Footprints in Paris

by Gillian Tindall

  On one evening the Lemoignes, true to French bourgeois style, organised a formal dinner for their guests – ‘a most swell affaire … about 10 courses’. There was shopping for the younger children at the Bon Marché, the huge Left Bank department store depicted by Zola in Au Bonheur des Dames, and on the last day in the Rue de Rivoli: ‘Father bought Mothery a lovely cape at the “Grand Magazin du Louvre” for 148 francs.’ There were more visits, no doubt enforced by Bertie, to churches and to the Louvre, and the next day they left. ‘They seem to have enjoyed themselves immensely here in spite of their bad luck in having such weather and of Mothery having such tight boots that it hurt her so much to walk that she was forced to borrow a pair of mine.’ It is cheering to realise that Bertie’s relationship with this undemanding stepmother was close enough for him to lend her boots.

  It is consoling also to find a month later, among the sparse entries as his time in Paris drew to a close:

  ‘Today I fixed as my last in the office, and really I am very sorry at it too, as in spite of the excessively long hours I enjoy my work thoroughly … As a reward for my services M. Lemoigne kindly presented me with a case of Shakespeare’s works in thirteen volumes, a very nice edition indeed … This present came as a very agreeable surprise to me, as I had expected nothing … I have learnt so much during the five months and a half I have worked for him.’

  So the stay in Paris was a success after all? Well, hardly. For only three days later a real cry from the heart breaks through the carapace of dutiful gratitude, optimism and grown-up decent behaviour that Bertie had tried hard to grow round himself:

  ‘What a cruel disappointment it is to me to know now that I must return home my object only half accomplished. Why did I not have the good fortune to fall into such good hands as I did in Erfurt to give me the power to learn French really as I wanted to, as I did German. The consciousness of a year half wasted lies heavy on my heart and I am dispirited and discouraged. Since the death of my poor mother I have never cried, until today when I sobbed like a child for half an hour, comfortless, with disappointment weighing heavy on my heart. I have learned much at business but not the French which I came for; how could I without help, without encouragement. At Erfurt, it was, I learned German so easily through the continuous intercourse with intimate friends. The Lemoignes I have never been able to make real friends much less intimate, and their greatest encouragement seems to be “I don’t understand more than half you say” …’

  This diary entry goes straight on to mention having been given two tickets for the Odéon theatre by a customer, and taking Monsieur Lemoigne with him.

  The reference to his mother’s death, six and a half years before, surely gives the clue to much more. Whatever accumulated grief and loneliness lay beneath Bertie’s sudden bout of crying, it was certainly about something other than a failure to learn fluent French. In any case, the letters that it was part of his work to compose several years later, when he was a fully fledged member of his father’s staff in Covent Garden, show that his French was entirely adequate to that purpose.

  The last days in Paris passed in intensive theatre-going, revisiting museums and the buying of presents, including ‘a doll for the Concierge’s baby’. The Lemoignes do not seem to have been on his present list, but he bought a cookery book and a chestnut pot for his stepmother, beads for the baby sister, ‘music’ for Maud and a compass for Howard – ‘May he like it.’ He packed his trunk ‘which from books alone is two thirds full’. On the last evening

  ‘We did not have dinner until after nine o’clock and then afterwards everybody sat down to read and not a word was spoken. What a difference to my last evening at Erfurt!!! The Billias [?] were so very sorry to lose [me] and all my friends but here I have no friends worth the name and the Lemoignes did not seem to mind my going at all, and I am sure their attitude to me lately makes me all the more glad to leave them.’

  He left the next day in a flurry of overweight bags and the unaccustomed expenses of a cab and porters.

  ‘Saturday, December 21st. At last I am started from that inhospitable Paris and glad I was too, to get away from it. I took the ten o’clock train from Paris to Dieppe and from there to Newhaven … There were very few passengers and only about 12 of the 2nd class stopped on deck, but they were very sociable and I was chatting the whole time pretty well. It was extremely cold, and a bitter wind was blowing the whole time. It was fairly smooth. The effect on the water of the constant changes in the sky were most beautiful – rainbow, snow, rain and brilliant sun.’

