One year Lily Ridsdale, the younger daughter at The Dene, trained a sewing class of village girls to sing carols in parts and then it was very different. A little girl tucked up in bed heard mysterious voices out of the dark singing, ‘From far away we come to you,’ the carol for which Mr Morris wrote the words with a double refrain:
The snow in the street and the wind on the door.
Minstrels and maids stand forth on the floor.
The far-off beauty of the mingled parts from the cold night outside was a thing she never forgot. As she lay listening in a little room with the fire flickering on the whitewashed ceiling and a long limp stocking pinned to the foot of her bed, knowing that tomorrow morning it would be full and lumpy, it was almost too much happiness to bear.
It was a point of honour to wake very early on Christmas morning and on that one day Nanny relaxed her stringent (and well-advised) rules about lighting candles ourselves and I was allowed to grabble for the matches when I woke and light my own candle and look at my stocking. There was something unspeakably satisfying about the feel of a well filled stocking stuffed with lumps of all sizes and shapes. Cubic lumps, spherical lumps, lumps in crackly tissue paper, lumps that might be penknives and sometimes a dormouse curled up all stiff and cold. Dormice were a recurring Christmas gift because last year’s usually got lost. One dormouse, woken by the unaccustomed warmth of Christmas Day, came alive, leapt from my hand and disappeared. I was disconsolate and another dormouse was got to replace it and weeks afterwards the original dormouse was found curled up asleep, quite well, under a heavy pile of blankets in the linen cupboard. Another dormouse escaped – my own fault alas! I forgot to put his water-tin back and he squeezed out through the hole – and drowned himself in the nursery slop-pail. I cried bitterly till my grandparents let me bury him in the garden among the lilies of the valley and my father drew me a picture of his little form with wings flying to Paradise, with earth spread out far below, and I coloured it with the nursery chalks and my grandfather had it framed in a carved and gilded frame – or at least it looked like that. But live stock was on the whole a rarity and the lumps were mostly inanimate, and always in the toe of every stocking was a tangerine orange. Nothing else would do.
The ritual of the morning was that my brother and I should bring our stockings into our grandmother’s bedroom and examine them there. Her bedroom was over the drawing-room and had a big window facing east like the window in the room below. Through it she could see the sun rise over the brow of East Hill until elms growing taller on the other side of the green made a jagged edge where once the line of the downs had stood out clear cut against the dawn. But we were with her long before the winter sunrise, climbing on to her bed, an oak four-post bed with curtains of the most delicate Madras muslin, soft enough to go through a wedding ring and so exquisitely patterned that one of her grandchildren wore dresses made from them twenty years later. In my remembrances she always used very fine cashmere sheets against the cold, and even in bed had lace on her head and the softest shawls pinned with a paste brooch. It was so cold getting out of one’s own bed by candlelight in front of a black fire-place, that one could hardly wait to put on dressing-gown and slippers, and then we dashed into our grandmother’s room where the fire had been kept in all night and my brother got in beside her with his sock, while I made a nest for myself at the foot of the bed with my stocking. I usually brought with me a couple of ginger-nuts which I had taken to bed the night before to make them soft and malleable. On any other morning it would have been my pleasure to roll them into sausages, or mould them into balls, or into a likeness of the human face, but this morning even they might be left unheeded, for there were better things to do.
How delicious it was to plunge one’s hand deeper and deeper into the stocking, pull out the presents, tear off the tissue paper and gloat on the reindeer gloves with fur lining, the necklace, the little fan, the tiny Prayer Book with print that no human eye could read and Sir Joshua Reynolds’ angels stamped in silver on the cover (how perfectly beautiful one thought it then), the pastels, the box of round chocolates sprinkled with sugar, and always at the end the tangerine, so cool to the touch, so sweet to the mouth, and even after you had eaten it, still useful for fireworks. You pinched a piece of the peel sharply, very near the candle and little spurts of oil from it caught fire for a moment and flashed through the flame.
