Where I Am, Where I've Been And Where I Am Going (Plus Some Other Destinations)

Me and my cat Ralph (RIP) in the garden of my rented house at Dartington in the summer of 2017.

Me reading this out loud (with only a few blunders):

This week I dreamed for the umpteenth time of Dartington, where I lived from early 2014 to the end of 2017. In my dream the old gardener’s cottage I once rented had been turned into some kind of gig venue-cum-arts lab, there were weird levitational air source motorbikes everywhere, and nobody would believe me when I said I’d lived there, especially when I told them about the draughts which in winter whistled under the doors and climbed inside the legs of my pyjamas and the way the boiler repeatedly broke and gave off a sinister oil smell which permeated my olfactory system to the extent that, for almost four years, I sort of got the idea into my head that it was the smell of the county of Devon as a whole. Eventually, these same sceptics booked me to do a talk about what it was like to live there during the second decade of the 21st Century. One by one members of the audience came up onto the stage, which was somehow a conversion of the cottage’s non-existent cellar, and each of them poked me to check I was real and it was only at this point, as parts of my arms, shoulders and face flaked off onto the floor at the touch of these strangers, that I realised that I was well over 100 years old and everyone I had been close to during my life was dead. It occurred to me that I could pretty much make whatever I wanted up about my time living at Dartington and nobody would know the difference. “Just over there, in the bathroom, was where I once recorded an album of Irish penny whistle ballads with Bjork,” I said. “If you tilt your head 25 degrees towards the carpet and look through that window, you’ll see the exact iconic opening shot they used for the episode of Columbo they filmed here, after I had magnanimously granted them permission in exchange for a week’s supply of firewood and a Twix.”

What does it all mean? That my cottage at Dartington Hall - a 1200 acre country estate in south Devon, formerly home to a progressive school, an arts college and a medieval jousting arena, amongst countless other wonders, and bordered on three sides by a river like some huge mellow snake it has charged with the task of protecting it from all that is mundane - left its mark on me like possibly no other one of the 25 other buildings I’ve lived in. But I already knew that. Only a year after I’d moved away from Dartington I was already bringing myself to the brink of tears by writing about my time there, the way an 80 year-old hippie might in recalling his time in pre-Manson Murders Laurel Canyon.

I see the dream as an optimistic one: Dartington, though visibly much-altered in my future vision of it, remained bucolic, non-conformist, a place breeding discussions about better, looser ways to live. Ever since I first familiarised myself with it, people have been ringing the place’s death bell at me. It’s not as good as it was when novelists and poets and artists could still rent the buildings dirt cheap… not as good as it was before they shut the art college down… not at good as it was when Michael Young helped cook up the idea for the Welfare State and the NHS there… not as good as it was when Rabindranath Tagore and Ravi Shankar used to hang out on the lawn in front of the White Hart pub… not as good as it was in the year 1400 when the first Duke of Exeter got to enjoy its sumptuous buildings and grounds in the brief halcyon wallet of time between moving into them and getting beheaded for conspiring against Henry IV.

No doubt this is all true, but the Dartington Estate is still, inarguably, there, and if you visit it for the first time, you’re probably not lamenting the money it’s been losing since the trust fund set up by its late owners, Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst, ran out, or its misguided rebranding exercises of the 2010s, or the land it’s sold off to property developers, or the recent closure of its alternative eco college, or the fact that the gardens are no longer free to wander around and people don’t write the beginnings of psychedelic folk albums as brilliant as Mark Fry’s Dreaming With Alice there any more. What you’re probably thinking is “How does a place like this even exist, still, in our torrid, tarnished age?” and “That salad I just had from The Green Table cafe might in fact be the tastiest available on this entire 121,000 square mile land mass!” What I would always jokingly say, when I drove a first time guest through the southern entrance and into the estate, was “We are now entering the compound.” And a compound is what it remains: both in the sense that it’s fenced off, from ordinariness and ugliness, in a semi-groovy “Come on in, allcomers, although do please note that you will be fined by Total Parking Solutions if you outstay the time you have paid for!” sort of way, but also that it still feels like a meeting place of ideas. Its days as a bold social experiment are long gone. That experiment is little more than some smouldering ashes now, but you can still smell them on the breeze, and it would be nice to think they could reignite, at some point.

