by Diana Cooper
The new life in Arlington Street ended babyhood. Taps and electric switches gave one a certain adult power. It was a vast house of exquisite proportions, now half-obliterated and totally deformed by the Overseas League, which has suppressed the William Kent decorations, torn up and roofed over the eighteenth-century cobbled courtyard and built a lot of new rooms. In our day the cab-horse (we never had a carriage of our own) was driven beneath an archway built into the lodge house, in one hutch of which lived Mrs Seed, the white-haired lodge-lady. The horse would slither and slide and panic on the slippery outsize cobblestones, the bells would ring an alarm and we would dash to the third-floor nursery window in the hope of seeing him fall.
The Quality, when the front door opened, found themselves in a darkish pillared hall, to the right of which was a wide and shallow-stepped staircase of stone, beautifully balustraded in wrought iron. Tradesmen darted down a stairway in the lodge and followed a subterranean passage that ran the long length of the courtyard. Huge kitchens were beneath the lodge, so that the food had a long cold journey before it reached the house. On the passage level was a fine big room looking on to Green Park, known as the “basement,” in which stood my brother’s unplaced tomb. There was also a servants’ hall where the nine servants ate and laughed uproariously. Never to-day are children told to shut the door against the deafening laughter of the staff. The narrow back stairs went up five stone flights with an iron banister curved outwards to give place to ladies’ hooped skirts—a pre-crinoline line. Between these banisters there just fitted a labour-saving letter-box slung between two leather straps and worked by a top-floor wheel and a basement handle. The procedure was to communicate from the upper floors by an echo-age telephone, saying to the cave-dweller “I’ve put some letters in the box,” and he would rush to manipulate the handle. Another device was a small electric gadget on the wall by the front door which, when a little lever was pulled down, would produce in a short time a child of nine dressed in heavy blue serge uniform, a pillbox hiding one ear, who would for sixpence encircle like Puck any distance in forty minutes, bearing letters or parcels.
Giving on to the Park on the courtyard level, connected by an outside stairway to a mangy garden below, was a Kent-decorated dining-room painted cream, a colour now much condemned as a background because it lasted too long as the artistic fashion, and a library for my father, with the Encyclopaedia Britannica, bound copies of the Badminton Magazine, current works of Conan Doyle and Kipling, Hansards, Blue Books, Red Books, Who’s Whos, Burke’s Peerage, Turf Guides and a large writing-table at which he wrote letters to Drummond’s Bank, the Leicestershire Agricultural Club, the Sun Insurance Co., occasional articles on dry-fly fishing for the Badminton Magazine and a blue-moon letter to The Times. I remember the dear man scratching away with his J-nib in an exquisite legible hand. He would lay down his pen to give me a pink sweetie called Otto of Rose against the doubtful breath of smokers, or to dab my nose and chin with a drop of cèdre (a manly scent) from a bottle on his table. No secretary and no typewriter gave a householder two good hours of tiresome work every morning, and the new income tax was another irritating complication. Years later, I remember, it rose to elevenpence in the pound. We all thought Papa would die. He looked too ashen to recover.
My own anxieties had begun. Ruin stared us in the face—everything sold, beggars in the street. This real fear must have come from my father’s perpetual threat of bankruptcy. Another great and yearly dread was the divorce of my parents. Never was such a thing in question. They lived exceedingly happily together, adored their children and were fully conscious of their happy condition. My father had a wayward temper that sometimes ran away with him, and once he threw a napkin at my mother because she had asked Princess Beatrice of Battenberg to luncheon without telling him. This must have started my fears. Heaven no longer lay about me.
To return to the house. There was, looking on to the cobbles, a large morning-room—my mother’s. Had she been less unselfish she would have put my father on the yard side of the house, to be disturbed by the clop-clopping of the horses, and taken for herself the sunny Park-side room, completely noiseless except on Sunday evenings in summer when the military band played Pinafore in the Park bandstand. True, the morning-room had the Kent plasterwork of fruit and flowery swags. It was densely packed with furniture and loved objects, all of sentiment, or things of a colour that she could not resist, such as blue-green Chinese jars or the dead straw of the palm-leaf fan that she used to protect her cheek from the fire. A great many of her drawings hung on the walls. Every room boasted an elaborate chimneypiece of carved wood or marble with an open steel grate.
