‘That saddle of mutton –’ I would begin from the open doorway, and mother with a sigh of relief pronounced, ‘A bit overdone. Clara got flustered because the jelly wouldn’t set’.
‘Was it all of a dither?’
‘No. The Lord was with us – very much at the eleventh hour, bless him! And everyone went chiefly for the cabinet pudding.’
‘What’ve they got on?’
‘The vicar’s in green silk and Auntie S’s trousers have a beautiful crease down the middle.’
‘No, but really?’
‘Auntie S is really looking awfully nice in golden-brown and sent her love to you: Mrs. Grimstone’s in purple (moiré I think) with a foetid little V neck.’
‘And Molly?’ I asked, referring to the daughter of what I called ‘the other doctor’, as he wasn’t ours.
‘Can’t remember for m’life so it must be something rather stumatic. Oh, if I had the dressing of her!’
Together in the warm dark with the circle of little black skulls on the ceiling we dressed Molly Voles; I was for pale blue satin of the shade which was called ‘electric’, and then it was over time for mother to leave me.
Or sometimes the vacuums at her own table caused her to rush upstairs for what she called ‘a refresher’, actually between courses. At these times the news was equally comforting but far more telegraphic.
‘Dear Mrs. Field sends you a kiss and Daisy’s got a chill and won’t be at school to-morrow, she says.’ Or,
‘New pudding quite a success and the Ackworth-Meads asked for the recipe which I thought such bad manners that they won’t get it out of me, and Mrs. Markham wants our Shakespeare readings in costume!’
This item meant a lot to me. For Mrs. Markham was not only a near neighbour in an avenue over the road, but for one who was to remain a non-intimate of us Morants, a complete specimen, i.e. a known face, house and definite address, also several listed characteristics, among which were a high colour and hard looking hair, a horsey and doggy and doeskin-glove’d atmosphere, and had once been rumoured, amid much laughter and cries of ‘She would!’ to have smoked one of her husband’s cigarettes. The Markham joke was allowed quite cheerfully to be shared by Mell and myself and ran concurrently with a policy which still sent children and maidens from the room if the word Divorce was going to have to be mentioned or the belief circulated that somebody dyed her hair, and elaborately burst into French at the children’s midday dinner-table at the slightest provocation, thus putting us all on the alert at once where an open discussion in English would probably have left us completely unheeding. Many books (including Trilby) and the reading of all newspapers were forbidden us until we were well on in our ’teens, and we never dreamed of surreptitious peeps and abstractions from bookshelves.
Perhaps we grew up a little backward according to the standards of to-day – no forced pleasures or premature ennuis – but at least normally and at our own pace which, in my case at least, was to be a slow one.
For the rest, I can pin down three glimpses of the night-nursery: A Christmas dawn, very grey, and waking after a night broken by anticipation, and feeling at the rails above my head for the woollen stocking, and squeezing it to hear the rustle of tissue paper packets. Duty-sleep accomplished! The Day is here! that disorganized delight darkened only by thoughts of church, or if one escaped the service itself, of losing mother and members of the family for what seemed to be endless tracts of time.
An Easter morning, and displaying the incredible quantity of advance eggs given to me upon the top of our chest of drawers – it looked like a confectioner’s window: of seeing all the year round upon the other chest of drawers the personal treasures of Aggie Drumhead, the nurse, which included a certain cabinet photograph framed in green plush with gilt tin corners, of her mother, in shawl, busk’d and bodice’d and a central parting, and a bulky, opulent family album with gilt clasps and a key, which I thought quite beautiful.
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I thought then, and I think still, that even in an era when toys were toys and not hideous models or imitations in miniature of world-belligerence, mother gave me the best presents in the world. Owing to her seniority, at an age when every year makes such a huge disparity, Mell’s gifts and my own were never in the same group, so that she had moved on to new dresses and those chunky handkerchief sachets of satin piped with cord and ornamented with a dry looking spray of ‘hand-painted’ flowers while I was still in the immeasurably preferable stage of objects which caught the eye and imagination.
