Kilvert's Diary, 1870-79 (Penguin)

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Take Clyro itself. ‘Beautiful Clyro rising from the valley… dotted with white houses and shining with gleams of green on hills and dingle sides.’ Bypassed in the 1960s by the A438, the current population of the village is less than it was in Kilvert’s time (when it stood at 842) and peacefulness descends as one walks the main street. Isn't that the kind of passage you'd read a book like this for? The cosy and the foreign, the intimate and the far away. They kept up a friendly relationship, mostly by post. There's some suggestion that her mother raised objections to her writing to an unmarried man (though I'd have thought that her writing to a married man would be even more suspect). They probably became engaged in 1876 (we don't know for sure, for reasons I'll mention later), but eventually it all petered out and once again Kilvert's hopes of a wife and a happy family life came to nothing. Further along, on the other side of the main road, is the village school where Kilvert taught the parish children their three R’s, and where he fell for the charms of ten-year-old ‘Gipsy Lizzie’. Kilvert, Robert Francis (1989). Alison Hodge (ed.). Kilvert's Cornish Diary: Journal No. 4, 1870: from July 19th to August 6th Cornwall. Alison Hodge. ISBN 978-0-906720-19-6.

Despite Kilvert's niece's actions she ironically was a Vice-President, and an avid member of the Kilvert Society for many years up until her death in 1964.At last, too, Kilvert had found a wife. He was married to Elizabeth Rowland, who he had met on a trip to Paris three years earlier, in August 1879. The diary is full of moments like this, tiny, luminous moments that are just...there. When he’s at his best, his eye for the stray, telling detail is almost Tolstoyan: In late 1871 he fell in love with Frances Eleanor Jane Thomas, the youngest daughter of the vicar of Llanigon, a parish not far from Clyro, and asked her father for permission to marry her. Because of Kilvert's position as a lowly curate, Frances' father looked unfavourably on the request and refused it. After receiving this rejection Kilvert wrote in his diary that "The sun seemed to have gone out of the sky". Frances, who was referred to as Daisy in the diaries, would die a spinster in December 1928. Shortly after the rejection, in 1872, Kilvert resigned his position as curate of Clyro, and left the village, returning to his father's parish of Langley Burrell. [1] From 1876 to 1877 he was vicar of St Harmon, Radnorshire, and from 1877 to his death in 1879 he was vicar of Bredwardine, Herefordshire. Yet I see no one until I crest the hill and reach the edge of the Begwyns. Stretching over 1,200 acres, this glorious upland moor is a favourite with local dog walkers and horse riders. Several cars are parked at the cattle-grid entrance; their owners dot the cloudless skyline. But try as I might I ended up disturbed by the passages about young girls. It didn’t help that googling for articles about Kilvert I found myself on a blog that I suddenly realised was attempting to normalise sex between adults and children. I felt contaminated and unhappy and blamed poor old Kilvert. I hate that I even feel I have to include this paragraph. I wish I could just say ‘different times’ and move on. I do think little children are beautiful and hope that in the end this is all he meant.

Plomer had had the commercial good sense to publish an abridged version of the diary, and the imposition of wartime paper restrictions made it unlikely in any case that the complete text could be published in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, Plomer had hopes that one day Kilvert's Diary might appear in its entirety. To his everlasting regret, though, he allowed the typescript of the full diary to go missing. Initially, this was not a matter of great concern. The original notebooks still existed, and a new text might be prepared from them. However, in 1958, Plomer learned from Essex Hope, to whom the originals had passed on the death of Perceval Smith, that she "had done away with most of the Diary". "I did not scold Mrs Hope," Plomer wrote at the time, but he admitted later that he felt like strangling her with his own hands. There is then a certain irony today, when walkers and ramblers – to adopt friendlier terms than ‘tourist’ – pursue a Kilvert Trail in search of places mentioned in the diary. This may be one of the happiest and most important days of my life, for to-day I fell in love at first sight with sweet Kathleen Mavourneen[his fanciful name for her]. . . . I fell in love and lost my heart to the sweetest noblest kindest bravest-hearted girl in England . . . How sweet she was, how simple, kind, unaffected and self-unconscious, how thoughtful for everyone but herself . . .She spoke of her favouriteIn Memoriam[i.e. Tennyson's poem, also a favourite of Kilvert's]and told me some of her difficulties and how deeply she regretted the enforced apparent idleness of her life, and I loved her a hundred times better for her sweet troubled thoughts and honest regretful words. Possibly by dwelling on this aspect of his personality and life I’ve given an unbalanced portrait. He had dark moments, certainly, but many readers will be mostly attracted to the abundant passages of fun and high spirits, of dinners, picnics and croquet parties, and of his rapturous responses to nature.Hope did preserve three of the notebooks. She presented one to Plomer himself, another to Jeremy Sandford, who had written a radio play about Kilvert, and the final one to Charles Harvey, a Kilvert enthusiast. The survival of these originals today in the National Library of Wales and Durham University Library gives one a taste of the sad, irretrievable loss caused by this wanton destruction. The appeal of several episodes in these manuscripts, absent from the edited diary, suggest furthermore that Plomer's insistence that he had published the best of the diary in his three volumes was much too confident. The Cornish Diary: Journal No.4, 1870—From 19 July to 6 August, Cornwall was published by Alison Hodge in 1989. [a] The National Library of Wales, which holds two of the three surviving volumes, published The Diary of Francis Kilvert: April–June 1870 in 1982 and The Diary of Francis Kilvert: June–July 1870 in 1989. The diary runs from January 1870 until just before his death on 23 September 1879. We believe the diary filled about twenty-nine notebooks. Mrs Kilvert removed all the notebooks from 9 September 1875 to 1 March 1876 and 27 June 1876 to 31 December 1877, we believe for personal reasons. She removed all mention of herself. On Mrs Kilvert’s death in 1911 the remaining twenty-two notebooks were passed to Kilvert’s sister Dora Pitcairn who in turn left them to her niece Frances Essex Hope, n ée Smith. Of all noxious animals,’ Kilvert continues, ‘…the most noxious is a tourist. And of all tourists the most vulgar, ill-bred, offensive and loathsome is the British tourist.’

