I Left My Grandfather's House

I Left My Grandfather's House[2] is an uncompleted autobiographical novel by the English author and painter Denton Welch.

Map showing Denton Welch's travels as recounted in "I Left My Grandfather's House". Red line shows the unaccounted-for parts of the journey, grey represents journeys by car and green by train.

I Left My Grandfather's House
First edition cover
AuthorDenton Welch
IllustratorLeslie Jones
Cover artistDenton Welch[1]
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
GenreAutobiographical novel
PublisherLion and Unicorn Press at the Royal College of Art
Publication date
1958
Media typePrint (Hardback)
Pages82
Preceded byThe Denton Welch Journals 
Followed byDumb Instrument 

Written in March 1943 and left incomplete at the time of his death in 1948, it is an account of a walking tour Welch took in the summer of 1933, when he was eighteen.[3] His travels took him from his grandfather's house in Henfield, West Sussex, through Hampshire, Wiltshire, Somerset and Devon, before returning to Henfield. The account of a second leg, in which he intended to follow the Pilgrims' Way, ends at Cocking.

Summary

Picaresque and episodic[4] in nature, Denton's adventures include encounters with a tramp, a young man who attempts to con him out of money, various (sometimes none-too-hospitable) youth hostel proprietors and members of his own extended family, invariably on a quest for a bed for the night. Parts of the journey are lost to him, as he frankly remarks in the narrative: recounting his arrival at Castle Cary, Somerset ("I think because I liked the name"[5]) he states that "I can remember nothing until I emerged at the market place at Dunster"[6] some 50 miles away. There is a similar gap between Salcombe, Devon and Taunton, although in this instance he recalls an episode walking part of the way "with a boy from Bermondsey."[7] Eventually running out of money, he gets some financial assistance from a youth hostel proprietor in Winchester to catch a train back to Henfield, where reminders of his unsatisfactory life there (in particular his indifferent aunt), prompt another odyssey, this time from Winchester to Canterbury.

Background

Welch did not return to the account, which he had entered in his journal for March 1943. The narrative concludes as he is engaged in a watercolour painting of a view from Cocking churchyard.[8][9][10]

As with much of Welch's unfinished writing, some of the material in this novel did have other incarnations: the incomplete[11] short story "Full Circle" (which he wrote in 1942, before he started on this novel) is an expansion of the account of his first night away, when he slept rough in a barn in the company of the farmer's teenage son, although in that earlier tale it is more obviously fictionalised as a ghost story. Additionally, the second half of his completed and published short story "The Barn" (written around the same time as I Left My Grandfather's House) revisits the same theme, Denton becoming a nine-year-old and the teenager transformed into an older, but still youthful, tramp.

Editions

I Left My Grandfather's House was first printed in 1958 by the Lion and Unicorn Press at the RCA (the Journals having been published in abridged form 1952 without this text).[12][13] Long unavailable thereafter, it was re-published in 1984 by Allison & Busby. Further editions were issued by Exact Change in 1999 (along with In Youth is Pleasure), the Tartarus Press (as part of a two-volume Welch anthology) in 2005 and the Enitharmon Press in 2006.[14]

The 1958 edition includes an introduction by Welch's art-school friend Helen Roeder. Several letters Welch wrote to Roeder appear as an appendix, although these concern his first novel, Maiden Voyage, rather than this work. These did not feature in any of the subsequent editions.

References
  1. The first edition has two cover variants: An edition with black and white illustrations features a watercolour of a lane with trees and a cottage. (The cover of the 2006 reprint uses a similar theme but with a different illustration.) The cover of the colour edition is taken from a pen-and-ink drawing of c.1940 featuring a cow in the park of Oxon Hoath with the manor house in the background. This is in the Royal Academy Collection, having been bequeathed by Carel Weight in 1999.
  2. This is not Welch's own title; the material was entered in the journal (and filling the remainder of the notebook in which it appears) under the heading "Book I". The title is taken from the first five words of the work's second sentence. Its supplier is unrecorded, but it has been used in every subsequent edition.
  3. De-la-Noy, Michael (1984), Denton Welch: The Making of a Writer, Harmondsworth: Viking. ISBN 0-670-80056-2, p. 156
  4. Phillips, Robert (1974) Denton Welch, New York: Twayne Publishers. ISBN 0-8057-1567-3, p. 130
  5. Welch, Denton (2006) I Left My Grandfather's House, London: Enitharmon Press. ISBN 1-904634-28-1, p.31
  6. 2006 edition, p.31-2
  7. 2006 edition, p. 54
  8. James Methuen-Campbell, in his 2002 biography, Denton Welch: Writer & Artist (Carlton-in-Coverdale: Tartarus Press ISBN 1872621600), identifies an undated note on scrap paper which appears to roughly sketch the structure of remainder of the story, suggesting episodes at Four Marks, Godstone, Kemsing, Stansted, Trottiscliffe, Charing and Canterbury.
  9. Welch also made a passing reference to this unfinished section of the story in his final book, A Voice Through a Cloud (1951, p. 116)
  10. A further three-paragraph fragment, rejected from A Voice Through A Cloud but connected with the reminiscence on page 116 of that work, appears in the 2005 anthology, Where Nothing Sleeps. Given the title "A Free Ride", it describes an episode outlined in Welch's notes for what would have been the remainder of the story. Since it is set in Canterbury, it presumably would have formed part of the concluding pages of the completed work. (Tartarus Press ISBN 1-8726-2194-5, Vol. 1, p. 390)
  11. The 2005 anthology of Welch's stories (Vol. 2, p. 375) states that this work is incomplete through the final page of the manuscript being lost, rather than Welch leaving it unfinished)
  12. Royal Academy Collection copy catalogue reference
  13. Two limited editions, both productions of the RCA, were issued in 1958. An initial edition of 150 has black and white lithographs by Leslie Jones, and states 'Privately Printed' and 'for James Campbell', who was an antiquarian bookseller who had obtained the rights to publish the story. A further edition of 200, a publication of the RCA, is similar but includes additional lithographs in colour. Both editions erroneously give Welch's birth-date as 1917, and state that he died aged 31.
  14. The 1958 edition makes one change — reverted in all subsequent editions — from Welch's manuscript: on page 73, "Fucking filthy water" becomes "Mucking filthy water". The first modern appearance of the word 'fuck' in literature in the UK, and the celebrated trial which followed it, was still a year away.
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