Aren’t poets supposed to live in garrets? Not Pam Ayres, whose comic verse — preferably recited in her rural Oxfordshire accent — has been popular with the great British public since the 1970s.
Other poets might look down their noses, but Ayres — known as “the people’s poet” — has sold more than 3m books. She regularly fills theatres, and her spoken-word albums have earned gold discs.
So, instead of a garret, Ayres, 68, has lived for the past three decades at Norcote House, near Cirencester, an eight-bedroom, 18th-century Cotswold pile that would not look out of place in a Jane Austen costume drama. Now Pam and her husband, Dudley Russell, are downsizing, and Norcote, set in 20 acres of prime Gloucestershire countryside, is on the market for £2.5m.
Those gold discs are now propped up against the wall in an attic room, ready for packing. Next to them are notebooks and manuscripts stored in a box marked “early work”. Pictures are coming down from the walls and rooms are emptying one by one.
Obviously, she’s written a poem to mark the occasion. “I will live in some town distant, I could not go by this place,” she says in Pollen on the Wind. “Could not stare down the drive, would have to turn away my face.”
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Sad, isn’t it? But don’t feel too sorry. “Some town distant” turns out to be just six miles away. And Ayres clearly still can’t believe that she was able to buy Norcote House in the first place. “We peered down the drive and there it was,” she recalls of the property, which was once owned by a family descended from Anne Boleyn’s personal physician. “Me, coming from the council houses, felt not a little daunted. Oh God, I thought, this is a stately home.
“I was brought up the youngest child of six in a perfectly respectable but hard-up family, and we were always being told to get off people’s land. To have this place, where there are fields around and nobody could say ‘Get orf my land!’ has been an enduring joy.” Nobody has been ordered off the land at Norcote, not even the occupants of a rather battered car that turned up one day, full of “blokes in turbans” who were looking for Stonehenge (which is 45 miles further south).
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The grade II listed property was extended in the 19th century and again in the late 1920s. It was built with that honey-coloured Cotswold stone that looks so appealing on summer days. The attic rooms have retained their heavy oak beams and there’s an extensive cellar below. In addition to the main house, there’s a coach house containing two flats, one of which, on the ground floor, doubles as Dudley’s office.
If Through the Keyhole came poking about here, the panel would be hard pressed to guess that this was an entertainer’s home. There are no pictures of Ayres with celebrity chums (although there are at least five photos of her meeting the Queen). They might notice the MBE citation on the wall in the hall, however, next to a poem she gave Dudley for their 30th wedding anniversary.
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The couple aren’t ones for lavish entertaining, either. “We used to have Richard Stilgoe [the songwriter] here, and Blowers [Henry Blofeld, the cricket commentator], but I’m not a good hostess — I get nervous. I like my family around me. They’re enough, really.”
That family includes two sons who have now left home. But not before they learnt to live off the land. Ayres once said that she grew up “on rabbit and vegetables”, and that her father poached pheasants. She is similarly self-sufficient. She has chickens, pigs and cattle, and wanders the grounds in her beekeeping outfit, looking after her hives. She even makes her own bread, chutney and jam. “I was brought up not to waste anything,” she says.
Ayres grew up in the village of Stanford in the Vale, then in Berkshire, now in Oxfordshire. She became a civil-service filing clerk after leaving school, but got bored and joined the WRAF, where — during a posting in Singapore — she discovered a talent for entertaining. “I’ve loved performing from the time I was at infant school, but in Singapore, you were far from home, so if you fell flat on your face, it didn’t matter. I just adored it.”
She started writing poems so she would have something to perform at the RAF station’s talent nights. “People laughed, and I went on from there.”
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Back home, she performed at folk clubs and was talent-spotted by BBC Radio Oxford, which gave her a weekly spot. When she produced a pamphlet of her work and hawked it around local bookshops, she sold an astonishing 7,000 copies. To put this in perspective, that sort of success would now put her in the top five of The Sunday Times hardback bestseller list. “That was terrifying, going into expensive bookshops full of lush volumes,” she recalls. “There’s me with a cheap little pamphlet, saying, ‘Any chance of you stocking me deathless verse?’”
Her big breakthrough came in 1975, when she won Opportunity Knocks — which is what we watched before Britain’s Got Talent was invented — and her future was sealed.
Opinion is divided about Ayres’s work. Readers love her, but her fellow poets don’t seem in any rush to hear her views on the iambic pentameter. At a Buckingham Palace reception, one well-known poet turned her back on her, while another referred to her as “the village bard”.
Her verse is light, comic and usually inspired by the everybody worries of ordinary folk (“Oh, I wish I’d looked after me teeth / And spotted the dangers beneath / all the toffees I chewed / and the sweet sticky food...”), but occasionally she branches into political satire. Here she is, for example, on John Prescott’s time at the helm of the country as deputy prime minister: “With one hand on the tiller, as steady as a rock / and the other disappearing up the secretary’s frock.”
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“There’s been a great deal of disdain,” she admits. “I wouldn’t call myself a poet, although some of the things I’ve written might be considered poetry. I’m just proud that I’ve made a lot of people laugh. A lot of people have gone home and said, ‘God, I haven’t laughed like that for years.’ That’s something to be proud of — there ain’t much to laugh at for a lot of people.”
It’s difficult to do justice on the page to Ayres’s distinctive accent, which could be another reason for that disdain. “I sometimes wish I never had an accent,” she says. “I’ve had people ask me whether I have to work at it. It’s slightly insulting, the suggestion that the poems wouldn’t be funny without the accent. You wouldn’t ask Billy Connolly or Max Boyce about their accents, would you?”
This sort of criticism clearly stings. Although Pam has been as relaxed and jolly as you might expect throughout the tour of the house, she suddenly falls silent. “Anyway,” she says eventually, with a shrug. “There we are.”
Enough of this introspection. We head back to the garden and leave via the rear of the house, where washing is hanging. “You’ll have to duck under me drawers,” she says — and I find myself waiting for the next line of verse.
Norcote House is for sale for £2.5m with Savills (01285 627550, savills.co.uk) and Knight Frank (01285 659771, knightfrank.co.uk)
Pollen on the Wind by Pam Ayres
See the driveway to our house, now strewn with leaves and softly black,
Today I travel down it and I won’t be coming back.
A hand is on my heart that feels so desolate and cold,
My home for half a lifetime. It is over. It is sold.
In this house I cried and thought my heart would surely break,
And felt more joyful happiness than was my share to take,
This home wherein for thirty years we flourished and we shone,
Is all to be dispersed, is to be scattered and be gone.
We were as they are today, were young and confident and brash,
And we ran among the rooms, in the excitement, in the dash,
In the thrill of exploration, and our children sang with joy,
They have come to take our place. This little girl. This little boy.
Shall I tell them? Shall I tell them there are bulbs already peeping?
Shall I ask them to tread lightly where my faithful dogs are sleeping?
Shall I point to little saplings which to mighty trees have grown?
Or slip away in silence; let them make this place their own.
Young men from the furniture removal company,
Will sweep away all traces of my family and me,
Agreements are in place which I can never now rescind,
We are blown away like pollen, like the pollen on the wind.
The native birds are singing, as they sing here every day
Who will feed my little birds when I am far away?
The people they are restless, I am realizing fast,
Already in this house I am a figure from the past.
I will live in some town distant, I could not go by this place,
Could not stare down the drive, would have to turn away my face,
I love it as a friend, but now must learn to dwell apart,
From my home. My former home.
My home embedded in my heart.
© Pam Ayres 2015 – from her book You Made Me Late Again!