The sight of Mr Ridsdale and Oliver made us move to the middle window to study the further movements of the Ridsdale family. Their house, The Dene, also faced the green, at right angles to ours, and in the summer it overflowed with children and Nannies. Our mother’s cousin Stanley Baldwin had married the elder Miss Ridsdale and every year they came down from their home in Worcestershire to spend some weeks at Rottingdean. What with babies and Nannies and luggage, they were such a large party that Cousin Stan used to have a slip coach for them which was shunted somehow from Stourport to Brighton. This impressed our young imaginations tremendously, as did the fact that an extra wing had to be built on to The Dene to accommodate them. When Cousin Stan was married I was to have been a bridesmaid in a muslin bonnet with one pink string and one blue, but on hearing the organ I shrieked so loudly that I had to be removed. Their wedding day, the twelfth of September, was always celebrated at Rottingdean and we used to write a wedding ode to them yearly. I can only remember one, which ran as follows:
Beautiful Cissy and Stanley bold,
Seven long years have not made you seem old.
Your hands are beneficent, bounteous and kind,
And the hearts of your fellows with sweetness you bind.
My father and mother’s wedding day was a few days earlier and just about this time there was always a great picnic on the downs. Mrs Ridsdale hired a farm wagon for the afternoon and a carter to lead the lumbering horses, and into it dozens of children and nurses were packed with the baskets of food and two great elephants of cart horses with feathery legs dragged it slowly up to Height Barn while the older children walked, or distracted their parents by climbing on the wagon or hanging on underneath. It was always a golden harvest afternoon when we went slowly up the road among the chalk ruts, along by the low flint wall covered with many coloured lichen. On the left the stubble lay white in the sun with a few poppies still blazing among the corn stooks. Then we were on the open downs, on that short springy herbage that makes walking a delight and nourishes the sainted mutton so well, and began to look abroad over the world. East Hill away across the valley on our right, Saltdean, where there used to be steps cut in the chalk cliff down to the beach, hidden at the end of a valley, Brighton racecourse standing out far behind us, the windmill brooding over the village and the road beneath winding away to the clump of dark trees that marked Woodendean, while ahead of us, a vision of enduring peace, was the perfect outline of Height Barn. Nothing but a large flint barn with tiled roof, but, through its absolute fitness in place and design for its destined work, drawing every line of the downs to converge together upon its perfect self.
Behind the barn was a deep hollow known to us as Wedding Hollow. It was too deep for a dew pond and I have no guess as to its origin. At its brink the horses were stayed and we all trooped down the winding path that led among gorse and blackberry bushes to the bottom. The nurses spread the rugs and unpacked the food and we settled down to our business of eating and playing till it was time to pack into the wagon and ride slowly home again, dropping the party one by one at their respective homes, till last of all the Baldwin children were decanted at The Dene.
The personality of Mrs Ridsdale was the life of The Dene. Who in Rottingdean does not remember her sailing down the village street, commanding of figure, a large silver-topped leather bag always hanging at her side, a word for every one, an eye to every one’s business, and always the first to do a kindness? A person too of immense character. Was it not she who invented and carried out the questionnaire for Kipling-hunters? ‘Can you tell me where Rudyard Kipling lives?’ a tourist would ask. Mrs Ridsdale would stop and fix him, or her, with her shrewd eye, saying, ‘Have you read anything of his?’ Very often the answer was ‘No,’ when Mrs Ridsdale would remark, ‘Then I won’t tell you,’ and pass majestically on. The first characteristic of the Ridsdale family which struck an outsider was their alarming frankness of speech with each other. As children we used honestly to be a little afraid of being sent on a message to The Dene in the morning. The family of father, mother, three grown-up young gendemen and one grown-up young lady (for Cissie Ridsdale was married to Cousin Stan and away in Worcestershire by then) would be sitting at breakfast still. In any other family the torrent of criticism and plain speaking which burst out would have meant a violent family row. But with the Ridsdales it was merely a family conversation and though we knew it to be so, we were not the less alarmed and lived in some kind of expectation of immediate bloodshed, so that it was a relief when a diversion occurred. Perhaps old Mr Ridsdale would take us to his study, a low dark room full of Indian curiosities and prickly fish and books. He was a mysterious and rather alarming figure to us, but always very kind, and whenever we met him in town he took us straight to a toyshop and bought us a toy, and what more can a grownup do?
