When I moved to Shropshire in 2024, I knew it was only a matter of time before I made a short trip across the border to Powys, Wales, where novelist Alice Thomas Ellis (who died in 2005) lived for much of the year. Alice Thomas Ellis – real name Anna Haycraft – was a unique figure in the literary world of the eighties and nineties: a North London bohemian, hostess and bon viveur who’d once longed fervently to become a Catholic nun. Instead, she ended up getting married, giving birth to seven children and writing numerous novels (often with a religious theme). Yet it was her ‘Home Life’ column in The Spectator older readers may remember, which ran from 1986 to1989.
Sandwiched between Taki’s ‘High Life’ and Jeffrey Bernard’s ‘Low Life,’ her weekly update on domesticity, whether in Wales or Camden Town, was a quiet delight. She wrote of her cats, her children, about North London winos and the Welsh rain. Her columns were full of unassuming wisdom – on how to survive parents’ evenings, unblock drains or even cope with a boa constrictor – and were equal parts cosiness, depressive wit, and frankly expressed frustration. They describe a lost world and are endlessly comforting – a bit like listening to Radio 4 of old.
My trip to her house – Trefechan – involves two buses and a long taxi-ride to and fro. I’m allowed just a couple of hours there – no cab will take me back once the school day ends. But it’s long enough to see Haycraft lived in a virtual fantasy of Wales – branches meeting overhead on winding roads, forests, meadows, stone cliffs, and rearing green mountains. Courtesy of Trefechan’s current owner, I see the house’s flagstones, its beams and whitewashed walls, the green Aga Haycraft and her family would huddle round on rainy days, drinking whisky and reading Agatha Christie novels.
Growing up in Wales, Haycraft said she’d fallen in love with the country as ‘people are supposed to fall in love with other people.’ Yet as with so many of her passions, this brought bereavement too. She lamented the old stone farmhouses replaced by ‘Dunroamin’ style bungalows, new motorways that scythed their way noisily through the valleys, and the annual hordes of trippers, sucking the individuality from each locale. ‘The tourist, and the locust,’ she wrote, ‘have much in common, destroying what they feed upon and rendering whole districts barren and pointless.’
Loss was a theme of Haycraft’s life. Of her seven children, only five survived – a little girl had died a few days old, a son at 19: ‘While I always knew with every thread of my being,’ she wrote, ‘that the death of a child was the worst that could happen, I had no idea of the extraordinary dimensions, the varieties of anguish, that it could induce.’ Friends noted a profound sadness in her but were at pains to point out contrasting qualities. Haycraft, wrote Damian Thompson in The Spectator, ‘was one of those sad people who mysteriously lift the spirit of others.’ Richard Ingrams, who gave her an Oldie column, agreed: ‘Like most people of an essentially pessimistic frame of mind, she is unfailingly cheerful and amusing.’
Her good cheer failed when it came to the ‘innovations’ of the Second Vatican Council
But her good cheer failed when it came to the ‘innovations’ of the Second Vatican Council, whose attempts to ‘let in the light’ and liberalise the Catholic Church she felt were nothing less than heresy and betrayal. The innovators, she said, had ‘made false what was true and rejected holiness in their terror of space, of silence, of the unknowable, the abject fear of facing God alone.’ She loathed the priests in stonewashed denim, the ‘guitars twanging in the aisles, clapping, hugs and handshakes,’ the confessors you went to for stern rebuke and penance but were more likely, these days, to drown you in a misplaced ‘empathy’ and ‘commit social work’ on you.
Her two books on the subject – God Has Not Changed and Serpent on the Rock – are great howls of disbelief and anguish at the perceived vandalism of Vatican II but full of zingers too. Haycraft was at her funniest and most deadly when writing out of rage, and her words seem even more relevant in 2026. What happened in the Church yesterday – the lack of authority figures, the mealy-mouthedness, the insidious assault on ideals in the name of a toxic ‘inclusivity’ – has spread out since to the culture beyond it, engulfing it like a tsunami. ‘I’m reminded of that sweet, fluffy little object in the long grass,’ she writes, that turns out to be the tip of the tail of the sabre-toothed tiger.’
Anna Haycraft – Alice Thomas Ellis – is buried, along with her son, in the nearby St. Melangell’s churchyard. ‘The place on earth where I come closest to peace,’ she said, ‘is in the graveyard amongst all the quiet dead. I seem to have thought, all my life, of little but death…. I am astonished when I think that two of my children have achieved this feat and I am left here, not knowing what they know.’ One’s own death, she said, meant little after such events, and she believed that time, which took her children further away from her, also brought reunion closer: ‘For the rest of your life you wait, rather as you waited through pregnancy, impatient for their presence.’
What she described again and again in her work was transience – of beauty, of mystery, the numinous, the sacred, of those things that enthral us but are, maybe mercifully, just out of reach. This life, she said, was a facsimile, ‘a substitute, a shadow of the real thing.’
But that ‘shadow’ exerted all too tight a grip on Alice Thomas Ellis. Her writing, her five remaining children, her homes in Wales and North London always called her down to earth, as ‘Home Life’ proved. ‘Enough of all this talk of death,’ she writes at one point, with sudden, characteristic practicality. ‘We all have to do time, and it is both unwise and ungrateful to yearn only for eternity.’
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