Hope Cottage by Julian Fane: ‘The Journal of the Twelve Months spent by Hugo and Gemma Loftus at Eastover in Lewes in Sussex’

I picked this book up at a library sale, attracted by the title – and even more by the cover, a lovely drawing of Lewes by Gavin Rowe*. 

I suppose I was expecting a rather cosy tale of life in a small town thirty years ago. Unfortunately, while Hope Cottage does have some elements of this, and its anecdotes about Lewes life are often entertaining, Julian Fane has an underlying agenda, and it is one that threatens at times to spoil the reader’s enjoyment of what would otherwise be a good story.

We first meet Hugo Loftus and his saintly wife Gem as they settle into Hope Cottage, Toby and Jane Whitaker’s home in Eastover. The two couples have agreed to swap houses for a year (the Whitakers having moved into the Loftuses’ London flat), and Hugo has decided this will be the opportunity he needs to write a book. So far so good; Hugo’s journal records the sights and delights of the Sussex Downs, the gardens of Lewes and the boats on the Ouse before moving on to the exploits of the local residents.

Although we are frequently reminded of the Loftuses lack of funds, the first person introduced is of course the ‘daily’, Bertha Prior. In many such novels, Bertha would be a salt-of-the-earth type with high standards in everything from cleaning to churchgoing. This Bertha is nothing like that; she’s had a string of husbands, owns two dogs called Minnie and Winnie, and is:

 ‘an egoist on the grandest scale….she does not converse,: she voices paeans of praise of herself.’

Bertha is, of course, also a useful vehicle to fill the reader in on various other people in the area, from the Cadwalladers of Cadwallader Place (old money, now rapidly descending into no money) and their flashy neighbours, the Drewetts of Downscene (new money, lots of it), to abandoned wife Wendy Aylward, widowed pensioner Mrs Spedding (‘the Spedding woman’), unfaithful left-wing academic Brian Hooke (Sussex University of course) and his campaigning wife Betsy, and shopkeepers Bert and Naomi Wilkins, ambitious parents of the beautiful Tracy, upon whose bountiful physical attractions Hugo is only too happy to dwell;

‘She wore a clinging pink T-shirt and abbreviated skirt – her figure is faultless, and its lissom fragility has a certain pathos as well as sex appeal.’

This from a man who declares himself devoted to his wife. 

Lewes (image: https://www.visitsoutheastengland.com/)

None of these characters is what you might expect. Guy and ‘Foxy’ Cadwallader (‘dyed black hair with the henna-orange and the white roots showing through…..her dress a stained brown sack that had got hitched into her knickers’) hold drunken parties, the Drewetts hold smarter but equally drunken ones, and scheme to get their hands on Cadwallader House and their daughter Monica married into the Cadwallader family. Both husbands are serial philanderers, something to which neither of their wives appears to object. Wendy spends her time either ushering at Glyndebourne or chasing after the local ‘confirmed bachelor’ Graham Phipps-Hullett, and Mrs Spedding sits in front of her television all day, with her defecating budgie Timmy roosted on the shoulder of her filthy old cardigan. In fact Mrs Spedding soon becomes one of the more likeable inhabitants of Eastover, even though;

‘”(she’s) losing the use of her legs – no wonder after making free with them for so long” Bertha added, cattily.’

Hugo does very little all day apart from walking Cindy the dog, making the occasional note in his journal, and conversing with the newsagent, Mr Patel, or ‘Uncle’, as he requests to be called. Uncle is one of the few truly appealing characters in the book, and Hugo does at least write with understanding about the casual racism inflicted on the Patel family, and their attempts to fit in with the local community.

Sadly, it does not take long for Hugo to start giving us the benefit of his personal hobby horse, and as this is the perceived Evils of Communism/Socialism/’Collectivism’ (ideologies which he does not hesitate to conflate), these parts of the book make for dry and irritating reading.

Hugo’s parents, we discover, were the last residents of Boltbridge Manor in Somerset. When his father was demobilised from the army in 1945, he returned to the estate and ran it with eye-watering inefficiency before dying in a freak accident just three years later. Hugo’s mother, however, lived on into her nineties. 'Mama' had no idea about money, spent (or gave away) cash with gay abandon, and refused to listen to anything she did not want to hear about the parlous state of the family finances. When her solicitor calls to try to explain the position to her, she dismisses his efforts with;

‘Let’s not talk about business, please. Are you ready for your lunch Dick?’

