Ashes to ashes - but where?

For nearly four decades, old Tom Storey kept the secret he shared with Beatrix Potter, the shy, secretive, industrious woman who, in the tiny Lakeland hamlet of Sawrey, by the shores of Windermere, lived, loved, wrote her stories, farmed, and finally died.

"She wanted me to scatter her ashes in one particular place," he said, "and I hadn't to tell anyone. I said I wouldn't tell." (This was in 1981,) Nor did he until he became ill himself and his weight went down to six stone from his normal 9-I0 stone. That is when he decided to share his secret with his son.
In December, 1901, Beatrix Potter, having been turned down by six publishers, drew her savings from the Post Office and published The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Her work was to launch a cult and an industry. Some 30 or so businesses were to sprout, involved. in picture plaques, cassettes, models of her animals, printed bedspreads, quilts, jig-saw puzzles, toilet soaps. Even buttons.

A few in the village still, 20 years ago, remembered the writer who died in December, 1943, at the age of 77. Tom Storey, 85 then, once a shepherd and her farm manager for 17 years, was regarded as the authority and Americans beat a path to his cottage door.

Sawrey is a grey little hamlet just over the Windermere ferry from Bowness. As winter comes, it has much of the tranquillity Beatrix Potter must have known. Mallards peck the gravel of roads for food. The lake is thinly misted, like an opaque mirror, and boats are dead in the water. All is green of field, brown of rush and tree, and copper of hedgerow. In his tiny cottage near the farm - Hill Top - where Beatrix Potter lived, Tom Storey was to be found in front of a two-bar electric fire in a room as compact as a space capsule: chair next to the bed, bed next to the TV; walls painted green, the tick of a clock intrusive; and from the window, a view of sheep. "You'd never have thought she was a lady, the way she dressed," he said. "She had an old herringbone tweed costume down to her ankles. A shy woman in a way, though she could be pretty stern. A bonny woman, too; upper class. She didn't bother a big lot with people in the village.

He produced a book of hers -The Fairy Caravan. It was roughly bound in brown paper and inscribed, "For Tom Storey from the author in remembrance of ..." followed by four names. The cottage was dark at mid-day. I ccould not make out the names and he could not remember them. Bob? Roy? Matt? At any rate, they were the names of dogs. He had read the book but "it isn't much." The smoke outside hardly eddied and was reluctant to leave the treetops. He sat there, static as the smoke. Tom told the people "at the lodge" not to send anyone else down to see him. He was tired of all that.

Beatrix Potter took to farming but was not particularly good at it, he said. "When she engaged me she asked whether I'd come down here and show Herdwick sheep for her. She didn't know much about them, but she liked them (Herdwicks have wool like Brillo pads: He had a suit nearly half a century old made from their wool). She was a good employer: if you worked. She knew if a man wasn't a worker."

Beatrix Potter's parents were wealthy and lived in London most of the year. They moved with their servants to furnished houses in Scotland or the Lake District each summer. In 1905, when approaching 40, she bought Hill Top. Peter Rabbit was based on a letter she had written to a boy named Noel -the five-year-old son of friends in Wandsworth. At the time of publication she was 35.
"She fina11y bought a farm (not Hill Top) from the royalties of Peter Rabbit," said Tom. "Cost her £5,000 with 2,000 acres. She left 1,000 sheep on it."

She was to fall in love with Norman Warne, the gentle publisher who took up her work, and he proposed. Her family opposed the match. Warne was to die from pernicious anaemia. At 47, she married a Lake District solicitor named William Heelis. Again, her parents objected. With the marriage came an end to her writing. But by then, Squirrel Nutkin, the Tailor of Gloucester, Benjamin Bunny, Mrs Tiggy-Winkle (the Queen's favourite), Tom Kitten, Jemima Puddle-Duck and Mrs Tittlemouse had been conceived, launched, and made immortal.
"I do not remember a time when I did not try to invent pictures and make for myself a fairyland amongst the wild flowers, the animals, the fung~,. mosses, woods and streams," srle wrote.
Bronchitis killed her. "I was with her the night before she died," said Tom Storey. "I didn't think she looked like dying but she was gone next morning. She wrote from hospital asking whether I'd carry on managing the farm for her husband. And when she came out she talked to me about her ashes."
Tom Storey's son went on to farm at Hill Top.
Strange that a woman who did so much to preserve fine countryside (she left more than 4,000 acres to the National Trust) should be responsible in death for the human avalanche of summer: 90,000 trippers in a "good" season. Flattered though she might have been by the response to her work, she would hardly have approved. Any more than some of the villagers who had to live with it.

 

Geoffrey Mather © 2004

17 February, 2007

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