  A family Christmas awaited him.

  Chapter XIV

  FAMILY MATTERS. AND A WORLD WAR

  After he was fully adult, Bertie no longer kept a daily record of his doings or thoughts. Physically, the diaries continued all his life, miniature leather-bound books each about three inches by five, stacking up year after year, decade after decade. He kept them all in boxes in his attic. But in them he recorded only his daily cash expenses. Thus an ordinary weekday might read ‘Lunch 11d. Papers 8d. Omnibus 1d. Tobacco 1s.2d.’, while the Sunday on which his first child was born has ‘Telephone 2d. Stamps and telegrams 3s.1d.’ followed the next day by ‘Advert. birth Morning Post 5s., Grapes for B 1s.6d.’ All the days of his life, banal, joyful or tragic, were captured in his hieroglyphic, condensed form, expressing so little but redolent of much.

  It seems to us now obsessional, pointless, this preoccupation with small change in a man who, once embarked on adult life, did not really need to count the pennies. But he was following a practice that, in his generation, was widespread, considered to be a good middle-class habit like a daily sponge-down in front of the washstand, or going to church on Sunday. Only right at the end of his life do the accounts waver: small sums of money are repeated, crossed out, altered, and finally the record is taken over in his last year by another hand.

  By the later 1890s, after one or two educational stages in other people’s offices, Bertie had joined his father full time in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. Besides himself, Albert Alfred and Mr Cox, there were now five full-time members of staff there, including two in the basement warehouse. There was as yet no electric light, telephone or typewriter. All the letters continued to be written by hand in the ‘copying ink’ of the period, a preparation which, when the page was pressed into another one, produced a kind of brownish carbon-copy for record in the letter book. In other respects, paperwork seems to have been kept to a minimum. Long after, Bertie noted that there were ‘no stock books, no sales were marked off, there was no stock-taking carried out and the accounts were not audited’.1 At the end of each financial year, whatever was in the bank, after wages and other expenses had been met, was simply regarded as profit and shared out, minus any monies taken during the year, between Tindall and Cox. This primitive system must have worked adequately, as Albert Alfred and family were by then living comfortably in the new rural home near Maidstone from which he and Bertie commuted daily. Years later, however, there was some protracted wrangle about this period with the Inland Revenue: maybe Bertie’s arrival in the firm was providential in saving Albert Alfred, in the end, from worse trouble.

  ‘Fresh from an accountant’s office,’ Bertie wrote, ‘I thought the situation to be an impossible one, and soon started stock-books etc … I also turned my attention to the method of keeping the authors’ accounts, which was elementary in the extreme.’ One may guess that some of the medical authors in the expanding publishing business, being less interested in royalties than in seeing their research and opinions in print, had not been receiving all the monies that should have been due to them.

  Meanwhile, as the century that had seen unprecedented growth and change and opportunity drew to a close, the usual copious orders for books continued to be sent across the Channel to Lemoigne and to the Baillières in the Rue Hautefeuille, couched in the usual peremptory tones. By 1901, however, all the letters in French are in Bertie’s hand and the tone, though formal, is more temperate. The fir
st typewriter arrived in 1903, along with a female typist. She stayed until 1919: indeed, several staff members who joined in those years were to stay for the rest of their working lives. Evidently Albert Alfred’s dynamic approach made subordinates feel valued; ‘He did not hesitate to rebuke any author or member of staff whom he thought to be dilatory or idle, but such a rebuke was generally followed within a few days by an unusually friendly letter or greeting and it was rare for the recipient to retain a sense of grievance.’

  It must have been in the early 1900s that Albert Alfred’s deafness, which had been coming on gradually for a decade following what was probably a virus infection, became severe. His eventual obituary in The Medical Press recorded ‘… but nothing daunted he carried on his life’s work with the utmost vigour. He was by nature genial, he enjoyed the company of his friends and was fond of entertaining them, but his deafness compelled him to forgo that pleasure … [It also] cut him off from music, to which he was passionately devoted. He had a rich baritone voice – there had even been talk of him taking up music as a profession …’

  Or the music hall, perhaps? Was that what was originally in the mind of the ambitious teenager who made his way to London in the 1850s?

