20 May: The Devil Went Down to Buckinghamshire
Well, it was inevitable that with all the pre-visit publicity about Hidcote Manor Gardens, I was bound to be disappointed. I found it pretty enough, but not the completely fabulous garden of paradise I’d been imagining. There was a section of roses – the particular variety Roseraie de l’Hay – where the air was swimming with delicious scent like something out of what Khaly refers to as “The Thousand Thousand Nights.” Okay, the topiary was way cool, but so many of the beds looked like they’d been put together by a blind person – there were at least five different colors of columbines in a clump, just as a filler. And it needed a lot more care than it was getting. I did have a nice set of elevenses at the tea shop, where two chickens have abandoned the hard life of pecking corn for the easy breezy world of cleaning up pastry crumbs.
You know it’s time to go home when you’re, like, “Oh, look, another El Greco.”
Upton House had been the property of the chairman of Shell Oil. Huge collection of fancy porcelain, which I have no interest in, sorry. Lots of sporting portraits of hunting scenes – someone had inventoried the hounds in the scenes – Belmaid, Pillager, Comely and Blameless all appear in more than one painting. They are restoring a very striking red and aluminum bathroom belonging to Lady Bernstead. Lots of Old Masters and groovy portraits – several Nativity portraits where baby Jesus is the source of light. And Clouet portraits of Francis I and Henri II. Little did I know, however, that the best part of the collection was the Shell Oil advertising posters – they had used marvelous contemporary artists like Rex Whistler and Duncan Grant. A particularly cool one of West Wycombe Park, my next stop.
While back home planning this trip, it had been my dearest wish to visit Compton Wynyates, my beau ideal of the Elizabethan manor house, which was handily in Warwickshire. However, I found that it was in private hands who were not making it available to visitors, and I had reluctantly given up on the idea of trying to find it under the circumstances.
Well, what should I see a signpost for as I was on my way to West Wycombe. I couldn’t resist.
It was the most wonderful drive through the perfect landscape – huge seas of nodding grasses with enormous dark trees guarding the ridges along the horizon. The lanes got smaller and smaller. Suddenly I was at a gate, which was open to view the most beautiful house in the world at the end of the drive. The family were out in the front, the children romping. I wished I had been able to get closer, but one had to respect their privacy.
Of course by the time I got back to the main road, it was later than I had hoped, and I was under the gun to get to West Wycombe before everything closed. There was no tomorrow, or rather there was – going back to London and turning in the rental car. The thought of losing out on the Hellfire Club caves made me faint.
First I turned into the West Wycombe Park, the Dashwood family estate, to find out how late they’d be open and get directions to the caves. I would just have time to do both. Spotting people in black farther up the hillside, I knew where they were going and sprinted after them.
The Hellfire Club caves are a uniquely English blend of creepy, cheesy and historical. The caves themselves are genuinely creepy – they are freezing cold chalk, with dripping wet walls – every time you reach out to steady yourself in the dark (because you have to walk through pools of darkness to get to the next light), your hands come away covered in chalky wet. Disgusting.
Sir Francis Dashwood, the local seigneur, was one of the founders of the Hellfire Club, a group of 18th century freethinkers and roués that included Ben Franklin. They met every so often to drink, dally with naughty ladies and play “satanic masses” – an early prototype of the Bohemian Grove. One member, a minor poet, loved the Club so much, he wanted to be buried there. So in a niche is an elaborate urn – accompanied by an animatronic skeleton such as you see on the bottom of aquariums, pushing its coffin lid open and flashing its red LED eyes. And then next to it, a placard detailing Ben Franklin’s opposition to the Stamp Act of 1789. Biiiiizarre.
I finally reached the dining hall, where a huge dome had been hollowed out. Niches containing classical nudes tastefully lit with red neon surrounded the chamber. Water drip, drip, drips down from the ceiling. I swooned.
The gift shop knows who it’s catering to – you can buy scary rubber bats and devil deelie-boppers. I made it back down to the Park in record time – there was just time for a stroll around the lake before the gates would shut for the night. There were the touches of Dashwood humor, but mostly it was a charming landscape, very serene and civilized, with lots of swans on the lake.
Finally, I went up to the Dashwood Mausoleum, with the gold folly on top of the parish church. When I read about it in the National Trust Handbook, I thought “Wait a minute!” The Dashwood mausoleum appears at the end of one of my favorite books, Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. Even without the caves, it would have been worth the trip to see “this phenomenon, so byronic in conception, so spick and span in execution, and sprouting so surprisingly from the mild Chiltern landscape.”