I once met a young woman – unmarried, and in something of a state – who said that only having a baby could help her psychologically. Help her? Procreation is for the child’s benefit, and should only be brought about by a care for its future and for the love of it as an individual. I believe that a child needs two parents, and that the father should play his part from the beginning. By this I do not mean that he should be dragged through the ugliness and blood of the labour ward, as if to punish him for his part in the event. I would not have had my husband near me, to hear me gasping and grunting, and see me in ridiculous postures, at any price. The actual giving of birth is my business, only mine.
To return to the problem of illegitimacy. It is no longer, we are told, a ‘stigma’. No? Here we are reverting to our usual bourgeois thinking. To millions of ‘unenlightened’ people it will remain a stigma, causing pain, or at least embarrassment, to the child from the innocent questions of its friends (children’s questions are, by the way, very rarely innocent), and a host of complications, some of which these hopeful unmarried mothers, delightedly withholding a real family background from their babies, cannot possibly foresee as yet. It is too early. I would bet that there is still many a household in England, from which the trendy daughter, following the fashionable moeurs and proud of her coming illegitimate child, will promptly be slung out. These girls might be in a minority, but I feel pretty sure they exist.
In the newspaper, only this morning, I read of a young girl discovered dead in her own blood over a wash basin, in a bedsitter, with her dead baby in a carrier-bag by her side. She had been afraid to tell her parents. This was obviously a pure accident. Most illegitimate births are accidental. But are some thought to be, in the new ‘freedom’ of the well-to-do, acceptable?
To marry is, of course, to take on a responsibility. To make a good marriage, needs a lot of patience and good faith, respect on both sides, common interests, and an enormous amount of understanding. Also, it needs love, which is something more, much more than sex alone, and more lasting.
I am sometimes suspicious – perhaps cynically – of some of those girls who will not marry the father of their child, even though they profess a loving relationship. Could it possibly be that the man doesn’t want to marry them? In many cases, the desire for ‘freedom’, however misguided, is genuine. But have either the man or the woman really looked ahead? I think if the woman did so, too, she would find that she had merely liberated the man – and with no advantage either to herself or to her child. She can be left flat and penniless – unless she is a ‘celebrity’ – and often, in the long run, she is.
My daughter, Lindsay, who naturally knows more about her generation than I do, thinks I am all too sanguine about the benefits of sex-education and the Pill. She is probably dead right, and I listen to her with respect. Her claim is that many young girls, say of sixteen or seventeen, have no idea, even after all the publicity, where they may obtain preventatives, but go blindly on in the conviction that nothing will ever happen to them. But it does.
She also suggests that few of them know anything about the current ideas of doing away with marriage altogether. Perhaps they don’t, although if so, they can’t read the popular papers. All I say is that, despite our new ‘freedom’, tragedies continue. And I have small sympathy with those who would boost these optimistic ideas on their way.
The chief trend-setters of our society are film stars, T.V. celebrities and footballers. Let them be careful what trends they set, for to their example thousands and thousands cannot bear to say no. They must bear a load of responsibility.
To quote the late Stevie Smith:
All these illegitimate babies …
Oh, girls, girls,
Silly little cheap things,
Why do you not put some value on yourselves,
Learn to say, no?
Did nobody teach you?
Nobody teaches anybody to say No nowadays,
People should teach people to say No.
She was a wise, stern woman, Stevie.
1954. She has by now gone back to Spain and I have had the remarkable good fortune of finding Doris.
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9. A Sharp Decline in Income
I have no clear idea from what income we had to decline. My grandfather (C. E. Howson) had died before I was born, but my memories were of comfort: of deep larders full of preserves, raised pies, hams, bottled fruits, and whatever else one finds in what might grandly be described as ‘still-rooms’. I wouldn’t know now.
On my mother’s side, we had been a theatrical family for generations. My grandfather, Australian-born of English parents, had begun by taking out band-parts for fourpence a sheet: he had played the violin in a theatre orchestra; danced as Harlequin in pantomime: and by some transition I do not know about, had become Sir Henry Irving’s treasurer, which job he held for twenty-five years. (I might say, in passing, that he seems to have been a good linguist. Some years after his death my mother and Aunt Kalie discovered in the summerhouse at the end of the garden, half a lifetime of diaries, written in violet ink in his lovely script, in Italian. And on the grounds that nobody would be able to read them – perhaps on other grounds too – they incinerated the lot. I am intrigued to think what may have been lost by this ridiculous action.)
