Transition

When the end came we somehow stayed connected, as we had been before we met. The sun danced on the still water's surface during our last afternoon in England, as the Eighties ushered in the death knell to the sensibilities of our world. We both recognised the gathering clouds almost upon us.

Our time was another century entirely. For a while we were able to survive out of time. But not now.

Sylvaine remains a valued colleague and friend with whom exists an affinity that transcends time. There was an interlude during our relationship when what we had might have become more enduring, but playing lead rôles opposite each other, as a couple who were madly in love for film dramatisations, somehow consumed that prospect for me. So close were we that she understood immediately. I remember the evening in Paris when she sadly said: "I understand." It still brings a lump to my throat. We do not visit each other’s country any longer; yet we stay ethereally, mutually and always a source of inspiration and encouragement in a much more dangerous, uglier world.

Billets-doux

These inscriptions are all I feel comfortable sharing. Correspondence, even now, remains too intensely personal to publish. In the above an indication of Sylvaine's deep passion can be glimpsed. 

Sylvaine

Jean-Claude Asfour, a casually-dressed Frenchman, journeyed from Paris to pay his respects at Byron House in November 1978. It was a property I had purchased largely due to its proximity to a woodland cemetery in Southgate He fetched with him a copy of Lits de Pierres, published in the previous year, which he had co-authored with an attractive actress. The female contributor to this unusual work (comprising largely photographs of churchyards and cemeteries) had written the following inside the copy Asfour had been sent to present to me in person:

“With joy and some despair I found Seán Manchester to whom I dedicate this book. I invite him to follow me through it … as his appeal is timeless … beyond Death. Now might he belong to two worlds without astonishment.” ― Sylvaine.”

I was naturally flattered to receive this book from one of its co-authors. But who on earth was Sylvaine? My curiosity would not have to endure too long a wait before it was amply satisfied.

French actress Sylvaine Charlet ran away from home on a motorbike when she was sixteen, eventually returning to Paris take a degree in English at the Sorbonne University, after which she completed her craft at the René Simon Drama School. By the time she had produced Lits de Pierres with Jean-Claude Asfour she had made a number of films, performed a lot of theatre, had her paintings exhibited, and was also something of an accomplished musician. She had been decorated with the medal of French Cultural and Philanthropic Merit by Graziella Hansotte, an honoured member of Jean Clair’s Little Cinematographic Studio in Marseille, and was soon to be to awarded (in the autumn of 1979) the French equivalent of the Oscar. In that same year she was chosen to represent her country at the Festival of Fantastic Horror Films held in Sitgès, Spain. It would seem that Jean-Claude had shown her an English book ― The Vampire’s Bedside Companion ― in which my contribution on the Highgate case appeared along with a number of photographs. This had triggered Sylvaine’s interest in both the investigation, technically still in progress, and, indeed, me.

Sylvaine Charlet at her country house in Tourraine.

The one thing we both shared in common was a love of animals, especially horses, and a deep appreciation of the Romantics. When in Tourraine, where she escaped to the country house then occupied by her parents (who have both since passed away), she turned to horse riding ― galloping madly with the wind in her long flowing hair like a fairy princess, but with a look of defiance in her ice blue eyes. She was surrounded by artists, musicians and intellectuals in Paris who found their escape in conversation, reading and wine ― but very little else. The French capital nonetheless provided her with the expertise to become a sword fencer, attending Master Roboth’s fencing class at University City. She could duel for film and theatre ― or, of course, for real.

As the 1970s wore on, Sylvaine became increasingly discontented. She longed for something more than performances on film and stage ― her heart cried out for the intoxication of some wild escape. It was at this critical moment that her colleague and collaborator showed her the English book wherein my work was published. Her eyes apparently darted across the pages, following my account as if she was living it herself (something, briefly, she would soon do, as recounted in The Highgate Vampire, which is the complete account). Jean-Claude had been chosen to cover Highgate Cemetery for Lits de Pierres, but was denied admittance to the afflicted Western Cemetery ― now closed to the public. He nevertheless returned to France with eerie tales of what had happened some years earlier.

Riding my mount circa the time Sylvaine made my acquaintance.

Sylvaine regretted that she had not been chosen to visit London for the graveyard book, and asked Jean-Claude to make an introduction on her behalf next time he was in England. He agreed, bringing the inscribed copy of Lits de Pierres, plus a sealed envelope addressed to me. When alone, I read it:

“I cannot believe you are existing in either life or death. Even your face looks unreal. I have seen pictures that have been published. It is a face coming from beyond the living world, or belonging to another time. I have received several times in my life an appointment with destiny which I had to obey. But this time I feel such an outburst of emotion about you which makes my mind, heart and body tremble. ― Sylvaine.”

