Owing to his admirable modesty, I only discovered gradually how learned he was about art, books, music, ballet, antiquities and a dozen other subjects concerning which I was terribly eager to know more. He himself, he explained to me, was of the type labelled ‘arty’—or even—which was much worse—‘arty-crafty’: a term which, though it conveyed very little to me, appeared to permit one a certain elegant latitude in the matter of dress. In my opinion John’s clothes were most attractive. I told him so: upon which he enlightened me about what might be called the basic theories of men’s attire. After that, I examined the un-uniformed section of the male population with growing interest. At last, I felt, I was beginning to realize What was What.
One night, John invited me to see the Sadler’s Wells Ballet at the New Theatre.
As a schoolgirl, I had seen Pavlova and Njinsky when the Russian ballet first invaded London. I had been so enraptured that for several days I had gone about in a kind of trance. The dancing of Margot Fonteyn and Robert Helpmann, however, produced a different effect. In a way, it was rather heartbreaking. Once again I was obliged to confess that, as a result of my life in the convent, something within me had become atrophied. I had grown incapable of apprehending ballet emotionally. It reached me no longer through the senses, but drily, if I may so express it, through the mind.
I watched the flitting Sylphides and the enchanting movements of Coppelia as though I were on the other side of a glass window. The waves of emotion that they are surely meant to stir no longer reached me. As Barbara had declared, through repression and disuse, certain sections of my being had simply withered and died.
1 Why answers to prayer should so often be described as ‘miraculous’, I have yet to learn. Abbot Chapman once said to me that our prayers were invariably answered: the only thing was that since God concerned himself more with our spiritual than our temporal good, he didn’t always do things in the way that we should consider best. But as any parent of small and not very far-seeing children will tell you, No is just as authentic an answer as Yes. God, explained the Abbot, being who and what he is, sees all round everything: whereas we, being of time, can only see our own little dot in the infinite and eternal scheme of things. At the time, I remember thinking it was a rather stodgy explanation. Now, having realized my own tendency to make mistakes about the things I pray for, I am completely satisfied.
CHAPTER TEN
(1)
EVERYONE, I suppose, has his peculiarities.
One of mine is that when, in the street, I encounter nuns, I tend to scuttle across to the other side of the road.
This is not because I dislike them. Quite the contrary. As a class, I hold nuns in the highest esteem. But the sight of those starched wimples, long dark habits and low-heeled shoes rouses memories I’ve no use for. And that is why, when nuns show themselves on my horizon, I dart up side-streets, averting my eyes as though Gorgons lurked beneath their veils.
It may therefore surprise you to hear that when the day came on which I felt I could no longer endure to go out for my meals in every kind of weather, I moved my lodging from Bettingdon Terrace to a convent school in Notting Hill.
The explanation is quite simple.
At the beginning of the war, when all children were evacuated from London, two or three of the Sisters to whom the school belonged were, with their pupils, billeted for a short time on the convent in which I was then still a nun. I had liked them. They were wise, kind, sympathetic women. And it now seemed to me that, faced as I was with the hopeless business of finding myself another room in war-packed London, they might be excellent people from whom to ask advice.
The convent was a big red stone building at the corner of Chepstow Villas. The Government had taken it over and transformed it into the headquarters of the local Red Cross and A.R.P. A few of the Sisters still remained there, however, presumably to keep an eye on things and to look after the lady-boarders who inhabited the upper floors.
In the ordinary course of things, the very last place that I should have chosen to live in was a convent. There is, however, a good old English saying to the effect that Beggars can’t be Choosers: and when the nuns offered me not only board and lodging but a gay little room with central heating and a window with a view of the chimney-pots of Bayswater that Whistler might have envied—all for less than I’d paid for my lodging alone at Bettingdon Terrace—is it to be wondered at that I accepted?
Of course, if I had wanted amusement or companionship, I should not have gone there. But I didn’t. I needed peace and quiet. Absurd as it must sound, at the day’s end, the strain of struggling through twelve plain hours of life had completely worn me down.
(2)
Meanwhile, I was picking up much interesting information about doctors at the Royal Society of Medicine.
Mr. Edwards, the secretary, who was certainly in a position to know, had assured me that no nicer set of men were to be found on earth than English doctors. This I was quite ready to believe. Watching them as they hurried in and out on their way to lecture hall or reading room I was impressed by what I saw. These tired, busy-looking men with lined and thoughtful faces inspired one with confidence. They looked sincere and kind: completely dedicated to the tremendous work which absorbed their lives and energies.
Now and again the girls in the Returns Office would draw my attention to celebrities.
‘Look—quickly! That’s Lord Horder just getting into the lift!’ or ‘There’s the Radio Doctor button-holing the fat little R.A.F. type with the gongs on his chest!’
And a brief and sometimes spicy biography would perhaps be vouchsafed in husky whispers…. All highly educative to one as ignorant of medical personalities as I.
One morning I arrived to find the hall so crowded that I had literally to fight my way to the stairs. Every known and unknown language was being jabbered by doctors—mostly in khaki—of every possible shape and size. A buzz as of swarming hornets made the air vibrate.