After so much emotion there were sausages for breakfast as if it were Sunday, as indeed it sometimes was, and – we must have been an extremely lucky nursery – heaps of presents on the dining-room table. All the things that were too big to get into our stockings, things like books and engines and bricks and a real carriage-clock of one’s own and always something very magnificent from Uncle Phil like a Punch and Judy Show that we could work ourselves, or a fort with a drawbridge, fully garrisoned, or one’s favourite poet (Longfellow that year, Browning next), bound in blue or green morocco with one’s name in gold on the cover, or quires of notepaper from Asprey’s with monograms in gold and silver and all colours.
This second wave of emotion carried us on to church time. As far as I can remember we never went to church in London, except the Abbey, which is different, but always in the country because of not hurting the Vicar’s feelings, so on Christmas day the family, represented by the women and children, turned up in full force. I had on a green woollen frock from Liberty’s with an embroidered yoke, a brilliant red woollen jacket, a blue tam-o’-shanter, and my new reindeer gloves which it took me the whole length of the service to get properly buttoned. How we enjoyed singing in the church and how delightfully Lily Ridsdale’s voice sounded and how infinitely more we admired the peacock yell of Miss White, the village laundress, and how nobly Mr Sanders the carpenter demeaned himself on the organ. Then there was the fun of saying ‘Happy Christmas’ to every one, lunch, the turkey with its gilded claws and general repletion.
After a decent interval the Curse of Christmas descended upon us in the shape of thank letters. My brother and I had written a quantity of blank forms in trusting anticipation of a good haul of presents, more or less in this form:
Dear …,
Thank you so very much for the … It is a lovely … and thank you so much for it. I hope you had a very happy Christmas.
Your loving …
But unluckily a rather hurried calligraphy made ‘much’ look like ‘muck’ and most of the thank forms were confiscated and destroyed. What a brooding nightmare thank letters are to children. One can’t tell them not to write, but when I get letters from my nieces running more or less as follows:
Dear Aunt Anglia (or Angelia),
Thank you so much for the lovely necklace. It was a lovely necklace and I do like it so much. We had a lot of presents. Now I must stop with love from Mary.
My heart aches for the tedious time they have spent on this and other thank letters.
After dark my brother and I were sometimes allowed, for a great treat, to go into the studio, which was as a rule forbidden ground. To reach it you went up the blue staircase and turned off past the linen-cupboard through a bamboo curtain. It was impossible to get a north light at North End House, so the studio faced east as the next best thing, but the light was never suitable for oil painting and my grandfather mostly worked in charcoal, pencil, or water-colour when he was there. There was an extravagance in his nature which loved to make pictures in a medium that would not last; to make a lovely or impish drawing on the back of a sheet of notepaper which some one else would use for a business letter, to paint birds and beasts and angels on a rough whitewashed wall where they would be rubbed and scratched. Among the exquisite letters with coloured pictures which he wrote to me as a very little girl, many are written on scribbling paper which was not good enough to wrap up groceries and have only been kept from falling to pieces by extreme loving care. Every year he made a sacrifice to art on my father and mother’s wedding cake. A large cake, smoothly iced with pure white icing was brought into the studio on
a board and laid on the large table. On it he painted a picture of the church, or the downs, or fat babies with a cat, or a pond with ducks, all in water-colour so that we could eat it without any damage.
When we left the studio to go upstairs to bed we went up by the blue staircase, past my grandfather’s bedroom hung with Arundel prints and Baring-Gould’s Lives of the Saints over the mantelpiece, and past my grandmother’s room, lingering a moment on the landing before attacking the last flight to our warm nursery. On this landing all the un-self-consciousness, all the discomfort, and all the beauty of pre-Raphaelitism was epitomised in a small space. Just at the foot of the top flight of blue stairs a zinc-lined cave had been built out from the wall with a tap in it for the use of the housemaid. There was no attempt at concealment inside or out. From the outside this preposterous square excrescence was stuck on to the back of the house, looking ready to fall off at any moment, and from the inside there it was, obviously a housemaid’s sink, with no disguise, and the water coming in from the Brighton main made a roaring that filled the blue staircase. Above the bold-faced sink was a stained-glass window of jewelled brilliance, containing four scenes from the story of the Sangraal; the summoning of the knights, the adventure of the Sangraal, and at the end the holy cup itself, guarded by angels in Sarras. The Holy Grail above a housemaid’s sink, both needed, both a part of daily life. It is easy to laugh a little, but there was a splendid disregard of external values in this juxtaposition and it was a summing up of the best part of the pre-Raphaelite attitude to life.