  The partisan obituarist of The Medical Press refrained from mentioning that he also ruthlessly made use of his disability as a defence. When any discussion took a line that was not to his liking, or bored him, he simply laid down his ear trumpet – or, when one of the early deaf-aids replaced the trumpet, he would make it whistle till conversation was impossible, and then, with an innocent expression, turn it off, declaring, ‘Well, my boy, if I don’t understand that at my age, how can you possibly know anything about it?’

  When he was in his late eighties, and still insisted on coming into work, a member of staff who travelled the same route used to be detailed to follow him at a discreet distance. One day they chanced to meet on a traffic island in the Strand. Albert Alfred plunged into a small gap between the moving motor cars and buses regardless of danger, remarking over his shoulder to his minder, ‘If you have all night to waste, my boy, I haven’t.’ He died in his bed at ninety-one, only a few days after his last appearance in the office.

  In 1907 Bertie’s younger brother Howard joined the firm too. He had been sent to Haileybury School and then, unlike Bertie, had been allowed to go on to Cambridge. His image has been fading now for ninety years: the last remaining person who recalled him in the flesh is now gone. He seems to have been, like Bertie, a rather serious, decent young man, though with a love of fun. A Cambridge photograph shows him posing in a laughing human pyramid with three other healthy-looking undergraduates in three-piece suits. He had a taste for good works – Pembroke College had what was artlessly described, in the language of the time, as ‘a mission to the slums’ in Lambeth – and he was good at sports, especially long-distance running. Like Bertie, he could produce fine pen and ink drawings. His main role within Baillière, Tindall & Cox was to travel around the country seeing agents, booksellers and potential authors.

  By 1914 staff numbers had risen to twenty. On annual office outing snaps they stand in rows on South Coast beaches – stiff collars and fresh piqué, laced boots, eyes screwed up in jollity against forgotten suns. Later, before tea, a few boots came off for paddling. No one actually went so far as to bathe, but Albert Alfred (who, after all, had spent his unmentioned childhood by the sea, in Hastings) liked the idea that they might. Every year he brought along his own bathing suit, concealed in a folded newspaper, hoping that one of his employees would give him the excuse to plunge in too.

  The firm was to have another half-century of prosperity and increase ahead of it as an independent entity, before disappearing into the maw of a huge transatlantic conglomeration in the 1960s, just a hundred years after Albert Alfred had founded his empire on hope and opportunism in one shared room off the Strand.

  In 1906 Bertie got married. ‘Got’ is, I think, the appropriate word, as, however willingly he participated, the marriage was initially arranged by others.

  Adela, one must suppose, had been dislodged from his heart or had simply been carried off elsewhere. Careful questioning of the last remaining informant produced a vague recollection of the name and the suggestion that she was some connection of Bertie’s stepmother, probably a niece. This would explain why she was treated with cousinly familiarity on family holidays, but also why it might not have been considered quite decent that Bertie and she should pair off. In Victorian and Edwardian England, unlike France where the propensity was for unions that kept all the money within the family, marriages with relatives were discouraged. In any case, in the few years before the diaries proper peter out, there are many references to ‘sweet, jolly girls’, usually friends of Maud. Living at home, Bertie did not lack female company. But at just thirty, he was apparently heart-free. The firm was doing very well and he had recently been made a partner. Clearly the next step, from the perspective of his elders, was that he should ‘settle down with some nice girl’.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, in Dublin, matters were going rather less well for the Jacob family, or at any rate for those of them that were still there. The elder children, on whose upbringing so much of Archibald Jacob’s chaotically managed earnings had been spent, were now launched into life or matrimony in various far-flung places, but Archibald himself had succumbed to chronic asthma and fatigue at the beginning of 1901. His death, though predictable, was unexpected when it occurred, and his widow and the younger children were left so badly provided for that the medical world of Dublin launched a memorial fund to keep them going. This fact, never mentioned in the family, only became apparent to me through a newspaper cutting I found on file at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland a hundred years later.

