Foreign News: Thanks for Your Shilling

George Bernard Shaw was 50 when he found an epitaph in the old churchyard of Ayot Saint Lawrence, 22 miles from London. It read: “1825-1895—Her time was short.” Then & there Shaw, who intended to live to 100, decided that the quiet Hertfordshire hamlet where 70 was considered a short life would be an ideal place to spend the coming 50 years. Shaw found a house, moved in, learned to love Ayot.

This is my dell and this my dwelling

Their charm so far beyond my telling,

That though in Ireland is my birthplace

This home shall be my final earthplace.

The lines were written last spring when Shaw, seven years short of his target centenary and bored with old age, was to be seen stumping about Ayot Saint Lawrence with a contax camera. Neighbors watched him focus on the village show places. “That must be hard work, sir,” said Postmistress Jisbella Lyth. Tiring, said Shaw. Last week the village had a chance to see Shaw’s photographs. Bernard Shaw’s Rhyming Picture Guide to Ayot Saint Lawrence (price one shilling)* went on sale in Mrs. Lyth’s post-office shop.

Shaw takes the visitor on a 59-picture tour of Ayot (rhymes, according to Shaw, with say it). Beginning at his own gateway, over which the local blacksmith has wrought an iron notice, “Shaw’s Corner,” he moves on to the churchyard which first drew him to Ayot. Two world wars have intervened and he notes another tombstone:

The Sword is on the Cross

And some of us are slain

We try to think our loss

Has been our country’s gain.

He admires the centuries-old abbey:

O’er this north door a trace still lingers

Of how a Gothic craftsman’s fingers

Could make stones creep like ivy stems

And tilings coruscate like gems.

Briskly he passes on to another Ayot tourist attraction, the house of Catherine Parr, sixth wife of Henry VIII:

Wise Catherine herself contrived

To wed the five times widowed Harry;

Yet kept her head on and survived

The Bluebeard she had dared to marry . . .

Her best loved guest was Ann Boleyn

Here they two danced and kept their carriages

And hunted long before their marriages,

Not dreaming that Ann’s elevation

Would end in her decapitation.

Soon he has completed the round of the village and is back in his own beautiful house, which is open for inspection:

Unless you are in haste and elsewhere bound

You may as well come in. I’ll show you round.

He conducts the visitor to the garden, notes:

Like Shakespear I possess a mulberry

But find its fruit a somewhat dull berry.

And then to a small wooden cubicle under a tree:

In shattering sunlight here’s the shelter

Where I write dramas helter skelter.

By Shaw’s will, his ashes, mingled with those of his wife, were scattered around this shelter.

A few more lines and the guide innocently concludes:

Now there is nothing more for me to tell.

Thanks for your shilling friend; and fare thee well.

Actually Shaw had wanted to charge two-and-six (35¢) for the Guide. “I think it might help you quite a bit, Mrs. Lyth,” he had said to the postmistress. “Thank you very much, sir, I am sure it will,” Mrs. Lyth had replied, but she had thought two-and-six too high for big sales, and after an argument, they settled on a shilling. Last week, with customers pouring into her shop, Mrs. Lyth had sold 200 copies of Shaw’s Guide in two days. Said she: “That’s jolly good going for a little place like this.” Not yet Stratford-on-Avon, Ayot Saint Lawrence was on the way to becoming a shrine.

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British Philosopher Bertrand Russell has this to say about Shaw, his lifelong friend, in the current issue of the University of Virginia’s Quarterly Review: “Shaw, considered psychologically, was an almost perfect example of the shy man with an inferiority complex . . . The stories that he used to tell about his family rather bear out this view … He used to aver that nearly all his family had been drunkards who, as a result of drink, had ultimately become insane and retired to a private lunatic asylum which, according to him, existed mainly for the Shaw family. The most remarkable of these relatives was the uncle who committed suicide by putting his head into a carpet bag and then shutting it. This uncle almost invariably made his appearance at Shaw’s excellent luncheons.”

*Clothbound copies at 5s. are available from the Leagrave Press Ltd., Luton, Bedfordshire, England.