This outpouring on parchment-like paper in an archaic hand was the beginning of a veritable avalanche of similarly written declarations from someone, not unlike myself, obviously born in the wrong century. Within months we had met and were soon collaborating in respective projects. I would later recount in one of my most popular books a shared adventure:

“Five years had elapsed since I revisited the still-closed western cemetery and witnessed the chaos of great mausoleums and untended graves. Now I was returning with a French arcanologist who was new to the case in the hope of discovering a link between the original undead contagion and the latest outbreak in neighbouring districts. The resonant tones of nearby St Michael’s clock filled the night air as we climbed the wall. In her excitement, Sylvaine left her bag on the top of the wall and I had to climb back to retrieve it. As I clambered on the top of the wall I noticed a large dog baring its fangs on the other side. Where it had suddenly appeared from was of less interest than avoiding its angry snarl which seemed to grow more ferocious by the moment. We would have to leave by another exit when the time came.” (The Highgate Vampire)

In the event, Sylvaine’s help was to prove most productive when I allowed myself to be persuaded to attend an eighteenth century masquerade where I caught sight of a spectral figure through the smoky vapour left by a firework display.

“Again I saw her. She looked absolutely devastating in a white dress of the period, finished with lace; jewellery shimmering at her throat, fingers and ears. Pushing through the crowd along the shore I could hear everyone clapping with approval as a cascade of brilliance above signalled the end of the display. As people began to retreat back up the slope, I was carried with the tide for a while and lost my quarry. Yet her image continued to haunt me as certainly as some substantial body is perceived in the dark though it cannot be discerned. Sylvaine assured me that only Handel’s music played during the display and that Metamorphosen was not included anywhere on the programme. But I felt certain that I had heard it. And seen Lusia.” (The Highgate Vampire)

The strange happenings in the grounds of an aristocratic mansion, against the backdrop of a tableau floating on a lake over which fireworks illumined the night sky, was the beginning of the end of my mysterious investigations into the case of the Highgate Vampire ― the terrible discovery of Lusia’s fate being aided to some extent by Sylvaine who seemed peculiarly in touch with the haunted realm.

Later on I agreed to collaborate on a variety film projects in France. Principal amongst these were productions directed by Guy Godefroy. Sylvaine and I starred in his film Beren, which apparently was written for the pair of us. I played Snegur Malher in the male lead opposite Sylvaine who, of course, was the character "Beren." Stills from the rushes appeared in Studio 148 magazine in Paris, and Sylvaine provided an interview while a close-up of us together graced the front cover. The remaining cast included Françoise Mojeret, Noémie Vialard, Méline Vialard, Harold Giroux, Christian Huitorel, Philippe Hermelier, Pascale Deforges, Alexandra Du Cluzeau, Françoise Poncet, Nicole Scoffoni, Raquel Iruzubieta, Manuel Rosado, Benoĩt Breuil, and Emmanuel Cantor. Shot mainly in Brittany and Paris, the film was in French, which obliged me to learn my lines by rote. A small number of these were later dubbed for the final cut. Ironically, my return to the Highgate case made it impossible for me to attend the opening, and to this day I have still not viewed the finished film. Guy Godefroy, who directed Sylvaine in a number of his films, regards Beren as his masterpiece. Many of the Parisian scenes in the film were filmed at the Père-Lachaise cemetery.

In the rôle of Snegur Malher with Sylvaine as Beren.

The film was made too late to be included in Andrew Warren’s biography Sylvaine Super Star (1978), where photographs reveal the actress doing her own stunts, riding horses, sword fencing, acting alongside animals and film stars she worked opposite, eg Peter Cushing, Oliver Reed etc. Included, however, is an early picture of Sylvaine with me.

When Carmel was published on the first day of the new century, Sylvaine led those who gave it a glowing and enthusiastic review. And when Katrina Garforth-Bles published privately a biography (now out of print) about my ventures into hidden realms, Sylvaine wrote the introduction, which was touching ― if somewhat panegyric. Yet her words, worthy of repetition here, reveal much about the generosity of spirit and passion evinced within the extraordinary being that is Sylvaine Charlet.

“When I heard about Seán Manchester for the first time, he was in England and I was in France. He appeared like the incarnation (in the sense of an idea becoming material) of something imagined, illustrated on paper, played on the piano, written, hoped for? And, as a matter of fact, this man was (and always is) a personality completely different from all those I have met in my life. I saw him as an outsider, a fool, a poet, a creator, an adventurer, an imaginative spirit, a soul who found himself in the wrong epoch. All his work, indeed, exposed a deep melancholy of a paradise lost. Who are we to say he is not right to battle the way he does against the ugliness and the evil in the world. All we can admire, with torturing regret inside the heart, is that all his efforts look like a drop in the middle of the infinite ocean. Still he does what he feels he must do. For he believes in ‘right’ ― not ‘might.’

“So, let us feel gratitude for his existence ― to be what he is and do what he does. Is he an obsolete figure? Perhaps. Like everyone eager to live with passion for beauty and the higher things. In fact, he belongs to the nineteenth century, its values, its aspirations and its aesthetics. Seán Manchester is a character typical of the end of an epoch. In that sense, he is bound to disappear as fireworks eventually stop illuminating the landscape, leaving behind him an atmosphere, a strong feeling of melancholy, lost for ever ― and that makes us all die a little.

“In future times, it may happen someone shall remember that a man like this existed, against all the storms, in an inadequate century; a hero, in a way, whose trembling light gave a warmth to the heart of those who wanted to live only on poetry, music, beauty and spiritual experiences. I am not sure that his peers realise who exactly is living among them. They will know and appreciate, as usual, too late. And the magic continues every time I have news from him, his creativity, his work. I can say I have in Seán a ‘brother soul’ ― for nowadays it is quite a luxury to feel less solitary in the world because of him.”

