Topsy-turvy times

SHANDY Hall has a leaking roof, broken-down central heating and a ramshackle, endearingly eccentric air about it. The medieval cottage-turned-Georgian farmhouse creaks and groans, as if it lives and breathes, as we make our way around it.

Patrick Wildgust, who lives in the house in the pretty little village of Coxwold, near York, where country parson Laurence Sterne wrote his groundbreaking novel Tristram Shandy 250 years ago, leads me in through the back of the building. We move our way somewhat chaotically through various higgledy-piggledy rooms with polished wooden floorboards and medieval beams until we end up, eventually, at the entrance.

This back-to-front approach is fitting, since Sterne himself was renowned for turning convention on its head. “Sterne didn’t begin at the beginning, so we don’t put labels on anything, there is no route. There is no point to imposing a system or rules. Sterne refused to accept rules existed. He subverted what a story is,” says Patrick.

Tristram Shandy, which doesn’t have a beginning, a middle or an end, ripped up all notions of narrative structure and scandalised literary London when it was first published.

But this progenitor of the modern novel, which went on to influence writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, is still as fresh today as it was in the late 18th Century.

Sterne enthusiasts and academics from all over the world now travel to this small, five-bedroomed house on the edge of the North York Moors to see where his complex masterpiece, the book that changed the world of literature, took shape.

Shandy Hall was in a dilapidated state, riddled with dry rot and deathwatch beetle, when it was rescued by the Laurence Sterne Trust in the Seventies. Now it houses the world’s finest collection of this genius of English literature’s works, letters, illustrations and ephemera.

You can sit in the study, a tiny book-lined room with a paper-strewn desk, where Sterne wrote Tristram Shandy. You can flick through his books, read his letters and hold his pipe. You can even stand in the pulpit in the church across the road where he preached, or explore the area where, between writing, Sterne used to step out into his garden “to weed, hack up old roots or wheel away rubbish”.

Since the 1880s, just a modest plaque pronounced that Laurence Sterne lived and wrote his most famous works in Shandy Hall. But this creaky old parsonage did become the focus of worldwide attention four years ago as the location of A Cock and Bull Story – the cult film version of Tristram Shandy – starring Hollywood A-lister Gillian Anderson, Steve Coogan and Stephen Fry.

Although it is a registered museum, opened to the public in 1973 by humorist Frank Muir, trustees have resisted the Disneyfication of this place of literary pilgrimage. You won’t find turnstiles at the door, tricorn hat souvenirs or a mock 18th Century tearoom serving Tristram Shandy shortbread.

Mr Wildgust, its hugely energetic curator, somehow manages to keep the building going on a wing and a prayer. If he’s not putting buckets under leaks in the roof, he’s busy organising tours for schoolchildren and academics, working on collaborative projects with artists, or putting up exhibitions to help raise awareness of the hall and Sterne’s work and life, as well as raise muchneeded funds.

This former English teacher, who stumbled into the role five years ago, has always been interested in experimental fiction and is passionate about Shandy Hall’s role as a centre for creative thought. The many engravings, pottery, prints and paintings on show, all evoking the hilarity of Sterne’s work, are testament to how Tristram Shandy has inspired artists over the years.

Using a quotation from Tristram Shandy as a starting point, Wildgust has had local schoolchildren doing 18th Century dance steps in the local churchyard. In the garden, youngsters have been engaged in trapping moths, in homage to Yorick, a character whose name derives from a skull moth. By the fireside in the old kitchen, he has had writers helping children experiment with language.

Living in a house like this has its downsides. It is cold, for a start, and Mr Wildgust and his partner rely on open fires and an Aga for warmth.

It’s an idiosyncratic house with its own particular regime. “It’s a bit weird. I wake in the middle of the night and re-discover I’m living in the middle of a museum.

“I am not tidy,” he says. “Another disadvantage is that when people come, everything has to be cleared away, put in some sort of order. But I’m not griping.”

The Grade I-listed building has already undergone one major restoration, but desperately needs more attention if it is to be saved for the nation. “The roof has been leaking for 30 years and the wooden guttering and windowsills need attention.

But the trust doesn’t have any money and can’t afford a major overhaul.

We have to make the best of what we’ve got,” says Mr Wildgust.

Some visitors confess they haven’t heard of Sterne, but come just to look around the fascinating house and gardens, which offer a perfectly framed view of Byland Abbey. And who can blame them? The two-acre plot, full of catmint, tree peonies and old-fashioned roses, includes a walled garden with unusual cottage plants, and a wild flower area, hidden away, like a secret garden, on the site of a 19th Century disused quarry.

Patrick points out the bluebells, meadowsweet and forget-me-nots.

“We have a colony of tree creepers here and every variety of owl including long-eared,” he says proudly.

The house itself, which began life as a medieval long hall, had a rich history long before Sterne took up residence. Over the years it was adapted, extended and changed until, in the 17th Century, a ceiling was put in, the fireplace moved to an outside wall and the house that we see today started to emerge.

Sterne did plenty of alterations himself. It’s thought he added an extension overlooking the garden and changed the layout of the house, which later became a farmhouse and was split into two homes until the Sixties.

Some spectacular wall paintings dating back to the mid-1400s were uncovered during the most recent restoration and an archaeological dig in 2006 confirmed that Shandy Hall formed part of a whole system of medieval buildings, running along the side of the village, which was then a centre for pottery making.

The ancient and the modern is skilfully combined in the Shandy Hall visitors view today. Alongside the stone-flagged floor and polished wooden stairs with 17th Century floorboards, Mr Wildgust has installed contemporary cast iron handrails, sculpted by a local craftsman to represent the plot lines of Tristram Shandy.

One of his favourite works of art which hangs on the walls of this ancient building is a computerised printout of the book Alice in Wonderland, the words making a pattern according to how often and where in the story they are used. “It is the most beautiful thing, all the words break down visually, the whole book is incorporated into this one artwork,”

he says.

Everywhere, we are reminded of Sterne’s love of playing around with words and plot. “It may be an old interior, but we are doing new things with it,” says Mr Wildgust. “I have tried to find a way to show Sterne is one of the most fascinating writers with whom you could wish to engage.

■ Shandy Hall and gardens are open to the public daily, except Saturdays, May to September, 11am to 4.30pm. The house is also the location for the Arts Council funded Asterisk* project, a meeting place for writers, artists and academics. Current exhibition: Pictorial maps of English counties by JL Carr, the author of the Booker prize short-listed novel A Month in the Country, on show at Shandy Hall until Friday.

■ Shandy Hall, Coxwold, York YO61 4AD Tel: 01347-868-465 Email: shandyhall@dsl.pipex.com