Old Mont

Sheila Stewart's book Lifting the Latch tells the life of Montague Abbott, an Oxfordshire farm-worker who was born at the start of the twentieth century, and spent most of his long life in and around Enstone, where he was born.

The book is based around conversations with Old Mont - his nickname - and is entrancing to read. He is an appealing character, and the world he lived in has long gone, a whole modus vivendi brought to an end by mechanisation and tractors.

Old Mont's life swamps with interest, and you really need to read it. No, you really do.

But this little book also holds an unsolved literary mystery that is intriguing as any you might find.

Old Mont fell in love with a nurse, Kate Carey, and they were due to be married. But Kate was caught in a blizzard while trying to get a train home, and she died just weeks before the wedding. She was about 20 when she died. In those pre-mobile days, Mont found out about her death only after her funeral, and in a letter from her family.

But if you try to find out who Kate Carey was, you'll fail. She did not exist. At least, not by that name. Nobody knows Kate's identity, and if Sheila Stewart knew, she took the secret with her when she died last year.

In July 2013 I wrote to her. She was 85 then, and, in her words in her 'dotage, and dropping off in the middle of writing to you!'

In her letter she says:

He might have changed Kate's true name and village to protect her memory; he was extremely angry when, passing through Bladon early one morning he decided to pay his respects to Churchill's grave - and discovered people had "walked all over it". He was astounded when I told him people couldn't help it, "thousands of people from all over the world come to see it, coachloads of tourists, cars, ramblers". "Why can't they leave folks alone when they are dead ?" was Mont's attitude.

The book gives a surprising amount of consistent detail about 'Kate', and enough of it hangs together as true to hold out the hope that someone will manage to reveal her identity. I think maybe the release of the 1921 census, sometime around 2022 might solve the puzzle.

Until then the mystery is as powerful as the charm of the story.

It really is worth a read.