by Denton Welch
Wooly told me what terrible things she would do to him. She sewed up his pyjamas, she made an apple-pie bed, she stuffed his socks with holly. To no avail—he never blinked or said a word.
My mother had difficulty with the servants at that time. The cook ran out one day into the garden, saying, ‘It’s no good, I’ve beaten until my arm aches and it won’t go right.’ She was referring to the mayonnaise which my mother had asked her to make. I think she imagined the request to be the height of unreasonableness, when all most people did was to go and buy a bottle of salad cream.
After she left I went into the kitchen with my mother, and right on top of the dresser we found fragments of sauce-boats and dishes and cups she had broken and hidden there. We could not get anyone to replace her straight away, and so our food was sent from a hotel in a sort of covered cart. I remember the miracle of it being hot and its typical hotel taste. I liked the excitement, but my mother thought it very nasty.
I was taken soon after this to Canterbury and saw St Augustine’s throne. I wanted to sit on it—I wanted to sit on a real throne—but no one would let me. I was secretly very disappointed that it was not studded with precious stones and never had been.
We went to Reculver as well and I can remember the tombs in the ruined nave and the feeling I had that the sea might at any moment come in and engulf it all.
The love for old things had been growing in me ever since I could remember and now I wanted to know about everything old. Wooly filled this need a little.
One day we went to visit my Aunt Dos’s mother who lived at Broadstairs. It was hot and I had on my white sailor-suit with the long trousers. It was cut exactly like a real sailor’s and I was very proud in it, but I would never wear the cap. I refused to wear a hat all my childhood, on account of the terror of having to take it off to strange ladies and the feeling I had that hats were like the collars round dogs’ necks—a mark of servitude.
We had lunch first in a restaurant in Broadstairs; there was salmon and salad, and I felt afterwards the tightness of my sailor trousers round the waist as we walked along the hot street. My mother was very pretty in cool linen, and she had just bought me some miniature tumblers and a decanter on a glass tray; they had black and red lines round them.
We arrived at the door and were led down the long glassed-in corridor that joined the garden gate to the house. It was dark and cool, with early nineteenth-century Gothic windows. We were taken out into the garden, with its wide lawns and great ilex trees. In one corner was a concrete staircase leading right into the ground.
We were taken down to the locked iron door and, when it was opened, torches were turned on and an empty concrete room was laid bare. This had been made, deep under the ground, because of the air-raids of the last war and, whenever the warning sounded, my aunt’s mother would send round for all who could take refuge in the shelter.
When we got outside again, she showed a strange bent bit of metal and said it was one of the things that had dropped in the garden.
The Pekinese did not like me at all, and I thought, as I have often thought since, how very deformed they looked.
When I got home I washed my tiny glasses and jug, and then began using them by pouring the water from the jug into the glasses. They were like thimbles filled with rain.
Wooly, that night, when I was having my bath, held the sponge filled with water high above her head and squeezed it, so that the deluge fell on the drum of my stomach and splattered off like raindrops on a pavement. This gave me a strange and delicious sensation and I implored her to do it again, but she suddenly thought better of her joke and would do it no more.
V
We went up to London for a little, before going back to China. I was taken to the Tower of London and was wildly excited. I feasted my eyes upon the jewels. I wanted to know which was the queen’s crown and which was the king’s. I was so used to the plain circlets of the fairy-tale pictures that I did not at all like the arches and plush caps of the crowns in the Tower. I felt that they were vulgar.
Disappointment waited for me in the room the little princes were supposed to have inhabited on the night they were murdered. I had expected a bed, an elaborate one with hangings and everything else as they had left it; all that I saw was the gaunt, bare squalid little room.
I screamed, ‘Mummy, where’s the bed, where’s the bed?’ and everyone laughed.
When we got to the prison where Guy Fawkes had been kept, I wanted to know what sanitary arrangements were made for him. My mother suggested that perhaps something was brought in and taken out again, but I wasn’t really satisfied. I seemed to be very practical and literal that day.
