A Call on Mr Fellows

BY JOE FYLES (FORMER TEACHER)

A gloomy day and then it rained bucketsful; it was as well that the Greater Gorm took me in his motor car, bribed with the promise of a pub meal, a bribe fuelled by my hope of returning with a few inconsequentials. We found the house easily enough. It is Edwardian, 1906, with afront path of vitreous mosaic, a porch that owes just a little to the Arts & Crafts movement - and overlooking the St. Paul's cricket square. It does not seem very big, but big enough for the respectable and secure middle classes - and with an attic storey for the housemaid.

The garden should have alerted me; clearly, it had once been cared for but the recent undergrowth had smothered that love, and the boarded windows were secure but hardly respectable - nor was the hammering it took to gain admission. Eventually Gerald Harriss (O.C. and a fellow of Magdalen) heard us, for the housemaid had long-since been dismissed.

Arnold Fellows had come to Chigwell in 1924 and left in 1959. Between these milestones he had been my predecessor as Senior History Master - and much else: housemaster of the Harsnett 's boarders and Second Master and a legendary example of the schoolmaster polymath, teaching senior History, junior arithmetic, collecting pictures and, undetected at the time and only realized later, exercising a civilizing influence on those who passed through his charge. The species is all but extinct.

Arnold Fellows was not at home.

Of course he was not there and I really knew it, for he died twenty years ago. Yet, if someone from the past keeps crossing your path, you begin to think that next time you might run into him, maybe just around the next comer. Fascinated as I am with the England of a hundred years ago and reading its newspapers and almanacks, I occasionally see an early telephone number and ask myself:

I wonder what would happen if I were to ring Rosebery's old number.

When I go to the Wigmore Hall, I usually have a sandwich in Cavendish Square, look across to no.20 and half-anticipate Asquith emerging. AL.Rowse had the same feeling when he found the case-notes of Simon Forman, the Elizabethan astrologer. Forman's clients were of Shakespeare's circle; Rowse almost had the Bard by the coat-tails, but never quite closed on him.

So it has been between Arnold Fellows and myself. When I was appointed to Chigwell, I asked for a copy of The Chigwellian and it contained his obituary. Soon afterwards, I came to rescue, from seeming chaos, the school's local history collection - but once I had excavated the more recent debris ... order and logical arrangement emerged, from a mind I could understand.

'That will be Arnold Fellows,' said Ken Dales.

So it was. Since, no year has passed without my discovering a marginal note of his in an old book in the Sixth Form History Library, learning an anecdote from an Old Chig.; half the second-hand bookshops I  frequent have Fellows' The Wayfarer's Companion, that classic for the traveller through Stanley Baldwin's England.

So many points of contact, so many hints of common interests, I have always wanted to meet him and now I had the prized invitation; a pity the intervening twenty-odd years but here, still, was his house, not quite as he left it - for he had spent only a part of each year there, and the rest in Paris, and Mrs. Fellows had followed that pattern after her husband's demise - but very nearly so.

The early sixties had fossilized and the eighties interred it, the carpets were worn and ragged and in the rain the attic leaked. Now The Fellows Hoard as I have come to call it was at last to be dispersed, heaps of his possessions, cairns of books on the floor; I was seeing it at the last moment and in 60-watt gloom. Yet the logic and order were still here and half a dozen housemaids could have rendered it spick-and-span for his return in under a week - for Mrs.Fellows had altered little, even some of the runs of his journals continued after he had left for the last time. Again, I had just missed him.

I had forgotten that, in house-building, Edwardian England, it was not acreage that was at a premium but street frontage. This house deceives, extends back and is large, large enough to house The Hoard. Here was his fine furniture, grand piano and all, here had been his pictures. He had collected, often from artist friends, with great discrimination. His own alma mater has them now, a valuable gift. Here I found his exhibition catalogues back to the early thirties, there the journals of learned societies, in that comer runs of magazines, over yonder photographs and - everywhere - books, every room, against every wall, often shelved up to the ceilings.

It was the books I had been invited to see, to see if any were of use to the school. Only now could I appreciate the full range of Fellows' interests, the books were his curriculum vitae: all the English classics - and French, slim volumes of once avant-garde poets, books on art, on politics - of course books on History, of all periods, dominated. From such libraries English liberal minds were stocked before and after Hitler's war. There was not one volume there with the subversive orange cover of Gollancz's Left Wing Book Club, not one from the Mosley Right nor of the crack-pot utopias that briefly flourished during the war. G.M.Trevelyan would have been at home.