One year, my present-in-chief was a large Christmas tree all to myself, fully decorated, and dangled and tinselled and candled and hung on its lower boughs with paper packets of more presents; or there was the year of the dolls’ dinner-table, complete with tiny cutlery and glass, siphons, épergne and damask cloth, next it the dolls’ draper’s shop which mother, contemptuously bundling the original contents to oblivion, stocked herself, and spent hours blocking four-inch bolts of material, rolling ribbon on to reels, contriving stands for hats trimmed and untrimmed, and filling the cash-drawer with dolls’ money – she even rigged up an overhead change system from cash-desk to counter, where a marble rolled in a groove conveying bills. Or there was the year of the Bavarian village, a wooden, three-sided oblong depicting a pleasant vista of peasants standing up and sitting down and driving cows up the hill behind a red-roofed church; you turned a handle, and instantly from two slits in the street rose an unending chain of more villagers who passed across the stage and disappeared to a tinkling melody down the other slit.
Mother would come in, cheek chill to one’s kiss, as she pushed up her veil of spotted net, from one of her day-trips to London; six o’clock was therefore a lurking-time in the hall, waiting for the special series of raps upon the knocker that she kept for my ears alone.
How I should like to be able to relate in Dickensian detail and heartiness, with perhaps a tear of domestic sentiment to wind up with, the feasts which celebrated our Christmas. But it is heaven’s truth that I can’t recall one single meal that we all ate at Evenfield in the whole eleven years that we lived in the house, except the repellent souvenir that, feed she the servants never so madly, orange-and-nut she them never so generously, the servants nearly always pilfered our oranges when they had exhausted their own. And once, Marcus and Mell had a passage concerning a small box of glacé fruit; Mell, invited to take one, with great moral courage made for the centre-piece of resistance, the apricot, and Cuss, unable of decency to protest aloud, was so riled that he silently rushed out into the snow and posted the whole lot into the pillar-box, which I have always considered a magnificent gesture.
We had, I imagine, no family games on Christmas Night: it may have been owing to our conflicting ages and bedtimes and the necessitous inclusion of father, who as we all agreed was passable at active games but no good at all on paper, because he became far above everybody’s head at once, even at that admittedly difficult pastime ‘word and question’, in which you are faced with a noun and a query and have to make a verse against time in which you bring in the word and answer the question. It is a splendid game, but needs, like pastry, a light hand, and father’s contributions were so scholarly (they included palindromes and Latin puns and mythologic references and historic incidents) that he morally broke up the party in no time. Also, in those days, everybody in the place was growing up, and that meant strictly family parties of their own. I don’t, now I come to think of it, recollect one tangibly lonely person in Addison. And so, as with so many dozens of other households if we had only known it, our Christmas Day made the mistake of starting crescendo and finishing diminuendo.
CHAPTER V
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I LOVED winter mornings in the day-nursery, with its contrast of sky-blue wall-paper sprayed with fat pink apple-blossom, the rime on the lawn, and the red sun behind the silver birch-tree that separated our garden from the house next door.
Sitting in my high chair that I stuck to long after I was old enough for an o
rdinary one (could it have been that self-same chair that auntie S wished installed first thing in the house?), with my back comfortably to the fire, head beneath the elaborate oil lamp suspended from the ceiling from which the paper chains of Christmas had been removed, I watched poor Mell shrugging into coat and tam-o’-shanter, slinging satchel round her shoulders and taking a last demented look at her German Grammar over the preparation of which she would sometimes cry with bewilderment at night in the dining-room. She invented, finally, a scheme to help her, which consisted of illustrating the margins of the book with vegetables and dressing them in trousers or skirts according to their sex. From nine o’clock to tea-time the nursery saw her no more, and she would pick up Janet Martin, who lived at ‘Stamboul’, that large weather-cock’d house over the wall at the bottom of our garden, to accompany her the two miles to the High School.
