But some family or other actually did own a yacht: a small, steam-run, charming affair with glittering brass and hanging wire baskets of pink geraniums, and they once invited me to be of a party and I must have gone because, although I’ve no recollection of mother being on board, for some reason I see myself with that double sight that Peter Ibbetson discovered, wearing a yellow linen smock and silk socks, green sandals and a huge green rush hat, whereas I’d much rather remember where we went and what we had for luncheon and who was there and what they said.
So much for the river as we knew it. On land, all was gas and gaiters. Mrs. Raymond gave haymaking parties for the Addison children friends of her own trio in part of her grounds, and to this we went carrying miniature rakes, and there was, with typical topographic perversity (for it ran parallel with a row of horrid little two-story villas) a quite lovely meadow one stretch away from our turnip field and opposite the Raymonds’ house, which in July was studded with buttercups, daisies and marguerites, its hedge festooned with briony. Here, mother and I once (only once?) sank down before luncheon, up to our shoulders in all that green and white and gold.
3
It wasn’t, of course, all haymaking and yachts and salmon mayonnaise and garden parties, though I have forgotten to include a jolly and rather squalid annual fair, with the Kingsmarket Military Band, which for two days in July was set down in the Vicarage Field in a cul-de-sac road by the post office in Upper Addison. This function was known as ‘The Band-and-Fête’, and it may have been for charity. I, mishearing as children do the sense of words, always alluded to it as The Bandon Feet, and it had a stall where with luck you won large, squat brown humbugs. And there was a large merry-go-round which ranked (and still does) for me with the harlequinade as a source of mental uneasiness, possessing as they both seem to me to do an other-worldly element into whose power one may be drawn if one isn’t very careful … those assured figures of brass, whose forearms only moved, quite dreadfully, and kept time with the whining or stridulous music … the menace that is steam which as evening draws on, glows, as do the names Cumnor and Glamis, with a misty doom … those haunted, haunting and knowing hoots that the thing as a class, race, or genus emits from its apex quite (apparently) without reason, but for some excellent and awful motive of its own which we mustn’t know….
Before the whole circular contraption with its brass and glass and gilding and secret sub-life I would stand, wondering as I regained the earthly sanity of coco-nut shy or Aunt Sally whether one could get round, lay, or exorcize the merry-go-round best (or at all) in story, verse or music, while Aggie Drumhead faithfully plodded after me. But even now I can’t overcome my unease at merry-go-rounds. Is it possibly because their musical repertoire is almost never current, but of an era forgotten or superseded?
Once, we stayed at Bognor. Three large fields away over hedge and cornland was a fair, and in the fair was a merry-go-round whose lurid glow could be seen from our hotel windows, blasts of whose melody were borne to my appalled ears upon the autumnal air. It played in its own desolating fashion, for I really believe it could make Ta-ra-ra-boum-de-ay and Sousa’s marches things of menace, that most bleak and ghostly and fascinating tune, Sand Dunes, which is melancholia incarnate even when helped out with a ballroom and débutantes. I was so overcome that I ran to mother’s room, indicated to her the window out of which we both leant. A little was enough. She promptly went to her trunk and taking out a flask of brandy gave us both a drink. After a long silence we both said ‘Hell!’, and closed the windows!
Mrs. Jasperleigh gave a number of iced At Homes from which mother returned, as she said, faint but pursuing, as she allowed herself, a mild whisky (at three-and-six a bottle) and soda, while I gather that auntie S’s affairs involved nothing more strenuous than looking on at tennis sets. It was the riverside residents who came out strongest, with their lawns that sloped to the water, and to these houses that mother, and later Mell, dropped in for an hour or so. I got the betwixt-and-between functions, and of these my completest recollection is of an afternoon fancy-dress garden party given by Mrs. Domrémy to which Mell and I drove in a hired victoria right through Addison, dressed respectively as Veronique and one of the Little Michus.
