We went in through a little white gate upon which we were forbidden to play, so we always climbed it or swung upon it when Nanny’s eye was off us. On the right was a little path between hedge and house, covered deeply with the shingle that is used so much for paths in that country. Another of our forbidden pleasures was to walk up and down this path from the front gate to the fence which divided North End House from Gothic House, the boarding-house next door, kicking and shuffling the shingle with our feet. Some of it went into our sandshoes and was very uncomfortable; the rest was left in untidy heaps till Ernest, the garden boy, came and raked it smooth again. On the left were brick steps going down to a little area outside the scullery window where the tradesmen delivered their goods, and this also was forbidden to us. In fact Nanny’s whole existence seemed to be spent in forbidding things for no particular reason. It may have been that she was not on good terms with the kitchen inhabitants and didn’t want us to mix with them, but visits downstairs, by the outside steps or by the more legitimate medium of the kitchen stairs, were sternly discouraged, though this didn’t in the least prevent one’s getting down to the kitchen and cleaning out the bowl in which a chocolate pudding had been mixed, or indulging in that peculiar passion of the young, uncooked pastry.
Between shingly path and scullery steps was a brick path which took one in two strides to the porch. Shingle and brick represented the two common forms of path in those days – asphalt had not yet reduced everything to a common ugliness – and there was a third and most uncomfortable form of paving which was round stones about the size of a duck’s egg laid close together in tightly packed earth, or sometimes mortared: a penitential form of pavement to all pilgrims, but more especially to those with bare feet. When you go barefoot all the summer your feet become hard enough to turn the edge of a piece of broken glass, but the hardest sole cannot happily walk on cobblestones, neither is shingle really comfortable. The paths that we preferred were of brick, cool and refreshing to the feet on rainy days and with a delicious basking warmth in sunshine, though sometimes, on an August afternoon, too hot even for our leathery soles, so that one was glad to walk in the gutter where water might be running, or pad along the middle the road. Damp walking is very much more agreeable than dry when you are barefoot. ‘Dirty and dry’ was the description of the most uncomfortable feelings one’s feet could have, smothered with chalky dust from the roads, or caked with the clay or mud one had acquired at the edge of a pond and then dried hard by sun and wind. The most delicious of barefoot feelings is to walk on meadow grass under flood, when the water is shallow enough to be warmed through by the sun; and another exquisite sensation is good rich mud squelching up between the toes and spreading oozily over the foot. Our cousins at The Elms who went barefoot half the year could go everywhere with impunity, but we who only took our shoes and stockings off for the six weeks of school holidays were not so hardy. Their most enviable point of superiority was that they could run over the tops of the downs without feeling the little thistles which lie spread out quite flat and close to the ground in that short herbage. While Josephine and her brother and sister could speed over flat thistle and stunted cowslip alike, we could only move with hops and shrieks of agony and were ignominiously reduced to putting on the sand-shoes which we usually carried slung round our necks for emergencies.
And now we are standing in the porch with its red tiled floor, a seat along one side and its black serpent knocker on the white door. There is no need to knock, or to pull the twisted iron bell-handle, for the door is never locked except at night, but as we have only just arrived from London there is a formality to be gone through. Already as we drove up to the house we have seen our grandmother looking for us out of the drawing-room window and now we must ring the bell to give her time to greet us. While the maid is answering it my grandmother will have left the drawing-room and taken up her position at the top of two steps, just inside the front door, and when the door is opened we shall see her, a little, very upright figure, in sweeping skirts, arms stretched wide and saying ‘Welcome.’ Such a difficult word to say without giving it some suspicion of affectation or a rehearsed effect, but from my grandmother the deep expression of an embracing love. She was so small that her grandchildren began to tower over her while they were very young indeed, but her carriage gave one the impression of six feet of dignity and she stood as straight as an arrow all her life. Her large eyes were clear blue and calculated to make a child stand abashed who had pricks of conscience about chocolates abstracted from the drawing-room cupboard, or peaches which had been handled till they were what William Morris used to call ‘pinch-ripe’. She was a widow during the greater part of my recollection of her, and always wore much the same dress, very long full black gowns of velvet or satin with a little lace. A large watch all set with chrysolites which my grandfather had given her was always pinned at her waist. He had bought it for its beauty in their early married days with almost the last eight pounds in his possession. On her head she wore swathes of soft lace, pinned here and there with an old paste brooch, and on one hand an old diamond mourning ring. It had belonged to an aunt of my grandfather’s and had a beautiful open setting in claws of gold, with black enamel and gold chasing on each side. ‘Aunt Catherwood’ died in 1872, and the name of the friend or relation for whom she had worn the ring was obliterated by time. Otherwise my grandmother wore hardly any jewellery.
