but generally the poor, sandy soil preserved the poverty of the small farmers. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been kinder to the neighbouring industrialists, and to the large and wealthy landowners who landscaped much of a valley which the English traveller William Cobbett called “one of the choicest retreats of man.” Shere marked the halfway point of the Tillingbourne, which rose from springs on the southern flank of Leith Hill, the highest point in southern England, and flowed past the beautiful villages of Gomshall and Albury to its confluence with the River Wey near Guildford.
By the mid-nineteenth century, much of the manufacturing base had been eroded, and the rural population, often untouched by the commercial wealth of the river, had stubbornly maintained their almost feudal traditions. As the mills closed, many in upland wooded areas might have agreed with Cobbett’s claim that the valley had produced “two of the most damnable inventions that ever sprang from minds of man…the making of gunpowder and banknotes.”
When the railways arrived, Shere flowered as a retreat for bohemian Londoners, especially artists, and by the beginning of the twentieth century the woodlands of the once remote Surrey hills had been discovered by a rich London merchant class. They came in search of seclusion, but felt close enough to the diversions of the city; and so the grey roofs of grand new houses began to disturb, here and there, the flow of forest green. When Duval arrived in 1962, the largely unspoiled medieval character of the village was attracting motorists and day-trippers and even the occasional foreign tourist. The outside tables of the White Horse Inn, in the centre of Shere, were always full in the summers when the first “yeah, yeah, yeahs” of the Beatles could be heard, sometimes too obtrusively, from the portable radios of young people sitting by the river.
Duval lived in an old secluded rectory near Tyler’s Cross, about half a mile outside the village centre. Catholic priests nearly always lived in a church house, close or directly adjacent to their parish churches. If it were a large and important church, especially in an urban area, the clerical accommodation would involve a group of priests tended by a full-time housekeeper. Unusually, the bishop had granted Duval special permission to live in Shere, on the basis that Duval had inherited the house from his aunt and no Church money had been involved in any purchase; perhaps even at this stage, the priest’s eccentricity warranted special indulgence or perhaps an isolation which would permit the ambitious bishop some room for manoeuvre when it came to denying responsibility, a chance to distance himself from his awkward subordinate.
Duval appreciated this freedom, because he found it very difficult to live cheek by jowl with others, especially other priests. And he was fond of his home in the former Anglican rectory; a Catholic inhabitant was a redemptive act in itself. The house, which Duval had renamed Hillside, had been built in the 1840s and enlarged in 1859 to include a spacious wine cellar and a large attic. Externally, the house was a hotchpotch of styles: part of it was robust Victorian red-brick although the stables, incorporated into the main structure, suffered from a mock Tudor timber-frame exterior, while the out-of-place Doric porch affixed to the main door was thankfully hidden in ivy. Hollyhocks and nettles as tall as a man filled the garden.
Neglecting the outside, Duval had busied himself with extensive rebuilding of the interior, particularly the unusual cellar which he had spent over a year modifying with his own hands. It was entered from a heavy wooden trapdoor in the kitchen. Twelve steps led down to a narrow corridor. On each side of the corridor, forty-three inches apart, stood three doors with small grilles. At the far end of the passage Duval had secured to the stone wall a six- foot-high crucifix, lit by two lamps at its base.
To his few acquaintances, Duval’s life was very staid, his interests appearing to revolve around his part-time work at a run-down Catholic church in Guildford, a good six or seven miles from Shere, and his writing in his spare moments. He was recognised as an Oxbridge scholar, but was considered somewhat lax in his pastoral duties, partly because he refused to live in the parish he served. That, at least, was the gossip in his dwindling congregation. They knew he was not a favourite of the bishop. Some thought the problem stemmed from an arcane theological dispute, although nobody in his congregation had been able to pinpoint anything too unorthodox in Duval’s often passionate and occasionally obscure sermons. None of his flock had ever got close to their priest, but some of the younger female members of the congregation had suggested that they found his sporadic house visits uncomfortable, a touch too familiar; nevertheless, no formal complaint had been taken to the bishop. Still, Duval’s superiors suspected that he was an odd fish, so allowing him to live out of the parish had some advantages.