‘It’s an International Conference,’ I was told when I asked what was happening.
Later in the morning I again became entangled with the same gentlemen as they poured—gabbling more excitedly than ever—out of one of the lecture halls. I noticed an elderly man explaining something to a group of smart young Yankee officers. Their expressions struck me. One does not often see reverence in the eyes of young America.
Then the elderly man turned round and I recognized him. It was Lord Dawson of Penn, friend and doctor of King George V—the man who all unwittingly had warned the Empire of the end of an epoch in the famous phrase: ‘The King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close.’
The last time I had seen him had been at my bedside in the convent. This may sound a little surprising. Let me hasten to explain.
When necessary, leave can always be obtained for doctors to penetrate behind walls and grilles to see their patients. Now, it happened that Lord Dawson was Uncle Stan’s doctor. And, after the frightful strain and worry of the abdication, he had helped him rather wonderfully back to health. Therefore, when I myself had been ill and my uncle had come to see me, he had suggested that what Lord Dawson had done for him, he might be able to do for me.
Accordingly, on a certain foggy winter evening, the famous doctor arrived. The Reverend Mother Prioress herself conducted him up the ghost-haunted panelled staircase to the tiny cell where I was lying in bed in the dark.
Reverend Mother put down the small oil lamp on the chest of drawers. Then, to my astonishment, she quietly withdrew. Lord Dawson and I were alone.
How he had managed to obtain this unheard-of concession remains a mystery. I have, however, observed that people with noses shaped like his very seldom fail to get their way.
Though it was easy to see that he knew nothing of nuns or of their peculiar problems, he was extraordinarily intuitive. We had a long and excellent conversation. Much of the advice he gave me I shall remember and follow till I die.
The last thing he said as he rose to go wa
s:
‘Look here: do promise me that if ever anything in your life begins to go as it shouldn’t, you will let me know….’
And now, here he was again.
That night I wrote and told him that I’d left the convent and was now on a job at the Royal Society of Medicine.
Next morning, I had just started work when one of the girls called out to me that I was wanted on the telephone. It was Lord Dawson’s secretary.
Could I, she wanted to know, meet him that same day for lunch or dinner at the Dorchester?
For some reason I was so staggered by this invitation that she had to repeat it a second time before I could really take it in.
‘Um … er … well … let me see …’ I heard myself murmuring as though rapidly referring to an overcrowded engagement list.
‘He says,’ the secretary’s voice continued, ‘that he would prefer dinner if you can make it because there would be more time for conversation afterwards.’
So dinner it was.
The look that the receptionist bestowed on me at the Dorchester when I went up to inquire for Viscount Dawson was enough to spoil anybody’s evening. Naturally, I was quite aware that I was far from elegant, but, after all, there was a War On and I really had done everything I knew how to in the way of tatts and bobs. I’d even summoned up courage to call at my sister’s flat on my way back from work, for I hadn’t the vaguest idea how to rig myself out for the occasion. Advice was imperative. And Gay and Barbara were still out of town.
Having prepared myself for scourges, I had been pleasantly surprised when both my sister and the Friend-That-She-Lived-With manifested quite a reasonable amount of interest and answered my agitated inquiries about costume and behaviour with far less contempt than I expected or deserved.
No; it appeared that evening clothes would, in the circumstances, be definitely wrong. An afternoon dress, with no hat and a smart coat, if I had such a thing? Yes: there would probably be cocktails—(before the meal, silly!—one never drank them during). I’d better not have more than one, and be sure to drink it slowly. I must remember not to stick my hands under the table like one used to do in the old days. One should keep at least one elbow firmly planted beside one’s plate and rest one’s chin on one’s hand at intervals. And never, never in any circumstances, must one say ‘ever so’. It had sounded quite sweet and enthusiastic in 1913, but to utter the phrase to-day, stamped one simply as beyond the pale….
Finally, my sister had lent me her fur coat and rather a nice pearl necklace. This filled me with so frightful a sense of opulence and luxury that I hardly dared venture into the street.
The dinner was a great success.
Lord Dawson had certainly determined that it should be so, for there were violets at my place and the food and wine would, I feel sure, have been judged excellent by a far more experienced palate than mine is ever likely to become. And when coffee was brought, and an orange-lipped young woman with long black silk legs and a short frilled tou-tou like a ballet dancer’s, appeared before my astonished eyes with an elegantly arranged tray of every possible kind of cigarette, Lord Dawson picked out half a dozen or so of the largest packets and started to build them up round my place rather like a child with a box of bricks.
‘I know more, I expect, about these things than you do,’ he explained. ‘Stuff them into your bag and try them out when you get home.’
Presently he dived into a pocket and produced some apples. He rolled the largest and rosiest across to me.
‘One each,’ he observed. ‘If people consumed more of these, my income, which, I may tell you, is at the moment not to be sniffed at, would proportionately diminish. Keep that, however, under your hat.’
