The Porch

‘The Porch’ being a novel by Richard Church, the chap whose three volumes of autobiography have been keeping me busy these last months. Reference 1. A second, cheap edition, from Dent, Church’s regular publishers. A rather shabby and battered dust jacket. Two different (ink) hands in the front, one a name and one a dated place. Plus a theatre ticket. I might add that I didn’t pay £15.00 for it – although I suppose I might have done.

The language of this novel strikes me as a bit crude compared to that of the overtly autobiographical work. Which was, however, around twenty years later. Church was born in 1893, the three volumes of autobiography appeared in 1955, 1957 and 1964, with this book of 1937 falling between the first two dates. A book which is also very autobiographical, and which fills in some of the gaps, particularly in regard to his mother and her final illness, in the later books.

The first half of the book covers the hero’s start in life in the lower reaches of the Civil Service and his attempt to break out into the world above of educated men and women, his ambition to be a doctor. The second half is a triangular romance, concerning the sister of the wife of the couple who live in the lower part of his house and a sick colleague. A sick colleague who eventually dies of the same TB which carried off his mother in the novel, his mother and brother in real life. At various places, you get the strong feeling that Church was a man who – for a civilian who was not medical and could not serve in the first war – was intimately acquainted with illness, dying and death.

For some reason, I did not get on very well with the first half, and only really got going in the second half. Which is much the same as in my yet to be reported first reading of David Copperfield, which also only really got going for me in the second half.

Much preoccupation with the tempestuous – but seemingly likeable – character of the hero. His colleagues, high and low, really do try to help. And with all the problems of the autodidact; the man from the slums with little formal education – but with talent and with burning ambition to better himself.

From where I associate once again to FIL, born twenty five years later, born in similarly decent but modest circumstances, but still stuck on the path that leaving school at 14 put him. In his case, it seems that there was no question of his training to be a doctor, despite his extensive experience in the war time Army Medical Corps, and had to settle for being a nurse, albeit a successful one, winding up as a principal tutor at a large mental hospital. My own father, ten years older, was luckier in that his family managed to scrape together the money to put him through dental school. He escaped – along with his extensive if unworldly interests.

The hero is not a poet, unlike the author, but his friend Mouncer is and we do get the odd bit of poetry – which, as this reading has interacted with my reading of references 3 and 4, I did try to engage with. Reading aloud does help, but I am still some way off lift-off. Maybe Pope’s heroic couplets will turn out to be the way in. In the meantime, I was struck by the steely judgement in the poem offered on page 318.

The hero’s mother – a lady with a past who went on to lose her husband young and who had to teach to live – died shortly before the opening of the book and he is living upstairs in what was their house, sleeping in what was her deathbed, having let downstairs to a very decent couple. This, plus the insurance money, plus his very modest entry-level salary from the Civil Service, is what he lives on. Not quite on the breadline, but not far off.

In the second half, as the relationship between the Sonnier girl (from Dartmoor) and the two men – John and Mouncer – intensifies, the novel seems to come alive. There are glimpses of the mature prose of the autobiography. A relationship which presumably draws on the early but doomed romance of Church that we learn of from reference 7, the romance involving his friend the cellist and the singer from the seaside. While Mouncer himself draws on a difficult poet whom Church got to know much later. We learn of him from reference 8.

[Holne is to be found to the northwest of Buckfastleigh, on the edge of Dartmoor proper]

This romance moves to Devon and Church’s description of the train running down the Exe south of Exeter seemed to be drawn from personal knowledge. As did the description of the Dart in its steep wooded valley which followed. I got the idea, fantasy perhaps, that Church was drawing on a visit to the very village, Holne, that we have visited a number of times, from where you can indeed climb down through the woods to the Dart at Newbridge. The only catch was that he talked of trout, which we have never seen there – although their presence seems likely enough. Did Church stay in the Church House Inn there, the very place visited later by Archbishop Ramsey? For which see reference 9.

Impressions and oddments

We get the odd pop at the perils of matrimony for the man who wants to do art. Seemingly a live issue for the thrice married Church.