So far as I can recall, my grandfather’s sister, Emma Howson, was the original Josephine in H.M.S. Pinafore. I cannot check the truth of this. A relative of a still older generation introduced the Carl Rosa Opera into Australia. And a lady (probably Mrs Albert Howson) who called herself Madame Albertazzi was a singer of no mean repute. One of my great-great-uncles was in the touring company of Our American Cousin, after Lincoln’s assassination.
But it was to Sir Henry Irving and Dame Ellen Terry that I owed any lustre of my background. Irving liked to deck his stage with good-looking people, whether talented or not: so my stately grandmother (born in the Old Kent Road and rigorously educated in speech and deportment by my grandfather) walked on as the Duchess of Norfolk in Henry VIII, carrying the infant Elizabeth. My Aunt Kalie was with the company for some time, and went on one of the later American tours: her most ambitious role, however, was as the Ghost of Marie Antoinette in Robespierre. Non-speaking.
Here, I think I must break off to tell a story. It was one of Irving’s spectacular crowd scenes, in this play, and Aunt Kalie was yelling with the others. After Irving’s great speech to, I believe, the Goddess of Reason, the crowd was to cry, ‘To the Champs de Mars!’ One night, unfortunately, Aunt Kalie mistook her cue, and raised that solitary cry before Irving had spoken. Whereupon the curtain came down. My aunt, in desperate distress, rushed off into a corner to hide: she did not know what was to happen to her. But Irving found her out. Standing noble and beetle-browed above her trembling body, he contemplated her. Then he remarked, ‘Original, Miss Howson, but don’t do it again.’
My youngest Aunt Emma, already stout as a child, but extremely beautiful, was called upon by Irving to act as a cupbearer: but she fidgeted and he had to get rid of her.
My mother Amy, however, having a small but pretty singing voice, went to join the D’Oyly Carte Company: she never rose higher than understudy to Yum-Yum (who did not fall ill) but it is from her that I gained an extensive knowledge of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas.
I have often thought that we had no recognisable class at all. We were thought of as ‘Bohemians’. I am afraid my family was afflicted with a degree of snobbery: the thought of ‘marrying into trade’ afflicted them as it might have afflicted a noble Victorian. But none of us ever did.
Our house, despite its ugly facade, had a bizarre attraction within. My grandfather had a charming taste in wallpapers: the drawing-room, deep blue and gold-flecked, was adorned in the middle by one or the innumerable perks that came from Irving – a chandelier from his production of Henry VIII. I cannot say the same of his taste for furniture: he brought some horrible rocking-chairs back from San Francisco, and some really dreadful pi
eces of yellow maple, including a desk that was also a souvenir cabinet, filled with such objects as emus’ and ostriches’ eggs.
The hallways were hung with Irvingiana: Beckett loomed just inside the door, Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, hung beside it. Satin programmes, from Royal performances at the Lyceum, abounded: I now regret that I have given so many away, kept so few, of those left to me by my Aunt Kalie. Though I could never have seen Irving or Terry, I was told so much about them, that I began to believe I had: they remain a cult with me. I especially love Ellen Terry, because she was so ginger-golden, and because she had been so kind with gifts of toffees to my mother and my Aunt Kalie who, as children, had been at school at Eecloo, in Belgium.
But I was most permanently impressed by the books in my grandfather’s library, mostly Irving’s rejects. There was, above all, the Irving edition of Shakespeare, enthrallingly illustrated by Gordon Browne: it was from this that I learned my Shakespeare at a very early age, just spelling out the captions and then seeing where they fitted into the text. I had read the whole canon by the age of eight, though with what degree of comprehension I shouldn’t like to say. Then there was The Life of Sir Stamford Raffles (dull), The Arabian Nights (expurgated), the complete works of Washington Irving, a few volumes of Dickens, and a medley of other books.