The drive to The Towers was the best part of it, for it took us from our house right through the main shopping street, past the Board School and down a residential road past innumerable well-known front gates, and in the toyshop I saw a new doll that wasn’t there the previous day, and something else unfamiliar shining in rows in a cardboard box, and promised myself an investigation next morning, or on the way home from French with Madame; and the Field’s drawing-room was empty but there was a head at Mrs. Field’s airy bedroom window which suggested that they were dressing for the party, and further on Mrs. Stortford’s gardener was weeding the gravel of the eternally sunless drive, and I actually saw the bun of Miss Abernethy bent over her bicycle as she wheeled it down her side turning where she lived, and wondered what she was going to do when she got indoors …
Outside Mayvale a string of girls was returning from hockey in the Park shepherded by lean Miss Kirkby (of the Boo and the Ploo), and one of them saw us and her mouth became a delighted O, and she pointed, and they all turned, and Miss Kirkby grew red with the difficulty of simultaneously greeting us and scolding the pointer, and muffed it, and called out to Mell, ‘Never let me see you doing that again!’ and to the offender, ‘How nice you look!’
Thelma made appearance as The Belle of New York, and some young man came along late, as Widow Twankey with a Dan Leno make-up, and we took a shy but easy fancy to each other – for who could fear a pantomime Dame? What drew him to me I don’t know: I suppose it was my dress that was copied to the last detail from the theatre posters of the musical comedy. And when the inevitable Thelma danced, Twankey said, ‘A Salvation Army Lass doing the cake-walk is well worth the price of admission’, and to me, ‘Why aren’t you performing? My small brother thinks the earth of your dancing’, and because he was a Dame with a low-comedy dot at either end of his mouth it was possible not to lie and say I didn’t dance at all, and to conspire with him not to ask anybody to request me to do so, and he kept his word, leaving me to an afternoon without apprehension. He turned out to be a Barstowe, elder or eldest brother of freckled Jacky at whom I threw a stone in the Park because I hated his white felt hat. Jacky had at least two brothers, Mell said, of whom father’s ‘Ha-Clifford!’ of the Royal procession was one.
CHAPTER IX
1
ALL this sort of thing apart, it was our garden which really meant summer to me, and if anybody fears that I am going to enlarge upon it I can assure him that I am going to make strong efforts to refrain, bored to resentment as I have so often been by the exactitudes of novelists and their confounded multi-leaved Encyclopaedia Britannica and the uprisings of their verbum saps. All I will say (at any rate for the moment) is that we had a chancy mesh hammock tied between two apple-trees that bordered the party wall to Stamboul into which it was difficult to get, out of which more difficult to unpack yourself, but at least it was in the shade, unlike the glaring publicities of Mrs. Jasperleigh’s garden furnishings, and that there was a greenhouse in which Stiles seemed to grow nothing but the more repellent cacti and some begonias, yet which smelt quite delicious and stuffy as if the rarest blooms were under cultivation – I can’t think how he did it! And in the kitchen garden stood a large stone tank, put in by mother herself, in which toads could be lowered to swim with pathetic human perfection their little breaststroke, and on the sides of which sporadic and unsuccessful efforts at plank see-saw were once made by Mell and myself until I entered the Cavalry for a brief spell, mounted on a huge bath-can of red tin lined with blue.
One could be noisy in the garden though we seldom were: it was large enough to protect on its three sides Cocksedges, Martins and Randolphs. It wasn’t in the least picturesque but I loved it, and even Mell, at seventeen, would come through the french window of the draw
ing-room after dinner to gallop round the asphalt paths in the summer dusk; I would watch her from the bathroom window while being dried by Aggie. (It was in the bathroom that I first put that sooner-or-later question ‘How do babies come?’ Aggie Drumhead happened to be physiologically ‘for it’ in my case and her sensible, ‘You must ask y’ mother’, very pleasantly got me nowhere.)
In the mornings the borders fairly raged with the smell of alyssum, and we had a passion flower which seemed to oblige every year and which most lovely of things I’ve never seen since. The lawn was large, blindingly green and probably tiresome for Stiles owing to its crops of daisies and dandelions, but his ploddings back and forth with the mower at least contributed another good smell to the day which drowsily competed with that emitted by the lavender bushes.
Actually it was Stiles and the kitchen garden by the tank that gave me my major contentment, for what more could anyone ask than fruit and vegetable snacks all round one, there for the pulling up or picking off, plus unlimited if disjointed conversation when Stiles was weeding the asparagus trench? Our dialogue progressed well until he got to the middle, then we both closed down until he returned to weed the other side.
