A Day in Calke Abbey, Derby
I should have not booked the wrong ticket carelessly, and I should have not planned two day trips back-to-back, but after I got back from Chesterfield, I parted for Derby the next day, 29 April. I was going to visit Calke Abbey, which was about an hour on bus from the train station.
Calke Abbey, though had been on a visit list, didn’t come to my mind when I ran through my course notes, and a blog written by a previous student that I stumbled across. She briefly mentioned that the class of 2020 went to Calke Abbey for school field trip on the module of Designing for Creative Lives. The heritage is operated by National Trust, with whom the RCMG (Research Centre for Museums and Galleries) of our school collaborated on a project to conserve and restore the place. I was impressed when the profs brought the project up during the lectures, and was quite disappointed when the field trip this year did not go there. Fortunately, the place is not far away from Leicester.
The bus driver knew exactly where I was going, and even pointed at the bus stop where I should wait for return. He reminded me the last bus on the day before he rolled away. I followed his instructions and this time, unlike my marching for Hardwick Hall, there were two big signs that showed, “Calke Abbey, The Un-stately Home”, before the long drive to the car park.
The house was surround by forest, or more precisely, it was protected by the forest. Through the woods, I saw the house on the hill. It was still early when I arrived, so I spent quite some time exploring the fields. There was a church, but seemingly it wasn’t open for a long while; there was also sheep, chewing grass with their horizontal eyes fixing on empty. It was quiet; the only sound was wind whirling through the trees.
As I stepped into the entrance of the house, I immediately feel that all the sunlight, wind, and the fluidness of time have been left at the door step; they so much lingered at the umbrella stand, but no further. The entrance hall was already full of things: heads of deer on the walls, trinkets, heavy furniture that takes a lot of place, etc.. These things tried very hard to win anyone’s attention, and they surely did the job. What impression I had was that they also tried to fill up the space. It was as if everything was saying to themselves, “I am big; I am an attention. Look here. Don’t look elsewhere.” The fixation of the deers’ heads, though motionless, seemed proving even more the need to be looked at. It also signified just how abandoned the place was, because the only place where things speak louder than people, is where the people stop bringing life to it and the inanimate starts taking charge.
However, this is the aura that drew me there. The common slogan frequently used by volunteers was “time-capsule”, and the term does describe the house well. When the National Trust took over the house in 1985, as the researchers and staffs opened the door, everything was exactly at its place lastly put in 1886. It must have been both fascinating and terrifying, just as some explorers’ trips to distant ghost towns, where the residents seemed have vanished overnight. There is nothing ghostly or haunted in Calke Abbey though.
There was a little story about the particular pug statue. When the people from National Trust first found it, probably Ms Moseley had previously put a match box under the pug’s broken leg, just like any family who can’t bare it to throw away an old souvenir. The staff thought it was worth preserving it, the match box included. However, perhaps due to miscommunication, the department of restoration didn’t know the purpose of the match box and threw the original one away, focusing on cleaning the pug. When they realized the mistake, they moved mountains and seas to find an exact match box — the same era, with the same brand — and they nailed it to the broken leg. I love this pug so much, as it symbolizes the mundane touch of life in a domestic diorama.
I chatted with one of the volunteers and introduced myself as a student of Museum studies from the Uni of Leicester. I asked her if she had received any of our previous students before, and her face immediately brightened up. Yes, she remembered that for several years, there had been a group of students coming for field trip. I told her that there had been a change in our course plan this year and we went to Birmingham (which I have to be honest, was less educative for me). I definitely couldn’t miss out this place, so I came alone. She was delighted to hear that.
Everyone in the house all had a dreamy look on their face. It’s not hard to understand: There were a lot more things piling and jamming in all sorts of cabinets and containers everywhere, combining with the history and the reason why the family did so. It was overwhelming. I didn’t know much about the generations of families, except Henry Harpur, the isolated Baron, but he was in the late phase of the history. I only learned his predecessors later, such as Sir Vauncey, the one who acquired the large quantity of natural collections.
As I moved upstairs, walking through the dining room, kitchen, and library, I looked more closely at the details. To people who didn’t know much about preserving or the technique of making things “look old”, these rooms seemed terrible: They were dirty, depressed, lackluster; they needed love. But it was exactly on the contrary. It is harder to keep old things look old, rather than just scrap everything and “restore the glory”. I know it perfectly, because I was in a similar position for quite a few years. I had an interesting with a volunteer in the library where she pointed at the carpet and said, “you can’t really tell that this was a new one, right? It’s a new one, we just printed the old and terribly worn pattern on it. The original carpet is beneath, but people think they are stepping on it. See how people avoid this worn patch? That’s how we want it.” If she had never pointed this out, I would never notice just how people reacted to the hidden and minute work the team had done.
