Autobiography

by Diana Cooper

  When we reached home, a large crowd of tourists would have collected on each side of the last hundred yards of the approach, and my grandfather would uncover his head and bow very slightly with a look of pleasure and welcome on his delicate old face. He loved his tourists. They represented to him England and liberty and the feudal system, and were a link between the nobility and the people. The house was open to them three times a week and on all bank holidays. They would arrive in four-in-hand charabancs from all over the country. Bedrooms and one drawing-room, one study and a dining-room were excluded from their tour. Otherwise, from morning to dark, armies of sightseers tramped through that welcoming house. No efforts were made to improve it for them. There were no signed photographs of royalty or of the family, no special flowers or Coronation robes draped casually over a chair, coronet to hand, no tables laid or crumpled newspapers. Nor could they have any idea of how we really lived. In the summer my mother arranged for us children to picnic out and not to return until the hordes had departed, for in truth the atmosphere—the smell—was asphyxiating. Not that one could get away with one’s picnic—they all brought picnics too and were encouraged to eat and sleep and take their boots off and comb their hair in the garden, on the terraces, all about and everywhere. They paid no admittance and two or three elderly ladies in black dresses—Lena the head housemaid, the controller of a regiment of maids and the terror of our chapel choir (she sang loud and false to poor Miss Thursby’s pedal-sore harmonium), and Mrs Smith the housekeeper, sparkling with jet arabesques, or a pensioned retainer—would shepherd them round.

  On Sundays the family, its guests, its governesses and nurses, my grandfather’s gentlemen secretaries, his chaplain, Mrs Knox and their child, made a tour of the demesne. Soon after lunch church clothes were changed for equally long close-fitting costumes. The pony chaise was ordered for my grandfather, and a groom to lead it. We would make first for the stables. Mr Durrance, the head groom, would be standing there in blue and silver, carrots in hand, to receive us. The gigantic Princes, Belvoirs and Wellingtons that drew the carriages, lined up hind-end foremost, were given a pat on the withers by my grandfather’s withered hand, and a carrot was proffered to each twitching muzzle. Next the sore backs of the hunters were looked at reprovingly. An apple for my Shetland pony, and the doors closed on the champing, the ammonia smell and the exquisitely-plaited selvedge of straw. A minute’s glance at the harness-room’s gleaming crests of peacocks on blinkers, another at the carriages, dog-and tub-carts and the sleigh. I never knew a great house that did not sport a sleigh, and yet I never saw one used in England. How did they ever come to the coach-houses and where are they sliding to now? Did Russian princes present them, or were they mascots to ward off the hunter’s dread of ice and snow?

  After the stables came the gardens. Mr Divers, the head gardener, had a black W. G. Grace beard covering his chest, a black cut-away coat, Homburg hat and a bunch of Bluebeard keys. It was impossible to imagine a spade in his hands. He would cut us off a fine bunch of white grapes from the thousand hanging clusters in the vinery, pick us a camellia apiece and offer some not-up-to-much apples to munch on the walk. My grandfather would congratulate him on his last-won horticultural medal and pretend to understand the Latin names of his flowers. I liked the poultry yard better because there was a muster of peacocks, and best perhaps the dairy and Miss Saddlebridge the dairymaid (whose face was not her fortune), who filled the dishes with creamy milk and churned yellow butter-pats crested with peacocks. The kennels next, but they smelt of dead horse, and hounds are not trained to know the difference between men and doorposts, so ladies often weakened on this last call. It was an exhausting walk and my legs were very short. I got a lift sometimes on my grandfather’s lap in his chaise, but it was hard on the polite and reluctant men and women who trudged a good three miles, the ladies gathering up their long skirts in their little frozen hands.

  My grandfather would come to London for the season. He had a house in Cambridge Gate, the only ugly row of Regent’s Park. He would send the carriage and pair to fetch us to tea occasionally. It was no fun.