‘Stiles, don’t you think that with toads having faces like ours and proper mouths they could be taught to say things, if parrots can without?’
‘Well, Miss Bobbin, if you ask me –’ (he moves off and silence falls for ten minutes). I stood in a nice, stupid, sun-warmed coma.
‘– it may be all for the best’. Stiles had returned. ‘If you get mystifyin’ them toads there’s no sayin’ what they mightn’t come out with.’
Stiles was an excellent crony. We never played down to each other and he never insulted me by a bogus belief in fairies or Santa Claus although we used both parties for the entertainment and profit they could afford. In this way he could and did tell me long instalments of a story invented by himself about a Frog Fairy while being perfectly aware that neither of us believed in her, and on Christmas mornings he would bring me large sugar frames with a scrap in the centre for the picture ‘from Santa Claus’, as he told me the shop they came from and when he had bought them. What line he would have taken about Peter Pan I can’t imagine, but feel sure that it would have been satisfactory and healing to one’s self-respect, and generally speaking one on the chin for whimsicality! I think that he would have asked, as I have so often asked myself, why Mr. and Mrs. Darling didn’t go to the Police Station at once, instead of accepting the disappearance of an entire nurseryful overnight.
Stiles specialized in horticultural Malapropisms which I was then too young to appreciate; to him an Antirrhinum was an Anteroom and an Ampelopsis a Hankylopshus, while, flowers apart, we treasure one sentence upon the subject of mosquitoes; ‘Ah … some calls ’em Musketeers but I calls ’em Gimlicknoses.’ And his principal verb was ‘to mystify’. It covered all the ground – literally, just as the house servants employed the word ‘fornicate’ in several connections but the right one. With them to fornicate or to be fornicating signified alternatively insincere flattery, a state of fluster, a waste of time, and a cook’s complaint that the sweep had been fornicating half the morning with the flues was entirely typical. Between the lot of them they have so confused me that I have practically had to eliminate the word from my own vocabulary, not that it ever occupied a prominent place therein, just as in the same way and through a similar abuse of the word on the part of one of my friends who positively ought to know better I have been compelled to jettison ‘criterion’, unless I put in some uncommonly hard thinking beforehand!
At noon, Stiles retired for refreshment to a potting-shed round a corner, which Cuss and Mell called ‘The Alps’, why I never asked, taking it for granted that the rather hollow sound of one’s footsteps in that dank cul-de-sac made the sound of ‘alp-alp’.
On arrival in the morning, Stiles’s first house of call and job was to the glory-hole, a window’d dug-out also facing the front gates, where he cleaned knives on a cocoa-coloured board with Goddard’s plate-powder and (I believe) polished boots and shoes. The place stank comfortably of knife-powder, and it is a fact that the face of Mr. Goddard on the tin is far more vivid to me to-day than is that of any one of my family, including mother. Stropping, his fat circular face beaming good-humour and his large rump a little protruding for ease, Stiles would turn profile to talk to me like a ‘songs at the piano’ artist as I lounged by the water-butts at the top of the steps. The butts were ostensibly kept for shampoos, the local water being hard, and smelt of smoke and gnats and tar, and although I can’t answer for the water that our hair was ultimately washed in, I do know that the shampoo was a delicious rich yellow cream called ‘Egg Julep’ which was sold in large round china boxes like potted meat. The process (like mother’s absence at church on Christmas Day) seemed to last for aeons, during which one lost all sense of past bread-and-milk or impending bed. Whether Mell, in her time, hated it too I don’t know. I must ask her.
If these occasions were a trial to Aggie Drumhead as well she never showed it: patient stolidity was her strongest suit and she would even manage to give in to my wish that I be read to while the involuntary tortures of combing were suffered. With the current issue of Little Folks before her on the day-nursery table she would lean, combing, while she read a rather unhappy serial called Sheila’s Secret (which she pronounced ‘Shella’, and thus, as with Fornicate and Criterion, put me out for several years to come in the matter of pronunciation). What the secret was I haven’t the faintest idea, but one illustration depicted a stormy-looking school-girl who looked ready for anything. I can see her face distinctly to this day, and should have liked to go to La Belle Sauvage and look up old files of the magazine and discover what was the matter with the girl.