This time we went back to China via the Suez Canal. We had had to book Wooly’s passage later than our own and so she had to go second class, which seemed to offend her very much, although she spent most of the day with us. However, going second class had its compensations, for I soon began to be told of the charms of a certain gentleman who was a rubber planter; how he had offered to take her ashore at the next port and how in Ceylon he had tried to buy a star-ruby ring for her. I asked Wooly why she had refused and she said that she couldn’t accept anything like that. I could not quite understand this, and thought that I should certainly accept a ruby ring if anyone offered me one.
Soon they were almost engaged and Wooly kept putting strange, rhetorical questions to me, such as, ‘Shall I accept him?’ She told me how well off he was, how good, how kind, how clever; and yet, through all her praise, I felt he must be fat and a little bald, with a well-developed taste for gin-slings. At Singapore he disappeared, after having asked Wooly to marry him. She had reluctantly refused, as my mother had strongly urged her to find out a little more about him before taking the plunge.
Wooly was unhappy, but somehow seemed to bear up. She would do lessons with me in the morning on deck. I was stubborn and found the multiplication tables very difficult. At eleven I was allowed lime squash with ice in it. Sometimes Wooly would stop it if she thought I was worse than usual. I thought she was a demon.
One day she went down to do something with my mother and left me in charge of the friend who had brought up the message. This woman was plump and smart, with high-heels and pearl earrings. She was a chicken and knew less than I did about the multiplication tables. She waited with an anxious eye for Wooly’s return, telling me the while that my sums were right when I knew they were quite, quite wrong. I thought, ‘I’m not such a disgrace if this grown-up fat lady can’t do it either.’
The children on board the ship had to have their meals before the grown-ups and I can remember the whirring fans and the endless succession of days on which we had buttered eggs and chicken and rice. The chicken always had a horrid, bitter taste which I have never known since.
There was an American woman on board called the Princess de Bourbon. My mother got to know her quite well and I often found them sitting together. She was a rather faded-looking woman who repaired the damage with make-up. Her teeth were always pink from her lipstick. She must have eaten lots of it. One day the stewardess brought us some of her handkerchiefs by mistake. They were embroidered with little coronets in the corner, which I thought very romantic.
One day Wooly told me that someone was very ill in the second-class part of the ship. The next day she told me with solemn relish that she was dead. I always imagine that I saw the service on deck and then the coffin shrouded in black slowly lowered over the side into the water, but this may only have been a graphic description of Wooly’s.
When we got back to Shanghai my lessons began in earnest for the first time. After breakfast I would be allowed a little free time and would speed out to my tiny garden near the stables. I did it all myself, which included making the little bamboo fence round it and laying the brick path. At one end was a big plane tree, round which my path wound to a miniature stool under its shade. Rambler roses, from cuttings, had gradually covered the fencing and I had an earthenware stoop as a bird-bath. The flo
wer I think I loved the best was my salvia, and when the winter came I dug up the plant and put it in the greenhouse, in an effort to keep it alive.
I took the little watering-can with the rose and watered it all lovingly; then I would hear the hateful call, ‘Denton, lessons.’ And I would have to go towards the house, rubbing the mud off my hands and then washing them in the cold, dark lavatory downstairs. Reluctantly I would walk up the stairs and then settle myself, with my books, at the nursery table.
Wooly has told me since that it was almost impossible to teach me sometimes; I would just sit, weeping sullenly until my face was red and swollen. Only, when my sums went right, everything was changed and I felt a quiet delight.
Then there was practising on the piano. Wooly would sit with me until my fingers would turn into stubborn sticks—this in spite of the fact that I had implored my mother to let me learn to play. ‘Little Boy Blue’ was one of the pieces that I had to play, meanwhile singing the words. It was an American version and instead of ‘haystack’ was written ‘hayrick’. I had learnt ‘haystack’, and with the stolid pedantry of childhood I considered everything else wrong. I would never sing ‘hayrick’, in spite of the insistence of Wooly and the many bitter words we had about it.