Ghosts

It was painful to witness the deterioration of England. This was magnified by the eradication of my old London haunts. Surroundings succumbed to a decline probably in evidence since the nineteenth century, which accelerated throughout the twentieth century; not helped by two devastating wars. 

My father was also deteriorating, having a heart condition for which medication had been prescribed. Yet he was fiercely independent and would not allow any interference. Knowing it would be fatal to stop taking his prescribed tablets, he nevertheless did stop taking them ― no longer able to live in a world without his first, last and only love whom in life he was unable to show the appreciation she perhaps deserved. Yet who are we to judge? Words that were her last eight years earlier nevertheless linger in the mind to burn away the veneer of romantic illusion that can grow like moss on memory.

In the weeks following my father’s death something happened that would provide a unique portal through which I almost glimpsed things as they had been in my youth. Following the discovery of my father’s body in the house where my parents had spent so much of their lives ― a house, moreover, now more resembling Mrs Havisham’s in Charles Dickens’ Great Expections ― an altered state of consciousness occurred which, coupled with the inevitable adrenaline surge that accompanies stress in crisis, found me walking the streets aimlessly, and calling on people I had not seen for decades.

  

Byron’s forbidden love with Augusta Leigh exacted from her a curl of chestnut  hair with glints of gold, and the following lines tied with white silk:

                                                Partager tous vos sentimens
                                                Ne voir que par vos yeux
                                                N’agir que par vos conseils, ne
                                                Vivre que pour vous, voilà mes
                                                voeux, mes projets, & le seul
                                                destin qui peut me rendre
                                                heureuse.

On the outside of the small folded packet Byron penned these words, followed by a cross:

"La Chevelure of the one whom I most loved +"

The equidistant cross now became their emblem. Curiously and coincidentally, I sign my own name with an equidistant cross preceding it; though for reasons entirely other than the mathematical symbol for the joining of two parts to signify sexual consummation. Byron made a note in his journal to have a seal made for him and Augusta with their “device.” This happened at the end of November 1813.

*               *               *

Almost one and a half centuries later, I met in the foyer of the Essoldo cinema, long since now demolished and developed like much else in London, the young sister of Pam, that establishment’s manageress. Every Saturday morning, Theresa and I would meet to attend the children’s matinée. Sometimes we would enjoy a more grown up film in the afternoon at the same cinema. The first of these was April Love starring Pat Boone and Shirley Jones. Theresa and I, seated in the near dark at the back of the picture house, tasted the sweetness of spring love ― our very first ― in all innocence.

It was the Victorian house of Mrs Murphy, the mother of my very first girlfriend that I called on at the turn of the new century. Martin and Pam, the girl in question’s brother and sister, were also visiting, but not Theresa. We spent an entire afternoon and evening reminiscing ― three weeks after my grim discovery ― and recalled happier times. Theresa, now ensconced in Dunstable, was absent, but it somehow mattered not. The family had once behaved as though they were my own. In grieving for the last of my blood family, I had revisited these surrogates from the past. I also visited an old friend and colleague. We talked  at length. And so on. The intervening years became illusory, and I was back. Those I called upon welcomed me as though time had stood still. Some, of course, were ghosts, as I walked the streets. Yet it seemed as though I was experiencing it all over again for the last time.

Theresa was the first girl for whom I wrote poetry. Her mother held onto them long after her daughter married two decades later. I was touched by that disclosure. When I saw Mrs Murphy for the last time in the new century she was eighty-five. She recounted the occasion of clearing out the poems during a spring clean not that many years earlier, describing them as “passionate and beautiful.” Needless to say, none of them have survived. Theresa’s marriage did not survive either due to her husband’s infidelity. She later found someone else who valued her for the gentle and kind person she is.

We had met as virgins; we parted the same. Pure and innocent, uncontaminated by the complexities that often beset adult relationships, was the love we felt for each other. First love is unique to each who experience it in their lifetime. Ours lasted until I quit school, as my fifteenth birthday beckoned.

Life at school had grown unbearable as the “timid little fellow with a lively sense of humour,” as one early report would attest, underwent a complete metamorphosis. And I went out into the world.

Christine, a slim, blue-eyed brunette was still at school, but fast becoming grown-up, when I met her. We slowly grew serious, and regarded our relationship as permanent for a while. We took regular walks over nearby Hampstead Heath. This was made all the more convenient by the fact that I had left my parents’ home and was now living in a flat at the top of a rambling Victorian house owned by a family who lived on the ground and first floor. I shared the top flat with Gerhard, a German three years older than me, whose girlfriend from Oxfordshire, Judith, was an English rose. Christine’s house was half a mile distance; so we saw each other a lot; a most rewarding experience for us both.

She was very mature looking for her age, but, being a couple of years younger than me, her parents were understandably anxious about the intimacy that had formed between us. Here was their schoolgirl daughter spending every available moment with a musician and photographer in the 1960s ― a time when youth culture came into its own, along with the permissive age. The two occupations were already gaining a reputation, albeit undeserved in my case, as being the most infamous and fascinating anyone could have. But her parents need not have worried too much. The relationship was tender, rewarding and evolved in a natural way. Christine was a normal, healthy girl who had the same expectations as did many young teenagers. My dreams, however, were romantic ― far beyond the norm. We both realised this early on, but enjoyed each other too much to make the break sooner than we did. Even then, it was a slow drifting apart ― a growing out of each other ― rather than a sudden wrench. When it came in the mid-1960s, we were both ready to go in different directions.