VI
On the top floor of the blue staircase was a bedroom where Nanny and our baby sister slept and next to it the maids’ bedroom into which I never penetrated in all the years I stayed at Rottingdean. There was a complete taboo on their door and my brother and I who were only too ready to go anywhere when we weren’t wanted never once dared to attempt the adventure. This same taboo was on the kitchen which we never dreamt of visiting without an invitation, whether it was the temporary abode of Mr and Mrs Mounter, or Mrs Snudden from the village, or a London cook who was brought down for the holidays. It was unexpected to find a basement kitchen of the worst period of Victorian civilisation in a whitewashed cottage. Both kitchen and scullery were well below the ground-level and lighted by windows which looked out, the one into an area some three feet wide, the other on to the brick steps by which the tradesmen came down with their parcels. There was no through ventilation except what came through a couple of iron gratings in the brick path behind the house and the larder was tucked away near one of them. In later years a passage was made under the corner of the hall to join the kitchen to the boot and knife and furnace establishment in the brown-staircase house, but in early days the kitchen was a dark cellar, very different from the large airy ground-floor kitchen of my grandparents’ house in London. However, maids were used to troglodyte conditions and in winter it was at least deliciously warm with a huge fire in the little room. In summer they opened the window, hung up quantities of fly-papers and took things as they came.
When we went down to the beach in the morning the kitchen often provided us with slices of dripping cake and a friendly cook waved good-bye from the window as the nursery cavalcade set out. The procession beachwards used to begin about ten o’clock on weekday mornings in August and September – on Sundays Nanny would not allow us to go within sight of the sea – with perambulators coming majestically out of all the houses where there were nurseries. First came our perambulator pushed by Nanny in her summer uniform of stiff white piqué and severe straw hat (for even Nannies wore boaters in the ’nineties), containing my baby sister, my brother with his legs dangling over the side, two wooden spades, two tin pails, and all the family bathing dresses and towels. I walked beside them with a green sixpenny shrimping net in which nothing was ever caught and the shilling for buns tightly clasped in my hand. At the corner of the green we were joined by the contingent of visiting grandchildren from The Dene, Didi, Lorna, Margot who was christened Pamela Margaret but called herself Perambulator Margaret, and Oliver. The other brother and sister came later and never really belonged to those days. Our Nanny and the Baldwins’ head nurse were firm friends and Edie, the pale-eyed, fair-haired nursery maid, was allowed to be a hanger-on at their gossipings. So the perambulators and nurses and children swept down the village street in a solid phalanx, moving aside for nothing less than the half-past-ten bus as it wandered round the village collecting passengers for Brighton.
All down the street were friends to greet. Mrs Ridsdale bearing down on us like a galleon, Mr Ridsdale with his velvet coat, Arthur Ridsdale the doctor, off on his horse to some outlying farm. Then Julian Ridsdale and Aurelian Ridsdale, with Uncle Phil and our cousin Ambrose Poynter, the last two down for a weekend, all wondering what to do and very ready to tease the nursery party for want of better employment. Aurelian and my grandmother had lately had a friendly dispute over a matter of a few pounds which each insisted was due to the other from some committee, and Aurelian had cut the knot by putting it into three Post Office Savings Bank accounts for myself and my brother and sister. It was the first time the nursery had had a banking account and I, being over seven, had the unfair advantage of being able to withdraw my wealth personally. Aurelian was the justest as he was the most generous and upright of men. There was always considerable confusion in my mind about his name because the Ridsdales had brought pieces of cornelian back from Egypt and I didn’t see why one name should be used rather than the other. Julian though, with his easy lazy banter, was perhaps the nursery favourite.