One day she told me to stand in the corner until I was sorry for my behaviour. I stood and looked at the electric-light plug which was there. I put my two fingers on the two points and sprang back, having received a shock. I thought Wooly had engineered it and could not conceive of anyone being so devilish.
I went out every week to dancing classes at Miss Sharp’s. Miss Sharp looked like a Lautrec drawing come to life: grey hair piled high on her head, an eagle nose with the piercing, bright eyes of a bird, and always wearing the black stockings and short pleated skirt which somehow gave her a cadaverous and depraved look.
Bone thin and agile as a cat, she must have been at least sixty. Her tongue was terrible, her energy untiring; when the children were at their last gasp and the Russian refugee who played the piano had at last rebelled, Miss Sharp would quickly take her place on the music stool and play fiercely while she drove us through the dance with shouts and biting sarcasm.
How often I have seen the Russian driven almost to distraction. She would come in, smiling nervously and smelling heavily of chypre. She would sit down, after having moved the seat about a lot, and then take off her aged fur and the many rings she wore. These jingled in a little tarnished heap as the piano vibrated. Her hands, the colour of Standard Bread, rose, curled and fell with terrible precision.
I was very romantic about her and felt that she’d left her heart in the steppes; and that the terrible trek across Siberia had broken her and only her shell was playing these metallic dances for us, as her soul was dead. My mother had evidently told me of the tragedy of these refugees and I had elaborated on the theme.
I learnt to distinguish left from right at Miss Sharp’s and ever afterwards, whenever I’m in doubt, I see the room again with the window and fretwork shelf-bracket on my right and the dance floor on my left.
Once I fell down with the little girl who was my partner. We thought this a huge joke and were laughing together when Miss Sharp came up like a cloud of thunder. She gave us to understand that we were gauche, ignorant, vulgar animals and of course I was chiefly to blame for not leading my partner properly. I was never quite allowed to live this down.
The sword dance and Christmas dance were utterly delightful. Miss Sharp countenanced no waltz but the ‘round and round’ of her youth and, to end, there was always the polka and gallop. I thus received a dancing education of perhaps the seventies and eighties of the last century.
We all had to appear in white. Two friends always used to come from their car to the entrance jumping in woollen flea-bags, like rabbits. This was because their parents thought that they would get cold on account of their bare legs.
Then there were the terrifying riding lessons. I had a demon of a pony called Whiskers and every week I would go with him to the riding school which was run by Cossacks. There I would solemnly ride round the covered ring, first trotting and gradually going faster and faster, trying all the time to do everything correctly.
Wooly would sit, watching critically and telling me not to be a jelly.
The Russians had a terrible habit of suddenly hitting one’s horse if they considered it was being lazy. Whiskers would shy viciously and I would often be flung off into the soft brown dirt. My puttees that I had done up so laboriously would unravel themselves and my hair become matted like a swallow’s nest.
What a relief it was to come out of the dark, horse-smelling arena into the daylight and to feel, at last, that one was walking on one’s own feet.
The Cossacks were young and sinewy and fierce; they punished the horses as if they were stubborn human beings.
Only once did I ever begin to like Whiskers and that was when he went wild one day, got out of his stable and danced all over the flowerbeds and lawns like a mad thing. He looked so dashing, his yellow eyes glinting as he raced through the roses and reduced them to ruin.
My father and mother had decided to make a trip to Java when the summer came, and so it was decided that Wooly and I should go to Mo-kan-shan to stay with some friends called Allen who had a house up there. The two Miss Allens were maiden ladies whose parents had been missionaries many years ago. They were American and their house in Shanghai was filled with furniture which dated from 1850 to 1860.
