Richard Barttelot, by Stephen Carroll

 

I first set eyes on Richard Barttelot nearly forty years ago when I moved into Stopham House, a rambling country house formerly the seat of the Barttelot family who claimed they had come over with the Conqueror. His cousin, the local baronet, had sold a leasehold interest to developers and the house had been converted into eleven flats. There were two entrances: the main entrance where the grand apartments were, and the servant's entrance (named by estate agents as 'the North Entrance') where the humbler flats were situated. Mine was round the back on the top floor and had once been the nursery. There was a fire escape leading from the bedroom which looked out on several acres of parkland and gardens and on summer evenings I liked to open the door and sit out on this when I got home from work. I noticed that regularly at dusk, a slight, nervous-looking man in late middle-age in a white shirt, cloth cap and gloves would hurry over the grass and make his way to some outhouses in the vegetable garden to fetch an old watering can. This he would fill at a garden tap before scurrying at even greater speed to a potato patch by the wall. The reason for the extra burst of speed was that the bottom of the can was full of holes which leaked water over his shoes and trousers and did not assist in the production of the crop. After several visits to the tap and much trampling of his infant potatoes he would return through the dusk the way he had come.

   I soon discovered that this White Rabbit figure was Richard Barttelot, who shared one of the grand apartments at the end of the building with his elderly parents, 'Colonel Billy' and 'Mrs Barttelot'.

   If ever I came near to bumping into him in those early days either at Stopham or while shopping in the nearby village of Pulborough, he showed positive signs of not being aware of my existence by ignoring my presence and walking by with his nose in the air. This state of affairs continued until the first Christmas Day. I was living alone at the time and wanting to make something of Christmas I walked up to the village church to attend the morning service. When it was over I hurried out of the door before the handshaking began and set off on the ten minute stroll home. I soon became aware of footsteps behind me but it wasn't until we had passed the sign saying 'PRIVATE' that marked the boundary of Stopham House that I let my pursuer catch me up. 'What do you think of Sir Edward Elgar's second symphony?' was the first thing he ever said to me. 'Did you know that he lived on the Stopham estate?' And later that afternoon he walked round to my flat and lent me some gramophone records. I have always had an eye for an eccentric. Some promising material was close at hand.

   I should explain that Richard's eyesight was poor due to an astigmatism and his eyeballs sometimes gave the impression of revolving at great speed. In spite of this, he would frequently say 'there is nothing wrong with my eyes.'

   Not long after our first conversation we went to a concert together, either in Petworth House or at the cathedral. What I do remember is that he took the music score with him and insisted on thrusting this at me during the performance with his finger on a sequence of notes despite my lack of enthusiasm; I am incapable of reading a musical score and told him so during the interval. Nonetheless, he continued to jab his finger and nod away. Somehow this was typical of a certain attitude he had. He could not accept that you did not share his interests, however odd they may have been.  For instance, when we parted after an evening at the pub or tea at my flat, he would press a barley sugar into my hand. This he did as if it was of immense value. Similarly, when he asked me if I collected stamps, I replied that I did not, but over the years he sent me dozens, possibly hundreds of 'First Day Covers'. Neither did I share his passion for locomotives and yet as the years passed I became a regular visitor to the Bluebell Line and a reluctant authority on Sir Nigel Gresley. 

   In those early years I was suffering from a broken heart and, I admit, I was lonely and needed to keepbusy. Impulsively after we'd shared a beer at one of the local pubs (he told me he'd never been inside a pub till he met me) I told him I was thinking of going on holiday to Italy and asked if he would like to come. He leapt at the chance. We arranged to fly to Pisa, hire a car and take in Florence and Venice from where we'd fly home. The morning of our departure stands out in my mind. It was raining and as I brought my car round to the front of the house to pick him up I saw him standing stock still in a fedora and white raincoat. I told him he looked just like Michael Rennie in The Third Man, but as he had never seen the film the allusion was lost on him. Nonetheless, he was not pleased and his eyes revolved as he climbed into the car. Sure enough, when we went through passport control at the airport, Richard was taken to one side and thoroughly frisked, something which outraged his sense of the natural order of things. I couldn't help but laugh. 'Mine's a name that once turned handles' he told me. 'A hundred years ago we could ride from Horsham to the sea and not leave our own land'. And he made a despairing gesture as if to say 'people just don't know anything these days. What has the world come to?'  

    Italy nearly broke our friendship. He had never held a driving licence but liked to point at the road signs and traffic lights as we passed them and to offer a commentary and advice neither of which were wanted at the time.