The next two girlfriends would both become models that I helped launch. Jacqueline and I were as serious as any couple can be, but, again, she was just sixteen when I first caught sight of her. I was her first love, and I felt considerable joy when I recently learned that she is still with her second love all these years later. The person she met, and her ensuing career change, could not have been more removed from the life we had together. She had a sweet voice, and occasionally sang a couple of folk numbers at gigs where I was playing saxophone in a modern jazz group who also performed rock.

The success of my photographic studio offered many opportunities. I had gained independence, something many young people crave, at a very early age. My music performances and indeed compositions would develop and evolve into abstract expressionism with view to the transcendental.

If the 1960s was anything, it was a time for youth culture, created in part by the baby boom of the post-war years, whose cultural icons were now musicians, photographers and actors. I was all three  ― discovering, whether I wanted to or not, that I was very much a part of the mini-renaissance now taking place in my midst. My photographic subjects included models, film stars, musicians, singers, dancers, and a host of young people who felt they could become the next Shrimp or Twiggy. Some, of course, did. Everyone was able to partake in the dream. But it was just that ― a dream ― and there would come the inevitable awakening as the decade drew to a close. So much happened in the Summer of Love that if it were all to be recorded in detail, I daresay no library could not hold the volumes that could be written. The old secure framework of morality, authority and discipline was crumbling, and in its place came one social revolution after another, casting as much shadow as illumination. Yet I have to mention one more relationship that at the time meant everything to me

I had become involved with a girl I barely knew called Mary who had a truly wonderful family, but, to my cost, was found to be incredibly unstable. She claimed to have had an intimate friendship with the singer Cliff Richard, and started writing letters to herself as if they came from someone else. I was understandably confused by what was going on, but also I was trying to run a studio, perform on stage in a repertory company and honour bookings as a musician. Notwithstanding my drift into a potentially disastrous situation, I was allowing myself to be carried by events and somnambulated into it with my eyes closed. By the end of April of 1967, however, I was awakened with a jolt, and discovered what it means to fall helplessly and hopelessly in love. Three decades later, I would write: “God help those who are hit by such an emotion ― there is nothing they can do. Nothing!”

The sun shone on that spring day when I first saw her with her, as we walked towards each other in the hustle and bustle of the crowd on the pavement, just around the corner from my studio. What I noticed first were here incredibly green eyes. Next I noticed her smile. Then came the golden glow of her hair, and the way the sun danced on those dark blonde tresses as they lifted and fell with each step. She walked with a bounce. Then those green eyes again ― eyes that would haunt me for years.

I felt absolutely compelled to approach her. Never had I known what romantic love was until that moment in which I caught sight of her. Who was she? I had to know everything about her. A voice that was soft and lilting issued from lips I yearned to greet with my own ― a voice as pure as herself. We ignited each other from the instant our eyes met. I drowned in her eyes. Suddenly life was joyful and bright in a way I had never known. The girl with green eyes ― was she the girl of my dreams?

Carmel was nineteen, and a secretary in a car showroom in Holloway Road. I respected her more than life itself, and at this time never allowed the ferocity of the passion I felt to more than smoulder beneath the surface. I wanted to protect and preserve all those qualities that made her so special. She came to the studio many times. Her portrait adorned the shop window and interior reception. She visited my flat, a mile north of the studio, and we drank wine. We saw each other for several months.

Then, suddenly, the girl with green eyes appeared to have vanished into thin air. All that remained was her vision ― etched on my mind ― and the many, many portraits that adorned the studio.

It was rumoured that she was now living thousands of miles away in America, but I had no idea of her exact whereabouts. I consoled myself by versifying, invariably romantically, my thoughts:

                                    Her face a poem of great perfection,
                                    She moves on silvery sunlit beams,
                                    Bathing my days in her sweet reflection,
                                    And come the night she fills my dreams.

                                    This lithesome maid of fair complexion
                                    With garlands of roses in her soft, bright hair;
                                    Blest with grace and of pure conception,
                                    The form of an angel and beauteous fair.
                                   
                                    With the stars she sleeps; with the sunbeams rises;
                                    She fills my life with her presence there.
                                    A laugh, a smile, a kiss entices;
                                    But never we speak of the love we share.

                                    In my heart I love her, with my body I worship
                                    This soft, gentle being, this woman so fine;
                                    And well I may dream of enfolding her to me,
                                    Whilst I know in my heart she will never be mine.

                                    Well may I love her ― shall eternity know it ―
                                    I reach for her now across space, across time,
                                    A far away land holds this fair maid, my lady;
                                    And to love from a distance am I ever to pine.

Music and its free expression was something in which I continued to immerse myself. Jazz venues, though less well remunerated, now held more appeal. My style, when occasion permitted, sometimes headed off in an avant-garde direction. The band for which I played saxophone was more than capable of adventurous music, which we allowed ourselves the luxury of exploring at certain clubs, having become the resident group Saturday nights through to Sunday mornings at the Club Le Care in Chelsea, where it was rumoured members of The Beatles and the Rolling Stones occasionally visited during the early hours. They would have certainly heard very different music.