About a fortnight before my most recent visit to Dartington, and about three weeks before I had that latest dream about the place, I was mooching around the North East Nottinghamshire countryside, not all that far from where I grew up, with my mum, my dad, my aunt Mal and my uncle Chris: the sort of flatish, agriculturally tamed landscape of my youth which partially explains why, the first time I set eyes on Dartington’s rolling wooded hills, flames came out of my ears, nose and mouth. My parents told Mal, Chris and me that they’d recently found an abandoned walled garden near here, and a horse skull on the banks of a small, secret river. The horse skull was mysteriously gone, but the remains of the garden were still there. Muntjac deer darted between old potting sheds and, as we stepped through a stone archway, I entered a ghost world of who knows how many forgotten horticultural lives, all of which I immediately wanted to document in my next novel. This was highly inconvenient, since I already had three wildly varying answers to the question “So Tom, tell me, what is your next novel going to be?” brawling in my head and sadly none of them revolved around a demolished manor house in the East Midlands. To complicate things further, a barn owl swooped along the adjacent field edge, less than twenty fours after I’d been having a word with myself about putting too many owls in my books. Oh well, I thought. The word I’d had with myself hadn’t been particularly successful anyway, proceeding more or less along these lines:

Me: “Maybe, as a compromise to the anti-owl crowd, you could leave the owls out of this one?”

Me: “Go fuck yourself, sellout. I’m mentioning the owls.”

As Mal impressed me with her knowledge of Georgian building techniques, I saw, out of the corner of one eye, a compact shape, flitting low between the splintered walls on the west side of the garden.

“Was that another muntjac?” I said.

“No, it was just Chris,” said Mal. “He can be extremely quick sometimes, for someone in his early 70s.”

“DON’T GO ON THE INTERNET AND TELL PEOPLE EXACTLY WHERE THIS IS, OR EVERYONE WILL BE HERE IN A FLASH AND IT WON’T BE AS SPECIAL ANY MORE,” said my dad as we left the garden, and my mum immediately echoed him, so here I am, being a good, dutiful son, not giving it away. Enough people are already online making lovely lost places less lost and lovely. But it is possible just maybe that, as a family, we tend to overestimate the desire of the general population to climb into half-wrecked two century-old greenhouses or examine the remains of a lath a 190-year-dead builder employed to finish an interior wall. We have always been great collectors of buildings, the Coxes: in a theoretical sense, if not a literal one. I don’t own one of my own so, to make up for that I look for ruined ones on my walks and get my possessive kicks by refusing to share their map co-ordinates with thousands of strangers. It’s selfish and greedy but I tell myself I’m also performing a public service in protecting some of the planet’s last tiny shreds of magic from the Great Devourer: the one some people also sometimes insist on calling by its other, more boring name, ‘Instagram’.

The power of buildings has shaped my life and casts an ever-increasing spell over my writing. I might be able to sidestep that from time to time but it seems unlikely I will fully escape it. I see plenty of evidence that I’m not the only one. The human characters in Tessa Hadley’s 2015 novel The Past, which I lost myself in on Monday and Tuesday this week, are brilliantly drawn, but the book extracts its unique power from the personality of its two main buildings - an ailing rectory on Exmoor, and a ruined cottage in some nearby woods, with no vehicular access - and their overarching influence on the lives of the four middle-aged siblings in the book. 1983, the novel I published last year, was originally going to just be a story about a building: a Victorian primary school that had formerly been a war hospital. But I wanted the book to be more than that. I always want it to be more than the thing it’s about, and more than the thing directly under the thing it’s about. As I mentioned, I’m greedy. I suspect it’s only going to escalate as I get older. By the time I’m 60, I’ll probably be trying to pack eight novels into the space of one, instead of just the four.

