APPLE DAY AT COPPED HALL by Adèle Geras

Once upon a time, O Best Beloved, there was no email. People sent one another postcards. The photograph below shows a caryatid at Copped Hall. One of the first cards sent to me by Linda Newbery, who's been a friend since the mid-1980s, carried a similar image.  This is my photograph but the one Linda sent had been taken by her mother, Iris Newbery, a wonderful photographer and one of the volunteers who, over the last 17 years,  has been responsible for the resurrection of Copped Hall from the ruin it was until quite recently.  Iris  often takes the photographs for the Friends of Copped Hall's calendar and Linda has sent me each one as it appeared. 

 The caryatids greet you as you go into the gardens. Opposite them are their male equivalents, the Telemons, see below. On October 9th, Linda took me and Jon Appleton and  Christian Keys       to Apple Day at the house, and for me it was like fiction coming to life, a sort of dream come true.

Linda's novel, THE SHELL HOUSE, (pub 2002)  features Copped Hall, though in a state far removed from its present condition. Linda changed things, as novelists often do and has added a grotto and a lake to the landscape,  but this was the place that inspired her.  I  love the book and I've wanted to visit Copped Hall for a long time.

Below is the view that greets you when you come up the  long drive. Copped Hall has been a place of habitation for several centuries.   From 1150, there have been families here, farming the land, building, and right up until the fire of 1917, it has been a home.  The Cranfields, the `Conyers and most recently the Wythes added to the original structure, made gardens, erected statues and created a house that could be seen from the surrounding countryside. Copped Hall overlooks three valleys and is a perfect example of a dwelling in a landscape - something that appeals deeply to the British. 

 Below is the present day façade of the house. After the fire in May, 1917, the Wythes did not restore the mansion. In 1952, the estate was sold and things from the mansion (staircases,  leadwork, gates, railings etc) were dispersed to dealers and others. One of the most touching things about the resurrection of Copped Hall is the effort being made to retrieve these items from the places they went to and a great many of them have been returned and put back where they used to be. After 1952, the gardens went to rack and ruin and there were also problems with vandalism.

It was clear to us, walking round the gardens, that archaeological work is still being done. Here is a photo of the excavation which hopes to uncover some of the Elizabethan remains discovered  on the estate.

In  1988 a group led by architect Alan Cox  got together to fight a proposal to put up offices on the land in the 1990s.  They won and the scheme was rejected.  They became the Friends of Copped Hall with the aim of buying the property and restoring it to its former glory. They gained support both locally and nationally for their principles.

Below is a picture of the Walled Garden, a place of supreme order and beauty. In the last fifteen years, it has changed from the tangled, messy jungle the original volunteers found when they took it over.  Iris Newbery has been a volunteer for many years and remembers these days very well. She is now nearly 91, but still volunteering. On the day we visited, she was in the office, in a gallery above the shop,  fretting over a printer which wasn't behaving properly. The laminator was also, she felt, on the brink of causing trouble.  She and others have each had a task that they've undertaken enthusiastically day after day, week after week, in all weathers. They have made an orderly paradise out of what was once a ruin and seeing it on a beautiful October day you realise how much work was involved. 

Here is one of the glasshouses. They were nothing but metal skeletons when the volunteers arrived to start the work.

And below is a heap of collected  bits of the decorative border to one of the paths which will be put back together again one day. Nothing that's rescued is thrown away. Everything that is found or bought from other owners is used imaginatively and intelligently.

And here is the gate of the Walled Garden. 

While the garden was being restored, work on the house was also continuing. The rooms of the mansion are still not exactly as they were. You can see bare walls, and roof beams and exposed areas which will one day be covered, but the soul of each room is there already. Here's the kitchen.

Here is what will one day be a most beautiful staircase. The Friends of Copped Hall are seeking money to restore it, bit by bit. Every little helps, as they say, and on Apple Day they displayed a number which people could text to donate even small sums and earmark them for this staircase. That's what I'm going to do with my donation because my photograph doesn't fully convey how wonderful it looks.

Here in one of the bedrooms is a dress displayed in a creative way which enables you to imagine previous owners, standing at the window. I'm a sucker for dressmakers' dummies and this is a particularly lovely outfit in front of a very nice view.

And this is a model of the house which is also a money box. You can put your notes and coins into a hole in the roof!

And here is another part of the garden.

Finally, what made Copped Hall extra enchanted for me was this discovery: it was where A Midsummer Night's Dream was performed for the very first time. You would have to go far to find a more perfect venue for such an occasion.

There's a website. It's at www.coppedhalltrust.org.uk 

The Hall hosts a great many cultural and educational events, though it's not open very often. It's best to look on the website if you want to visit, but I can promise you will love it. The volunteering continues into the catering too. I saw, (though I didn't eat) ranks of delicious - looking home- made cakes but I can vouch for a terrific veg and nut roast and salad.  50 p bought me Margaret Gervis's recipes for Mincemeat Cake and Tea Loaf on both sides of one piece of A5, beautifully laminated by Iris Newbery's laminator when it was in tip top condition...

The Way We Lived Then - Celia Rees

Compton Verney is currently hosting the Exhibition, Britain in the Fifties - Design and Aspiration, looking back to the time when Harold Macmillan announced that 'most of our people had never had it so good'. A time when everything was new. Modern. The exhibition starts with the Festival of Britain and follows through to 1959, the end of the decade and the dawn of the Sixties and Withnail's 'greatest decade in the history of mankind.'