On the next floor there was a vast ballroom on the court side, generally used as a studio, music and play room, with a piano littered with opera-scores and often an unfinished bust of one of us mobled in wet cloths, a centre-skylit drawing-room elaborately decorated, and two rooms on the Park side with iron balconies. One was a gilded drawing-room (later to become my nursery) and the other my mother’s bedroom, with next door under the stairs a slip of a bathroom with a narrow tin bath like the one in which the brides were drowned. The rooms were enormously high on these three floors and the stairs were very exhausting, especially for the ever-changing seventeen-year-old nurserymaid who carried our trays up the last flight of four, and for the “boy” who carried them up the other three storeys. Many a time did we hear with joy the interminable clatter of a whole tray’s fall, with its horrid mutton and cabbage and tapioca pudding.
On the third floor a passage, the only one above stairs, led from my father’s bedroom and a spare room to the schoolroom, Marjorie’s room and Mrs Page’s, who had now replaced Deborah. On this floor was the special bathroom-cum-box-and-lumber room. My father was very pleased. A six-foot-two man, he had never had but a hip-bath and now he could soak at full length and have a very big sponge. I remember how shocked I was when he told me that he never used soap in his bath. He had Windsor soap, we had Vinolia and Pears (a choice at Belvoir) and drearily innocent Cimolite at home. Above this floor two wooden flights of stairs led to the three-roomed nursery wing and the four-roomed maids’ wing. God knows where the other servants slept—in the basement or lodge presumably.
So much for 16 Arlington Street, one of the most unspoilt eighteenth-century houses in London, built at the end of a cul-de-sac, where daily lingered a hope of a barrel organ (to whose now lost music the clumsy-booted children danced, holding wide their skirts with more graceful fingers), wrapped in its inevitable overalling of patterned green baize complete with Italian grinder, corseted, mortar-boarded wife and the soliciting monkey in regimental red, equipped to present arms. Or very rarely the dramas of Punch’s life, and Judy’s death, and Toby’s indifference, ringed round with a knot of smaller children, cabbies, and flocks of pigeons and sparrows squabbling for the grain that fell from the poor horses’ nosebag, horses that in cul-de-sacs never found the straw to deaden their hoof-fall for dying ears.
Here my mother drew, and entertained very occasionally. Here my father wrote his letters, laced on his boots at mid-day and walked down Bond Street, taking off his top hat to bow to acquaintances at every other step. Here we all had our meals at one and two o’clock respectively on different floors. From here Marjorie went for casual education to Miss Wolff’s classes in South Street, Mayfair, and to art schools in Kensington, and Letty too later on, and brother John came and went to school.
I became a good little girl, affectionate and, Nanny said, “well built.” No one thought me pretty but my mother. My hair was put into curl-papers every night since memory starts. It was all a pale yellow fuzz in the morning and at parties, but fell lankily at the end of the day or when it rained. I wore scarlet shoes with rosettes like Harriet’s (and the Matches), and for best a black satin Vandyck dress with collar, cuffs, and apron of lawn and real lace. I also had a short sensible black satin coat for the Park. I was a happy trusting child, a little frightened of the dark and never allowed the chin
k of open door that would have helped me. Spitting out cod-liver oil in the “place” was my only deceit I remember.
My mother spent the mornings in bed. I see her sitting cross-legged in her bed writing endless letters with a flowing quill pen. On her knee was balanced a green morocco folding letter-case, with blotting paper and a pot of ink which, curiously enough, never got splashed on the Irish linen sheets. It had a bristled penwiper and pockets for letters written and unwritten. Having no telephone, in urgency she would give a stylised scream to attract her maid Tritton, to whom she would hand a letter marked “Messenger Boy” to be put in the box. My mother would not take long to get up or to wash in soft sterilised water poured out of high stone bottles bought from the chemist. She used very little powder (Fuller’s Earth) and a speck of Roger & Gallet’s pink lip-salve (the same that she would surreptitiously smear on my resisting mouth for fancy balls).