That most innovative and influential saxophonist, John Coltrane, had died in July 1967. Numerous other musicians failed to survive the 1960s. Exciting and bursting with unrelenting optimism as it was, that fashionable decade unleashed a dark side with its embrace of drugs and debauchery on a scale hitherto unknown. Its shadow, ever becoming more dense and dark, is today cast across much of the globe. During all this I never stopped thinking about the girl with green eyes. Many years would pass before we restored any contact. An old work colleague of hers, whom I met accidentally, having given me Carmel's New York number. Within hours of the long distance conversation on the telephone, Carmel boarded a plane and came to visit me. I met her at the station, we walked hand in hand to street level, and then kissed. Her only words in that soft voice: "What took you so long?"

We stayed in touch and would meet again. She was very successful in fashion, and I was celebrated in my own way. Undoubtedly, there was mutual passion that had found fertile soil in our briefly being together, but, once again, circumstances acted like a poisoner to the blooms bursting from that rekindling. I moved to a new address at Hampstead Garden Suburb, and, due to my sensitivity over privacy, always remained ex-directory and not traceable on the electoral register. Fate conspired at that same moment of my moving to have Carmel relocate from the United States to an unknown destination in New Zealand, and from there was anybody's guess. She once told me she was very fluid regarding where she lives.

When we were together for the very last time, I discussed writing a novel where she would be central to the story, and that it would be called Carmel. She was greatly enthused by the idea. Yet we were already destined to never meet again. Years later I wrote the novel where she dies early on.

*               *               *

In the same year that Carmel was published my father died. I had quit London following the death of my mother eight years earlier; the place having become too polluted and altered for me to remain.

Subsequent visits to London, in the years that followed, found it had returned to a friendless, faceless city. But those weeks at the end of the millennium year were to offer a time warp where the past was almost witnessed through a weathered window. Thereafter I felt like a phantom, who was not even present in the capital, passing through sadly unfamiliar places. Indeed, I felt like a ghost.

Bloodline

Newstead Abbey Park family house in many acres of private woodland.

My mother wrote a modest memoir, pencilled in her beautiful copperplate hand, titled Recollections. She commented that Newstead “held a secret,” adding that “the walk to the Abbey was short. It was in the same grounds as my parents’ home. I remember how absorbed Seán became with the whole atmosphere of the place — very intent.”

I knew little concerning Byron’s life when I was a child, and would not trouble to read a biography about him until I was nineteen. Yet I recall the poet’s name cropping up in hushed tones when I was still quite young. It did not take long for an awareness to develop of the family connection, albeit one that was to remain firmly in the cupboard where Byron’s skeleton nevertheless rattled from time to time, despite the bloodline’s illegitimate origin. Unlike today, such things were not considered at all appropriate for dissemination. Hence much caution was in evidence about the Byronic legacy my mother and I had inherited. In those days it would remain a topic unmentioned in company, and even in private it was to be a mysterious family legend.

By the time I had my first complete work published (as opposed to contributions I had made to anthologies edited by other authors) there was no question in my mind that the book would be dedicated to the memory of my illustrious ancestor Lord Byron.

Not unlike the poet’s early work Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, my first complete work in print became an immediate bestseller. My mother recounted in her Recollections:

“Newstead held a magic for me. Seán loved it too. He went about the grounds with my brother, Colin, who had a tree house and a gun. Dad only allowed Colin to have a gun because the poor rabbits were dying in agony from myxomatoses. I was given a book of English poetry by my father. Seán picked it up and out of the one thousand one hundred and fifty poems chose Byron’s She walks in Beauty to read. I don’t think Seán even knew the connection between Lord Byron at that time.”

The longest absence from Newstead as a child was the period spent in Canada where my parents sought their future and fortune overseas. “I heard some lovely reports about Montreal, which I related to Allen,” my mother recorded.

“These little stories fired our imagination and we decided to go. Seán was aged three. Allen went first by air. Seán and I stayed at home until three months later when we were passengers on the Aquitania from Southampton to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Allen had been in Toronto for three months, but we settled in Montreal, a beautiful city built around a mountain topped by a cross. This seemed significant to me at the time. I had collected crosses for years. The highlight of our day was to take the bus to St Catherine’s Street where we would have a chocolate éclair each with a beverage. Weekends would find the three of us walking up the mountain or visiting the lake. It was all very pleasant, but our future in Canada was really doomed from the start as many things were not what we had been used to in England. The accommodation left much to be desired, and Allen discovered that work was in short supply. So back home we came on the Ascania, a much smaller version of the Aquitania, which proved to be a smelly little ship. We docked at Liverpool and from there we sailed to Dublin where we stayed with Mr and Mrs Berry. He was the keeper of DublinCastle.”

The rickety and foul-smelling tug called the Ascania should have been scrapped years before we boarded it, and almost certainly was soon after our arrival in Liverpool. This was in marked contrast to our time at Dublin Castle as a guest of the Berrys. In the previous century the spectre of a frail gazelle of a girl of medium height, in Regency clothes, flitted down the corridors with large, enquiring eyes brimming with tears. She occupied the shadowy places I now found myself wandering. I would write her biography one day, and it was published in the saddest year of my life. My biography of Lady Caroline Lamb was the last book my mother would read before she died.