In the nursery, I was left to please myself until the morning walk or shopping with mother, the heaven-sent rumour conveyed by gardener or errand boy via Aggie that the ice was ‘holding’, which delightfully upset the morning, or until it was time to go downstairs for lessons with mother. Of these lessons I remember that as a punishment I was made to read the stodgier of the letter-press at the end of Lays Of Ancient Rome instead of How Horatio Kept The Bridge, which also bored me greatly in any case, and the woodcuts of which, depicting young men in curly toupés, knee-length skirts and repulsively muscular calves, seemed to me to be so unreal as not to be worth my attention. Anyway, that session ended in tears and mutual disappointment, and the day closed with a visit to the toyshop and the bestowal of a box of dolls’ notepaper with gilt edges and a spray of forget-me-nots in the corner of each tiny sheet. On another occasion, mother concluded the lessons with the present of a copy of Sesame and Lilies. I was pleased, regarding the book as a piece of property, but I never read it and haven’t got round to it yet! I feel certain that something instinctive whispers in one’s ear that certain literature is not and never will be one’s cup of tea. Why Sesame, and wherefore Lilies? I don’t even want to know. It’s all very shocking, and I may have missed something, after all, but don’t think I have!
Over geography I made the same grandiose errors in location at eight years old as I make now, and mother once said, very reasonably, ‘No, that island belongs to us. You wouldn’t want the French to pull down our flag and set up theirs on it!’ Scripture she very wisely left alone, for I defy anybody in the world to make that subject interesting until the time that they shall be old enough to read such books as Ur of The Chaldees and The Bible As Literature, which weren’t published or thought of then, because neither society nor public opinion had faced the fact that if the Bible is worth study it is worth research and checks-up that would redeem it from the pit into which it had fallen and align it with the vital things of life. And so in the most happy and comfortable manner I learnt to read, and very little else. Mother probably knew that learning only begins when the textbooks close and that the ultimate point of reading is not so much the retention of facts as the knowledge of where to put your hand on them when wanted.
I cheated, once, in a spelling lesson. The word was ‘theatre’, and mother, having been called from the room, I sat, knowing that the word was somewhere near me in the nursery; and then it came to me that Theatre was painted on the drop-curtain of my toy theatre, and I got up, pulled aside the red velvet tableaux curtains (copied by mother from those at the Theatre Royal in our market town) and remedied the scholastic lapse in a second.
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To approach that model theatre was fatal, for you promptly became dead to the world. Even father had a pondered facetiousness ready for it and was quite offended, on general principles, that his suggested Greek inscription (which he wrote out meticulously and which looked like ‘Hoi-yoi-Oy’ to me) was not incorporated into the décor: it meant, I believe, ‘We aim at the noblest art’, which, as far as doing the thing properly and taking things seriously went, we did, but there was an unspoken feeling that if father’s kind of art crept in and took charge the theatre would cease to amuse or please at once. Emphatically we evaded hoy-oy-oyings, but, as against this, Marcus took a hand and cut a trap-door with his penknife up which the Demon could be poked, or twitched by cotton from the flies, a device of which I became so enamoured that for months not only the Villain but all unsympathetic characters came up it as well, until I learnt from mother that Irving had never treated himself to such an entry or exit, even in Faust.
For that theatre Mell made elaborate transformation scenes, collapsible kitchen tables and handkerchiefs with a large inked handmark for Widow Twankey, a hint she had picked up from Dan Leno, and the ballets were strictly dressed alike, while a matinée of The Geisha at the Theatre Royal, Kingsmarket, moved Mell to construct a perfect little veranda of painted papier mâché which she covered with single blossoms from a spray of artificial lilac on one of mother’s summer hats, to imitate wistaria. An artist friend of ours told us that Mell must have an uncommonly straight eye, as the veranda was to scale to the fraction of an inch – he measured it. The ideal Stock company came from the Addison toyshop: the dolls were four inches long, had pink wadded bodies and limbs, with china heads on to which wigs could easily be fitted. And no doll trod those boards who was not previously made-up, with pink from a virulently-coloured boiled sweet, and face-powder (or failing all else, icing-sugar).
Between lessons, walk, hoops and gossip with cronies in the Park, and later, waiting for the daily arrival of the governess, with a pink nose and a bicycle, came the mid-morning milk and Fairy cakes alone with mother, gossips in which, as with the theatre, time ceased to be, and once was to bring down from above the patient, wondering Miss Abernethy to shepherd me to sums on a slate at a preposterous hour. The Fairy cakes have now, in their pristine glory, gone off the market, although they cling like divorced countesses to the title. But who dies if memory lives?