We never made much use of our treeless lawn except to lie on it and sometimes with rugs and sticks to make tents for enemy-camp games with Janet Martin. Mother preferred the veranda as it wasn’t overlooked by the kitchen window, and for a brief while a clock-golf set was laid down, and several matches played with friends who strolled round replete with Sunday roast beef, and, their duty to pleasure accomplished, would sink down by mother under the Japanese honeysuckle to enjoy her tea and her talk. One man I can’t place was home from India and couldn’t take his tired eyes off the lawn and kept murmuring happily that it was incredible:
Why we never played tennis at Evenfield I now attribute to mother’s dislike of all active games and to Mell’s satiety with them at Mayvale; between the two of them I got none, and in London was too diffident to learn a game whose standards of performance were becoming higher and higher, and that is one of the good things of life which I’ve missed completely.
Mell’s birthday is in May, and one year it was as hot as July and that meant a veranda tea and sunhats; mother got the spring flowers by an April birthday: poor Cuss and father fell heir to those iron-grey months, January and February, and of all the family it was I who collared the autumn with October and its reds and greens, copper and mauve, with the apple-trees dressed for the occasion and celery available and muffins ‘in’ at last, roast pork for luncheon, bonfires by the currant bushes, hoar-frost and dahlias – and a resultant capacity for melancholy and nostalgia. You can’t have everything.
2
In the late summer before breaking-up, Madame staged two fixtures: a term-end dancing display and a huge fancy-dress fête for a charity which she called Ze Whiff an’ Strey. What constitutes a waif I have never discovered as it seemed to me to be more a feature of the narrative-verse of George R. Sims than an actuality, but I suppose there must have been juvenile strays, though it seems unlikely.
It was at this time of year that Madame burgeoned and became what we called cream of Tartar: against her even mother could do little and to quite a large proportion of the pupils and mistresses she was Muddarm until the holidays, for she disposed of the leisure of everyone as a General does his forces (‘At tree (lozenge) you shall come for rehearse until siffe
n. Zhere will be no tea, you shall bring some kek in a bàgg’). Into all this I was drawn, and solo dances and special appearances were remorselessly contrived for me, and not soon shall I forget the costume for a ballet of sailors as conceived by Madame, nor the rumoured tension at Mayvale while she debated the relative merits of caps of white satin or blue silk, while the pleated skirts and everything capable of a border were edged with red-white-and-blue ribbon of which the shops still had a plentiful supply left over, I think, from the coronation of King Edward the Seventh.
For the Scottish reels foursome Madame evolved kilts of red sateen pleated all the way round. This brought the tension beyond rumour and almost to our gates, for here Mrs. Martin rose up in the craggy might of her ancestors and fought a battle with Madame Fouqué that did credit to her clan and blood.
March, march, Teesdale and Wensleydale! …
and not only was Mrs. Martin’s blue bonnet over the border but her cap over the windmill as makeweight. Didn’t Madame realize that the kilt had an apron and that to pleat the front was unhairt of? And wheer was the sporran, relic of the day when the Scots wore scarce aught else? That settled it! The sporran was suggestive and stiffened Madame’s resistance to its inclusion: had not Madame herself banned the Cake-walk at the dancing-class when hinted to of its origins?
It must have been a rousing session, that one at Stamboul, for Madame had actually walked the mile and a half to the Martins to quell rebellion, and what with the decent, Sabbath-keeping outspokenness of Janet’s mother and the improper reticences of Madame they should have made a drawn game of it. But Mrs. Martin (née McIntyre) was hampered by her own tradition of hospitality, and, we heard, plied Madame steadily with her rich cakes while in full quarrel (which prolonged it), and although her guest refused to budge one inch in the matter of the kilt, Mrs. Martin withdrew Janet from the foursome, and there was a coldness … indeed there were several. For during those weeks the social temperature annually fell in varying degrees all over Addison, with mothers maddened by sewing-machines whizzing our garments that, as they put it, would never ‘come in for anything’ after the display, while the machines and sewing nurses of other parents stood only too idle, their daughters having been quite monstrously passed over.
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