My mother and I after returning to England.

Within a couple of months my parents had left Ireland, and once again I was amongst the familiar scenery of our beloved Newstead Abbey Park. Soon after my fifth birthday, however, I began attending Hungerford School in north London, and visits during holidays were all that now seemed possible. My mother’s Recollections continued:

“A lovely city, Dublin, but it held no future for us, so we came back to England via Dunleary to Holyhead, staying in Nottinghamshire. Allen went ahead of me to London. Seán and I joined him shortly after to find temporary accommodation in Highbury Hill. Then we found rooms in Holloway, followed by the Mansions where we had a porter and cleaner. I recall how eager Seán was to read and write, and he made fast progress. Seán had talked at a very early age. It was when he went to school that we noticed the early signs of his originality. He was different, always different from others, and he had a way with words from the start. He was also very perceptive right from his first year. He seemed to read one’s thoughts and feelings.”

  

Visits to Newstead nevertheless continued on a fairly regular basis. It was in the Abbey’s vast collection where I discovered a pencil portrait of my Dublin Castle phantom: a quarter-length drawing of a pensive young girl with slightly downcast eyes. Mesmerised by the elfin creature, a window seemed to open within my subconscious mind to rich colours lit by candelabras stuffed with melting candles, heavy brocades and tapestries, exquisitely decorated harpsichords, sombre paintings in large frames, dark oak furniture, and reverberating, melodic strains from another time. Amidst all this appeared a ghostly female with rosebud lips, fawn curls and large, sad eyes.

Momentary glimpses of Romanticism’s haunted realm where the flickering, wavering image glided in step to echoes from a tinkling, distant spinet, offered somewhere I would visit throughout my life thereafter — a primitive form of time travel.  The identity of my apparition became soon became apparent. It was Lady Caroline Lamb.

Caroline’s husband was Secretary of Ireland in 1827, two years after their separation, and he would have stayed at Dublin Castle for long periods of time. This was three years after the tragic death of Caroline’s fatal passion Lord Byron. She had stayed at the castle prior to when her husband, William, became Secretary. He almost certainly accepted the post because he could not bear to watch her suffering any longer in the wake of the terrible news about her lover Byron. It would destroy her in the end.

My psychic portal grew faint as childhood innocence itself gradually eroded over the years, but later in life I renewed my acquaintance in becoming the biographer of Lady Caroline Lamb. Lord Brocket invited me to Caroline’s country residence in Hertfordshire, Brocket Hall, and Lady Brocket entered into a correspondence where she told of the haunting at the Hall. In February 1992, Lady Brocket wrote of “a woman in the Ballroom” when she was playing some Chopin on the piano.

Frédéric Chopin ― my mother’s favourite composer ― and mine. How memories are stirred whenever the sound of his music fills the air. Each visit I made to Chopin’s tomb at Père-Lachaise in Paris, I would invariably discover freshly cut red roses on the grave ― lovingly placed by a mysterious admirer.

My mother playing some Chopin on the piano at our Newstead home.

When we arrived in London from Ireland, having settled in a first floor flat in Islington, my father ordered a rosewood piano to be delivered. It remained with my parents to the end. On this instrument my mother would continue to play the music of Chopin in those early days. When we removed to the Mansions, where Fred the porter and Alice the cleaner were part of the fixtures and fittings, the piano followed. Its final destination was the house my parents purchased within a short walking distance.

The children at Hungerford School adored my mother. They called her “flower face” because of the curls around her constantly smiling face. She was at her most beautiful during this period and attracted many admiring glances — yet she remained ever childlike and innocent, charming everyone along the way, to the end of her life.

Despite the transparent naîvety that never left her, my mother led the way and made things happen. She wanted a child. My father was less convinced. When we returned to England from overseas, my mother would be the one to discover and organise each  of our homes. It became apparent to me in later life that she earnestly wanted me to find the romantic fulfilment that she felt she had been denied all along.

Some years I won a national poetry competition with To Nature ― On Autumn:

                                                ’Twas down a little country lane

                                                Leaf-strewn, in coloured hue,

                                                That to my memory will remain

                                                The joy I found in you.

                                                Sweet whisperings from a brook nearby,

                                                Sad notes of birds’ late song,

                                                Filled my heart with an ecstasy.

                                                Dear Peace, for you I long.

                                                When back amid the noise and pain

                                                Of daily toil and strife,

                                                Locked in my heart that country lane,

                                                Brings reality to life.

Notwithstanding the influence my mother had on these three verses, Newstead Abbey Park had provided for me the brook and nearby country lane. My mother had much older memories. When she was very young and her parents had moved from Derbyshire to an idyllic setting at Wollaton, a brook ran along the bottom of the country lane where their house was situated. She often spoke about her first home. Newstead, in many ways, would magnify its joys and aspects ― adding acres of woodland and more besides. After the Newstead property and its acreage were sold in the early 1960s, my grandparents lived out their remaining days in a house built for them on land purchased at Wollatan Park. The haunting of their home by a cold presence that apparently manifested as a spectre, allegedly causing my grandmother to fall down the rockery one evening, precipitated this final move. She lay undiscovered for some hours before her husband returned. Presentiments of doom and disaster seemed to intrude her everyday existence thereafter and she never properly recovered.