Or kind Lily Ridsdale would carry us off to the garden to play croquet, or to her sitting-room where, on winter evenings, she would play the piano indefinitely for us and the Baldwin children while we sang such time-worn songs as ‘Where did you get that hat?’, or ‘I’m a Prima Ballerina Assoluta’, or ‘The man that broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’. Or there was the excitement of a visit to the billiard-room upstairs with those charming coloured balls to play with and the chance of being horribly teased by one of the grown-up brothers who were not too grown-up to enjoy lashing a little girl into a frenzy for their amusement.
The Ridsdales had been in Rottingdean long before my grandparents came. They remembered the village in the early days when there was no water except that supplied by a donkey who walked round about with pails filled at the village pump which stood in the angle of Trunky Thomas’s barn and cowsheds on the village green. Those were the days when the Dover Coach Road still ran to the south of Welfare’s Green and the miller was living in his little house below the great sails of the windmill and the winter storms brought strange cargoes to Rottingdean beach. One wintry week of south-west gales cast up a bullock and a baby, rapidly followed by a whale and a grand piano; but the glory of Rottingdean was the day that a cargo of brandy came ashore and messengers were sent all over the country on horse and on foot with the happy words, ‘Free drinks at Rottingdean.’ On another occasion the beach was again covered with casks and the messengers were sent out, but it was all an idle dream, for the cargo was paraffin oil. Rottingdean was certainly concerned in the smuggling trade in still earlier days and there were caves in the chalk cliffs which no one entered. One indeed was shut with an iron door, an object of immense interest and terror to us. There were rumours too of an underground passage leading from the old Vicarage to the beach with an outlet in one of these caves, but of this we never had proof.
The Dene possessed the first telephone that reached Rottingdean and the first we had ever seen. It was the kind that you had to wind up with a handle for a long time before it would start and you had to hold the combined receiver and mouthpiece in a tight nervous grip to keep it connected, so that you were nearly paralysed if your talk lasted any length of time. It was one of our treats to be allowed to hear Mrs Ridsdale telephoning to Brighton.
Rottingdean must have been well abreast of the times, for not only did it introduce us to telephones, but to our first motor. From our eyrie in the drawing-room window we could see on the other side of the green the Kiplings’ motor pawing the ground before the door. It was one of those incredible machines raised high from the ground with a door in the middle of the back and it didn’t like starting and when it had started it didn’t want to stop, except halfway up a hill, and it perpetually ran dry on the tops of lovely downs miles away from even a dew-pond and when the grown-ups went in it the ladies wore tweed motor caps of gigantic size with veils swathed tightly round them and stuck through with enormous hatpins. When we saw the Kipling children dancing round it, we were consumed with longing to go and dance too, so slipping from the room we ran across the green and kicked up the dust with bare feet to express our joy. Finally the majestic machine got under weigh
and drove off with a trail of smoke and smell behind it and we were left lamenting. To the best of my remembrance I never went for a drive in the monster, because whenever a ride had been promised it refused to go and we sat and sat in it while the chauffeur tinkered at its inside and then had to get out with a promise for a real ride some day. But ‘some day’, as my brother very truly remarked, ‘is in the days that never come.’ Just at this moment the young Kiplings were descended upon and carried off by a horde of nurses and governesses and we betook ourselves to the churchyard for further entertainment.
