I Left My Grandfather's House
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 First edition cover | |
| Author | Denton Welch |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | Leslie Jones |
| Cover artist | Denton Welch[a] |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Autobiographical novel |
| Publisher | Lion and Unicorn Press at the Royal College of Art |
Publication date | 1958 |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages | 82 |
I Left My Grandfather's House is an uncompleted autobiographical novel by the English author and painter Denton Welch. Welch provided no title for this work. The text was found in his journal, set apart from his usual entries at the end of one of the journal volumes, the heading "Book I". The title is taken from the first five words of the work's second sentence and used consistently since its first publication.
Written in March 1943 and left incomplete at the time of his death in 1948, it is an account of a walking tour Welch took in the summer of 1933, when he was eighteen.[1] His travels took him from his grandfather's house in Henfield, West Sussex, through Hampshire, Wiltshire, Somerset and Devon; he then returned to Henfield. The text continues with an abbreviated account of a trek following the Pilgrims' Way, which ends at Cocking.
Picaresque and episodic in nature,[2] Denton's adventures include encounters with a tramp, a young man who attempts to con him out of money, various (sometimes rather inhospitable) youth hostel proprietors and members of his own extended family, as he seeks a place to sleep for the night. Parts of the journey are lost to him, as he remarks when recounting his arrival at Castle Cary, Somerset: "I can remember nothing until I emerged at the market place at Dunster", a gap of 50 miles.[3] There is a similar gap between Salcombe, Devon and Taunton, although in this instance he recalls an episode walking part of the way "with a boy from Bermondsey".[4] Eventually running out of money, he gets some financial assistance from a youth hostel proprietor in Winchester to catch a train back to Henfield, where reminders of his unsatisfactory life there, in particular his difficult aunt, prompt him to undertake another hike, this time from Winchester to Canterbury.
Welch never returned to the account, which he had entered in his journal for March 1943. The narrative concludes as he is engaged in a watercolour painting of a view from Cocking churchyard.[b]
As with much of Welch's unfinished writing, some of the material in this novel had other incarnations. The short story "Full Circle", which he wrote in 1942, before he started on the text published as I Left My Grandfather's House, is an expanded account of Welch's first night on the road, when he slept rough in a barn in the company of the farmer's teenage son, although in that earlier tale it is fictionalised as a ghost story. The second half of Welch's short story "The Barn", written around the same time as I Left My Grandfather's House, revisits the same theme, presenting Welch as a nine-year-old and the teenager transformed into an older, but still youthful, tramp.