Meanwhile our luggage was being unloaded from the omnibus that had brought us from Brighton station. It must have been a relic of early omnibus days in London, with seats beside the driver and a knifeboard on the top where one sat back to back just like Leech drawings in old copies of Punch. There were other buses running between Rottingdean and Brighton, but they were vastly inferior. Those from the Royal Oak were indeed drawn by four horses, but they were such thin and jaded wisps that to drive behind them was misery, and one found oneself wondering whether their bones would come right through their wretched starved-looking bodies before the journey’s end, or if they wouldn’t choose this journey to lie down at the bottom of the long hill and die. But though the other bus was only drawn by two horses, they were so white and so stout and competent that it was always, if possible, arranged for us to come by the train that was met by the bus from the White Horse. It came right up the steep hill into the station yard and was waiting for us at the end of our journey. We would willingly have clambered up to the seats beside the driver, but they were usually reserved for lucky grown-ups and the most we could expect was occasionally to be jammed in, between a grown-up passenger and the driver, and allowed to hold the reins when he had gathered them up. Our Nanny had strong objections to our going outside, which were partly in the general scheme of repression and partly, I must now admit, a not unnatural avoidance of the responsibility of a child with quicksilver in its legs and sea-air in its brain being loose on the roof. So as a rule we had to ride inside with Nanny and the baby, though even here were compensations, for the bus actually had a door that was shut in cold weather and straw on the floor in winter, so that it was not difficult to find romance.
The family luggage had been piled on to the roof: large black shiny dress trunks with round tops, heavy leather trunks, massive Gladstone bags, Nanny’s tin box locked and corded, and, neady sewn up in hessian and mackintosh, the baby’s bath containing all her belongings. Fashions in luggage have changed as completely as everything else since those days, and I suppose Nannies and housemaids all have suit cases now and what has happened to the tin trunks I cannot say. I was walking not long ago in a quiet street in Mayfair when a very old four-wheeler came round the corner and drew up at a large house. Like John Gilpin’s chaise it did not drive up to the front door, but stopped at the area gate. There got out of it a very respectable man in overcoat and bowler and to him the driver handed down a small tin trunk neatly corded which he took on his shoulders and conveyed down the area steps. I felt that I was seeing a ghost of other times, the gentleman’s gentleman with his tin trunk
going down the area steps and in at the servants’ entrance. As the cab turned round and made for a very discreet public-house with green blinds in the windows a few doors off, the shade of Thackeray seemed to be hanging over it.
By now perhaps I had been lucky enough to be perched up in front between the driver and some friendly grownup, with a broad leather strap across us both, much needed when the driver turned the horses’ heads, and we drove down the long steep hill from the station, the bus almost pressing the horses’ hindquarters. The driver held them well up, bracing his feet against the board in front, and we held on to the seat and were thankful for the strap which kept us from slithering down, especially when our legs were too short to reach the floor. Our bus had special privileges and was allowed to go along the sea front while other and inferior buses had to come and go by back streets. So we swung round to the right in Castle Square, leaving the Pavilion behind us, and there in front was the sea which we hadn’t seen since Christmas, the pier, and the bathing machines hauled up from the tide. Past terraces and squares of Regency houses we clattered, delightful houses with great bulging windows overlooking the sea, some curved, some angular. Past the mysterious terrace of houses which were all black and built, so Nanny used to tell us, of very hard coal, because the man who built them had made a fortune in it. Past Sussex Square, sloping uphill, prosperous and spacious, each house thrusting out bow windows to get a glimpse of the sea, with gardens surrounded by the eternal euonymus. There were rumours, also supplied by Nanny, of an underground passage leading from Sussex Square to the lower esplanade, Madeira Road, so called I imagine as an attraction to invalids, and we deeply envied the inhabitants.
