The pallbearers included Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and seven of the Edwardian age’s most esteemed writers – Rudyard Kipling, A.E. Meanwhile, the rest of Hardy’s body was reduced to ashes, patted into an urn and escorted with solemn pomp into Westminster Abbey. (The embarrassed vicar, so the rumours continued, in pressing need of something to bury, summoned the foreman from the neighbouring farm, who shot the cat and opened up its stomach to retrieve what had been swallowed). The tin was kept for safekeeping overnight in the vicarage, where a cat was rumoured to have knocked it off the mantelpiece and devoured the contents. On the evening of January 13, the impasse was resolved when the local surgeon cut out Hardy’s heart, wrapped it in a towel and put it in a cake tin.
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There followed a grisly tussle between what Hardy had wished for himself – to be buried alongside Emma in Stinsford churchyard – and what his grandiose and pushy trustee Sydney Cockerell wished on behalf the nation – viz. Two years before, in January 1928, Thomas Hardy had died at the age of 88, his last words “Em! Em!” suggesting that his mind was reeling back to his first wife, Emma Gifford. He finished the manuscript in July 1929, four months after his divorce, and it was published on September 29, 1930, causing an immediate furore. Distant in time and space from its material, the composition of the novel, which was to become his favourite book, was unexpectedly pleasurable and easy. Maugham believed that “it is the impressions of a man’s first twenty years which form him”, and at the age of 53 – and extracted from his turbulent marriage to Syrie Wellcome – he had chosen to look back at his boyhood on the Kentish coast and at his early adulthood as a medical student in London.
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“I have never felt entirely myself,” wrote Maugham, “till I had put at least the Channel between my native country and me.” Cakes and Ale or The Skeleton in the Cupboard was the first book that he completed at the Villa Mauresque on Cap Ferrat where he had gone to live in June 1927. “It’s very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.” Willie Ashenden “You’re queer fish, you writers.” Rosie Driffield