  We were not very fond of our aunts and uncles who lived with him at Belvoir. There was poor Aunt Kitty who drowned herself. Unarmed for life, artistic and frustrated, she sought and never found relief, neither by joining the Church of Rome nor by becoming a nurse at Guy’s—a highly-commended move in 1914 when I followed her to that great hospital, but in her day condemnable. These departures exasperated her eccentric mother (my grandfather’s second wife), so Aunt Kitty, decked in what jewellery she possessed and marking the fatal brink with her parasol, found peace in the deep Belvoir lake. When his Duchess died, Aunt Queenie kept house for my grandfather. She painted water colours and wrote about art for the Connoisseur. Aunt Elsie, the youngest and our favourite, married Lord George Scott, who came over the Border like Young Lochinvar to court her. She scarcely knew him when they were married in the Belvoir chapel. I was bridesmaid in a Vandyck dress (cream satin this time). She died alas! too young.

  Uncle Cecil was a big success with children, being always on all fours. He went to the Boer War as a reporter. He quarrelled with the family. He suffered from spy-fever and at the age of eighty, I am sorry to say, could no longer endure life itself so ended it beneath a train at Crowborough. Uncle Billy died young of fits, and Uncle Edward, the eldest of my father’s half-brothers, died of tuberculosis and other dread diseases. Uncle Bobby, the youngest, had all the strength and health and character that the others seemed to lack. A gallant soldier in the Boer War, with a D.S.O. for us to admire, he became Master of the Belvoir Hounds. He wore an eyeglass and had a drawl, though he very rarely spoke. I remember his man asking us when or where some event was to happen, adding “I’ve asked His Lordship, and all His Lordship says is ‘Aw’.” He was forty-five in 1915 and on the reserve of the Sixtieth Rifles, so the war took him and killed him.

  We were chiefly at Belvoir in winter, I suppose, for I think of the tobogganing down slopes worthy of a world’s fair, and my fear of the horse-pond ice breaking and drowning Letty, and of day-and-night prayers for snow. The elders outprayed me in their petitions for thaw and for the Meet of the Belvoir Hounds at the Castle door. Bright and beautiful as meets were, I would rather have had snow. Meets were two a penny, and following the hunt in a pony-cart frankly bored me. The ladies wore top hats or billycocks with very black veils drawn taut across their cold noses, and fringes and buns. The men were in pink, with glossy white “leathers,” swigging down cherry brandy from their saddles to keep out the cold. Hounds making a faint music of excitement were dexterously and mercilessly being whipped into a pack by Ben Capel and his underlings. The Master, Sir Gilbert Greenall, was popular though seldom seen, and in his place would be his redoubtable wife surrounded by the horses pawing and twitching and foaming at the mouth, some incorrigibles sporting red bows on their tails that said “I kick.” Then they would be off, with a flinty clatter of hooves and suppressed oaths and the language horses are thought to understand, through the bare woods to the open Vale, the second horsemen following demurely. They would hack home cold, weary and fulfilled in the twilight, generally caked in mud and smelling of horse, and fall upon the tea and boiled eggs, and discuss the runs and falls and scandals until the gong rang for dressing-time, getting louder and louder as it approached down the unending passages.

  The gong man was an old retainer, one of those numberless ranks of domestic servants which have completely disappeared and today seem fabulous. He was admittedly very old. He wore a white beard to his waist. Three times a day he rang the gong—for luncheon, for dressing-time, for dinner. He would walk down the interminable passages, his livery hanging a little loosely on his bent old bones, clutching his gong with one hand and with the other feebly brandishing the padded-knobbed stick with which he struck it. Every corridor had to be warned and the towers too, so I suppose he banged on and off for ten minutes, thrice daily.

  Then there were the lamp-and-candle
men, at least three of them, for there was no other form of lighting. Gas was despised, I forget why—vulgar, I think. They polished and scraped the wax off the candelabra, cut wicks, poured paraffin oil and unblackened glass chimneys all day long. After dark they were busy turning wicks up or down, snuffing candles, and de-waxing extinguishers. It was not a department we liked much to visit. It smelt disgusting and the lamp-men were too busy. But the upholsterer’s room was a great treat. He was exactly like a Hans Andersen tailor. Crosslegged he sat in a tremendous confusion of curtains and covers, fringes, buttons, rags and carpets, bolsters, scraps (that could be begged off him), huge curved needles like scimitars, bodkins, hunks of beeswax to strengthen thread, and hundreds of flags. The flags on the tower-top, I suppose, got punished by the winds and were constantly in need of repair. I never saw him actually at work on anything else. There were slim flags for wind, little ones for rain, huge ones for sunshine, hunting flags, and many others.