As we drove along with the sea on our right and houses on our left, the prospect of the downs opened in front of us and far away we saw the black sails of the Rottingdean windmill which meant our journey’s end. One of the many romantic parts of this journey was to see the remains of the roads that had been swallowed up by the sea, for the chalk cliffs crumble very quickly here and people still spoke of the road we were just coming to as the New Road, though it had been in use for many years. The Old Road had continued the line of the sea front, going all along the coast to Dover, but much of it had fallen away and become unsafe for wheeled traffic. In those days one could still walk upon it, a grass-grown road between grassy banks, and the horses would have been glad enough to take it and be spared the heavy pull up the hill which the new road could not avoid. Sometimes a daring passenger would get out at Kemp Town and walk along the old road, picking up the bus further on, but there was always the chance that the bus might get first to the meeting of the ways and not wait for you. In any case Nanny would never have allowed us to leave her sight, so we stuck to the bus while it swung round past the French Convalescent Home with miserable homesick foreigners looking wanly at us from the chairs where they lay wrapped in rugs. It seemed so desolate to be French and convalescent at that windy corner and almost in sight of your native land.
Now the horses slowed down for the long pull up the first hill. My mother had what seemed to us an excessive tenderness towards horses and all country drives were a succession of dismounting from and remounting whatever vehicle we happened to be in with a view to sparing the horses, always when going up hill and often when going down, unless she had previously satisfied herself that a drag of unusual power had been put on. It was always a sore point with us that we were forced to get off and walk up the long hill and indeed I cannot think that the weight of two children of five and seven would make any appreciable difference to the horses. The only effect it had was to make us vow secretly never to get out of any carriage, however steep the hill, when we were grown-up. Another of my mother’s amiable weaknesses was to make us do a kind of sitting gymnastics, supposed to be favourably received by horses. If we were going up a hill we would be adjured to sit well forward on the seat to throw the weight as near the front as possible. On the level we would have a brief respite and when we descended the further slope, the command was to lie right back so that our weight might somehow hold back the carriage. I have even known her stop a dog-cart at the bottom of a hill to shift the position of the seat, we meanwhile plodding up the hill, and then, after a brief normal ride along the level, she would have us all out again to move the seat back to a position more suitable for going downhill.
At the top of the long rise a clear expanse of country was open before us. Roedean School was still in its cradle in Sussex Square and there was nothing to break the long lovely lines of the downs. Brighton lay behind us, the gasometers were passed, and the only signs of man’s handiwork that we could see ahead were the black windmill and, between us and the sea, the tall chimney that was a ventilation shaft for Brighton’s main sewer, a gaunt ugly piece of utilitarianism, very different from the shaft at the other side of Rottingdean which was disguised as an enchanting little cottage, white with green shutters. Only on some days did a wind blowing from its direction across the downs betray what the house was meant to hide. All the rest of the way the old road ran green and deserted between us and the cliffs. In places it was quite broken away, but much of it was untouched, with a little strip of grass still left between the further bank and the sea. Only if you went near the edge you could see ominous cracks, and the beach below was strewn with huge fragments of chalk that had crashed down in the winter when alternate frost and thaw were doing their destructive work. Here and there a few houses stood roofless and derelict, abandoned as the cliff crumbled and fell, used as a resting-place by tramps. Presently a long valley opened on our left and we stopped to set down a passenger for Ovingdean which lay half a mile or so away among trees at the end of a white road. Here my mother would take advantage of this stop to turn us out and make us walk up the last hill. This time we felt less resentful, for Nanny was safely inside the bus with our baby sister and with her eye removed we could scramble up the steep bank of the chalk cutting, clutching at scabious and yellow horned poppy as we climbed, and walk along the top of the ridge looking down on to the bus. Now we came to Greenways, the only house facing the old Dover Road that was still inhabited. Behind it were pigsties and we could hang over the wall watching and smelling those agreeable animals till the bus caught us up.
