by Denton Welch
The storeroom downstairs next to the pantry was another locked room and another source of delight. Here were kept rows of earthenware and glass jars, filled with jellies, jams, chutneys and pickles. The tea was in painted boxes lined with silver, and the coffee-grinding machine reared its strange head at the corner of the table.
China and glass were stored here too—I can see now the harlequin set of glasses, one red, one blue, one yellow, one purple, one white, each wreathed with vine leaves, that must have once graced Victorian tennis parties.
At meals my brother and I each had our own utensils, without which we would not eat. They were our christening presents. Each had a silver mug and porringer, a silver knife, fork and spoon. When I went back to China for a year after I had left school, I found my place at table laid with my spoon, my knife and fork—our old cook had told the boy that I would eat with no other.
III
Soon after this I went to my first school. It was a small kindergarten. I shuddered when I heard the sentence and implored my mother not to send me, but she said she was sure I would like it and it would be so nice to learn something. So one morning I was taken with my brother into the Jaws of Hell.
There I was left with some other children and a woman with pale hair. They horrified me. I was given a little desk and the woman with pale hair wrote strange signs in my new book; she said that they were numbers up to nine and would I copy them very nicely underneath? I began laboriously to copy, my heart swelling with the feeling of captivity. When I had got to five I noticed the little dash at the top and, feeling sure that she had made a mistake, I carefully copied it out several times leaving the stroke out. The teacher came up a little later and put them all in, but I hardly believed it to be correct even then.
The next thing we did was to begin making a little church out of match-boxes and coloured paper. This was much more to my taste and I began soon to be thoroughly interested. This lovely church grew in the succeeding days and I will always remember the day that I put the coloured transparent paper in the windows.
I soon began to get fond of Miss W., and from her I learnt many things. Of course there were unhappy times too. There was the terrible day when I came to school with golden sailor buttons on my shirt. One of them became loose and, in the way that children have, I began to push it up one nostril and to gently blow it out again.
Suddenly I sniffed inwards instead of blowing out. The button stuck, I tried to blow, it wouldn’t move. I let out a terrible wail, Miss W. rushed up. I told her what had happened and she took me quickly to a room and told me to lie down on the table (I don’t know why to this day). Then she must have telephoned my mother for, through my tears and despair, I heard her footsteps and her voice and soon we were both sitting in the car going to the doctor to have the button removed. The situation had improved enormously the moment my mother had appeared. I felt I could bear the fact of having a button in my nose for life if she was with me; now in the car I was almost calm and my mother said, ‘Now, darling, let’s try once more to blow it down,’ but it was no good. So we went to the doctor and I sat in front of the window, and with his little forceps he jerked the button sharply out. Oh the flood of relief, the laughing and tears! I loved the button now and wanted to keep it, but when it had been pulled out the doctor had thrown the little golden ball far out of the high window over the tree tops into the street.
There was another horrible occasion when some of the little girls at the kindergarten were dressed up as gnomes for some play. I arrived late and, seeing these little apparitions, thought that some of my schoolmates had been transformed by a wicked fairy. To make matters worse, these children, seeing how superstitious I was, began to lay strange spells on me. These I did not quite believe, but it was enough to make the day a failure—to feel that at any moment I might—just might—become a toad.
I believed so many things at this time. I believed my toy wrist-watch really ticked. I believed the terrible story a friend told me of some children who played truant from school and were stolen by gypsies to be used in a circus. They were skinned, and wolves’ hides sewn on instead. She said the nuns had told her this as a warning not to stray from home or play truant from school. I believed that babies were born out of breasts and that just the miracle of being married made them appear.
This summer we went to Wei-hai-wei, which is by the sea. We had taken a house in Half Moon Bay, on the cliffs, with a great apricot tree overshadowing the front. The baths in the house were enormous earthenware kongs, or jars, decorated with patterns of birds in yellow and brown glaze. We had had to leave our nurse behind in Shanghai, as she had fallen in love with a man and wanted to marry him. He afterwards turned out to be married already and my mother told me that our nurse was very unhappy and she had died. I suppose now that she killed herself.
Every day we would take a picnic and our bathing-suits to the beach below and spend the day there. To get to this bay one either walked across the promontory or went round it in the rowing boat. When the sea was rough, I found the passage in the boat very terrifying and would insist on walking by myself through the fields where the peanuts and maize grew, down the deep-cut path with the little rock plants growing between the stones.
Arriving on the beach, I would see the boat rising and falling as they tried to beach it and would feel glad I was not in it. We had a little house of matting made on the beach and in this we would undress and keep our things. After our bathes we would be given two ginger biscuits each—I loved these, and the Huntley & Palmer tin gives pleasure to me even now.
My brother and I had a passion for the shells that we found. We laid them out in wooden boxes on cotton wool. Fan shells were the most rare; they varied from white and pink to deep coral. Sometimes the coral ones were tiny, like a lacquered fingernail.
We would make expeditions to other parts of the coast, sailing and then walking over miles of cushioned thyme and tufted grass. Perhaps we would eat by a wayside shrine, the little painted gods and painted walls washed and faded by the weather.