  The water-men are difficult to believe in today. They seemed to me to belong to another clay. They were the biggest people I had ever seen, much bigger than any of the men of the family, who were remarkable for their height. They had stubbly beards and a general Bill Sikes appearance. They wore brown clothes, no collars and thick green baize aprons from chin to knee. On their shoulders they carried a wooden yoke from which hung two gigantic cans of water. They moved on a perpetual round. Above the ground floor there was not a drop of hot water and not one bath, so their job was to keep all jugs, cans and kettles full in the bedrooms, and morning or evening to bring the hot water for the hip-baths. We were always a little frightened of the water-men. They seemed of another element and never spoke but one word, “Water-man,” to account for themselves.

  If anyone had the nerve to lie abed until eleven o’clock, which can seldom have happened, there were many strange callers at the door. First the housemaid, scouring the steel grate and encouraging the fire of the night before, which always burned until morning, and refilling the kettle on the hob until it sang again. Next the unearthly water-giants. Then a muffled knock given by a knee, for the coal-man’s hands were too dirty and too full. He was a sinister man, much like his brothers of the water, but blacker far and generally more mineral. He growled the single word “Coal-man” and refilled one’s bin with pieces the size of ice-blocks.

  The carpenter’s shop was an excitement. It smelt good. One could use the lathes and coax Mr Ricketts to frame a picture or make a box with one’s name fretted into it. Then too there was Betsy, the little old stillroom help. She was ninety when I first remember her. She had been born in the Castle, no one quite knew how, and for seventy-five years she washed and dried the plates for the lesser meals. She was felt to be one of the Castle’s treasures, together with the Benvenuto Cellini ewer and basin. The visitors were always shown her. She had never learned to read or write—no disgrace, I think, to the family, as what child of her class did learn to read before Waterloo? But maybe she was the happier for her ignorance, for she was always laughing, lived to over a hundred and had a grand funeral.

  Lastly there were the watchmen, who frightened many a newcomer to death. There was a little of the water-men about them, but they were dreadfully silent and they padded. All night they walked the passages, terraces and battlements, yet no one really saw them. One would leave a paper with a request (as one put a letter to Father Christmas in the grate) on the floor of the passage. The paper would disappear and the request would be granted by this remote, unseen power. Always if one woke in the night, as the fire flickered to its death, one would hear a padded foot on the gravel outside and a voice, not loud enough to waken but strong enough to reassure, saying “Past twelve o’clock. All’s well.”

  Nothing changed until my grandfather died. He was well over eighty and had lived a life devoted to ideals. His heart had been broken when his lovely young wife, Miss Marley from Ireland, had died bearing him his second child (the first was my father). Twenty years later he had married again the “Grandmama” I knew, who bore him about eight sons and daughters. His political leader was Benjamin Disraeli. If anyone still reads Disraeli’s books, they will find Belvoir described in Coningsby as Beaumanoir and Lord John Manners, as he was then called, in the character of Henry Sidney. He became Postmaster-General and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster without aspiring to office. His biography was written by Charles Whibley.*

  *

  As soon as the Castle became my father’s property the old order began to change. Bathrooms were carved out of the deep walls, rooms and passages were warm without the coal-man’s knock, the water-men faded away into the elements. Forty strong horses turned to the power of one motor-car. Only the kettles remained, singing night and day on the hobs. The watchmen still guarded the fort, but no longer cried “All’s well.”

  The children at Belvoir became the Castle guides for the Quality. The unfortunate guests, after the Sunday walk and a tremendous tea, were handed over to Letty and me (the novice) to be instructed about our family history and heirlooms and any legend we had picked up, or the facts about the authenticity of the Benvenuto Cellini ewer, or the strange panel representing Henry VII and his minions Empson and Dudley. I cannot tell how irritating or disarming we were, babbling and embroidering truths and suppressing nasty rumours about the Gainsborough being a replica.