One book we did not have was one grandfather had destroyed in a rage. He had always detested Irving’s secretary, Bram Stoker. One day he came home with a greyish volume in his hands, and said to his children, ‘Stoker has written a beastly book. It’s all about people who suck other people’s blood and lunatics who eat flies.’ He put it straight on the fire. It was, of course, the first edition of Dracula.
After his death, and during early childhood, prosperity still seemed in the air. My Aunt Kalie, theatrical ambitions forgotten, had taken a job at the Ministry of Transport. My Aunt Emma married, though it did not turn out so well for her. Our chief sadness was for my grandmother, diabetic and now going blind. She was to be totally blind for the last ten years of her life. She loved to cook, and was magnificent at it: it was a tragic day when she was told that she must stop, since a nail and a dead mouse had been found in successive rice puddings. She took her consolation later, such as it was, in teaching cooking to me, and questioning me closely as I followed her instructions. I regret that all her teaching has been mostly forgotten, and that my cooking today is no more than mediocre.
It was some time before my father’s death that we began to feel the pinch. No more were we able to keep open house, as my grandmother had done, on Sunday nights, the table covered with roast chickens, pies, jellies and wonderful trifles. Our ‘musical evenings’, which we much prized, became fewer and fewer. (They were somewhat better than average, because we were able to draw on many professionals.) My mother and I left our flat at the top of the house to make way for lodgers, and shared the semi-basement sitting-room as a bedroom. All manner of lodgers passed through our hands: one was speedily removed, being suspected of sleeping sickness: one, a rubicund Welshman, got into fights on the stairways with my Uncle Charlie: one, who posed as a doctor living with his sister, sat quietly upstairs manufacturing pornographic literature, until the police caught up with him.
All this seemed to me great fun, and I was surprised to hear my Aunt Kalie mourn that my grandmother, could she see, would be deeply distressed by the relative poverty indicated by the state of the larder.
But when my father died, things had to alter more radically.
I was then at Clapham County Secondary School, for which my mother paid fees of £5 a term. She had to plead with an acquaintance among the governors that this should be remitted, which it was. She took in typing, to bring a little money into the house, for R. K.’s debts lingered on, and death did not appear to cancel them. She had some interesting clients, among them Mr Hsiung, author of Lady Precious Stream, and the son – or grandson – of Buffalo Bill. To see the last coming down our area steps on Battersea Rise, with Stetson hat and long white flowing locks, was something of an experience.
And I – few clothes, and meagre pocket money. But I adapted to all this without pain. I had my own plot in our long back garden, with poplars and a cherry tree, and had cultivated it as I pleased, never at a loss for bedding-out plants and packets of seed. Now, at times, my mother would find me a hard-to-spare twopence, and I would go out in a delight hitherto unfelt to buy a root of pansies, or of pink-tipped daisies: to put in this one plant gave me more pleasure than putting in all the plants previously at my disposal. Poverty was rather fun, though it was nicer whenever it stopped hurting, like the old story of the lunatic banging his head against the wall because it was such a joy when he ceased to do so.
On my way home from school, I would call in once a week at Grandmother Johnson’s house; usually, with great laboriousness, she would extract from the reticule beneath her skirt, a sixpence. I did sense that she could ill-afford it, and indeed, when she continued the practice after my adolescence, was very embarrassed.
Of course, all this put an end to any hope of higher education for me. My headmistress, the splendid Miss Ethel A. Jones, who remained my friend till her death at the age of 84, wanted me to go to Oxford to read English: how she hoped to overcome my mathematical difficulties first (I am numerically blind) I do not know. But her wishes didn’t matter. Grants were very slender then, and that I could have supported myself, let alone my mother, was inconceivable. I spent one year in the sixth form, left at sixteen-and-a-half, and at seventeen – this must have been a severe strain on what were my mother’s now very frail resources – took a six-month course at the Triangle Secretarial College in South Molton Street, which was rather smart.
Then I had to go out to work. I found a job as The Junior in the West End branch of the Central Hanover Bank of New York in Lower Regent Street. Very little banking was done here: it was really designed for looking after the needs of travelling Americans. The offices were sumptuous and brand-new: but I was paid the not-so-sumptuous sum of £2 a week, which, after four years rose to £3.