   By some lucky chance we found a perfect refuge above Florence where we booked in for a couple of nights. This took the pressure off me since meals were included, Richard being like one of the babes in the wood outside his native patch. In order to see the sights we had to make our own way into the city, park on the outskirts and walk. As soon as we got near a postcard stall he would jut out his chin and make a bee-line for it. Of course there were thousands of such stalls and it was ages before we got to where I had planned for us to go. Time was against us and progress was painfully slow. I remember pointing out a fresco of heaven and hell in one of the churches and doing my best to explain what was going on. He just could not understand that bishops and princes were on the hell side. 'How could they be?' he wanted to know, after all they were the governing class, they had rank. In fact he didn't see the point of great works of art at all. They meant nothing to him. Tombs of composers and princes – well that was different. They belonged to his scheme of things. And this brings me to the question of his way of seeing the world. Over the years I took to calling it his philosophy of labels. He was more interested in a label than the thing it represented. A postcard of the Uffizi or the Ponte Vecchio was better than the real thing, while back at home where one of our regular walks took us through an ancient woodland some of the prize specimens were labelled. 'Now this is an English Oak', he would say happily. The actual tree meant nothing for him. When my mother was in hospital recovering from an operation he presented me with a handful of cuttings from magazines to give her, explaining that they were pictures of flowers that he'd cut out. A bunch of pictures represented a bunch of flowers.

   And then there was the painter Arnold Böcklin. He had lived and died at our pensione and in remembrance of him a life-sized statue stood in the area between the terrace where we sat after dinner and the stairs. Richard went in to order coffee, but it didn't come. It turned out that he'd asked Arnold Böcklin to bring it to us 'sur la terraza'.

  After a few days in Fiesole we left for Venice. Having found the motorway and paid at the first toll booth he could not understand that I had to stop the car a hundred miles away at the next booth. 'Go round!' he ordered, 'We've already paid! As the toll booths were manned by gun-toting policemen I was not keen. He was furious.

   It was getting late when we arrived in Venice and we hadn't reserved accommodation. What was more, the sky was black and a thunderstorm threatened. All he wanted to do was to buy postcards. When eventually we had found a seedy place to stay we were asked to hand over our passports. Richard was not pleased. His eyes revolved. This was not the sort of thing that happened to members of his family when they travelled.

   Naturally I found out a lot about him and his quirks during the trip. His first ambition, he said, was to be a naval architect specialising in the design of battleships, and when this seemed an unlikely goal he thought he might become a couturier instead. However, a specially cast horoscope had seen a future for him as a shopkeeper which was why he had chosen the world of books. He kept lists. There was a list of men who had disappeared, a list of people who had died at the age of sixty (he was convinced he would die on his sixtieth birthday and seemed disappointed when it didn't happen), one of men who had lost a limb in some heroic fashion, and another of those who had lost an eye. Lord Nelson and Sir Carton de Wiart were both on two lists, having each lost an eye and an arm. 'Not many people have that kind of distinction' said Richard. As for his own history, well, he could have gone to Eton, he said, but out of respect for his father ('a younger son') he had gone to Wellington instead. It was a tough military school and he had not liked it. From there he had gone to Brasenose College, Oxford, but had been invited to leave after the first term. He had not bothered to attend lectures but had spent his time at the railway station spotting locomotives and listening to the sound of them shunting. His most painful memory from these times and which he referred to repeatedly during the years of our friendship was the scout's reaction to the half crown tip he had bestowed when taking his leave.

   After Oxford he had worked at Foyle's for a while before opening a little bookshop of his own in Newhaven. This had been inevitable. It was written in the stars. 

    He revealed that he had a secret lady friend called 'Miss Newman' who he had known for a very long time. For some years he had cycled to see her once a week and she had cooked him liver and bacon. Sometimes they took short holidays together though I doubt that they shared a room. She had a tendency to walk out of films. She had, for instance, walked out of A Room with a View at the point where the vicar had stripped off and swum naked. 'It must be difficult for her to find a film that she didn't have to walk out of,' I suggested. He fixed me with a glassy look and said 'She did not walk out of One Hundred and One Dalmations.'

    After the death of his father, a small tree was planted beside his grave in the churchyard. 'it is an acer,' Richard told me with some satisfaction. The tree did not thrive and after a year was replaced by another. Richard had a bossy sister and when the second tree began to look unhappy she instructed him to feed it. I know that what I am about to relate will stretch the reader's credulity but I really did see him kneeling on the ground by this tree with a teaspoon in one hand and a bottle of plant food in the other, making coaxing noises as he held the spoon up to its leaves. Needless to say, it soon followed its predecessor. 

   Richard had spent some years living apart from his parents 'over the shop'. When I met him he was 'between shops' as it were, a state that had gone on for ten or twelve years. But when a small shop in the local village became available, he had taken a lease. It was obvious that he had no head for business and I ventured some advice:

Me: Perhaps if you had more shelves?