Duval had no actual pastoral duties in Shere itself. Apart from the normal pleasantries in the village shops, few villagers knew much about him. At just over six feet, Duval stood erect and athletic, and his mildly pock-marked face made him appear, to some females, as attractively world-weary and interesting. An actress
“He sounds like Richard Burton,” she had insisted.
“Speaks like heaven,” replied her companion in a mock Welsh accent.
When Duval had first appeared in the village, one or two of the bridge-playing, charity-organising elite had thought to invite him to their soirees, and some of the bored local housewives had turned their heads at the early- middle-aged, good-looking man with the distinguished grey at his temples. He seemed rather mysterious, but when it was rumoured he was a Catholic priest, perhaps even a defrocked one, the matchmakers forgot him. That was the way Duval wanted it, because he did not deliberately court attention. He had Surrey family connections, twice removed, but they were all prominent Anglicans, and those who shared his Norman surname were strangers. He had no friends, only acquaintances.
Duval always made a point of changing out of his clerical clothing before he returned from Guildford to Shere; he preferred to adopt the uniform of a country squire-buff corduroy trousers, highly polished brown brogues and a tweed jacket. For a while, when he first arrived, old Mrs. Malthus who lived in Pilgrim’s Way had worked for him as a part-time housekeeper, but when she died Duval had not looked for a replacement.
He was on nodding terms with the landlord of the White Horse. Once or twice a week, the priest would enjoy a solitary pint of beer in the back bar. The landlord would sometimes ask about Bobby, Duval’s border collie, who would curl up under the table in the corner of the low-ceilinged snug. Occasionally Duval would visit the other village pub, the Prince of Wales, but he shied away from the good-hearted friendliness of the drinkers there.
Duval walked Bobby for at least an hour every evening. Starting from Hillside, which stood at the end of a narrow dirt track, he would usually follow the bridle-path to Church Hill. From there he would take the footpath, crossing the Tillingbourne on the tiny bridge, and then traverse Upper Street, making his way towards the steep North Downs.
Other times he would wander around Shere interpreting the history of the village’s timber-framed houses. To the practised eye, Shere exhibited scores of architectural treasures: the seventeenth century had been preserved well enough, but Duval enjoyed the occasional Regency flourishes and the pomposity of late Victoriana. The historian in him always smiled at the replica timber-framed shop in Middle Street, designed by the young Edwin Lutyens to fit in with the adjacent houses, hundreds of years older. The quaint fire station, the fragile wooden footbridge across Upper Street, the gentle meanderings of the stream along Lower Street and the ducks near the stone bridge by the Square; for Duval, Shere was an England which the so-called “swinging sixties” were threatening to engulf.
In his walks, Duval always included a visit to St. James’s, an anchor in a disturbing world. The church stood a mere hundred yards from the White Horse via the lych-gate, another piece of Lutyens, but it had to come before alcohol in his perambulations; that was his observance of a daily piety-duty before pleasure. Although St. James’s church dated from the twelfth century, the Domesday record demonstrated the existence of a previous Saxon church in what was then known as Essira. It was “held” by Queen Edith, wife of Edward the Confessor, so the dutiful Norman accountants had recorded in 1087. The basic structure of the present building was completed about 1190, in the initial Early English style. Duval had researched the church in detail, believing St. James’s to be the finest example of this rare Transitional church architecture. The fundamentals of the exterior had changed little, although the internal arrangements had been altered during the Reformation. Duval, of course, disdained these refurbishments as defamatory. Like all medieval churches, St. James’s had not contained seats, only a stone bench set into the walls for the old and lame. The great Lady Chapel, with its twelfth-century arch, deep mouldings and clustered shafts of Purbeck marble, had been filled with common pews. The centre of worship in the Reformation had been shifted from the altar to the pulpit-from God to man-but, with the Catholic revival of the 1830s, the focus moved back to the altar.
Duval also disliked the West Gallery, erected by public subscriptions in the 1740s for the poor of the parish. What did they know of architecture? It had completely skewed the proportions of the church. In 1848 the rood window had been renewed, but it was a poor reproduction of an Early English original. The Victorians, however, did