Newstead was to become for me a symbol of all that belonged to the old world that was already irrevocably, moment by moment, slipping away. More than anything my mother wanted me to find real happiness; something that was always just out of reach for her. This is reflected in the lines I would write in a novel published some eight years after her death.

“The world we once inhabited has gone. … This is your time and your world. Find happiness in it, if you can.” So tells Mina Harker to her son, Quincey, in Carmel, my sequel to Bram Stoker’s gothic masterpiece Dracula. Yet it could have been my own mother speaking. Her world was fast disappearing as two catastrophic wars heralded the quick demise of a cultural identity and spiritual destiny that had lasted two millennia.

Today that England, and much that made it the most wonderful place on Earth, has all but disappeared. Nobody regrets its passing more than do I.

Ancestry

                     

Lord Byron (1801).                                    The Author (1947).

Thank heaven for that place in Newstead Abbey Park, which stood in the shadow an old monastery, and now still older mansion, of a rich and rare mixed Gothic. Here I would spend time encapsulated in a world that remained somehow in its own history, set in the midst of forest trees, which very semblance stood petrified in yestercentury — not swaying, nor even fluttering in the night winds of war.

Yet here, too, I would become acquainted with the mysterious effect of the supernatural, which would, many years later, oblige my grandparents to quit their forest home following an unearthly spectral haunting. A malevolent ghost-like figure was believed to be responsible for my maternal grandmother’s early death.

My mother was a sweet and innocent soul who sought beauty and goodness where it seldom seemed to dwell. She sang, wrote poetry, and played the piano a little (especially her favourite composer, Chopin) when she was young, but the ultimate prize of happiness, as envisaged in her heart, seemed to elude her. So she stopped doing these, as life itself grew tiresome as the inevitability of compromise dawned. Yet a sparkle in her blue eyes remained from a time when dreams had not flown.

Dorothy, my mother, was born at a time when the previous world conflict had practically wiped out an entire generation, and was growing tired by the spring of 1918. Her paternal grandparents, both quiet by nature, had a farm in Derbyshire. The abode of her maternal grandparents, also located in Derbyshire, was the destination for Christmas holidays. These would be spent with her parents who themselves resided in close proximity to Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire’s Sherwood Forest.

A semi-ruined priory: home to the Byron family for three centuries.

Once the habitat of the celebrated poet and his ancestors, Newstead would become a symbol of all that is Gothic and Romantic, which now, irrevocably, has slipped into the reservoir of fragmented memory. This is where I “played as a child in the avenues of sombre forest trees in Lord Byron’s gloomy abode where the fading twilight coupled with the moan in leafy woods to herald the filmy disc of the moon.”

I was conceived in October 1943, as the war in Europe prepared to reach its climax. Thus, nine months later, came into the world “the great, great, great grandson of the famous poet, through an illicit liaison between his lordship and a maid at Newstead Abbey.” Many years later, I would thank leading Byron scholar Professor Leslie A Marchand “for his help and comments in private correspondence about the ‘records of births and deaths of the lower (servant) class in those days’ when trying to establish facts about the poet and Lucy, my great, great, great grandmother.”

Portrait of Lord Byron (oil on canvas) by the author.

Owning this blood connection would lead to certain expectations, as reflected in the following from a gothic magazine: “He was invited to appear on Central Television’s Saturday Night Live, but only on condition that he ‘dressed like Lord Byron’.”

Author (including shield from his personal coat-of-arms).

Byron was seldom without consolation of the female kind and of the various servant maids who slipped between his sheets to keep him company at Newstead, Lucy was far and away his favourite. He called her Lucinda, but in the following lines she appears as Lucietta:

                                                Lucietta my dear,

                                                That fairest of faces!

                                                Is made up of kisses …

A letter, 17 January 1809, to John Hanson confirms that “the youngest is pregnant (I need not tell you by whom) and I cannot have the girl on the parish.” On 4 February 1809, Byron wrote to Hanson: 

“Lucy’s annuity may be reduced to fifty pounds, and the other fifty go to the Bastard.” He had originally provided her with an annuity of one hundred pounds. Three years after making Lucy pregnant he put her in charge as revealed in a letter to Francis Hodgson, written from Newstead on 25 September 1811: “Lucy is extracted from Warwickshire [where his and her son had been weaned]; some very bad faces have been warned off the premises, and more promising substituted in their stead … Lucinda to be commander of all the makers and unmakers of beds in the household.”

Byron’s letters might suggest a callousness in his relationships that is perhaps unwarranted, but when his illegitimate child by Lucy was born, he wrote a poem in which he hailed his “dearest child of love.” He had always wanted a son and Lucy provided him with his first and last. Surviving progeny that followed were all female. He composed To My Son when Lucy’s child was born:

                                    Those flaxen locks, those eyes of blue,

                                    Bright as thy mother’s in their hue;

                                    Those rosy lips, whose dimples play

                                    And smile to steal the heart away,

                                    Recall a scene of former joy,

                                    And touch thy father’s heart, my Boy!