Last October I visited another old building with my parents, similarly for the hell of it. This one had a roof and wallpaper and everything and was looked after by The National Trust. It’s known as Mr Straw’s House and sits on a quiet street in Worksop, that most Yorkshire of Nottinghamshire towns. For those accustomed to the elaborate brocades and grand extrovert reception halls of British heritage buildings, it might come as a shock, being the preserved - and by “preserved” I mean “including damp walls, austerity lighting and overall mildewy atmosphere” - 1920s residence of a couple of grocers, William and Benjamin Straw. “WHY DOES WORKSOP EXIST?” asked my dad as we entered the reception area, providing a National Trust employee with a challenge she had almost certainly not anticipated at daybreak. “THIS IS DEPRESSING,” he said later, as we inspected the highest of the house’s three floors and I smiled apologetically at another guide. “I’D BLUMMIN’ HATE TO LIVE HERE.” My dad has a tendency to oversimplify and exaggerate in these situations, the ratings in his critical repertoire generally being limited to “ABSOLUTELY SHIT” and “FUCKIN’ BRILLIANT”, but in this case I found myself agreeing with him: as historically interesting as the paraphernalia in the house was, its spong mincers and taxidermy bitterns and the postcodeless addresses on its hoarded yellowing correspondence, the place gave me an icy, hopeless feeling. Interestingly, my mum pointed out that its layout and features were reminiscent of a house, also Edwardian, about twenty miles south where we’d lived for around a year, from around the time of my 10th birthday. As she did, a significant moment in my own past began to liquify and reshape itself until, before long, I was peering at a whole new side of it.

I’d had a relatively stable childhood until the day in spring 1986 when my mum arrived in my bedroom in that house to tell me, regretfully, that we were going to be “moving house again”, and, to my mind, it’s at that split second that my path as a person, and a writer, shaped by houses begins. My dad, suffering from depression, yearned for the countryside, struggled with life in suburbia, and my mum, who had worked hard to decorate and renovate the house and been happy in it, yielded to his needs, taking me away from the many friends I had made and the reputable comprehensive school I was supposed to be enrolling at that autumn. By early summer we were in a village ten miles north, with an open cast mine due to be built directly behind our back garden, and I was variously befriending and getting physically threatened by its thriving population of teen glue-sniffers, witnessing my beloved cat Tabs get killed on the road outside our house, and getting ready to attend a significantly less salubrious secondary school where, in time, I would thoroughly wank up my GCSE results. In the years that followed, our idealised mental picture of the Edwardian house, its big rooms and beautiful original tiles, would expand in direct accordance with my dad’s guilt. But now, leaving Mr Straw’s house, I saw everything differently. That little north-facing garden had been dark, hadn’t it. And what about the noisy main road less than a handful of buildings away? Tabs could just as easily been hit by a car on that. And then there were the dogs who always shat directly outside our front door after their owners had taken them to see the vet who lived thirteen yards away.

I have done my best to make clear to my dad, over the years, that if he does feel any guilt about his abrupt uprooting of our life 39 years ago, that guilt’s focus should not be me, and he is anything but, as he sometimes puts it in one of his more melodramatic moods, “A TERRIBLE EVIL PERSON WHO RUINED YOUR LIFE”. Even before last autumn when I saw Mr Straw’s House and questioned my idealised image of that house we briefly lived in during the mid-80s, I had long been aware that, by moving us away, my dad had inadvertently done me a big favour. Messing up at that much rougher school - a school where a love of learning was gradually beaten out of me, both literally and figuratively - and living in the less safe and easy places we lived after 1986 meant, when I decided what I truly wanted to do with my life, I fought that much harder for it, because I knew nothing less than fighting was necessary, to stay afloat. Then, after I achieved that life and hit more rough patches, I kept fighting and trusted that, if I did, everything would always work out for the best. None of it made me bright, but it made me bold. Add a tenacity inherited directly from my parents and you have the reason that, despite many setbacks, I am still doing what I do.

