Katharine Moore
In 1984, Shoreham resident Katharine Moore published her first novel, Summer at the Haven. She was 85 at the time – and received an award for the most promising first novel of the year. Her fiction may have come late, but Moore had already made a name for herself with numerous non-fiction and children’s books dating back to the 1930s. And she would publish several more well-received novels before her death in 2001, aged 103.
Brought up in Reigate and educated at Oxford University, Moore was a teacher at Walthamstow Hall School, Sevenoaks, during the Second World War and afterwards spent time in India. Her books included studies of Rudyard Kipling and accounts of social change, with a focus on the experience of women. They included Victorian Wives and She For God: Aspects of Women and Christianity. A pacifist and Quaker, she concluded that “World War Two was the nearest to a righteous war, if you can have such a thing” and published a vivid war diary, A Family Life, in 1989.
For 22 years she corresponded with the actor and raconteur Joyce Grenfell, and their intense exchange of ideas was published after Grenfell’s death in An Invisible Friendship. The two resolved never to meet, so as to be franker with each other in their letters, which were particularly rich in discussing issues of faith. Moore lived at Riverside House, a couple of hundred yards from Shoreham Church, and in the last decade of her life she wrote a novel imagining herself into the mind of Damaris Perronet – the daughter of Revd. Vincent Perronet, supporter of the Methodist movement in the 18th century. Damaris was highly valued by John and Charles Wesley on their frequent visits to Shoreham; Moore’s book about her was called A Particular Glory. |
In 1981, a hundred years after the death of Samuel Palmer, Moore had made another contribution to understanding Shoreham’s past by penning a “documentary drama” about Palmer. It was put on by villagers in the church, with a cast of about 20, along with children from the school.
As her years advanced, Katharine Moore adopted a wry attitude to her own longevity. “I never had much time for old people,” she reflected in her later years. “So perhaps this long life is God teaching me a lesson.”
by James Saynor