With father in London at his office, Marcus once more quite suddenly not with us (Winchester) and Mell at the High School, it was I of our family who got the lion’s share of the nursery.
It was a good room to loiter in when the action slowed down: one could even enjoy a cold in it or whoop and be sick in it without unfriendly feelings. The furniture was rather battered, the upright piano, poor soul, a horror whose keys badly needed their teeth brushed, and the pictures were bygone supplements of Nelson watching Trafalgar, while a midshipman bound up his own wrist and was chaffed in the process by a senior officer in white knee-breeches, and the middle-distant deck was filled with sailors in Sam Weller suits and varnished pot-hats, and a nice, greedy nineteenth century chromolithograph of an inn parlour and a beaming maidservant in a mob-cap serving a capon to a tableful of huntsmen who grinned from ear to ear, gallantly toasted her in tankards of beer and a spirit that I long believed to be admiration until I became very much older indeed and perceived to be what Mr. Sinclair Lewis dismisses as ‘belly smiles’.
On the floor was a large square organ that you turned by a handle and on to which huge perforated records of brown cardboard were placed in the gramophone manner. It was seldom enjoyed: it had a large capacity for alarming which may have been due to the castratedly ecclesiastic sounds that it emitted, or to its repertoire, only one item of which I remember, ‘The Lights of London’. Oddly enough, and before I ever saw London, this tune conjured up a vista of a wide bridge aligned with standard lamps that I have since identified with so many of the existent bridges in town.
Another ne’erdoweel toy was a box of stone bricks which traditionally belonged to my brother. These depressed us even to look at: they handled soapily and had a dreary smell of what I now diagnose as provincial side-streets and Nonconformity, and the sheets of models of what you could build from them were enough to put anybody off at any age.
The dolls had an unreliable time of it; I don’t know what sort of mother Mell had been but I can answer for my own persistently non-maternal instincts. Far too large to go on the stage, I must have
regarded them as would an actor-manager his daughter who refused the theatre as a career, or his son who chose the commercial life. I certainly once gave the dolls a Bible reading, but mainly because I had a dressing-gown that buttoned down the front and a cap shaped like a biretta, and fancied myself as a Padre.
Mell and I both wrote as a matter of course – I even finished two novels; to ages up to sixteen this form of endeavour presents no difficulties whatsoever. Mell ran more to historic plays (a line from her Robin the Outlaw ran, ‘Now let the jerkin ring!’), but she seldom finished anything. She completed a quarter of a Chinese musical comedy with an opening chorus of coolie gardeners grouped round rose bushes (‘the trees were planted long before we came’) which a subsequent study of professional libretti leaves me still considering was cuts above most of the shows then being produced: it would, indeed, be impossible to be worse than some of them.
My novels were descriptive and satiric. I went to the living for my characters, and no love affair could live, or did, in such an angry sea, nor was any engagement able to withstand the gales of chaff in which I conducted it. Even the heroine (Aggie Drumhead) had a face that was merely ‘sensible’, lost the affections of her ‘intended’ upon a picnic, and, taking an after-luncheon nap, descended into hell, from whence, amid detailed and adjectival descriptions of troops of fiends, she failed to rise again on the third day. Aggie’s comment on this work was, ‘Well, there’s a cheek!’
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The use of a pen only became irksome when letters of thanks to godmother, grandmother and such other remote London persons as plied me with presents for mother’s or duty’s sake had to be tackled and which couldn’t be covered by verbal thanks to the givers in Addison itself. And that wasn’t all. For through the last week of December and the whole of January small double-leaved invitation cards with a festive coloured picture appeared upon my breakfast plate. ‘We hope you can come to our Party’, said they in print, with the sender’s name (more victims to the ink-pot in other nurseries) filled in below, or ‘We are giving a New Year Party and are expecting YOU’, they said, with another and different picture. Sometimes a sail appeared in the shape of return cards supplied to me in which the mere scrawling of my name at the bottom of the printed thanks and acceptance solved the compositional agony. But one or two houses, quite monstrously closing their eyes to the juvenility of the illustrated invitation, sent stern, adult white squares of printed announcement, to acknowledge which that baffling, treacherous and currishly snapping commodity, the third person singular, had to be resorted to, a medium in which I am not at my best to this day.
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