Echoing Voices

In No Voice from the Hall, John Harris recollected his covert entry into empty and deserted country houses in the years after World War II. Here, he now broadens his sights, sometimes straying into Europe or as far off as Malaya and the USA. This memoir draws together incidents and adventures throughout John Harris' life. We hear of Ruler Matlock who set him against formal education, of his antics during his very short apprenticeship as an upholsterer at Heal's, and of his brief yet profitable curatorship of the Grotto of the Four Walls at the Battersea Pleasure Gardens. In France in 1953 he is befriended by Richard Penard, the great French collector. He trespasses into the Desert de Retz to find the faded glory of the China House and the Broken Column, and he experiences the Bohemian life of a student on the Left Bank in Paris. At Paul Mellon's Oak Spring, in Virginia, he is awakened by gangsters and we read with astonishment of MI5 bugging Anthony Blunt's rooms above the RIBA's Drawings Collection. As the tales proceed, new comrades join his snooping.With them he shudders at the horrors of the Hazelwood Chuckle House, travels to Czechoslovakia and at Horin discovers the glories of a decayed baroque suite of apartments and meets its custodian, a Polish Hurricane pilot. This book features many figures from the art and architectural world: Francis Watson, James Lees-Milne, Nikolaus Pevsner, Paul Mellon, Basil Spence and others.