by Iris Origo
These questions were sharpened, in any case, by shyness, solitude, and the absence of a stable foundation.
As a little girl, the only religious instruction that I remember was given me at Desart by Gran, whose own faith was that of a cheerful, good and unquestioning child. She told us Bible stories, made us learn the Collect by heart, and said we must pay attention in church to the Lessons and the sermon, so as to be able to say, when we got home, what they had been about. On my visits to America, too, I went regularly to the little church near Westbrook at Great River and could not fail to observe that my American grandmother was a religious woman. I think, however, that (taking, as usual, my examples from books rather than from real life) it was the Evangelical heroines of Charlotte Yonge who inspired me to read a chapter of the Gospels every night at bed-time, and, a little later on, a chapter of The Imitation of Christ or of St. Augustine’s Confessions. I was very reticent about all this, but when, soon after my fourteenth birthday, my mother asked me if I would like to be confirmed, I said that I would. I hoped, I think, for a miracle: complete enlightenment and … wings.
The skin and shell of things
Though fair
Are not thy wish nor prayer
But got by sheer despair
Of wings.
The next few months were very disconcerting. The incumbent of the English Church in Florence was an elderly canon with a large hooked nose—an aristocratic nose, he considered—pompous, rhetorical, and insincere. When he glibly held forth about God and love I was overcome with embarrassment; when he said, sinking his portly form on to the ground beside the schoolroom sofa, “Let us kneel for a few moments in prayer,” and then, rising carefully, dusted the fine black broadcloth of his trousers, I found it difficult not to laugh. Since, however, there was no-one else whom I could ask, I did try to extract from him an answer to some of the questions that were troubling me. They were very simple ones: I wanted, I desperately wanted, to believe in the divinity of Christ; I wanted to reconcile the world as I knew it to the life of faith and prayer; I wanted to be helped to ‘be good’. I received, not a stone, but dust: long, windy dissertations on the Church of England, instructions to learn the Athanasian Creed by heart, an assurance that my besetting sin was pride, explanations with some gusto of the Seventh Commandment, lingering especially on ‘impure thoughts’ (I had no idea what he was talking about) and finally a promise that, on the day of my Confirmation, grace would assuredly be granted me and I would never again suffer from any doubts. Slowly, painfully, I realised that Canon D was just talking. “And is your dear Mother at home?” he would ask, when our ‘little talk’ was over—and I gradually realised, as I took him down to the drawing-room, that it was for this that I had been granted the privilege of a ‘special private preparation’.
Meanwhile the atmosphere at home was not conducive to piety. Geoffrey Scott—an excellent mimic—added to his repertoire a parody of the canon’s drawing-room manner and once, when I had been told to write an essay on ‘The Apostolic Succession in the Church of England’, offered to do it for me, provided I would promise to hand it over without altering a word. My mother confined herself to cutting the parody short: “Really, Geoffrey, not just now!” Another guest gave a comic description of the Bishop of Gibraltar, whose large diocese included Florence. I laughed, of course, downstairs—and afterwards, in my own room, was overcome by a sense of guilt. But I still hoped that, when the actual day came, everything would be different: grace would be granted me.
When the day came, a cold wet Sunday in March, I had a roaring cold in the head. Dressed in my white dress and veil and thinking only of my fear of sneezing at the moment of receiving the Sacrament, I drove down to the ugly little English church in Via della Marmora. There were only three other candidates: two middle-aged women (one of them a housemaid of another English resident) and a curly-haired little boy, who was going in the following term to Dartmouth. His mother, mine, and Doody formed the rest of the congregation. The Bishop, who belonged to the school of muscular Christianity, delivered to us, I presume, the address which had also served him for boys’ schools in Gibraltar and Malta or for crews in the Mediterranean. We were adjured to ‘fight the good fight’ and ‘to play the game’. Behind my veil, shivering, I sneezed and sneezed. I tried in vain to pray. When the great moment came, I tried to hypnotise myself into a state of exaltation; in my heart I knew I was feeling nothing at all.
When we got home, a guest asked, “Well, Iris, do you feel a real Christian now?”
I ran up to my room and burst into tears.
The harm that this episode did me was entirely disproportionate. I had been aware, of course, for some time that many of the people around me were not practising Christians, and that my mother herself only paid lip-service to what she had been taught in her youth out of a sense of seemliness; but it was certainly unfortunate that my first conscious encounter with hypocrisy and snobbishness should have been in a man whom I was prepared to revere as a priest. A simpler or more spontaneously religious child would no doubt have gone on saying her prayers, while looking for other guidance: a more instructed one would hardly have been affected by the canon at all. But there was no-one to guide me. A spring that was just beginning to flow was channelled underground again, for many years.