I am surprised, fifteen books in, to find it’s no less of a battle than ever. Why the hell is that? The precise answer is too complex and intricate to detail here in an essay which is already arguably too long for the average modern attention span. But one contributing factor is undoubtedly that the world, shoved discourteously on by the digitisation of everything, keeps getting that bit more crowded and competitive. In a couple of ways 1999 seems like yesterday to me but one way it definitely doesn’t is that it was the year my mum and dad just happened to spot an ad for a run-down cottage in a local paper for 70something grand then - mostly because virtually nobody else had spotted it - managed to buy it. Stuff like that doesn’t happen any more. Even the moment when I found that cottage to rent at Dartington Hall - simply by having the brainwave “Hey, I bet they rent some of those buildings on that estate out to people!” and writing to the Dartington Hall Trust - feels like part of a much roomier era now. If Dartington’s old worker’s buildings were still up for rent, which they’re not, they’d be on RightMove, more formerly half-lost lovely things digitally discovered, to their detriment, and a dusty, flailing ball of what the locals call DFLs (‘Down From Londons’) would be scrapping it out for them on the undignified playing fields of an estate agent’s email database.

The publishing industry is victim to another version of that same swarming claustrophobia. We live, arguably, in an era of too many writers and too few readers, and that fact is far more tangible than it was even 11 years ago. The hustle is no longer the cringy anomaly; it’s the norm. You can decide that it’s not for you and sidestep it, and choose to promote your work via the unconventional, maverick method of just doing your work, and possibly upping its quality and volume, but, if you do, and you’re not in some position of elevated safety with your backlist and sales (the publishing equivalent of being a homeowner), you can’t afford to relax. Perhaps, for example, you found a new way of publishing, outside the mainstream, via a publisher you believed in and trusted, then wrote seven books for them in approximately the same number of years. But then perhaps, to your surprise, last year, that same publisher suddenly stopped paying you and its other authors the money it legally owed you, and still hasn’t paid you that money. Perhaps then, as it fully dawned on you what had happened, you made the difficult decision to take the rights back to your books and look for another publisher. Perhaps this left you in a limbo state, feeling in the darker moments like your life’s work had been snatched from under your pillow in the dead of night, feeling, sometimes, like your latest, still-unpublished novel didn’t even exist, and marvelling at the unanticipated unfairness of it all, temporarily unable to quite motivate yourself to commit to writing the follow-up. Perhaps you kept yourself sane by walking, and looking for abandoned buildings and writing more pieces than usual on Substack, while trusting that this limbo state, too, would pass, due to the evidence that so many other troubled times had. But perhaps you also thought, “Bloody hell, it’s a good job I’ve learned to be so tenacious, and am such a workaholic, because if I hadn’t, and I wasn’t, I’d be absolutely fucked right now.”

The mistake, in moments like this, is to focus your gaze in the middle distance, on someone in a vaguely comparable walk of life to your own, and think, “Look at them, with their charmed existence, free of struggle and injustice.” The scales of their life surely hold a mixture of fortune and misfortune and to think otherwise, just because the particular types of fortune and misfortune are different to your own, is a failure of imagination and empathy. The author William Boyd, in the episode of Desert Island Discs recently devoted to his life and musical tastes, touched on this idea, which is one he has often explored in his novels. Boyd himself could easily be seen as a textbook example of how to live a charmed writing life. He’s got a degree from the University of Glasgow, where he fell in love with the woman he’s still married to today, attended Oxford not long afterwards, published his first book at 28, which immediately established him as a big name in British literature, and he’s still with the same publisher, more than four decades later, and has lived in the same beautiful Chelsea house for decades. All things that are very unlike me. But, also unlike me, he had a dad who was disdainful of his ambitions to be an author and who sadly did not live long enough to see him published then say something like “BRILLIANT, I DIDN’T WANT IT TO END - CAN YOU WRITE SOME MORE?” after reading his latest novel and embarrass him by asking loud unusual questions in heritage buildings.