I am not sure how one goes to Mo-kan-shan, but what I remember is a long train journey, then stopping the night with a Dutch consul somewhere. He was tall and rather fleshy. He wore a monocle and collected beetles. There were whole trays of them in his library, brilliantly coloured, varnished, iridescent. He asked me to collect for him while I was at Mo-kan-shan and gave me a horrible lethal bottle.
I took it, feeling rather flattered, and went up to bed. Wooly left me and put out the light. Then I began to hear noises. They were faintly like the chattering of sparrows, but I knew they were human. There were silences and thuds and little furtive rustles. My heart was so thick, I felt it must press against my lungs and stifle me. I ran on to the landing. I screamed for Wooly. She came, much too slowly I thought, and went to the windows. I expected her to be clubbed by an unseen hand, but all she found was that the balcony of the servants’ quarter almost touched the windows and that they were sitting there in the cool of the evening.
The next day we set out in a motor-boat up the interminable canals. The sun was hot and the engine smoked and chugged; we passed under beautiful ruinous bridges, exaggeratedly arched, their masonry joined without mortar and all hinging on the wonderfully carved keystones. The houses and hovels along the bank were terraced. One was of cut stone, like a jigsaw puzzle.
The evil green water fell away from us and spread out like a plume behind. I looked at the person who was sitting next to me on the dirty velvet cushion. It was a Eurasian girl with black hair and cream face. I looked down at her hands, at her turquoise ring. On one hand she had a little thumb sprouting out of the normal one. I saw it with a shock and felt sick. I looked away and then returned to it. I hated her, I wanted to have her done away with, blotted out.
We left the motor-boat and got into sedan-chairs. They were carried on heavy bamboo poles by garlic-smelling coolies glistening with sweat. They grunted and sang, as slowly we swung up into the mountains. We left the watery rice fields, the pools between the rocks, and passed by the neglected tea terraces. The path was steep and narrow, the efforts of the coolies were agonising; the sedans swung from side to side and I was terrified. I thought I was much too heavy for them and that they would lose their balance and throw me down a gully.
The light was fading now and the great bamboos were waving in the evening air. What I have since realised to be Offenbach’s ‘Barcarolle’ was humming through my head. Wooly must have been singing it. I hummed it out loud to stem my fear.
Far above us I saw little points of light. I s
houted to Wooly, and the coolies began to sing more lustily; it seemed to echo across the mountains, through the air which was heavy with night smells and the sound of rushing water.
The Miss Allens had heard our coolies and were at the door, silhouetted against the warm light. They paid the coolies and dismissed them in a masterful way, speaking Chinese. The fact that they could speak Chinese impressed me very much. They led us into the living-room, which had a lot of varnished wood in it and basket-chairs. Miss Ethel went to the kitchen and brought back a laden tray. There was tomato soup with a blob of cream floating in it, and pumpkin pie, which I had never tasted before.
Soon after this I was taken to bed and when the light was turned out I went to the window and saw the great bed of mist which lay in the valley between the mountains.
VI
The next morning I was up early. I saw that we were right on the mountainside and that the garden was in terraces. Everywhere were bamboo groves, luxuriant ferns and tiny rock-plants. Everything was broken and woven together with streams. The springs bubbled straight up through rocks and sand. There were bamboo pipes leading from some of these. I followed one line down terraces through the bamboos and suddenly I was in a little clearing with a swimming-pool before me. The pipes were steadily filling it. I knelt down and put in my hand. It was stingingly cold.
Then I remembered my lethal bottle and my promise about catching beetles. I rushed back to the house to get it, but I was caught. I was to have breakfast, and then there were lessons and a weird system, invented by Wooly, of fingering and practising without a piano. That afternoon I went for a solitary walk with my bottle. I found strange things and popped them in without looking, but I soon got used to killing and did not mind. I kept wondering if I had found anything very rare and what the Dutch consul would say. After tea we went down to bathe. The pool was now full of the bright, bitter spring water. By this time I had learnt to swim and I felt proud as I did my energetic breast-stroke.