When I first heard the story of Henry Harpur and his isolated family, I pictured the whole house a gloomy and Byronic place. I was probably projecting the image from Twilight, which is my only knowledge of being a tragic and heroic character who abhor the society. I do acknowledge that this is more of my personal fantasy and the reality is that Henry Harpur had his private nature: probably a person of sensitivity, with warmth and humor, and quite some curiosity. During the lecture, we talked about the many possibilities of his character, and how National Trust could have brought it to remind people the importance of mental health. It is not a far fetch, but the fact that people who simply don’t like getting social don’t need to be seen eccentric, or even inappropriate. I think the house successfully preserves the oddness, but I was deeply disturbed to see that the multitudinous collection — in crates, boxes, and trunks — being left and locked at a sudden moment, as if Hilda Mosley, the last hostess in charge, woke up one morning and finally put the seal on the majority of the house. From this day on, we no longer walk into these rooms. We used them last winter, last month, last week, last night, but now we’re going to leave them be.
When I grew up, my grandmother (mother of my father) lived in a traditional Sanheyuan (saⁿ-ha̍p-īⁿ), with a grand court in the front. But to be specifically, she only lived on one side of the whole site. The rest of the house was basically warehouses in ruins. Broken and make-shift walls make the back of the house an extension of the kitchen, where the furnace sits and breathes, and where the logs stumps. When the government charged the land for new construction of the high way, the whole site was already in ruins: My grandma was getting older and older, and more and more places were left untidied. I clearly remember how I had explored the abandoned parts of the site, where the furniture was left rotten (the climate is humid all year); the smell of damp wood and dust, moss and dirt on the ground. I wondered, as a child, who might have sat on those beds and chairs, and where they might have been. Are they going to be angry if they know their bedrooms and living quarters are in shamble? I even saw rags of coats. Are the owners gonna come back and claim them? I knew that “they” were probably my relatives or my ancestors, but they were probably more far-gone and I knew my classmate better than I knew them. It was an early moment of a child, thinking about the loss of material but which I never owned, and I, although unclear why, felt terribly sorry for the things that my stranger relatives left uncared. Later when I grew up, about 11 or 12, I read Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt, especially when the girl roams in the old house where her mother grew up, the vast, familiar tinkle rings in my mind again: belongings that once were intimate to a person were left in a frozen frame of time; time brings an end to them, but it was time, too, that remembers.
My tour in Calke Abbey wasn’t really that pessimistic and overly nostalgic, as the volunteers were being such happy bubbles. There was one who were counting the glassware and was glad to share his conservation work with a young museum student. Another volunteer agreed with me when I commented that the house looked like the prop warehouses that I’d worked at, and we sat in a corner watching piles of boxes and furniture being stuffed in the room. What a magical moment.
One feature of the house that I am still curious about is the tremendous amount of bird taxidermy. Exactly like what I commented in Wollaton Hall, that I felt it was cruel to be stuffed in a tiny glass case with ten other different species, Calke Abbey totally pushed the boundaries and achieved another level. There were hundreds of birds, in hundreds of cases, some are taller than me, all stacked up in rooms across the house. The diorama was no longer the point, but the scale of obsession towards certain type of collection was overwhelming. I never understand the passion of bird watching, or hunting, and it’s hard to imagine a metaphor to quantify a hobby. Now I’ve found one. These bird collection, according to the volunteers, was only the tip of the iceberg, because Hilda Moseley sold more than two-thirds to other museums in order to pay the tax. I do not want to picture the scene of more dead birds in the house. They surely have added strokes to a scenery of the typical haunted house in vampire stories.
It was bright sunny outside when I finally stepped out from a cold, stone-slabbed servants’ hallway. The temperature immediately rose from chilly fingers to burning cheeks. I had the chance to roam in the vast property, including the woods and the gardens.
I definitely bought the guidebook, and I really wish that it had been written by one of the English Heritage writers. This is the second guide book I have, first one being Hardwick Hall. I prefer the ones of EH because there are simply more content and background explained, and the mise-en-page is more pleasing; whereas National Trust tends to focus on the lineage of the house, rather than each room.
This is by far my favorite place: the stunning remains and all the sentiments evoked. It is amazing to see how people rely on materials to remember, despite the fact that they are mostly considered unreliable and not trust worthy, for they always, without failing, perish. Those who abandon materials and praise it as a moral must have also missed the humane part of memorizing.