My mother entertained occasionally at two o’clock luncheon. Very beautiful women were always round the table. Lady Westmorland was the most lovely in my eyes, perhaps because she painted her face. I would come down in my embroidered-with-wheat-ears lawn frock and scarlet shoes and stand by my mother’s chair while she plucked admiringly at my hair and let it flutter slowly through her fingers. No one saw me with her eyes. The gentlemen were kind. I was told particularly to remember Cecil Rhodes, a thick square man who stared at me and did not know what to say either. Later on I remember the bearded Lord Salisbury (Prime Minister on and off), to whom my father was secretary. I remember him chiefly because I dropped a valued sixpence behind a bookcase in the drawing-room and half-crying told him, so he gave me another. I was scolded for asking gentlemen for money.
My father went down to the House of Lords in the afternoon. My mother would etherealise Cecil Rhodes, Paderewski, Arthur Balfour or George Meredith with her skilled pencil. Queen Victoria she drew, but with only one sitting (Deborah Metzker, a pudding-basin and mantilla on her head, had to pose for the accessories). She was a justly renowned artist. In 1902 at the Grosvenor Gallery, in collaboration with Benjamin Constant, she gave an exhibition of 192 pencil portraits. Two were bought by the Luxembourg. All the celebrities of politics, literature or the stage, all the beauties of their day, were pleased to sit to her and see themselves through her beatifying eyes. We were often her models, statue-still for hours at a time. Lessons went forward with Nanny, and I would go every morning to the schoolroom for piano lessons from Mrs Page. This idyllic life was varied by visits to Belvoir, my grandfather’s castle in Leicestershire, and to Sussex, where my mother rented cottages beside the summer sea.
CHAPTER TWO
The Castle on the Hill
THE Castle stands high on a hill overlooking the vale of Belvoir, then a contented vale of solid farms and farmers who followed foxhounds and thought of their acres in terms of “runs,” “jumps” and “coverts.” The Duchess who had built this Valhalla was a Howard from Castle Howard and as a bride had been grievously disappointed at the low wandering Charles II house built on the foundations of a Norman stronghold. She had expected better, so her kind rich husband allowed her to raze it to the ground and to build on the old foundations a real castle, neo-Norman, neo-Gothic, neo-everything. Scarcely had she got it up than it was burnt almost out, with many of its prized treasures. Undaunted she built it up again. So steep was its hill that she made a cyclopic causeway to link it to a neighbouring mound. She furnished it lavishly. She hung it with the family chefs d’œuvre and a respectable collection of Italian and Dutch Masters, with Gobelin tapestries and all the stained glass, the dogtooth, the red and the gold of the day. This second castle was opened by the Prince Regent in 1820.
The Duchess bore about ten children and died of what must have been an appendicitis at forty. She had prepared her mausoleum on the further mound, where in statuary she floats heavenward towards her recovered marble-winged babies. Blue and yellow hidden windows light her flight. Her sorrowing husband did not re-marry, and at his death his son succeeded him—Uncle Granby to my ears but not to my eyes, for he died before my birth, and his brother John, my grandfather, inherited the estate. The fortunes had been sadly depleted by the castle-building.
Lord John (now the Duke) was a beautiful bent old man. I can see him very clearly, walking down the endless corridors of Belvoir, wrapped warmly in a thick black cape buttoned down the front, for these passages in winter were arctic—no stoves, no hot pipes, no heating at all. He would unbutton his cape at the drawing-room door and hang it on a long brass bar with many others. He joined his large family at lunch, but I do not remember his talking very often. I would sit on his bony knees when the meal was over, and be allowed to blow open his gold hunter watch, and ask for a comical poem that he and I both liked to hear recited in a sing-song tone that has stayed with me until now. A strange choice for a child of six, it was about a cuckolded Roundhead whose wife was hiding an escaped Cavalier:
I went into the dairy to see what I could see,
And there I saw a gentleman’s boot
Where a gentleman’s boot ought never to be.