Even today, though, the sparsely populated nature of the region means that one is still more likely to encounter sheep than people. And the countryside, quiet hamlets and remote churches of a low, squat design that Kilvert knew have changed so little and retain much of their former character. Of course, it's impossible to tell whether he was misinterpreting her friendly concern as love. Either way, it all came to nothing. As a postscript, although we probably feel that Mr Thomas behaved correctly in this instance, given his daughter's youth and Kilvert’s precipitate ardour, it is notable that none of his five daughters ever got married; we can only guess to what extent his normal fatherly protectiveness became controlling behaviour. It may well be apocryphal, but it's said that Daisy was asked in old age why she'd never married, and she replied 'No one asked me.' Did she know how close Kilvert had come to asking her? Howells, Anita (13 June 2001). "Kilvert and a sad love affair". Hereford Times . Retrieved 24 October 2017. Quite apart from his dismal love life, there is a strain of melancholy running through the diary. He records mysterious illnesses –‘face ache’ features quite often, for example – and has some terrifying dreams, which might be indicative of depression or worse. For example, on October 14 th 1872 he records ‘a strange and horrible dream’, or more exactly a dream within a dream, in which the Reverend Venables (the vicar with whom Kilvert lodged and who was effectively his boss) tried to murder him, and he in return tried to murder Venables: Consequently, only a little more than a third of the diary as it existed into the 1950s survives. Almost two thirds has been lost forever, irretrievably, destroyed perhaps in a fit of pique. This too is very hard to bear; at least we have the consolation of the existence of what remains, one of the most enchanting, heart-breaking, loveable, intriguing, beautiful diaries ever written.Francis Kilvert also published pleasant but conventional poetry, republished by the Kilvert Society in Collected verse: 3rd December 1840 - 23rd September 1879 by the Reverend Francis Kilvert in 1968. He does accept rejection by his beloveds' parents rather easily, however. His sense of honour and propriety was evidently acute, but perhaps he should have fought his corner more persistently; after all, as he pointed out himself, his own father had overcome initial rejection. He did however eventually marry, which I'll come to a little later.

St Michael’s, the 12th-century church, extensively rebuilt in the 1850s, is much as it was in Kilvert’s time. Whenever I sit in the churchyard, with its avenue of yew trees leading to the lychgate, I think of that wonderful moment in the diary on Easter Eve: the graves, decorated with flowers, are described as looking like people asleep in the moonlight, ‘ready to rise early on Easter Morning.’ When the diary reached the editor William Plomer in the 1930s there were 22 manuscript volumes. Several volumes had already been destroyed, probably by Mrs Kilvert, who removed all references to herself. Possibly some had also been destroyed by Kilvert himself, for example one that recorded his affair with Etty (as we've seen, he believed that he had been 'very very wrong', and it's plausible that he would have not wanted it to survive). So Plomer didn't have a complete text to work with, which is unfortunate.

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After a century and a half, there is still no better guide to this stunning corner of the Welsh Marches than Clyro’s erstwhile curate. Just this once, however, I ignore his lead in favour of a refreshing pint. He certainly liked nothing better than a deserted road. ‘I had the satisfaction of managing to walk from Hay to Clyro by the fields without meeting a single person’, he wrote in 1871, something he regarded as ‘a great triumph and a subject for warm self-congratulation’. The diary excerpts cover the years from 1870 to 1879, but sadly they’re just a small taster of what he wrote as his wife and later a niece destroyed a lot of his diaries.