I’d never before seen anything quite like the Dorchester. Compared with the convent, every detail of whose architecture and furnishing was carefully designed to elevate the soul by suppressing all that could in any way indulge the body, this place seemed to have been planned to make that body as snug and comfortable as could possibly be conceived. How different, too, were the faces, clothes, and general behaviour of our fellow-diners from those of the people by whom I’d been surrounded for the greater part of my life! Lord Dawson entertained me by pointing out interesting people at the various little tables dotted about the large luxurious room.
‘That woman’—he indicated a luscious person whose diamond ear-rings flashed with each movement of her head—‘kept an old clothes shop in the Mile End Road till clothes-rationing started. Then she made a fortune. Nobody, you see, could check up on what went backwards and forwards across the counter. Now she lives in great style and has champagne with every meal.’
Much impressed, I studied her in silence.
Quite at the other end of the room, two extremely sophisticated-looking women were deep in talk.
‘That’s an odd ménage,’ said Lord Dawson. ‘They are in love with each other and live together as if they were man and wife. What do you think of that?’
Before I could answer, a ravishing creature in one of those long, bare-backed gowns which I’d gathered from advertisements were the modern woman’s evening dress, strolled past our table. She touched Lord Dawson lightly on the shoulder with an exquisitely tended hand. He introduced us and I realized that I was talking to the wife of one of our leading generals out in Africa. In the short conversation that followed, I had ample opportunity of realizing how deep was the abyss which now separated me from the ‘society woman’ of the present day.
It was after she had drifted gracefully away that we really began to get down to what I believe are now known as brass tacks.
In a fatherly kind of way, Lord Dawson inquired whether I had any Expectations.
A little ruefully, I replied that if he meant rich relations from whom I had hopes of legacies, the answer was emphatically No.
Lord Dawson put down his cup and began to talk interestingly and urgently about Industry. What I needed, he told me, was a Career. Very well, then. He would help me to plan one.
He was, he said, deeply interested in what he called the Welfare Department of Industry. He sketched what his idea of the person in charge of such a department in a first-class industrial concern ought to be. He told me, that in his opinion, I was in many ways qualified for such a position. Of course, I should need training; it might even mean a year of intensive study in one of the London hospitals. But with him behind me, that could easily be arranged. In fact, if the details of the work (and he proceeded to explain them) appealed to me, he would not only see that I had the best possible training, but, if I made good, at the end of it, would guarantee me a first-class job. I was to think it over carefully, he said, and, when I’d made up my mind, was to let him know.
At the end of the evening, Lord Dawson packed me into a prepaid taxi, reminding me that I was to write to him as soon as I had decided whether I wanted his help or not.
It was a wonderful night. There were stars everywhere, swarming like golden bees against the dark velvet of the sky. I stopped the taxi. Walking is conducive to meditation. And I certainly had plenty to meditate upon as, shining my torch along the kerb, I walked back the rest of the way. Yet somehow, I think I had already decided that Welfare, Industrial or otherwise, was not for me.
(3)
Of course, if I had accepted Lord Dawson’s offer—as I was strongly urged to do by everyone of whom I asked advice—my life would probably have been more useful than it is to-day. Or—would it?
Knowing myself, I felt sure that no matter how hard I tried, I should never be able to hold down a job of that kind for long. Besides, did I honestly want to? Wasn’t it rather unwise to tie oneself up again so soon to a job for which one felt not only no enthusiasm but even a vague repugnance. The very word Industry suggested everything in the modern world that I most disliked.
Heaven knows what fate might befall me were I to set down here the feelings which, since my exodus, had been inspired by contact with what in my youth had been known as ‘the lower c
lasses’. I had come forth from my convent with definitely socialist tendencies. But a year of cheek-by-jowl intercourse with the working people of to-day had changed all that. There had been, of course, plenty of exceptions, but on the whole, ‘the people’ now impressed me as full of class prejudice and an almost vindictive envy-hatred-and-malice fixation towards anyone who was richer, cleverer or in any way superior to themselves.
A good illustration of what I mean occurs in Noel Coward’s Cavalcade. His thumbnail sketch of the gradual change that takes place in the attitude of Fanny and her mother towards their employers during the years between the wars was most illuminating. Quite possibly, if I’d known more about the causes of that change I should have been less repelled by it. As it was, I merely noted what had happened with resentment and a certain puzzled regret.
All of which, it now appeared to me, didn’t form a very promising foundation on which to build my services to Industry.
Another thing.
In reviewing my misspent life, I am increasingly impressed by the fact that all my worst mistakes have resulted from turning a deaf ear to Inward Urges.
I say ‘urge’ rather than ‘inspiration’, because an Urge is such a queer, inexplicable thing that one hesitates to think of it as strictly spiritual. Indeed, in my case, Urges usually begin to operate from a prosaic spot somewhere in the pit of the stomach. Like some blind, irresistible force, they take complete possession of one’s being, impelling one to follow or to refrain from, some particular course of action. Should one, however, struggle to resist, and continue resisting, the Urge gradually fades out and ends by disappearing altogether. When this happens, I have observed that the remembrance of it tends to haunt one uncomfortably in the years that follow.
I Leap Over the Wall Page 26