So I called to my wife and I said “My dear,
Pray what is this gentleman’s boot doing here?”
“Why, you old goose, you blind old goose,
And can’t you very well see
That it is a milking-pail
My granny has sent to me?”
“Hobs bobs, here’s fun!
Milking-pails with spurs on.”
I went into the kitchen to see what I could see,
And there I saw a gentleman’s sword
Where a gentleman’s sword ought never to be.
So I called to my wife and I said “My dear,
Pray what is this gentleman’s sword doing here?”
“Why, you old goose, you blind old goose,
And can’t you very well see
That it is a toasting-fork
My granny has sent to me?”
“Hobs bobs, here’s fun!
Toasting-forks with scabbards on.”
I went into the chamber to see what I could see,
And there I saw a gentleman
Where a gentleman ought never to be.
So I called to my wife and I said “My dear,
Pray what is this gentleman doing here?”
“Why, you old goose, you blind old goose,
And can’t you very well see
That it is a waiting-maid
My granny has sent to me?”
“Hobs bobs, here’s fun!
Waiting-maids with breeches on.”
After this poem, or another starting “O that my lips might bleat like buttered peas,” lisping Aunt Queenie would say “Tingaly the bingaly, Farver,” and he would let me ring the gold bell on the table. The groom of the chambers, thus summoned, would ask what orders for the stables. Some days the answer was “Perfection round at a quarter before three, if you please.” These were the good days for me and Letty. We would watch my grandfather mount Perfection from the mounting-stone against the castle wall. Perfection was snow-white, very fat and quiet. Either one of his sons or Mr Knox, his private chaplain, would ride beside him, while a smart old groom, liveried in blue and buttoned in silver, top-hatted and cockaded, jogged behind.
The Rev. Knox, our private chaplain, was “extra-parochial.” I have never heard of another ordained clergyman being extra-parochial. My grandfather was his bishop. He could, I suppose, have celebrated Black Mass in the little white plaster gothic chapel, and nothing said. But Mr Knox was not a Black Masser. He was a black Irish Protestant with a brogue, who played a jig on the fiddle and had the hands and legs of a man who thinks of horses even in the pulpit. We had prayers every morning, and church, morning and evening, on Sunday. We said our prayers and sung our canticles out of morocco-bound, octavo books printed with f’s for s’s, and prayers for the eternal health of Queen Adelaide. How well we knew, by the speed of the morning prayers, if Mr Knox was hunting that day or not, and how fa
r off the meet was. We used to believe that he wore his spurs under his cassock and surplice.
He was, among other unclerical activities, Captain of the Belvoir Fire Brigade. That was a magnificent turn-out. The alarm would ring and the brigade would muster, some of them from a mile away with a precipitous hill to climb. They had axes and Britannia helmets. The engine was hand-pumped and went out for real business, in my recollection, but once—to a burning stately home of a neighbour eight miles away. I think that its going was more in the nature of a gesture than anything else. The house was burnt to the ground.
But the days when my grandfather did not ride were not so free for us. A lengthy discussion would be carried on between him, some aunts and the groom of the chambers as to whether it was to be the landau, the victoria or the barouche that should be used for the drive. I never understood what the issue was—the size of the vehicle, the state of the roads or the condition of the horses. Anyhow, the decision was made and the children were dressed for the afternoon drive. I remember genuinely hating it, I don’t know why. It was not more boring than the pram and the walks holding Nanny’s hand, never for one second being allowed to relinquish it. Perhaps it was because I, for one, always felt sick and dreaded the smell of the blue leather padding and the hot horses, and sitting backward, sometimes on the vast landau seat, sometimes on the minute stool of the victoria. Whatever it was, I hated it. I would be dressed, as usual, in a black satin coat, black satin bonnet and scarlet shoes with rosettes. We would drive for an hour and a half through country roads of very little interest. There was no town within eight miles and scarcely any neighbours to leave cards upon. So round and round the muddy lanes of the estate we splashed, with an immense apoplectic coachman on the box and an alert footman in a fawn boxcloth liveried coat, check-lined and almost to the ground, who sprang up and down to open the too many gates.