Voices in the Garden

John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds
by Eileen Warburton

(Page 3 of 7)

Leigh on Sea: 1926-1939

Voices in the garden. I half-hide in one of the bamboo-clumps. Down the path beside the Cobb Road march two young gentlemen, age about five each. I challenge them: "What are you doing here?" All such previous encounters have resulted in almost immediate panic-stricken flight. But these two stand smiling. "We're going for a walk." Then one asks, "Is it your garden?" The other, "Are you the famous writer?" Already winded by this engaging frankness, I make them take me to where they got in.... "It's to hide from the other boys, we don't want them to know." "It's the best garden in Lyme, this," one of them confided, "a wizard place."

— John Fowles, diaries, december 7, 1986

It was not a show garden, although its owner loved to show it to visitors. It was the secret place of a solitary, turned in upon itself, not facing the outside world at all. The single acre of the Belmont House garden spread over a steep slope, dense, walled and fenced, with a lone locked gate at the bottom, shut off even from the sea beyond. Entering from the terrace by the house, sixty-year-old John Fowles had passed the greenhouse and well-kept orchard and vegetable patches and descended by winding pathways into a green chaos, where outside sounds quickly diminished and the light was filtered through heavy leaf canopy. He had always needed wild places, and his wild places were always places to hide. His own garden, where on this wintry day he waited unseen amid the green for his childish visitors, had grown wild and secret, a mirror to the mind and spirit of its gardener, much like the books for which Fowles was famous the world over.1,2

This garden on the Dorset coast of England had a peculiar, semitropical miniclimate, catching the sun on its steep south face, so that the unique and unexpected flourished there. It was old, and Fowles delighted in discovering the works of his predecessors, the plants stocked by owners stretching back over 150 years and the odd ruins of buildings from earlier times. He himself had filled it with plants from all over the world, specimens dug up or cuttings stealthily nicked while traveling and smuggled home stuffed into the pockets of his raincoat or trousers. He knew each growing thing with the intimacy of a lover in a long relationship and murmured the words of their names tenderly. Relishing the rare, he always identified his plants by their Latin names to scholars and interviewers, making up the Latin when he had forgotten and delivering this fictional mischief in an avuncular deadpan. Fowles truly shared this domain only with a stone statue of the goddess Ceres and with the other wild creatures that came and went unmolested: owls, hawks, blackbirds, herring gulls, dormice, foxes, hedgehogs, deer.

In the garden's hidden interior clock time seemed arrested. Time moved imperceptibly by seasons and each plant's secret ways. Fowles cherished this sense and found that only children, like these little boys, experienced the garden quite the way he did. The realm was created by adult labor, but in it, Fowles was also free to see like a child. When he had drifted for hours, breathing damp earth and blossom, mesmerized by the bending of light and the bending of time, he would hear the sound of a bell, calling him, as Conchis was to call Nicholas Urfe, back to the other world of everyday reality. Climbing up the path, slower for his six decades, John Fowles would reemerge from the garden to see waiting for him the one woman he had loved for more than thirty years.

John Fowles's earliest memories were of another garden, his father's garden in the Essex suburban town of Leigh-on-Sea. Unlike the Belmont House sanctuary, however, the garden at 63 Fillebrook Avenue was not a wild thicket for hiding. It was controlled and exposed, two circumstances John Fowles spent the rest of his life escaping. The merest tenth of an acre abutting a tiny semidetached house, Rob Fowles's weekend orchard was an obsessively pruned and espaliered collection of prized apple and pear trees. While John Fowles would walk through his garden, pointing out the exotic species he had surreptitiously acquired on his foreign travels or crushing a pungent leaf to hold to the nose of a visitor, Robert Fowles would proudly tell of the prizes won by his Cox's Orange, the exact yield of his Lady Sudeley, and of how he had bought each as a sapling for only a few shillings.

The son's memories of his father's garden, however, were not of prizes and prices but of scent and taste. No fruit ever equaled in flavor his father's James Grieves or matched the succulence of his D'Arcy Spice. In this fragrant, sensuous place, John Fowles in his earliest days was an adored only child, attended by two young, pretty, affectionate women. In the novels he published decades later, the configuration is often similar: A young man is lost in wonder in a green, enclosed natural place, instructed by an authoritarian older male and teased, cherished, and tempted by a pair of lovely young women. In the suburban reality of the late 1920s the women were John's mother, Gladys, and his cousin Peggy, who lived with the Fowleses as the little boy's caregiver until he was ten.