We get quite a lot on the tedium of the examinations that a boy who left school at 14 had to push himself through if he wanted to get on. Examinations in a lot of stuff which he was unlikely to make further use of – but I suppose it was training of a sort – and it did sort the wheat from the chaff. You had to be very driven to get through it.

There is the tension between opting for the security of low grade but secure work in the Civil Service – with a pension – and doing something more daring. The hero’s opening gambit was to secure his back, as it were, with such secure work, which left him maybe six hours a day for private study. A hard, lonely choice which I dare say, in real life, often ended in tears. There had been plenty of this in the autobiographical books. Tension which had not vanished in my own day, with a chap whom I used to know well being full of these problems and it might have been interesting to have had his take on this part of the book.

On page 23, we get a passing mention of niggers. Not particularly offensive, nor unusual for the time of writing, but it would not do now.

There were lots of pianos at references 5 and 7, but not many here, notably his mother’s Lipp, preserved but now rarely used. Not a brand I had come across before in my piano collecting travels.

The pastiche of a Milton sonnet offered at page 232 of the present book, is the very same as that at page 190 of the second volume of autobiography, noticed at reference 5. The wrapping, however, is rather different.

We get diggings again on page 258, an old word for digs which I first came across in the roughly contemporary Agatha Christie, perhaps as long as fifteen years ago. And scheming landladies with daughters. Church is not above a touch of smut! This not being the first hint of this sort either.

Some of the hero’s colleagues started in the slums and we are told of how bad parts of Camden Town were at that time, say the first decade of the twentieth century. From where I associate to the Kentish Town where BH started out as a teacher in the early 1970s, at that time still a fairly slummy area. Still with a working street market which, inter alia, sold real Finnan haddock, at that time not a luxury item. Gentrification was only just getting under way.

Probably elsewhere, Church has commented on the advantages of an author sticking to his publisher, of not shopping around for the better deal. In his view, these advantages are apt to be more valuable than any short-term improvement in the cash flow. That said, all three volumes of his autobiography were published by Heinemann rather than Dent. Another puzzle.

Trivia

Microsoft want it both ways. The twenty five above spelt as one word is a spelling error, spelt as two is a grammatical error.

While all this was going on I had a telephone conversation with a very pleasant young lady who wanted to visit me in about a fortnight’s time. Arrangements were all made and we were about to end the call, when I thought to mention that parking outside the house was not a problem. At which point it transpired, rather to my surprise, that what the pleasant young lady had in mind was a telephonic visit: given her location a real visit might have been awkward. A usage which came with the invasion of Zoom at the time of the plague? A usage of the very young?

Conclusions

Not without interest, but I don’t suppose I shall read it again. We shall see how BH gets on with it – if at all.

More positively, reading this book has prompted much thought. It was not like reading one of those novels which just carry you along for a few hours, after which you emerge refreshed, but untouched and unscathed. A bit like taking a few drinks, but without the hangover. Inter alia, one thinks about how the lives and events portrayed (or imagined) touch one’s own. About all the common threads which bind us together. A throw back to the days before radios and televisions, when people talked about the books they were reading rather more than they do now?

I am reminded of my schooldays when one of the teachers explained that the point of education was to teach one to think, to think for oneself. A corollary of which is that thinking is an autonomous activity, going on in the head, somewhat detached from whatever it is that its owner might appear to be doing – if anything – from the outside.

From where I branch to my longstanding interest in the nature of consciousness. When did thinking start on the evolutionary tree? Before or after we became recognisably human? Does conscious thought have to involve language? As things stand, on a forced choice, I would answer after we split off from the apes, after and yes. But that is very much work in progress. 

References

Reference 1: The porch – Richard Church – 1937.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Church_(poet). 

Reference 3: Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word – Walter J. Ong – 1982.

Reference 4: The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present – Eric A Havelock – 1986.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/09/church-two.html. Concerning reference 7.

Reference 6: Over the bridge – Richard Church – 1955. The child – closing with the death of his mother.

Reference 7: The golden sovereign – Richard Church – 1957. The young man – closing with the birth of a baby daughter.

Reference 8: The voyage home – Richard Church – 1964. In retrospect.

Reference 9: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/09/the-church-house.html.