Then the drag was put on, leaving those shiny smooth marks on the surface of the road, and we skidded down hill into the village while Charlie the conductor blew his long coaching horn. Charlie was one of the village wits, a tremendous favourite with all the maids. When he stood at the back of the bus, swaying to its motion as it turned down to the right to the White Horse, the archangel Gabriel would have compared poorly with him in our eyes. The White Horse was the official terminus of the omnibus, but after delivering some parcels it would go round the village putting passengers down at their doors. The White Horse was a real seaside inn then, facing the sea across a strip of grass known, from the name of its proprietor, as ‘Welfare’s Green’. The older inhabitants of the village remembered when the Dover Coach Road ran between Welfare’s Green and the sea, but in our time it had all crumbled away and only a fragment of the inner bank was left, which would fall in the next frosts. West of the green was a large ugly house, vaguely Gothic in style, what my grandfather used to call ‘battlemented, castellated, Blue-beard Bosh’. Its garden wall was perilously on the edge of the cliffs and summer after summer we would see how more of the garden had slipped into the sea till at last the house itself began to fall piecemeal and its remains were carted away. In the far corner of the green was a little summer-house of trellis, ‘erected’, in the words of Dickens, ‘by humane men for the accommodation of spiders’, where, in the season, a photographer took up his daily abode. His whole stock in trade was half a dozen of those delightful triumphs of the scene-painter’s art which represent a lady and gentleman in bathing dress, or riding like Templars two at once on a donkey, with holes to put your face through. We would have given a week’s pocket money to be immortalised in one of these enviable positions, but Nanny would
never hear of it; and what made it the more unfair was that we had seen photographs of Nanny and our grandmother’s maids taken in these very backgrounds. Curious dark pictures they were, rather like daguerreotypes and taken, if I remember rightly, on tin, while for sixpence extra you could get a richly chased gold frame.
All these delights we had to look at with envious eyes while the bus waited outside the White Horse and then Charlie blew his horn and we turned the corner, leaving the sea behind us, and drove up the village street. One needed eyes on both sides of one’s head to see all the friendly shops and houses and faces that we passed. First there was the convent, ‘Star of the Sea’, peopled by nuns who had been driven from France. They did beautiful needlework and took boarders and my grandmother and I were once invited to a display by their pupils, during which three young ladies in white muslin sat side by side at one upright piano and played an arrangement of the Estudiantina waltz for six hands, a performance which did more credit to their power of controlling their elbows than it did to the musical qualifications of the kind-faced nuns who taught them. Then, crossing the Newhaven Road (an easier matter when there were hardly any motors to swoop down and kill one at the cross roads), we came to Stenning the baker whose buns perfumed the air, Mrs Mockford at the little fruit and chocolate shop which always smelt of ripe pears, Mr and Mrs Champion in the Post Office where you also bought spades and buckets, Read’s Stores with the red-headed assistant. A glimpse up the hill on to the downs and we had reached the turning that went up past the forge to the Vicarage and then came the butcher’s house and shop standing a little back from the road where Mr Hilder home-killed South Down mutton twice a week – meat of such juicy close-grained excellence that my brother was moved to describe the Sunday joint with tears in his eyes as ‘sainted mutton’. Then the long flint wall of The Dene garden with its overshadowing elms, and on our left the field with the newly erected Drill Hall which Rudyard Kipling had imperially given to the village, beyond it the entrance to the racing stables, and finally North End House and our grandmother’s face at the window.
Three Houses Page 4