Once we were taken to a Chinese play. The theatre had been hastily constructed on the beach, near the Chinese town, and as we walked towards it in the evening we passed the salted shark which was lying out to dry in the sun. When it was ready it would be eaten. The play was an exciting pandemonium: terrifying warriors, wonderfully dressed, were standing on tables piled on top of each other; soon one threw himself off and lay as if dead. Another was riding on a fantastic hobby-horse. There was strange, nasal singing and hot scented towels were distributed for the audience to steam their faces in. Here was something old and so conventionalised as to be almost like a religious ceremonial.
The British warships in China would spend much time at Wei-hai-wei, and one day we woke up to see the long grey ships lying in the harbour by the island. My brother was wildly excited and at length persuaded Lara, the handsome Italian boy whom my brother adored and whose parents had a nearby house, to sail out with him to the nearest of the ships. Lara was about seventeen and so much older than Paul. He sailed a boat and rather enjoyed having Paul as a willing slave. They set out secretly the next day, early in the morning. We knew nothing of it until Paul returned at lunch, flushed and happy. By great good luck they had reached the warship safely and the officers had taken them on board and entertained them.
One night we had a most exciting party out of doors. All the grown-ups were to dress as children and the older children as grownups. I was only allowed just to go and see the beginning before I went to bed.
The party was being held on an old tennis-court behind the beach. Lanterns were lit on poles all round and there were trestles covered with white cloths and heaped with what I imagined to be delicious food. I tiptoed up to look and to my horror discovered that the food was an elaborate mixture of horrible things. There were great jellyfish on silver platters. Heaps of queer seaweed and sand, decorated with sea urchins, bloated deep-sea fish and a sinister collection of animals in shells. Then there
was every sort of berry one had been told not to eat, and fantastic-looking fungus and toadstools heaped in a cake-basket.
This was Lara’s grotesque joke. All the real food was hidden under the trestles.
The air was purple and the moon was beginning to shine on the sea. Lara was playing on his flute and I was crying with disappointment that I had to go to bed. I lay in the dark under my mosquito net and looked at the shadow of my toy junk which had red-brown sails and was varnished bright yellow.
I had a strange habit at this time of asking my mother for her signet ring, which I would thread in a lock of my hair, tying it firmly with another. Then I would run along the beach looking for shells or exploring, and as I ran I would feel it bang and bob against my head. My hair was very curly, like my mother’s, and I could knot it easily, but one day I lost the ring while I was on the beach. I hunted everywhere. I waited until the tide went out, but I never saw it again. My mother was not very angry, but I missed this toy very much. It was my fetish and talisman.
I would like to smarm my hair down after we had been bathing so that I made a glossy cap. I thought it looked very smart and grown-up like this.
Sometimes when we went out in the hired carriage on the bumpy roads I would pretend to be a very bad-tempered woman called Lady de Courcy. Nothing was ever right for her. I would sit on the step issuing strange orders and finding fault with everyone and everything. I can always remember the abuse this imaginary lady heaped on Americans—because they wore their hats crooked!
During this time in Wei-hai-wei I was painfully learning to swim. I had a life-belt made of kapok which I always wore, but nothing would induce me to jump in out of my depth. One day in the boat my mother wickedly pushed me in. I gasped and gurgled and thought she had got tired of me and was going to drown me. I could not forgive her for days afterwards.
IV
In 1922 we came to England again, this time to leave my second brother Paul at school. He was only eight, but still it was decided that he should be left. Our great-aunt Blanche had suggested that we should take a house near her at Birchington and consequently we soon found ourselves at St Anthony’s.
It was squat and urban, with a sun-lounge. In the garden was a miniature building with one room which we were to call the Wendy House, at the sentimental prompting of Wooly, the governess that was soon to come to us.
Before her we had Miss T., who took us to see her friends who lived in what she called the Smuggler’s Cottage. There were horrible snakes and centipedes in bottles of spirit on shelves in the bathroom of this house, and I could hardly wait to escape.
Miss T. was very artistic and, as I already showed signs of a certain aptitude, she thought she would teach me to draw. She set up some drapery and gave me a piece of charcoal. I laboured and smudged and rebelled, I ran with my charcoal into the garden. I can see now the impatient whisk of her skirt as she turned her back on me and went into the house, clutching the board and the paper. Soon after this she left and I was allowed to go on with my childish drawing.
Hilda, a friend of my mother’s who was staying with us at this time, has told me since that one day she found me drawing a conventional sun, but instead of the straight rays I had made waving, sinuous ones. Asking me why I did this, I thought for a minute and then said, ‘It’s the sun with the wind in its hair.’
Auntie Blanche’s house was reached by a footpath through a waving field of corn. In her hall were Chinese pictures on rice paper of horrible tortures. Bright and delicate, they horrified, yet held my eyes. There was a round turret at one corner of the house. I hated it. It seemed so imitation.
I was desolate the day my brother went to school. I wandered in the garden and went to look at the underground house we had made for worms the day before. The worms had all escaped through the earth and only the little cardboard lids and strange food we had laid out remained. I found a bit of string that we had played with and I thought I should never get over my loneliness.
