She was a friend of my family—the Carlins, as I have chosen to call them. She and my father met in the fifties through the editor of the architecture magazine where she began her career. My father had taken her out a few times. They were never lovers, but there had been some tenderness between them: enough that, years later, when she took to phoning our house in the middle of the night, my father would drag himself out of bed, and I would hear the low monosyllables of someone listening to another’s woes, patiently if without great interest, until I fell back to sleep. My mother, absolutely unthreatened by this sallow, angular woman with her hornrimmed glasses and staring eyes, who by then looked unwell much of the time, would say, after these nocturnal disturbances, “Poor Helen. We ought to do something for her.”
“Ye—es,” my father would agree warily. And they would invite her to dinner in London or to Salesey for the weekend.
In fact they had already “done something” for Helen in at least one significant way. They had introduced her to their friends Renata and Otto Shenker, proprietors of the Whitethorne Press, who took her on as a proofreader and an editor after she lost her job at the architecture magazine.
Occasionally Helen would take me and my sister to a pantomime. I found her a forbidding figure, unsnapping her hard little handbag for cigarettes every few minutes and arguing viciously with the bus conductors and other officials we encountered. Later in life, I began to find her more interesting.
She came down to Salesey one weekend in the summer of 1975. My mother had invited some neighbors to join us for Sunday lunch. It was a hot July day. Helen had been out on the lawn in a deck chair with the papers since eleven, sipping her dry vermouth and smoking. She broke off with her usual irritable air when the guests arrived.
At lunch my mother placed Edward Leeto, the High Court judge who owned a weekend home nearby, on one side of Helen. He’d received some stinging rebukes in the press a couple of months earlier, in response to some controversial remarks he’d made during an IRA bombing trial he’d presided over that spring, and memory confers a slight subdued air on him at this occasion, as if he were being more than usually careful about what he said. On the other side my mother placed a young American, Ralph Pommeroy, who’d recently inherited a dilapidated old manor house in the area and was trying his hand at English country life. Helen seemed fascinated by his appearance, and at the same time intent on picking a quarrel with him. At one point I heard her snap “What a ghastly idea!” at a comment he’d made about turning his house into a commune.
“Why’s that ghastly?” Ralph asked, smiling.
“Oh dear God, where should I begin?”
“I mean … Did you ever live in an intentional community?”
“A what?”
“Well … on a commune?”
“You’re not serious.”
“I’ve lived on several myself. I find them to be very positive places, mostly.”
Helen looked him up and down, scrutinizing the unruly hair and excitable tawny eyes, the collarless linen shirt billowing over his robust torso, the gold-embroidered waistcoat, as if for implications she might have missed.
“Well perhaps you’re more naive than you realize.”
“Oh, I know I’m naive. Even so, I’d like to give it a try. I think human beings are inherently drawn to small communities where they have a stake in everything that goes on and everyone shares the, you know—”
“Rubbish,” Helen interrupted. “You’re talking about hobbits, not human beings.”
Ralph laughed. “Well, I am kind of a hobbit myself, at heart. But I think it’s true. We feel alienated and isolated in these vast impersonal societies we’ve created. We hanker for something more like a tribe, where we can help each other along instead of this dog-eat-dog—”
“Oh for heaven’s sake,” Helen interrupted, splashing some wine into her glass.
By now their conversation had attracted other people’s attention. There was an MP there, Peter Dacey, a wartime friend of my father’s, who’d been a junior minister in Harold Wilson’s first government.
“This is the Schumacher line,” he said, looking at Ralph over his wire-rimmed glasses. “Small Is Beautiful …”
Ralph looked surprised. “You’ve read that?”
Dacey nodded. “I think he’s onto something, especially with his idea of sustainable development. That makes good sense to me. Where he loses me is this obsession with pulling everything back down to the village scale. There are things a large, complex state can do that are absolutely unique.”
“Like building nuclear weapons?” Ralph said.
Dacey smiled. “Fair point. But I mean positive things—hospitals, universities, large-scale agriculture—”
“I’m not sure large-scale agriculture—” Ralph cut in but was interrupted by my father, whose ears had pricked up at the mention of Schumacher, a particular bête noire of his at that time: “Villages won’t give you the pyramids,” he growled. “And tribes