Christcliff

Christcliff tells the story of the cottage in Eskdale, in the western Lake District, in which my mother was born, and of the other houses nearby owned by relatives, many of whom are buried in the valley in St Catherine’s churchyard. This makes it sound as if the family is deeply rooted in Eskdale, but in one sense this is not true at all. It was only in 1926 that my great-grandmother’s brother Sandie Lindsay (later Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University and Lord Lindsay of Birker) acquired the first of these cottages, Low Ground; and then only because he had not, as expected, inherited Corsock, a grand 18^th-century country house in Dumfriesshire. For most of the time, most of the cottages served simply as holiday homes. My mother was only born in Christcliff because the family had been evacuated from Oxford due to the threat of invasion in the Second World War.

In another sense, however, Eskdale served as the only place which a disparate extended family could all relate to. They identified with the valley and orientated themselves in relation to it, despite being scattered across England, Scotland, the USA, Australia and New Zealand. It was the one constant point of reference. For many of the family, who led nomadic existences, it constituted a kind of home, even if they only spent a fraction of their time there. But despite being frequently described as having a ‘timeless quality’, the Lake District has changed constantly and significantly over this period. This place which serves for my family as a fixed point of reference is not the same place across time at all.

Despite its geographical remoteness, Christcliff felt to me as a boy far more connected to a wider world, far more charged with possibility, than the ugly bungalow in suburban Edinburgh where I grew up. The cottage itself, and the objects within it, served as tangible links to more exciting existences than mine: to the world of pure ideas that I imagined Sandie Lindsay or my great-grandfather, Sir Frederick Maurice Powicke and my grandfather, Richard Pares, both eminent historians, to move in; to the travels around the world by ocean liner and flying boat of Sandie’s brother Tom Lindsay; to the diplomatic life of Sir Ian Dixon Scott, married to Sandie’s daughter Drusilla; and to the adventures once to be had in the colonies in Africa and Asia, spuriously evoked by the ‘Calabar Mission Field’ board game and described in the pages of the Boy’s Own Paper which were kept on the landing of the stairs. It was not until much later that I came to question what being related to these people really meant to me, or what these things represented. It was also only when I started to think more about the lives of these men that the remarkable women in the family started to acquire clear contours: Sandie’s wife Erica Storr, quaker, socialist and poet; Hsiao Li, married to Sandie and Erica’s son Michael, whom she met while he was teaching in Beijing during the Japanese occupation, and accompanied on a hair-raising trek through the mountains when he had to flee the city after war was declared on Britain and the USA; my great-grandmother Susie, Sandie’s sister and wife of Maurice, whose correspondence and support stitched the extended family together; and my great aunt Libby, a fiercely independent architect.

On a more instinctual level, Eskdale was also the place which my mother loved above all. When keeping Christcliff became too onerous, we told ourselves that it had been a time as much a place, and that this time had passed, but she hid how much it hurt her to part with it.

This is thus a story about place, change and belonging. It is a story about the English countryside as a source of identity, and about a particular kind of family in its pomp.