The inevitable result of all this avoidance is that, on Mama’s death, Hugo inherits nothing and the estate has finally to be sold. So far, so predictable – such things happened to country landowners all the time after the war – but the difference here is that Hugo lays the blame firmly at the feet of socialism (in the initial form of a council clerk who has sent Mama a rates bill with ‘Rich bitches should and will pay more’ scrawled across it) and seems convinced that what he sees as ‘the natural order of things’ means that families like his should be eternally baled out by the general public, and that the failure of the estate is nothing to do with his parents’ mismanagement and everything to do with the atrocious demands of the working man to have a fair share of the cake;

‘Mama was not to blame for being born with a streak of reckless benevolence….she became the victim of contemporary politics.’

Karl Marx

From the history of his own family Hugo quickly moves on to long diatribes on Soviet history, the evils of Marxism and the treachery of Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt and co. He even manages to throw Sigmund Freud into the mix.  This goes on for pages and pages, such is the grudge that Hugo holds, and whether or not the reader agrees with him it soon becomes very boring. I longed to return the goings-on in Eastover, which, when they are allowed to resurface, are really quite entertaining. Yet it is about politics that Hugo intends to write his magnum opus.

The other serious problem in Hugo’s otherwise pretty easy life is his sister Rachel. Rachel still lives near the ancestral home with her second husband Jim, an unpleasant bully. It is never entirely clear whether Rachel is properly ill or simply miserable, but Hugo worries about her a lot (and also manages to attribute her unhappiness to the unjustified fate of the family money). Rachel, incidentally, is another person who is described as having no money, but who still has ‘a daily’ to look after everything. This may have been normal for middle class families 40 years earlier, but by 1990 only a very few people I knew even had a weekly cleaner.

The interludes with Rachel are not as tedious as the lectures on politics, but they are nonetheless far less interesting than daily life back in Sussex, mainly because Rachel’s story never really moves on; she is miserable at the beginning of the year and still miserable (though possibly sicker) at the end of it. Back in Eastover, however, love affairs, unplanned pregnancies, weddings, floods and firework displays carry the plot forward, and I did find myself wanting to know how everyone’s lives would turn out.  

Glyndebourne (image: www.glyndebourne.com)

Hugo and Gem also have a visit to Glyndebourne, which is beautifully described, although the Damascene moment that Hugo affects to have experienced during The Marriage of Figaro is perhaps a little stretched as the author attempts to resolve his hero’s inner turmoil.

At the end of the year, Hugo’s book remains unwritten and he at last, and thank goodness, realises that it might not have been very good anyway. The Loftuses dither about whether they might stay in Lewes instead of returning to London, and are handily able to leave this option open when Mrs Spedding moves into a care home and offers them her cottage.

Image: The Daily Telegraph (in its 2009 obituary of Julian Fane)

It is hard to find out much about the Honourable Julian Fane. This old Harrovian son of the 14^th Earl of Westmoreland had been a page to the Marquess of Cholmondeley at the Coronation of George VI. The author of many books, Fane took his writing very seriously, but did not achieve great popular success. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1974, and counted Lord David Cecil, Lady Cynthia Asquith and LP Hartley amongst his friends. His wife Gillian was a director of Glyndebourne Opera House, and the couple, who lived in Sussex and had no children, were generous benefactors of this and other causes.

It does seem likely that Fane shared Hugo Loftus’s view of the world, and although Hope Cottage does show occasional glimmers of irony, it is hard to imagine that anyone who writes a 25 page chapter focused solely on his hero’s critical opinion of Marx does not identify with that hero’s ideas on some level.

All in all, Hope Cottage is, like the curate's egg, good in parts, and an amusing story about village life, but it is also a prime illustration of why writers should ‘show not tell’, and would have been a better book if its author had stuck to the narrative and avoided lecturing his readers.

Hope Cottage by Julian Fane was published by Hamish Hamilton and St George’s Press (the latter having been set up by Fane and two partners in 1969) in 1990.

*Gavin Rowe, an Associate of the Royal College of Art, has illustrated many books for adults and children. He was for many years the BBC’s in-house artist, responsible for the success of iconic programmes such as Jackanory.