Gladys May Richards Fowles was nearly twenty-seven when John was born. She was a handsome, full-figured woman, with dark hair, eloquent eyes, and a shy smile. John looked like her, tall, with wistful hazel eyes, a bashful smile, and an unruly shock of dark brown hair that flopped over his forehead. Neither of her children could remember their mother with a book, and she was not an intellectual. She was, however, a great talker, who kept up a constant flow of chat and was keen at crosswords. While her ten-year- older husband revered his meticulously controlled garden and was suspicious of the wild and rural, Gladys was a country walker, with a sharp eye for the first green shoots of spring. She kept birds, dogs, and cats, crooning to them like babies. She was a churchgoer and devoted to her parents, brother, and sister-in-law, all of whom lived within half a mile. As a girl she had studied in an excellent secretarial school but had not been allowed to take a job and so, as her son-in-law thought years later, had poured her considerable energies into the domestic sphere.4 She kept a serene household for her nervous husband, so ordered and quiet one could "hear a pin drop."5 She was, by every account, a truly exceptional cook and an excellent seamstress, who also knitted and worked embroidery and tapestry. Late in life she took up watercolors and handicrafts.

Gladys had feared she would not have children, so John as a boy was "the apple of her eye" and mother and son were close companions. In all her memories as an old woman (and her memory was as prodigious as her cooking), she recalled times spent with John, walks in the country, planned outings, projects she helped him with. A few years after his birth she lost a baby either to miscarriage or stillbirth, leaving John the sole object of her deeply reconcentrated love and attention.

Side by side with Gladys was pretty, freckled Peggy Fowles, the daughter of Robert Fowles's elder brother, Jack, who had been killed in the war. Eighteen when she came to be nursemaid to the infant John, Peggy was the little boy's caregiver, playmate, and close companion until John was ten and she twenty-eight. He always spoke affectionately of Peggy Fowles. But this beloved cousin disappeared from his life in 1936, when she emigrated to South Africa with her two younger brothers.

Both the Fowles and the Richards families were Londoners who had moved to the rapidly growing Essex suburbs just after the Great War. Gladys and her younger brother, Stanley, had grown up in material comfort in fashionable Chelsea, the children of John S. Richards, a lace merchant. As newlyweds J. S. Richards and his wife, Elizabeth Pascoe Whear Richards, had come up from Cornwall to London, where, exactly like Sam Farrow in The French Lieutenant's Woman, he had joined one of the new department stores of the modern Victorian age and risen to be chief buyer of lace for John Lewis Ltd. He was a "master draper" in 1899, when his daughter was born. In 1918, as the Spanish flu epidemic decimated Europe, the Richardses moved to Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, the western residential suburb of Southend-on-Sea. Although connected to the capital city by rail, this seaside town was reputed to have "good air" and a healthy climate.

The Fowleses, Robert Fowles's large family, were also well-to-do middle-class London merchants, originally from the West of England. They lived in a spacious house overlooking Clapham Common, attended by servants and sending their many children to good schools. Reginald Allen Fowles, Robert's father, was a partner in Allen & Wright, the family's tobacco-importing firm, founded a generation earlier. Even his children called him "Pard." The company flourished in several London locations, notably Piccadilly Arcade, and Reginald also owned income-producing commercial properties. He provided a comfortable life for his first wife, Lilian Ellen Lawrence Fowles, mother of Robert John Fowles, born the third son and the sixth of seven children in 1889. Robert was only six when his mother died. Reginald eventually remarried to a Gertrude Brown ("Lovey" to the family), who gave him five more boys and girls.

Robert John Fowles grew up in a happy crowd of siblings and friends, avidly playing cricket, golf, and tennis and enjoying the urban pleasures of London vaudeville and music halls. He enthusiastically prepared for a career in law, clerking and reading in a barrister's chambers. He heard most of the great Edwardian King's Counsels arguing in court and was ambitious to be one of them.

The Great War crushed his dreams and his future.

© 2005 Viking, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Eileen Warburton is a scholar who lives in Newport, Rhode Island.