The emphasis is on design, everything from fabric to furniture and household goods. The exhibition allows us to look with new eyes at everyday items easily overlooked or dismissed as 'ordinary'. We are invited to see that things that we might unthinkingly assess as unexceptional, dull, even ugly, were actually different from anything that had gone before. It was the decade when everything was new. Not new exactly, but the design movements of previous decades in furniture, ceramics, fabrics, architecture were no longer exclusive, they were being made available to Macmillan's newly prosperous, aspirational middle classes. 

New, bright, boldly patterned designer materials might be available but women still routinely made their own clothes. Shop bought 'gowns' were for the rich, or for special occasions. Few households were without a sewing machine as this spanking electric machine, array of dress patterns and impressively stocked sewing box illustrates.

New materials, like formica, and a host of mechanical gadgets and appliances from fridges, to washing machines, electric cookers, electric mixers and teasmades were set to make women's lives much easier. 

The display shelves themselves are an example of the new design. The appliances arrayed show what housewives aspired to, or desired: a Kenwood Chef, a teasmade, a portable radio, stainless steel toast rack, an electric kettle. The styling was American or Scandinavian. The aptly named 'Maidsaver' with it's multiple cupboards and counter, replaced the larder, scullery and notional 'maid'. 

The introduction of a television into more and more living rooms was poised to transform everybody's life. The advent of ITV, launched in 1955, and the 'commercial break' were about to make people want the above illustrated innovations and all the household products that went with them: Persil, Flash, Fairy Liquid. Their slogans and jingles would become part of our consciousness and culture.

All this innovation is neatly illustrated in a series of artfully created rooms,  deceptively simple but carefully curated. Meticulous in every detail, each one re-pays close attention.  The television, showing the Coronation on a loop, is twinned with a large radio standing rather forlornly in the opposite corner. The previous source of all home entertainment was about to be eclipsed. Many of the exhibits were loned by local people like my friend, Barbara Crowther, items still in use 'part of the furniture'. This adds to the illusion that these are rooms in real homes rather than artefacts in a museum.

They certainly spark much memory and reflection. The rooms murmur with the chatter of re-discovery:

"We had one of those..."

"My mum made me a dress in that material."

'I had one just like that!"

"I remember..."

'I remember' is repeated over and over again, sometimes as an  exclamation of recognition, sometimes prefacing a deeper memory, a longer anecdote. The display of bathing suits (stout to our eyes, frilled and ruched) seems particularly redolent, sparking memories of trips to the lido, the seaside, family holidays with sisters and brothers, mum and dad. When I visited the exhibition with friend and fellow author Linda Newbery, we were exclaiming at every turn over one thing or another, adding our voices to those around us. 

The lifestyle depicted  is neatly summed up by a series of panels from Ladybird books in their pre-ironic incarnation. 

Mother is dressed to go shopping in a hat, heels and costume, the little boy is in his school uniform, the little girl in a smart red coat and beret. She carries a basket, a miniature of the one her mother carries. They visit different shops to make purchases. I remember such trips with my mother going from shop to shop, to George Mason's (grocer), Dewhurst (butcher), Simpson's (fishmonger), Warden's (draper & haberdasher), Timothy White and Taylor (chemist), Midland Educational and Twig's Toy Shop. This was how my mother shopped. There were no supermarkets in our town until the 1960s. 

My mother went 'up the village' most days, buying little and often. She had to shop like this because we didn't have a fridge. Or most of the shiny gadgets and appliances on display. We were a middle class household but we didn't have a washing machine. My mother made do with a wringer then a spin dryer. An odd fact of British consumerism is that the front loading washing machine, the Bendix as it was known from its manufacturer, was eschewed for the twin tub top loader. Front loading made washing too easy.  As it says in the accompanying notes to the exhibition, 'in practice many of these new, much trumpeted machines failed to liberate women from the kitchen, but instead tended to re-enforce gender stereotypes - resulting in more rigid gendering of domestic spaces.' In some ways they made more work, not less. Ease of cleaning and washing meant these chores were performed more often.

 This exhibition offers a snapshot of a certain kind of life style. It shows a revolution in design that  has one way or another influenced all our lives. The title is Design and Aspiration and, by default, the lifestyle shown is middle class, even upper middle class. Most households, even middle class ones like mine, didn't have all the 'mod cons' on display here and some had nothing at all. The new council houses, much of the design a bargain basement version of what we see here, were not available to all. Slum and back to back housing was still very much with us. Not everybody could aspire to live like this. 

As historical novelists, we are always interested in visiting exhibitions that re-create a particular era and this one does it very well. It is important, however, to remember what is not shown here. I lived through the Fifties, so I could fill in some of the gaps. Remember things that no exhibition can show. The cold in winter when few people had central heating. Coal grates, gas fires and single bar electric heaters didn't heat much of the house. Frost on the inside of the windows as well as the out. 

And smells. Smoke from those coal fires and steam trains, people smoking indoors. I don't specifically remember, but its not hard to imagine the body odour. Baths rather than showers. Some houses still without bathrooms. Talcum powder at best, the use of deodorants was not widespread. Sounds that are lost, like the early morning rattle and whine of the milk float. The noise, or lack of it, in a world with far less traffic, fewer aircraft, ubiquitous machines in cafes, musak in every shop. If we can remember the era, we have to remember hard. If not, we have to imagine if we are to re-create how people really lived then. 

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com