a fork.

‘Here you are,’ said John, picking it up and giving it to him. ‘Bear up, Burden. It’s a blow for us all,’ which words he felt, as indeed they were, to be singularly unhelpful. But the old waiter, with the wide philosophy of the uneducated, said Mr Leslie was right, and if a man – he meant a King – died in his duty, that was all a man could do.

‘Well, you have done your duty for a great many years, Burden,’ said John, obeying the instinctive reaction of the governing classes (for so they remain by faith, charity and tradition) to come to the help of a dependant. ‘Cheer up. We must think of the Queen, not of ourselves.’

‘Which Queen, sir?’ said Burden. ‘There’s three Queens now, sir.’

‘Lord! So there are!’ said John Leslie. ‘I was thinking of His Majesty’s own Queen, Burden – Queen Elizabeth.’ And then he realised that already there was a new Queen Elizabeth, her father’s successor, and everything was too difficult. He gave the old man a friendly but carefully gentle slap on the shoulder as a mark of good-will and left him to his knives and forks.

In the hall he found his wife pretending to read an illustrated paper upside down.

‘John!’ she said. ‘Have you heard?’

‘Burden told me,’ said John Leslie. ‘God bless him – and us all, for that matter. Let’s get what we have to do done and have lunch and go home.’ So they went first to the bank, where already everyone was hushed and the noise of coins being shovelled into brass scoops felt like sacrilege. John’s business with the manager took some little time. When he had finished his talk he collected his wife.

‘I’ll go to Brandon’s office now,’ he said. ‘Will you come?’ But Mary said there was some household shopping that she ought to do and she would wait for him at the club when she had finished, so he went away and Mary went up towards the High Street.

By this time the cruel news had spread. It was only a very short time since she had been at the White Hart, watching from the window the ebb and flow of shoppers on the pavement. The pavements were still crowded, the shoppers ebbed and flowed, but with a difference. Under a common, a national impulse, there was hardly a woman but was already in some kind of black. Some had almost widow’s weeds. Some who probably had not a black suit had put a black coat over what they wore. Some strange black hats had been exhumed or rescued from the jumble-sale box. Some women had tied a bit of black chiffon or black veiling over their hair, for it is not everyone who has a black scarf to hand. Some had neither coat nor dress of black and had pinned a knot of black ribbon or material to their dress, as dark or light-blue favours are pinned on the day of the Boat Race. For the men a black band for the sleeve had in many cases been found at home, or bought, or possibly made in haste from an old sock.

Mary Leslie, unprepared for this morning’s woe, had a horrid feeling of guilt that she was not in deep mourning and was just going into Bostock and Plummer to buy at least a black scarf or a ribbon for token, when she ran into Mrs Crawley, the wife of the Dean, who was already in a black coat and hat.

‘Josiah is in the Cathedral,’ said Mrs Crawley without any preface. ‘Not exactly a service. A kind of anybody who likes coming in and praying for His Majesty. Will you come?’

‘I should love to,’ said Mary, ‘but I don’t feel properly dressed.’

‘Come back to the Deanery,’ said Mrs Crawley, ‘and I’ll lend you something. Not that it really matters, but one feels safer somehow. Oh dear! There are so many people to be sorry for that one doesn’t know where to begin. Do you suppose royalty always have some black things just in case? My father always said every woman should have one black dress in her wardrobe because you never know,’ to which Mary Leslie replied that it was all very well, but you weren’t always at home when people died and then you couldn’t get at your blacks; but luckily the Deanery was close at hand, so this problem could be neglected. Here a black scarf was found and Mary with Mrs Crawley went across to the Cathedral.

In London when there is any national crisis the people crowd to Buckingham Palace. So in the crises of His Majesty’s illness had thousands of people waited night and day, in rain or shine, as if the fervent good wishes of his subjects could help him – as indeed they may have done. So now hundreds of people who never came to church except on Sunday, and often not that, had thronged to the great space enclosed by the white walls of the Cathedral, with cold winter light filling the clear windows. Silent black multitudes thronged the nave and the transepts. In the choir county dignitaries could be seen among the clergy. Lord Pomfret, tired and hard-working as ever; Sir Edmund Pridham looking twenty years older than his already considerable age; landowners and titles belonging to the county – all with the feeling that a father had left them, summoned by a power greater than thrones and dominions. The Dean said – not without difficulty – a few words about the late King. The oldest Canon, who was popularly and incorrectly supposed to have been present at Queen Victoria’s accession, also spoke, and was quite inaudible, though less from emotion than from lack of teeth and a rooted distrust of dentists which had made him refuse to have false ones. The brief service was over and the worshippers went about their ways, rather unwilling to speak.