On my depression burst a new bomb. This was Wooly. She wore pince-nez and had two wings of hair that left her ears exposed. She took Kruschen salts, and I always remember the queer feeling I had on that first night when she bathed me.
She was energetic and full of anecdotes, always about herself and her past. She managed me very much more than I had ever been managed before. With Wooly, the ginger pudding always had to be eaten to the very last crumb, even if it choked one and the sullen tears were streaming down one’s cheeks.
My life became defined. There were special ways of drying oneself, eating, sleeping, brushing one’s hair, folding one’s clothes, and these rules must not be broken.
But in spite of all this, I liked her. We would walk along the cliffs or go into the town to do some shopping, and always I would be holding on to her elbow and playing with it by rubbing the loose skin over the hard bone. It gave me a curious sensation which I have never forgotten. Wooly’s arms were white and heavy. Only this protruding bone was without the cushion of flesh; there was only the loose supple skin that I would roll backwards and forwards over it. Later I can remember rubbing the cheeks of my dog in just such a way when his jaws were taut and rounded by holding a ball.
There were funny little darts in one shop that we went to. They had bright coloured fluff for a tail and tiny needle points. I liked the red and yellow ones best and Wooly would call me ‘red and yaller’, as if it were a term of abuse.
She would tell me on these walks of her past life: of the enormity of her sister who took the Crown Derby tea-set when their mother died, whereas it should really have come to Wooly; of her life in Africa with her late husband, when all the natives would come to her saying they were dying and all they really needed was a little castor oil which she would give them, after which they were her willing slaves and eternally grateful.
She would tell me of the terrible whips the Boers used and how they would rub salt afterwards into the wounds they had inflicted on the natives.
There was the story of her industrious childhood too: how she would apply herself to any problem that she did not understand until she had mastered it, how she never liked to be beaten by anything. Sometimes, after these intense bouts of application, she would go to bed and lie staring at the wallpaper until the roses wove themselves into the pattern of her dreams and ran riot, taking strange forms, opening and shutting their mouths.
‘This child,’ her parents said, ‘will certainly have brain fever, if we do not stop her working.’
And she was made to sit quietly in the old garden. I imagined her, at the time, in the frilly trousers and hooped skirt of the thirties and forties of the last century, bowling a hoop, thus unconsciously placing her birth quite sixty years too early.
It is strange that I had these bright mental pictures of Wooly’s childhood. She must have thrown an unreal air of romance over it all that attracted me.
Wooly had a jewel-box, in which were many interesting things. There was the Queen Anne threepenny-bit, and the George II florin that had been enamelled in different colours on one side and made into a brooch.
One day a friend of my eldest brother’s came over for the day on his bicycle. He told us that he collected coins. Wooly came down after lunch with the threepenny-bit and gave it to him. I felt stiff. and thick inside with jealousy and envy—to give it to a complete stranger when I had coveted it for months!
Wooly was the first person to tell me of the beauty of wild flowers, of cowslips and primroses. I secretly knew that they were not nearly so beautiful as roses and lilies, until she took me one day to picnic in the bluebell wood. One could not walk for crushing them. I did not know what to do until Wooly said that it couldn’t be helped and plumped firmly down on her coat in the midst of them.
At St Anthony’s I slept in a room which was on the ground floor. She told me that I must not be frightened and then repeated a terrible story about a girl she knew whose hair had gone white in a night because a burglar had pressed himself against the window and mad
e frightful faces at her.
In the morning I would rush into my mother’s room and watch her having early-morning tea. Sometimes she would still be lying asleep and I would have the faint feeling of not quite wanting to kiss her until she was fresh and alive and not still half asleep. By the basin was a bottle of glycerine, honey and cucumber hand-lotion. I could never believe that it was really made from honey and cucumber; I would ask my mother about it and pour some on my hands to smell it and to feel its stickiness.
Wooly would read to me sometimes in the Wendy House. She had a book of stories which elaborated the nursery rhymes and I was told not to interrupt; I would listen, taking it all in, but still half watching the many earwigs which would crawl in from outside. My eldest brother, when he came back for the holidays, would put these earwigs on pennies and then would pass electric shocks through them and kill them.
One day of the holidays my eldest brother said he wanted to go to the films. He had a friend with him and after lunch they both got ready to go. Paul implored my mother to let him go too, but neither of us was allowed to. He began to cry and shout, and at last he climbed on to the roof of the Wendy House and said that he would swear at everyone if he was not allowed to go. I had a superstitious terror of what might happen. I waited and waited. Paul cried and shouted still. Then, disappointed past all endurance, he shrieked, ‘Damn fool, damn fool, damn fool!’ I did not know what would happen, I was overawed at this boldness and wickedness.
The outburst seemed, however, to have relieved the situation and he soon came down quite quietly and smarmed his hair with water. Tea was very quiet that afternoon and my brother and his friend had the decency not to mention the film they had seen.
This friend, who was at Uppingham at the time, had brought with him his violin. I never heard him play it, but he would take it out from under the bed and hold it under his chin with the little velvet cushion wedged against him.
One night he made a booby-trap for Wooly. It was a pillow and some shoes placed over her door so that they fell on her when she went in.