The grey Saxon church faced our grandparents’ house across the green and stood on a slight slope. As in most country churchyards the same names occurred repeatedly on the graves; Mockfords, Moppetts, Dudeneys, Carpenters, Snuddens. It was not always safe to wander in the churchyard, as Bowles the sexton was apt to chase one away and had a religious belief that bare feet were unsuitable to consecrated ground (a belief shared by Nanny). But as he was luckily working on the north side of the church, up against Farmer Brown’s muck-yard, we were able to slip round to the south side and contemplate that sinister family tomb which gave the names and qualifications of all the family except one sister, after whose name was nothing but the word OBLIVION. There was another terrifying tomb which said, ‘I AM HIDING IN THEE’, and we always had visions of what might come out of it towards dusk. The corner to the south of the porch was as yet untenanted and there my grandfather was to lie and a little great-granddaughter near him, and at last my grandmother’s ashes.
Now, a little sobered by our sojourn among the tombs, we waited till Bowles’s back was turned – for he was a strict Pauline and I had no hat – and went softly into the church, all hung with fruit and flowers for Harvest Sunday, with a great sheaf of corn below the pulpit. We always had a feeling that the little church was part of family life, because the East end was made glorious by seven of my grandfather’s stained-glass windows. As we mounted the chancel steps the Tree of Jesse was on our right, beginning with Jesse asleep at the roots and spreading its branches through David with his harp, Solomon holding a little temple, Hezekiah with his sundial and so up to the humble Mother and her Baby enthroned on the topmost boughs. Opposite was Jacob’s ladder, where angels went up and down between earth and heaven. My grandfather and William Morris worked on all the windows together and as long as they both lived the standard of noble form and rich colour was unsurpassed. As with so much of Morris’ work, the master’s hand was needed and after his death, followed so closely by my grandfather’s, windows were still carried out from Burne-Jones designs, but they were never the same. Their most glorious joint work was the great windows of St Philip’s Cathedral in Birmingham where reds and blues are a deep flaming beauty and every line in the leading of the glass is a master’s line. The windows at Rottingdean are not so stupendous as these, but they are perfect in their way.
A little further on, just before the altar, was another pair of windows facing each other, St Mary and St Margaret who was there with a thought of the artist’s own daughter Margaret. They are in deep blue, St Mary standing quietly alone, St Margaret leading her conquered dragon on a cord. Above the altar were the three windows which my grandfather gave for his daughter ‘in hac aede feliciter nupta’; a triptych of angels. To the left is Gabriel with the lily, to the right Raphael with his pilgrim staff, and in the middle Michael the archangel pinning the dragon with his lance, his helmet cast aside. Below each angel is a little picture of his doings; Gabriel bringing his lily to the Virgin Mary, Michael fighting the grisly coils of the worm, and Raphael leading a little child who walks confidingly by his side with quick steps, holding his hand, with face upturned to his heavenly companion. My grandfather returned to this picture when he had a silver seal made for me with a green ivory handle and on the seal the engraving of an angel leading a child by the hand across a hill under a starry sky. One of the great differences between my grandfather’s stained-glass windows and others was not only the colour – for Mr Morris was largely responsible for that – but the skilful use of the lead between the pieces of glass to build up the design. The leading seemed to follow the flowing line of his pencil and never cut across or disturbed the unity of the picture. That is, I think, where so many glass designers fail.
Here we could stay in peace, feeling more than we could understand, till our inconstant minds were as full of beauty as they could hold and the prickings of conscience for our unauthorised outing began to make themselves felt. Then we went down the nave into the sunlight and saw the white porch of our home waiting for us across the green and so back to the drawing-room.