  The only Jacob son still at home was Donald, the youngest of the family, a sweet-natured, blond boy, delicately built. Aged seventeen, he was summarily despatched, in a new corduroy suit and looking woebegone, to Canada. There, it was unrealistically hoped, he might take to farming. Needless to say he did not, and it was fifteen years before anyone saw him again. He reappeared in the middle of the Great War as a private in the Canadian army. He had acquired an unfamiliar accent in the various parts of North America to which he had wandered, and a still more unfamiliar and flamboyant taste in clothes. He had also acquired, in the army, a favoured buddy (‘the Kid’) whose presence with him on leaves caused his rediscovered sisters some (unspoken) pondering.

  By 1902 the widowed Mrs Jacob and the three daughters still with her had moved from the big house in Ely Place to a much smaller one in the Dublin suburbs. Gone now, too, was the summer home down the coast, the happy family holidays when the girls were encouraged by their doctor father to bathe every day, long hair floating out like mermaids. Gone, too, the social life centred round ‘the Castle set’. Although no one voiced the fact baldly, matrimonial prospects for these girls were now not nearly as good as they had been for their elder sisters. Laura, the eldest of the remaining three and slightly deaf since childhood, was tacitly designated Mother’s helpmate. Mab, the youngest, was despatched to train as a nurse, an occupation by then just about acceptable for a doctor’s daughter, and to which she bravely stuck although temperamentally unsuited to it. As to Blanche, who was agreed to be the cleverest and had been their father’s favourite – what to do with lively Blanche?

  In the event, she seems to have spent a good deal of time with the ship-building Coote family of Liverpool, who were related to various other Cootes of Queen’s County and Sligo and connected to the Jacob clan: Arthur Jacob’s wife had been a Carroll-Coote. They apparently took to Blanche, and the fact that she was almost certainly a paid companion to Mrs Coote was another of those never-spoken things that only became evident to me long after all concerned were dead.

  She was lucky to escape becoming a nursery governess, then the only other option readily available to middle-class girls whose own education had been sketchy and impractical. Governesses
only just counted as ‘ladies’ and were, from the Jacob point of view, perilously near slipping down that dreaded slope into the great unmentionable swamp of the lower middle classes, from which there was felt to be no ready way out into a suitable marriage or anything else.

  It was a far cry from the days thirty-odd years before, when the Jacobs of Ely Place had ‘tamed’ Mr Tindall, graciously accepting him into their circle because he was convivial and could sing well. Did he, I wonder, feel a certain dark pleasure at the stumbling fortunes of a family who had once been in a position to patronise him? Or did he just see an excellent opportunity, a way of strengthening his firm’s connection with the Dublin medical world and acquiring for himself the entire rights to The Medical Press?

  At any rate, in 1905 Albert Alfred suggested to Mrs Jacob, disconsolate and lost in her suburban sitting room and her crepe-trimmed toque, that Blanche might spend a holiday at the Tindall home near Maidstone. May Tindall was married now (very satisfactorily, from her father’s point of view, to a Wimpole Street surgeon-gynaecologist) but Maud was still at home. Bertie, it was indicated, had seen a photo of Blanche and was ‘quite smitten’.

  Blanche was not really pretty but she was animated and she had abundant and lovely hair, genuinely golden, as Bertie must have seen when finally presented to her in the flesh. She was also warm, musical and, in the best Irish tradition, an amusing raconteuse with a fine Dublin vocabulary of vivid figures of speech. Like many people with more intelligence than education, she could be bossy and a troublemaker, but then Bertie was used to bossy people and had much experience of withdrawing into some inner fortress of his own till the trouble passed. In any case he too could be tactless, single-minded and – just occasionally – lost his temper spectacularly.