  My father was frankly philistine. He was wise and knew about dry-fly fishing and how to be loved, but very little about the possessions which he inherited late in life. If we were not to be found and he was forced to show them himself he would, with a gesture, wave a whole wall away—a wall studded with the finest Nicholas Hilliard miniatures (pronounced in those days “minnychers”)—with a “Don’t worry about those: they’re all fakes.” Running in late on our duties, we would blush for him and lovingly shield him. I remember with what solicitude we tried to save his dear face when he discovered to his humiliation that the massive gold snuffbox embossed with Rs and coronets and presented to him with “A Happy Christmas from Harry” (my uncle) had been taken out of his own show-case. The castle tour took hours and its victims were spared nothing. There was the Regent’s Gallery, endlessly long with blue-and-white Chinese bowls the size of vats, filled with Belvoir potpourri, in each of its twelve windows. Marble busts of Caesars and of our own Dukes lined its walls, hung with Gobelin Don Quixote tapestries, and a carpet of arum lilies on a scarlet ground covered its acreage. There was the Elizabeth Salon, with a Canova-ish marble Duchess presiding, hand on heart. She had commemorated herself in the painted ceiling as Juno enthroned beside her good friend the Duke of York (undressed) as Jupiter. Light from the great bow-window was all but blotted out by two over-life-sized easelled pictures of her and her legitimate Duke, looking as though they were alive and might, when the fancy took them, step out of their golden frames on to the huge velvet footstools placed at their feet. The final lap of the ordeal was the hardest and meant their climbing the highest tower (the last hundred feet by ladders), to be battered by the wind like the flag above them.

  *

  Sussex by the sea was wonderfully different—a cottage for a castle. I never went there until I was six, and I was disappointed by the beach. It was middle tide when I first saw the sea, with rows and rows of little long white waves. I had imagined something generally bigger with occasional breakers the size of hills, but the sand was a delight that I had not been told to expect. We took every year rather squalid cottages at Aldwick near Bognor, at Rustington, at Angmering—all of them villages scarcely marked on the map. Finally we got to the outskirts of Aldwick and stayed there. There was a four-roomed thatched cottage called Prior’s Farm, from which one walked through acres of waving corn to the tamarisk hedge that protected it from the sea. A tired old dear cooked and cleaned and heated water for washing. The earth closet we disapproved of but bore with resignation.

  The last cottage found was an early nineteenth-century sailor’s house and lodge. In the house, which still belongs to my son, lived Mrs
Fisher, a woman in her eighties, six foot high with white plaits framing her ears like Queen Victoria’s on the florin. On two sticks under a black straw mushroom hat she would sail haltingly round her garden and orchard of an evening, complaining always of her groins (we learnt later that these were breakwaters, not parts of her body) and rating poor Maria, her adopted daughter, who cooked and cleaned and mowed and chopped and dug and harvested and nursed the tyrannical old beauty. She never went to bed, but slept in her clothes in the dark kitchen. They said that sixty years before, on a white horse, she had galloped down the narrow lane to the sea with her husband-to-be, and seeing the little house had vowed she would live in no other.

  The lodge, where we lived, was a Regency bungalow. Nanny and we children undressed for bathing in a little coppice at the sea end of the garden. There would be murmurs of “Turn your back” and lo! Nanny was dressed in bloomers and tunic of shocking-pink. The Tree children were with us and Iris, the youngest of us all, was tethered by a rope to her drunken Nanny. There was never a question of learning to swim, but we splashed in the waves or crab-dabbled wearing waders and picking up cuttlefish or decorating our sand-castles with tamarisk. In my earliest days at Bognor I remember being in a bathing-machine drawn into four feet of water by a carthorse, and dipped head and all into the sea by the old bathing-woman, her long skirt billowing in the water.

  My mother, coming for Sundays with Maud Tree, and many a pampered sybaritic man from the Great World, unused to pallet beds and earth closets, would take rooms at Mrs Fisher’s. One of these dandies, Claude Lowther, a poet and a wit, who always wore a gardenia and with whom I was furiously in love, once sent on bed and bedding in advance, saying that it was “hideous but comfortable and without fleas.” When Mrs Fisher died my mother, with borrowed money (she had none of her own), bought the little property and twenty years later gave it to me. The cornfields that isolated it are harvested for ever. King George V gave Bognor a Regis to its name and made Aldwick the Royal Road to Health. The Bay Estate now replaces the waving wheat. Dorothy Perkins ramblers and scarlet salvias have driven out the poppies and cornflowers and binding convolvulus with which we trimmed our straw hats, with a cabbage leaf in the crown to protect us from sunstroke (which I got). In the middle of the Tudor canker of Manor Ways and dinky villas, we are still the three-acre blot, the undeveloped waste-land.