Then Mr Green would come by, or Miss Mabel Green whose cheerful habit of countenance made Didi Baldwin call her ‘Miss Smileyface’ and be horribly scolded by her nurse for impertinence, or Miss Bates who always walked solitary with a black poodle. As we passed by the shingle-covered road that led to Hilder the butcher’s house and shop, the noise of home-killed South Down mutton might come bleatingly and bellowingly to our ears. Then there might be the vicar whose Adam’s apple surpassed in size that of all other clergymen, or his successor who shocked the nursery, always staunch Conservatives, by wearing an open collar and white tie instead of the conventional dog-collar. Then from various lodgings in the village other children joined the beach party. All Herbert Trench’s boys and girls with their friend Peggy Middleton who were lodged during the holidays in some of the buildings of St Aubyn’s school and had the school gymnasium as their most enviable playground. Gillie and Chrissie whose father was, we understood, a very glorified kind of policeman. Their elder brother and sister Charlie and Julia – poor Charlie who had a banjo and used to play ‘When Father laid the carpet on the stairs’ in the Mermaid on a summer afternoon, with all my family and The Dene and Hillside applauding. He was at odds with life for many years. Then his name shone at Gallipoli, but he aged too soon and died in another land, so far from the youngster who sang at Rottingdean.
All the summers run into one as the young shadows of so many friends come to join us. Viola and Una Taylor talking French with their mother, which seemed a little suspicious to our less cosmopolitan nursery, Viola adoring my little brother and giving me a set of Miss Edgeworth’s Early Lessons, a very early edition with tiny steel engravings pasted in as vignettes for chapter headings; Molly Stanford, dark and long-legged, from her father’s school. There were two boys’ schools at Rottingdean, St Aubyn’s in the village, owned by Mr Stanford, and a newer school out beyond the village on the road to Woodendean kept then by a Mr Mason. The village’s estimation of the two schools was shown in those days by the one being known as ‘Mr Stanford’s’ and the other simply as ‘Mason’s’. Oliver Baldwin was to go to Mr Stanford’s school later, and when Didi Baldwin grew up her little boy was to go there too.
Mr Stanford was related to our beloved ‘Aunt Madeline’, Mrs Percy Wyndham, and so had some of the blood of Lord Edward Fitzgerald and the enchanting Pamela, and more than one Fitzgerald descendant was at his school.
If we were lucky Na
nny might have to stop at the village Post Office and we could talk to Mrs Champion and look covetously at the iron spades which were absolutely forbidden to us in case we cut off our toes. Mrs Champion also sold buckets and shrimping nets and sandshoes and quantities of shell-ornamented boxes which I still think are among the most ravishing products of art. The chef d’oeuvre of the Champion collection was a little mirror encrusted with coloured shells such as any mermaid might have been proud to own. It was so much admired by the fastidious Charles Ricketts that I had to get him one for his private collection.
Then came the baker’s shop kept by our friend Mr Stenning. He was undoubtedly the stoutest man ever made, and rumour had it that he spent all his holidays at Dieppe – an easy journey from Rottingdean which was only a few miles from Newhaven – where his bulk, discreetly veiled in a black alpaca jacket, was less noticed among the portly Gauls than on his native beach. But I have never known a man with such a noble conception of buns. His penny buns were larger than the largest Bath Buns, fine upstanding voluptuous creatures warm from the oven with a deep brown ambrosial varnish on their outsides, heavy with currants and sultanas and more spice-flavoured than any ordinary hot-cross bun. We usually bought a shilling’s worth – thirteen buns in those spacious days – to take down to the beach for the bathers after their encounter with the icy summer waters of the Channel.
After this we might exchange a few pleasantries with Mr Shergold (mysteriously known to us as Shamrock), who drove the village fly. My brother, seating himself one day against orders on the back of the fly, was carried far away into the distance, too frightened to jump off, and had to walk miles back along the hot road. A little further on an archway on the right led under some cottages to Rottingdean’s indubitable slum called Golden Square, where several families lived in great squalor within a stone’s throw of the open downs. Mr Murphy, the head of one Irish family, was blind of an eye, and was held up to us as an awful warning because his trade was stone-breaking and he would not wear glasses to protect his eyes and one day a splinter flew into his eye and he was blind to this day. Where exactly the moral came in I don’t know, as our opportunities of stone-breaking were practically nonexistent; but it impressed us very much. One of his daughters, Annie, entered my mother’s service in an ill-omened hour as between maid, and inaugurated her service by leaving an oil lamp turned up so high that the bedroom which it was to have warmed was knee deep in soot before my mother was alarmed by the smell and rushed upstairs. Then we might have to stop at Mrs Mockford’s little shop to order fruit for North End House and buy a penny bar of Fry’s chocolate cream.
Three Houses Page 10