                                    And thou canst lisp a father’s name —

                                    Ah, William, were thine own the same, —

                                    No self-reproach — but, let me cease —

                                    My care for thee shall purchase peace;

                                    Thy mother’s shade shall smile in joy,

                                    And pardon all the past, my Boy!

                                    Her lowly grave the turf has prest,

                                    And thou hast known a stranger’s breast;

                                    Derision sneers upon thy birth,

                                    And yields thee scarce a name on earth;

                                    Yet shall not these one hope destroy, —

                                    A Father’s heart is thine, my Boy!

                                    Why, let the world unfeeling frown,

                                    Must I fond Nature’s claim disown?

                                    Ah, no — though moralists reprove,

                                    I hail thee, dearest child of love,

                                    Fair cherub, pledge of youth and joy —

                                    A Father guards they birth, my Boy!

                                    Oh, ’twill be sweet in thee to trace,

                                    Ere age has wrinkled o’er my face,

                                    Ere half my glass of life is run,

                                    At once a brother and a son;

                                    And all my wane of years employ

                                    In justice done to thee, my Boy!

                                    Although so young thy heedless sire,

                                    Youth will not damp parental fire;

                                    And, wert thou still less dear to me,

                                    While Helen’s form revives in thee,

                                    The breast which beat to former joy,

                                    Will ne’er desert its pledge, my Boy!

The Byron family coat-of-arms.

To My Son, incorrectly dated 1807 by Thomas Moore, was first published six years after Byron’s death. Lucy’s pregnancy, of course, did not take place until early 1809. Moore misread the date. Furthermore, the housemaid did not die the early death of the young mother eulogised by the poet whose “lowly grave the turf has prest.” According to the housekeeper, Nanny Smith, Lucy overcame the “high and mighty airs she gave herself as Byron’s favourite,” married a local lad, and ran a public house in Warwick. The fate of the child enters the forlorn and forgotten realm of so many illegitimate offspring of servants, and does not resurface again until a century later when my Derbyshire maternal grandparents returned the bloodline to Newstead Abbey Park where they purchased twenty or so acres and had a comfortable lodge built almost within the shadow of Byron’s ancestral home. In the poem, Byron changed the scenario of Lucy’s end to conform to the sentimental moralising of the period, which required that the fallen woman must pay with her life: “The mother’s shade shall smile in joy, / And pardon all the past, my Boy!” 

The poem addresses Byron’s natural child, challenging the convention that would withhold from his “little illegitmate” a father’s loving concern, along with any claim to social position. Byron’s pride, along with his sense of honour, was offended by the common practice of turning out pregnant maidservants. He knew the fate of country girls who bore illegitimate children, surviving on the pittance provided by parish poor rates, the workhouse, or making their way to the nearest city and entering a life of prostitution. Along with keeping Lucy employed, Byron made provision — exceptionally generous by the standards of the day — for her and their child in his will. Lucy was to have an annuity of £100 (later reduced to £50); the other £50 was to go to the child.

The poet’s only legitimate child was born of Annabella, Lady Byron, on the night of 9 December 1815. She was named Augusta Ada. His half-sister, also called Augusta, would later tell him that while Ada resembled her mother more than Byron, “still there is a look. I never saw a more healthy little thing. It was a melancholy pleasure to see Lady B for I had suffered great uneasiness of which I had given you hints.” Well might she feel uneasy, for, on 15 April 1814, she had given birth to a daughter of her own, Elizabeth Medora, whose father was rumoured to be Byron. There was absolutely no way he could be sure that he was the father, even though at the time this was assumed to be the case, and he never acknowledged the fact. He nonetheless showed great fondness for Medora, and Lady Byron herself was struck by the child’s extraordinary beauty. Absence of proof positive allowed licence for speculation, needless to say, of which the most astonishing example was the theory advanced by Richard Edgcumbe in Byron: the Last Phase (1909) that Medora was Byron’s daughter by his boyhood’s love, Mary Chaworth, obligingly adopted by Augusta. However, his half-sister Augusta did write to him of “a likeness in your picture of Mignonne [Medora].” 

Claire Clairmont gave birth at Bath to a daughter, on 12 January 1817, whom she named Alba, after Albé, the name the Shelley family had assigned to Byron while in Geneva. Byron asked rhetorically: “Is the brat mine? — I have reason to think so.” Before leaving England with her mother, the child was baptised “Clara Allegra Byron, born of Rt Hon George Gordon Lord Byron ye reputed father by Clara Mary Jane Clairmont.” Allegra was spoilt, wilful, and undisciplined — a carbon copy of her father when he was a child. By the age of four Byron arranged for her to be enrolled at a Capucine convent at Bagnacavallo, Italy. On 20 April 1822, Allegra, aged five years and three months, was dead, to the profound grief of the nuns who regarded her a very special child. When Byron heard the news he sank into a chair, and asked to be left alone. Three years later he told Lady Blessington: 

“While she lived, her existence never seemed necessary to my happiness; but no sooner did I lose her than it appeared to me as if I could not live without her.” The body of Allegra was sent back to England to be buried at Harrow Church near Peachey Stone where the poet had spent so many hours as a boy. The rector of Harrow refused to erect Byron’s proposed tablet, and the child was buried just inside the threshold of the church. Byron had wanted the words: “I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me.”

The author's portrait hangs alongside that of Lord Byron in a room full of family heirlooms.