Halfway across the Close Mrs Crawley and Mrs Leslie were overtaken by the Dean, who had brought Mrs Morland, the well-known novelist, away from the Cathedral with him. That worthy creature had been crying, her face was most unbecomingly blotched, and so incapable was she of coherent speech that Mrs Crawley took both her ladies to the Dean’s study and sent for tea.

‘You will have tea too, Josiah?’ she said to her husband. ‘And don’t be pompous about it,’ she added in what was for her an unusually sharp voice. ‘We are all unhappy, but at least we can be simple.’

‘I can’t,’ said Mrs Morland, pulling her hat a little more crooked as she spoke. ‘What is so awful is that all the time I’m putting what’s happening into words. I know I oughtn’t to, because one ought to be thinking of nothing but His Majesty, but I can’t help it. I suppose it’s because of having earned my living for so long by writing that I have to think aloud – only not really aloud, only aloud to myself inside myself. Oh dear, I can’t explain.’

But though no one of her hearers was a writer, unless we count the Dean’s sermons and his articles in the Spectator about his trip to Finland and other even duller ones in the Church Times, they all understood in part. For most of us, we think, tell ourselves stories about what we are doing and the way we are behaving, almost unconsciously, though not all of us – luckily – get the thoughts patted and banged and pushed and humoured into words. The Dean, feeling we think that he perhaps ought to say something but didn’t know what to say, oozed out of the room. The three ladies all had another cup of tea and tried to talk normally.

‘You know,’ said Mrs Crawley, ‘Rose Fairweather is down here with her children. Her husband is to be at the Admiralty for a few years. They are staying with her people at Winter Overcotes and want to find a house. You don’t know of one, do you, Mary? Somewhere over this side of Barchester? I forget how many children they have.’

A better antidote to true grief for a departed king could not have been imagined. Rose Fairweather, the incredibly beautiful and even more incredibly silly daughter of Mr Birkett, the former Headmaster of Southbridge School, was always what is called news-value. Her husband, now Captain Fairweather, R.N., with every kind of medal and order and distinction, had risen steadily in his profession, not unaided by his wife whose devotion to him, whose lavish and undiscriminating affection for everyone combined with an exquisite ruthlessness in getting her own way, had been of considerable advantage to him. A woman whom every male from retired full Admiral to smallest midshipman worships at sight, who calls everyone darling and is known to adore her husband above everything and to renounce cheerfully a night-club or a world première (as they say) of Glamora Tudor and her male star of the moment on her husband’s account, whose broadcast affection for practically everything in trousers no gossip has been able to touch, may be an unusual wife for a naval captain; but a better wife in her own artless way than Rose Fairweather did not exist, and her husband was fully aware of it.

‘I don’t know all of a sudden like that,’ said Mary Leslie. ‘Yes, I do, though. It might do. I wonder.’

‘Do tell me,’ said Mrs Crawley, adding a little unkindly, ‘then we could wonder, too.’

‘I am so sorry,’ said Mary Leslie. ‘I was just thinking. That house where the Umblebys used to live – just outside Greshamsbury Park. The people who live there are going abroad for two or three years – I really don’t know why – and I believe they want to let it. Shall I ask? It has quite a nice garden, and the bus stop is just down the village street. Where is Rose now?’

Mrs Crawley said she was at Winter Overcotes with her parents, so Mary said she would telephone and now she really must go as John would be waiting for her at the club, and the party dispersed.