Him: I think I know more about selling books than you do.

Me: How many bookshops have you had?

Him: Three.

Me: and how many failed?

Him: All of them.

I should add that whenever he had been 'shirty' towards me, which happened quite frequently, he had always found a way to apologise. He was in fact, terribly nice. On one occasion when we were going out somewhere reasonable and I was wearing a tie, he asked if it was an O.E. tie. 'You know I wasn't at Eton' I said. 'People do sometimes wear them,' he replied with a glassy expression on his face, but later that evening he rang to apologise.

   His piano duly arrived on completion of the lease and was duly installed and passing shoppers were sometimes able to hear his compositions 'The Grand Canal' and  'Souvenir de Fiesole' as they went about their business. Fans of Casablanca gave the shop a nick-name: 'Rick's Bar'.

   The stock was what might be called 'eclectic'. Writers with the initials R.B. (which he shared) were favoured. You could be sure of finding the works of Robert Bridges, Rupert Brooke, Robert Browning or Robert Burns. Otherwise it was pot luck. New books could be ordered, and I asked him for several. Most of them, when collected, bore underlinings in pencil and faint notes in his now familiar handwriting. I didn't mind this but I fear other customers might not have felt the same way about new books they had ordered. I was once in the shop when a tourist asked if he had a guidebook to our part of Sussex. After some high pressure selling on Richard's part, the lady escaped with an ancient edition of A Guide to the Highlands and Islands which he had wrapped for her most carefully in a brown paper bag. Naturally, not having a vehicle made the purchase of new stock difficult but he was occasionally to be seen at dusk on a summer evening struggling along on his bicycle at an impossibly slow speed, burdened with carrier bags full of newly acquired books. Sometimes there would be accidents. Either a plastic bag would break and the books would spill out or he would fall off and hurt himself. Once I saw him returning home newly stitched by the doctor after falling into a ditch but happy in that he had found amongst his purchases a good clean copy of The Testament of Beauty (which, unaccountably, failed to sell). When he finally realised that the business was not flourishing he economised by turning off the heating and the lights. The windows were permanently misted up so that I heard more than one passer-by say that the shop had already closed down. It was only a matter of time.

   There's just one more vignette I want to record. Here is an extract from a letter he wrote to me shortly before he moved into a care home. I should mention that he liked little better than a good obituary.

It will be a new life and could be quite surprising. Will the inhabitants know about Lord de Tabley? Out of the three obituaries you kindly sent, I think King Michael of Romania the best – and the saddest. In exile he was forced to do menial jobs, such as selling vacuum cleaners and test-flying aircraft. I suppose better than happened to King Faisal II, gunned down by thugs in the royal palace. I had never heard of J.Halliday who has also gone to join the great majority.

 

For the last two years of his life Barpot lived in a care home from where my wife and I took him out on a weekly basis, falling into a routine of helping him outside to the car and driving into nearby Ilminster where he would post his letters at the post office and buy a packet of shortbread biscuits at the Co-op. Our slow procession along the high street soon became a regular feature of Wednesday afternoons in the little town especially at the post office where a long queue would build up behind us as he enquired about First Day Covers and the availability of this year's Christmas stamps. Then we would drive off to one of a number of places we had discovered for tea, his favourite being 'the hotel', where the sugar came in cubes a few of which he would squirrel away. His cap always served as a napkin on these occasions and we had to remind him to shake the cake crumbs from it as we left before he put it on his head.

   He sometimes said when we took him back to the care home that he felt he didn't really belong there, that it was for old people and, despite the fact that he was well into his eighties, he was there under false pretences. For several weeks he was in love with one of the lady residents and as long as she was alive he didn't mind getting back to the home after our outings, in fact he would disappear with almost indecent haste as we signed ourselves out. But once she had been wheeled out through the back door he would think of things to delay our departure. For instance he might mention that during the week there would be a visit from an animal sanctuary who were planning to bring 'one of those horses they make into socks' − which turned out to be an alpaca − to cheer up the old folk, an idea he didn't much care for, or that a pianist who would, alas, be playing 'popular numbers' was booked for Tuesday afternoon. Slowly we edged our way out and as we waved goodbye from the far side of the heavy glass door he looked as frail and ghostly as one of the shades of the dead Homer tells us of in The Odyssey.    

   The end came not long after our final weekly outing. We were slowly making our way up Ilminster high street to the post office when he collapsed. A helpful shop assistant brought a chair for him while I fetched the car and we manhandled him into the back seat. As I started the engine I asked my wife whether we should return to the care home or go straight to the hospital. At this point Barpot woke up, pointed a finger towards the sky and ordered 'the hotel!'