The joys of Friday, of pay-day! By Thursday, I was so hard up that I could barely afford a cup of tea and a bun for lunch, for part of my salary went to my mother, who gave me back 10s a week for fares, food, and the ten cigarettes which I could not even then do without. But on Friday I deserted the ABC and went to Slater’s, where I would have an omelette and chips, and a blackcurrant sponge pudding. I should wish to say that I have never enjoyed, in my life, any meals as much as I did those.
My mother’s typing earnings went largely to my grandmother to pay for our keep. With the little she was able to save, she bought material to make me new dresses.
I should hate anyone to think that I am romanticising poverty: if I am romanticising it at all, it was my own semi-poverty. True poverty, sleeping rough under bridges, on freezing nights, protected by newspapers, hardly entered my head. For I had a warm bed, a supper usually brought from the delicatessen over the way, a loving family, and nothing to hate but my daily journeys from Battersea Rise to the office. In autumn and winter, wrap up as I would, I was invariably cold. I would look out from the top of the bus upon the windows of the Piccadilly clubs, upon peach-fed men stuffing what I believed to be kidneys and reading The Times: and I hated them all. Curious this, as I never liked kidneys myself.
Now, the thought of real poverty, above all that of very old people, lonely and friendless, struggling to keep warm with, at best, a one-bar electric fire, distresses me beyond measure. For what can I do, except subscribe to charity? I admire the young people (a maligned generation, except for the nihilistic minority who cannot be maligned too much) who do try to take practical action about these things, and who see far beyond them to the horrors existing in the Third World. I feel far older than my years, and perhaps more helpless than I need be.
My only excuse for writing this chapter is that we had a ‘come-down’: a wretched thing for my elders, but a stimulus to me. What became of Irving’s chandeliers?
The Japanese kakemonos, brought back by my grandfather from one of his American trips, on the walls? But Ellen’s picture hangs in my study still. Contemplating it, I can only think that her Lady Macbeth was, as Shaw put it, ‘such a dear’.
Three years after my father died, my handsome young uncle, with his dark curling hair and bluebell eyes, died also, from a duodenal ulcer too long neglected. Then, when I was eighteen, my grandmother. I remember the times when I ought to have read to her, but didn’t. I played the piano, I sang her favourite songs, but I hadn’t the patience for very long bouts of reading. Something else of guilt. Many years later, when Charles, my second husband, temporarily lost his sight – or most of it – I would read to him for hours, and love every moment of it. But in youth is cruelty.
10. Edith Sitwell
She was said to sign her letters sometimes with ‘Edith Sitwell, D.Litt., D.Litt., D.Litt.’, representing her three honorary degrees. (I am by no means certain that there is any truth in this, but it would be characteristic.) She delighted in the honours that came her way in a manner almost childish – as if she had been, say, a Girl Guide awarded a medal for rescuing some infant from a watery grave. Her pleasure in academic recognition came, I am sure, from the fact that she had had no education to speak of. Not that she needed it. She did very nicely without. She may have made herself into a Queen: but at heart she was humble. She was not really arrogant. When she seemed to be – and arrogance was a favourite dressing-up part – it was all facade. (I intend no pun.) She liked to behave like a great lady, which of course, by birth, she was: but spiritually she was more like a gentleman. So, come to that, was Queen Elizabeth I.
I should like to tell the story of how we happened to meet her (in 1959: alas, we had far too few years of her joyful company). I had written my novel, The Unspeakable Skipton, and I was rather pleased with it. This is rare with me: some of the novels of my later years, including The Humbler Board and The Humbler Creation, were saved from incineration by the efforts, in the first case of my younger son, and in the second, by my husband. This is not mock-modesty. I always feel, on the completion of almost any novel, that it is no good at all. But Skipton was quite different. I dropped it in, with the greatest confidence, upon the then Managing Director of my publishing house: and waited for, in due course, cries of delight. Nothing. Only a mysterious silence. Then an awful silence. I felt bound to break it. What, I asked, was wrong?
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