While she was in the Cathedral His Majesty had seemed less far away. While she was at the Deanery she had forgotten England’s loss, as we all so easily (and thankfully) forget even our own heavy troubles while we are with friends and talking. But no sooner had the hospitable Deanery doors closed behind her than the feeling of loss and an empty house came over her again, so heavily that she went across to the Cathedral and knelt – not alone – trying to find words for her feeling, though beyond ‘Please, please, God, make His Majesty happy’ she could not think of anything to say, till she remembered His Majesty’s Queen-mother and his Queen-widow and his elder daughter suddenly called to her high responsibility. But even then she could not manage anything better than ‘Please, please,’ without any definite prayer. So she gave it up and went on her way to the club – but not altogether uncomforted.

At the club Mary found her husband waiting downstairs, so they went straight to the dining-room where John had booked a table; most luckily, for the morning’s news had driven many people to seek among a crowd of friends or acquaintances, or even strangers, forgetfulness of the journey which the King had taken alone, though not, they felt, even if they could not put the feeling into words, unfriended or unguided – rather supported and accompanied by the Master who does not leave His good and faithful servants strangers in a strange land.

During the morning the tide of black had been rising, and there was a hush in the dining-room and a general feeling that somehow gin or whisky weren’t the thing, but a half bottle of red wine would not offend. For this we have no explanation. One came, like a shadow, into a back corner of our mind and was gone before it could materialise. But we think we should have felt the same, though why, we have not the faintest idea.

The Leslies exchanged news. Mary told John how she had been to the Cathedral and gone in to the Deanery. John said he had had a very satisfactory talk with Francis Brandon and gathered that there were quite definite hopes of a new baby, and Lady Cora Waring was going to be godmother.

‘Four is a very nice number,’ said Mary, not wistfully, for her three boys had filled her heart and life very comfortably, but as a mathematical fact, to which John replied that he quite agreed, but three was somehow a nicer number than four; adding rather sententiously a Latin tag about the gods liking odd numbers.

‘Anyway,’ said Mary rather conceitedly, ‘three is a prime number. I remember that from school. Why prime, I wonder?’

But John said it wasn’t worth wondering about and they might as well go home. Mary did say something about mourning, but John said – and very properly, we think – that mourning in the country simply looked silly, and so long as she didn’t put on a red dress with spangles and dance the Cachuca down Greshamsbury High Street she would be quite in order, with all of which she agreed – as indeed she always had agreed with what John Leslie said for nearly twenty years.

Those who know Barsetshire will remember that the old Greshamsbury consisted of one long straggling street about a mile in length, with a sharp turn in the middle, so that the two halves of the street were at right angles. Inside this angle was Greshamsbury House, where Greshams still lived, with its gardens and grounds. Within the last hundred years or so many changes had come of course. The village had grown considerably and not always for the better, pushing out towards the railway, where there was a quite large working-class suburb. Of the great wealth that had come into the family through the heiress Mary Thorne, who married young Frank Gresham, much had been lost or confiscated through deaths and taxation and a good deal of the large estate sold. The property had, since the end of the war, been made over to the National Trust. Trippers came in roaring motor coaches and cars through the great gates and up the lime avenues; they walked in the terraced gardens and were shown the principal rooms. But Greshams still lived there. The house had been divided of late years. The present owners, a quiet elderly couple whose family were mostly in London or abroad, lived in one part of the house. The big rooms were kept aired and dusted for the National Trust visitors, but not used. The smaller wing was let to cousins: Captain Francis Gresham, R.N., and his wife Jane, daughter of old Admiral Palliser, a connection of the Omniums, over Hallbury way. Several years as a prisoner of war in Japan had not done Captain Gresham any particular good, and to his great grief he had not been allowed much active service, but he was at the Admiralty during the week and came down for weekends. Their only son Frank, born some years before the war, was now at Southbridge School; and there were two little girls, born after their father’s release, but of them we do not know very much at present except that they were eminently kissable and quite fairly good.

With Captain and Mrs Gresham the Leslies had become very friendly. There was a good deal of coming and going between Greshamsbury Park and the Old Rectory, and Frank Gresham was a devoted admirer of the Leslie boys, especially of Minor, whose Alpine feats on roofs and towers he tried to copy. Not always successfully and least so on the night when he had scaled the Headmaster’s House by what was known as the Everest route, including a nasty col between the built-out bit at the back and the main building, where he suddenly found himself looking in at the window of the nursery bathroom where Mrs Carter’s nurse was giving her uppers and unders their special Saturd. . .