I can’t believe I’ve never been to Ditchling before. Less than twenty miles from me, it used to be home to artist Frank Brangwyn, and notorious sculptor Eric Gill, as well as several brilliant weavers.

Frank Brangwyn was largely self-taught but also worked for a while in the studio of William Morris.  Famed for his magnificent painted murals, among his many works Brangwyn even made some designs for stained glass. I was devastated to discover that I had missed an exhibition of his Skinner’s Hall murals at the Ditchling Museum last year.  He lived his later years as a recluse in Ditchling, where he died in 1956 at his unusually named house, The Jointure. Brangwyn was born and spent his early years in Belgium so not surprisingly devoted a lot of his energies during the First World War to propaganda paintings and posters to support the war effort.

In The Artist’s Wife there’s a scene where my character Edmund travels by train and is surrounded by propaganda posters – similar in nature to some that Brangwyn produced:

Edmund huddled, collar turned up against a cold wind on the station platform. Behind him, the walls were plastered with army recruitment posters. An image of women and children fleeing a burning village was captioned Remember Belgium! As he waited for the train, he read another on the same theme. This one pulled no punches, showing a German soldier, bloodied bayonet in his hands, trampling on a young woman’s body and about to stamp on her small baby. Edmund read the accompanying text with a growing sense of nausea as it graphically described young girls horribly mutilated, old men burnt to death, mothers and their babies butchered. Here in this small Hampshire town, it was hard to credit that such brutalities were taking place just across the English Channel. His thoughts turned to Lottie. Were innocent children like her really being murdered so cruelly and savagely by the German army?

Perhaps it was in the fabric of the church itself. Here was none of the soaring majesty of York. In St Margaret’s, the columns were simple and stolid. The stone floors dipped where centuries of feet had trodden the surface into curved hollows. The plain glass windows in the body of the church contrasted with the side chapel, which was bathed in the colour and light of the window Edmund and Alice had created in memory of Commander Bowyer.’

St Margaret’s in Ditchling has some stained-glass windows, but like the church in my imaginary Hampshire village of Little Badgerton, they are mostly plain.

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