When Katherine Swift took on the esoteric title of Keeper of Rare Books at
Trinity College Dublin, she left her husband, Ken, behind in their house in
Oxford and commuted between the two cities each week. She loved her
scholarly work in the grave, beautiful library with its great showpiece, the
Book of Kells, and she adored Dublin: “I made good friends in what was then
a raffish, exciting, interesting city.” But Ken Swift was not thrilled with
the arrangement. They had met at university – Katherine was only 21
when they married – and he missed her. She had often said that what she
would like to do, above all, was to make a garden. A serious garden, not
grand necessarily, but not a suburban patch either. “Every Friday night Ken
would meet me at Heathrow with a sheaf of estate agents’ particulars,” she
says. “It was his plan to lure me home. There were diminutive Georgian manor
houses we couldn’t afford, gaunt brick ruins with walled gardens filled with
nettles, sagging timber-framed palaces…”
Then he found the Dower House at Morville Hall in Shropshire, a National Trust
property offered for lease to applicants considered by the Trust to be “the
right kind of people”. She first saw it alone, driving through the winter
dusk on a Friday from the ferry at Holyhead, arriving after nightfall,
leaving the car and walking down the avenue, feeling her way in the
blackness. She sensed, rather than saw, the high horizon of a wooded hill,
the bowl of land cradling the turrets, pavilions and cupolas of the big
house. The windows of the dark, untenanted Dower House “yielded nothing”. It
was enough; this was where she would make her garden: “I’d finally found
what I wanted to do.”
Twenty years later, she and I sit in the library of the Dower House: white
walls, white linen-covered sofas, red silk curtains and a blazing log fire.
There is Darjeeling tea and toast, a choice of damson jam, honey and
Gentleman’s Relish. Outside the tall sash windows, rain falls steadily on
the garden, dimpling the surface of a long, slender canal with its border of
tulips and crown imperials, drenching the rose beds with their supports of
pillar and rope swag, bouncing off the beehives in the wild garden, soaking
down to the seeds of poppy, valerian and wolfsbane yet to snout up through
the mix of red soil and rich, black compost.
What was once an acre of rough grassland grazed by cows has become a series of
garden rooms enclosed by 12ft-high yew hedges, each echoing a period of the
house’s history and the ghosts of its previous inhabitants, Eliot’s
“footfalls in the memory”. Digging over the ground, Swift found fragments of
china, white marble floor tiles, broken clay pipes, opaque slivers of
medieval glass “blue as snow-melt”, and wondered: “Who drank from that cup,
who smoked that pipe, who looked through that window?”
The kitchen garden was the first to be planted: “So Ken could have vegetables
to cook with.” By now he had moved his bookshop to nearby Ludlow: “He did
all the shopping and made dinner every night, so I didn’t have to think
about anything except the garden.” She worked alone each day till the light
ran out, sometimes longer, feeling her way; everything was grown from seed
or cuttings. “We had no money; it took six weeks to dig 1,000ft of 2ft-wide
trenches for the yew hedges in stony ground, and I had tennis elbow by the
end; I was often so tired I crawled up to bed on my hands and knees.”
As she laboured on, the church clock kept time, striking the quarter hour,
recording the progress of her day. “It provided a kind of basso continuo to
life at Morville.” She recalled her mother’s copy of the Book of
Hours, and the calendar that prefaced it with its illustrations of the
horticultural and agricultural tasks allotted to each month: “Keeping Warm
and Chopping Wood” in February, “Mowing” in June, “Ploughing and
Sowing” in October, “Slaughtering and Baking” in November. The chiming of
the clock, the rhythm of the seasons, the sense that she was part of a
continuous cycle of life, death and renewal had a profound effect: she would
write her own book of hours, recording the arc of a year in time past and
time present.
The Morville Hours took 14 years to complete: a work of extraordinary lyrical
beauty, both scholarly and poetic, the incantatory naming of things and the
writing at times so erotic it makes you weak at the knees. It is a book of
fragments – gleaned from the soil, from the stories of neighbours, from
record books, from liturgy. But there are, too, fragments from her own
story, shards of painful memory: her mother telling her, “Having you ruined my
life”; her grandmother, Ada, warning her father: “You’ll swing for
that temper”; a terrible row between her father and her husband
followed by 30 years of estrangement. “Making the garden mended all of
the broken heart and pain of childhood,” says Swift. “Writing the book
made things clearer – it was a kind of expiation.”
When she started on her garden she realised how much she owed her father, who
had always made gardens wherever they lived, taking cuttings from place to
place: “We moved a great deal; he was always taking umbrage at something or
someone, falling out with a boss or a neighbour.” She began to include him
and his gardening exploits in her book: “Then I felt mean, not writing about
Mother; eventually, I had to explain this fearsome pair.”
Her parents, she writes, had a knack for starting over, for reinventing
themselves, changing jobs, changing places, changing religion, both
continually in a ferment of new ideas, literary, political, philosophical,
theological. They were educated out of the working class, but never arrived
in the middle, and were uncomfortable with both. Each move meant a new
school for Katherine and her brother.
“We never had people round,” she tells me. “We were the ultimate nuclear
family, all on our own.” Her parents had tempestuous rows – “My mother
would sit weeping at the breakfast table, ‘I only stay for you,’ she said” –
and their children were required to take sides: “She enlisted me, always,
against Pa, whom I loved.” Later, when she was married, and her father fell
out with her husband, she was forced to choose again: “I felt I had to be
loyal to Ken.” Father and daughter were reunited after 30 years when he was
ill with dementia and her mother moved them down to Shropshire. “I looked
after them for seven years; they only had me and the kindness of strangers.”
Outside the cheerful warmth of the library and the kitchen with its ancient
Rayburn, the house has an austere chill familiar to anyone who has lived
before the advent of central heating. It smells of wood and Imperial Leather
soap and the faint citrus tang of the ornamental Seville orange trees,
over-wintering in the front hall with its galleried upstairs passageways.
One year, Swift was snowed in, alone, roads blocked, power lines brought
down by ice: she sat and read by candlelight in an armchair pulled up to the
fire, shutters closed, “the tapestries stirring in the draught, carpets
lifting on the bare boards of the corridors”. She was, she says, supremely
content: “Isolation: it’s what I do best. Gardening, reading and writing.
All solitary pleasures.”
She has no children: “I discovered soon after we were married that Ken didn’t
want them.” Wasn’t that a terrible shock? Wasn’t she angry that he hadn’t
mentioned it? “Well, no, I was a bit surprised, but I was only 22, not
thinking at all about babies.” Her own mother suffered “catastrophic”
postnatal depression after her birth – “Don’t have children, dear,” said her
parents. “I think that was a really good piece of advice,” she says now. “I
didn’t want to risk putting myself through what my mother went through. It
was entirely selfish, really.”