Most of the books - as Dr. Harriss had warned - were out of date. I asked for a few of continuing interest for the school library and some invaluable pamphlets for the sixth form. All in a limited time, I had to work feverishly, weighing down the long-suffering Greater Gorm, soaked in the interests of Leaming and loading the motor car.

Then, as I accustomed to the time-stopped gloom, the real treasures began to emerge. One pile destined for the plastic bin-bag was ... Teacher Fellows' history notes; this heap was Housemaster Fellows' accounts from his stewardship of Hainault . Set down are the pocket moneys boys drew, the cost of boot repairs, the dates when the barber was summoned to sculpt short-backs-and-sides. Now his mark-books, next photographs of camps and sports on top field. Much is annotated, with letters from parents and recent O.C.'son war service showing that rewarding no-man's land between teaching and friendship; the legendary humanity of Fellows was revealed, the anecdotes proven. I had almost caught up with him.

In the end, out-of-print books can still be found; the Chigwell desiderata are priceless and there are boxes of it. Whoever is to bring Godfrey Stott's History to the millennium and re-write its last chapters at a more objective distance now has the necessary archives. Good for Arnold Fellows - and for Gerald Harriss who thought to invite me.

There is more. The Greater Gorm had taken advantage of my maniacal excitement to slope off and escape to the attic. Here, like some new Schliemann or Camarvon, he had unearthed another layer. We had almost come upon Arnold Fellows writing, writing The Companion.

There were huge folders of guide books, his collection of topographical photographs and architectural slides - these alone a treasure, recording the England celebrated by Betjeman and the young Pevsner and later betrayed to the developers. Above all were a set of those tiny rose-red volumes, The Little Guides To The Counties. We were seeing the grain from which The Companion was threshed. The Nottinghamshire volume proves it - scribbles on churches, the dates he visited the places. Elmthorpe in Leicestershire has 'mention this' and at Appleby Parva Fellows firmly disputes with 'No, only a pupil of Wren'.

All of this in a house wherein Miss Havisham might equally be expected.

One book I brought away opened and out fell a letter from Alfred Cobban, the eminent historian of the French Revolution. It was a minor matter, a book for review. Yet ... Cobban was my own tutor; yet again, Fellows crosses my path; yet again, I am too late.

When we had finished, The Greater Gorm was given his pub lunch and we drank to Arnold Fellows' memory.

Underlying all of this is another dimension. Was I seeing some snippet of the future in my predecessor's past? As a little lad I used to cycle off to the mossland villages of Lancashire with The Little Guide in my pocket and now have almost completed my own set of first editions; my guide-books outnumber his - so too do my slides, but in colour. I already have over thirty years of exhibition catalogues ... runs of journals

... and old theatre programmes. We live in a house even bigger than that of Mr. Fellows - and solely to house my books. Worse, I have all my Chigwell archives, can account for every free period ever taken, have copied every report. Let no parent reading this ever try to rewrite history with a 'He was much better in the Removes': I will have the wretched boy's dossier ... and know where to find it ... and my collection of art and politics cuttings already far outstrips .... so do the records and the tapes ... ! Alas, though, our piano is only ... an upright. Was my call on Mr.Fellows a distant warning? Thus, I have another parallel.

I cannot escape the man - nor do I want to, but I cannot meet him.

Richard Holmes in his wonderful collection of biographical essays, Footsteps, retraces the route taken through the Cevennes by Robert Louis Stevenson in his Travels With A Donkey. Stevenson made the journey in 1878; Holmes re-walked it in 1964 and with Stevenson's book as his only company. After a while, Stevenson became an almost palpable companion and one night Holmes crosses the Allier and enters Langogne so drenched and exhausted that his mind begins to play tricks. He loiters on the bridge; sub- consciously he expects to meet Stevenson. Suddenly he realizes that the bridge is modern, Stevenson crossed by the old bridge, now broken.

'It was beyond my reach over time.'

'You could not cross such bridges any more,

just as one could not literally cross into the past'

Just so, and just so Arnold Fellows has eluded me.

Before I left, I purchased from Dr. Harriss a few volumes for my own collection: four Little Guides, two pre-1914Baedekers and a 1915 Who's Who.

'Arnold would have been pleased for his successor to have them.'

I do hope so. Calling on Mr. Fellows is an eternal memory ... even though he was not at home.

J.Fyles

24 August 1993