Four months later the drawing-room would see very different sights. It would be Boxing Night and we were all seated in the inner room waiting for the mummers. Rumours of splendid preparations for their entertainment were afoot – supper for them in the dining-room with a gigantic pork pie and quantities of cider. A knock was heard at the door heralding their arrival and the audience began to wriggle on its seat with anticipation. Then noises and bumps and murmurs were heard from behind the curtain and dumpings on the bare boards (the Morris carpet had been rolled up and put away for the evening), and at last, just before we burst with curiosity, the curtains were drawn and the play of St George and the Dragon was shown to our enchanted eyes. The actors could make but little attempt at dressing-up. They were poor labourers and most of them wore smocks and leggings with a few ribbons and pieces of coloured paper to adorn them. The smock-frock was still worn in Sussex by the older men when I was a child, and some of them had venerable furry top-hats. The play proceeded on its usual course, St George, Turkish Knight, very unfeminine princess, Dragon, and Doctor; it has often been described. At the end of the play they took their customary toll of the audience:
Here come I little Devil Doubt,
If you don’t give me money I’ll kick you all out.
Money I want, money I crave,
If you don’t give me money I’ll kick you all into your grave.
But after this they added an epilogue of their own contriving. They stood in a circle all facing inwards – a method much to be recommended for shy performers – and sang, not as you might archaeologically hope, old Sussex carols and folk-songs, but ballads about Lord Raglan and his Crimean War. Folk-songs in the making perhaps. And then, because of Christmas time, the ‘Mistletoe Bough’, with a rough attempt at harmony in the last melancholy lines of chorus,
O-oh, the mistletoe bough,
Oh, the mistle-toe bough.
The long-drawn tale of the Baron’s young bride who invited the guests to play hide-and-seek on her wedding night and then got into a chest and was never discovered till years later when:
The skeleton they found mouldering there
Of the bride who had formerly been so fair,
chilled our young blood and was directly responsible for nine-tenths of our nursery nightmares.
But at last even this horrible joy was over and the mummers went clumping away to the pork pie. I remember, for memory has her tactless moments, that the back drawing-room windows had to be opened wide to let out the smell of unwashed corduroys, and the cold night wind rushing in made the candles gutter in their tall brass candlesticks. Then a sleepy child was sent up to bed and fell asleep to the sound of the revellers’ voices below.
Christmas at Rottingdean began by the arrival of the turkey with gilded claws, which came by the omnibus, together with a great sheaf of holly and mistletoe. We were allowed to help with decorations, sticking bits of holly in behind pictures (the scratching noise of holly leaves on whitewash sets my nails on edge even now), and tying mistletoe over the kitchen stairs and in the nursery. For a week beforehand the waits had been about the village, frankly blackmailing the inhabitants by the horrid noise they made. There was no romantic Christmas atmosphere about them. I don’t suppose any of them knew any carol beyond a very garbled version of Good King Wenceslas in which they always telescoped the last two bars into one, making two c
rotchets and a minim out of two minims and a semi-breve on the word ‘weather’. There were no relics of folk-song here, no hymn to Woden dressed in Christmas guise and handed down from father to son, no Christmas ballads whose words were ‘outway rude’ though their tunes were modal, and no reverence for Christmas except as an easy way of getting sixpences. Six or seven village boys would join together with a lantern and come up the street murderously rattling through Good King Wenceslas. Nearer and nearer they came till at last we could hear the click of the front gate and the shuffling of feet in the porch. Then the real spirit of tradition got loose in the following hymn or canticle sung at a rattling pace with an accelerando to the fortissimo on the knocker.
May God bless
All friends here,
f. With a Merry, Merry Christmas
And a Happy New Year.
cres. Pocket full of Money,
Cellar full of beer,
ff. Merry, Merry Christmas
And a Happy New Year.
BANG, BANG, BANG on the knocker.
When the parlourmaid went to the door a shrill chorus of voices demanded ‘Shilling for the waits, please Miss’ and the message was brought to the drawing-room, which was only too thankful to buy immunity at the price of a couple of shillings. Hardly waiting to say thank you, the vocalists dashed off to blackmail The Elms or Hillside.
Three Houses Page 9