When I interviewed Boyd for a newspaper in 2002, after half a decade of devouring every novel he’d written, proof copies of my own first book had just come back from the printers. I remember that, from my 26 year-old’s perspective, Boyd’s life as an author - its combination of unceleby modesty, productivity, breadth of subject, loyal fanbase, the blatantly watertight, affable nature of it all - appeared overwhelmingly attractive, and perhaps, I thought, not entirely unattainable for me at that early point, before I’d learned the first of numerous lessons about how harsh the publishing industry can be. Fast forward to now and, six publishers later, my mental image of that day now has a caption under it reading ‘POOR DELUSIONAL YOUNG IDIOT MEETS SUCCESSFUL AUTHOR’. If Boyd’s career is one finely maintained, imposing building, full of diverse yet well-dusted rooms, mine is a collection of roofless cobweb-throttled bothies and haunted goat barns, scattered widely and indiscriminately across the countryside. That’s not how I originally planned it but I have learned to embrace it… love it, even. And perhaps Boyd and I aren’t so different in a few ways. One of many things I always loved about his books was the joyful, exploratory, unpredictable nature of them. I remember talking to him about his rejection of the “write what you know” cliche, his mission to take a subject he didn’t know about, but wanted to, and write about that instead. That was what I wanted to do too, and still is. To do more of it is probably my greatest desire, creatively.

One part of the artistic process where Boyd and I strongly differ is that he writes the end of a book before he writes the beginning. It makes him feel he’s less likely to abandon a novel he’s begun (something he’s still never done). Working that way holds no appeal for me. When I start a book, not knowing the where on earth I’m going is my central adrenaline high. You could probably call this another way that my life as an avid relocater and my writing are inextricably linked. Having taken out the contract on a new rented house, I’m like a small child on Christmas Eve, and will generally barely get a wink of sleep the night before a move. “I wonder what’s going to happen next!” I’ll be thinking. I’m much the same when I’m writing a novel. When the mists of a story start to enfold me, I can’t wait to wake up the next morning and get to my desk. Every year, it all swirls together even more: life, and storytelling. I’ve trained myself to the point where I can’t happily live without telling stories, so why wouldn’t it? Cut me, and I will bleed ink. If the blood is a sandy red colour, and there’s something grainy and rough about it, don’t worry: it’s just the brick dust mixed in there.

My take on “Write what you know” is that, even if there’s some truth to it. it’s never an instruction you need to give yourself. I trust that, while I’m exploring what I don’t yet know through my writing, the “what I do know” bit will arrive naturally all on its own. I will, no doubt, write about houses again: as a theme, I have too much to say about it and find it too interesting (what could be more fertile, in discussing the human experience, than the idea of home?). And if I leave the windows of the houses open, an owl or two will no doubt fly in. But meanwhile, I want to cut loose and roam into new areas of knowledge, surprise and test myself, write what I wouldn’t expect myself to write, because that’s what really lights the candle. My paradox is that I crave stability - a comfortable home that I own, a publisher who pays me - but also have a clear-eyed view of all the ways instability has artistically benefited me, all the ways that bad experiences can mutate into good ones. I can tell myself I left Dartington in December 2017 because I heard the estate were going to change the use of my house and kick me out, but I probably did it more because I was interested to know what a drastic and unlikely move, to a high snowy place six hours away, would do to my writing. I’m reckless in that way, just as I’m boring and sensible in other ways. I’ve learned too much about the benefits of change to ignore the temptations of it and too much about the pay-offs of pain and frustration to take just one view of pain and frustration, even when I’m experiencing them. I don’t want to be stressed, and unpaid, and frustrated, and bruised, like I am now. But it would be an oversimplication to call it a “bad time”. It’s a lots of things time. Hopefully one day I will look back on it and think, “That was an important part of everything which subsequently happened.” And then maybe I’ll dream a weird dream about it and wake up and realise that, once again, I’m in a wholly different place.

Abstract painting of Gardens Cottage, Dartington Hall, by Jo Cox (2017)

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