* * *
Then came the process of ‘coming out’. Self-consciousness and shyness obscured for me the years between seventeen and nineteen and clouded much of my pleasure. I had, indeed, two good reasons for feeling uncertain of myself: the first, that I was introduced in swift succession into the society of three countries in turn—Italy, England, and America—and had to learn to adapt myself to the various shades of correct behaviour in each; and the other, my very clear realisation that I was not pretty. I had as a child, and indeed still retain, a passion for physical beauty, and knew exactly what looks I would like to have—though the image varied at different ages. As a little girl, my ideal was personified by a large family of Russian sisters who lived in a villa near Florence—all as lissom and slim as ballet dancers, with large almond-shaped eyes, long pigtails and dark little heads as glossy as chestnuts. I looked into my glass and saw a spotty round face with a shapeless nose, too big a mouth, soft, mouse-coloured hair—crimped into unbecoming waves by the damp, tight plaits into which it was put every night—and a plump, shapeless figure. A little later the spots disappeared, but my hair remained mouse-coloured and my figure plump. At fifteen, in the full tide of my classical enthusiasm, I would have liked to resemble one of the mourning maidens on an archaic Greek vase, or, in more cheerful moments, Persephone gathering flowers. I bound a gold fillet round my hair but got no closer to my ideal. At seventeen, having heard the French expression jolie laide, I scanned myself anxiously in the glass to see whether I might perhaps be placed in that category. No, I decided, no-one could call me piquante or alluring: I was just plain.
All this was, of course, trivial, but the sense of inferiority engendered was very real—and to this day there is a certain quality of distinction in the looks of some of my friends, a fineness of bone and carriage, which I cannot see without a pang of regret, though a passing one. In youth, however, this preoccupation wasted a lot of time: no form of vanity is more disturbing and persistent than that which is based on insecurity. Any echo of faint praise I snatched and treasured far more eagerly than a pretty child. When, at fifteen, having been made up slightly for the first time to play a very small part in a charity performance at the British Embassy, I overheard Geoffrey say to my mother, “At thirty she may be quite attractive,” I lived in a glow for weeks.
My other cause for anxiety might have been diminished by a little coaching. The first society into which I was introduced was the highly local and traditional one of old-fashioned Florence. The names of the Florentine families whose decorous parties I attended—the Rucellai, Pazzi, Strozzi, Gondi, Ginori, Fresco-baldi, Pandolfini, Guicciardini, Niccolini, Capponi, Ricasoli—had been interwoven into the long tapestry of Florent
ine history. Some of their houses had been designed by Michelozzo, Alberti or Benedetto da Maiano, or their family chapels frescoed by Ghirlandaio or Filippino Lippi. Their ancestors had been priors under the Comune, merchant princes in the Renaissance, or Liberal country gentlemen in the nineteenth century. For centuries they had ruled and administered their city and cultivated their lands, and some of them were still proud to belong to the great charitable Confraternity of the Misericordia, founded in the thirteenth century to succour the sick and the poor and, anonymous in their cowled hoods, would still pace through the city streets at funerals, bearing lighted torches and intoning prayers. It was, according to tradition, Pazzino de’ Pazzi who, on his return from a Crusade, brought back from the Holy Sepulchre the flint which still sets alight, from the High Altar of the Duomo, the rocket shaped like a dove which, on Holy Saturday, flies down a wire from the altar to a cart decorated with fireworks.1
It was a Capponi who defied the invading troops of Charles VIII of France with the high-sounding phrase, “If you sound your trumpets, we shall toll our bells.” It was a Ricasoli who turned Tuscany into the first truly liberal state, on the English model, on the Continent of Europe.
Their estates, never neglected, like those of many great land-owners of Southern Italy, but frugally and carefully administered under the master’s eye, according to contracts and traditions handed down since the fourteenth century, extended from the rich vineyards of the Chianti to the woods and pastures of the Mugello, from the wheatfields of the Val di Chiana to the wide plains of the Maremma by the sea, where wild buffalo still grazed and there was duck and snipe-shooting in the marshes. Their children were brought up simply and soberly, with strict English nannies and French or German governesses, and spent their long summer holidays, monotonous but untrammelled, on their family estates, varied by perhaps a month at the seaside in a little villino at Forte dei Marmi. And when they grew up (with a few exceptions) they married each other and the story began all over again.
It was into this self-contained, local, dignified society that I—a little foreigner chaperoned by someone else’s mother—was suddenly plunged, as anxious as any chameleon to suit my colour to my surroundings. The standard of formal good manners for a young girl was high: she was required to be modest and self-effacing, but also self-possessed and alert. Moreover I found that my little Italian friends who, a year before, in their dark blue serge frocks and long black stockings, had been just as awkward and as giggly as I, had suddenly blossomed out, without any period of transition, into graceful, charming young women, who seemed to know by instinct what, on every occasion, they should do and say. I observed, for instance, that they gracefully made their way across the room at a party, asking to be introduced when a married woman came in whom they did not know (with a slight curtsy, if she was an old lady); they would even stop dancing to do this, make their polite greetings, and return unperturbed to their partner. But how could such ease of manner be achieved? Sometimes I pretended blindness when one of these ladies appeared; sometimes, out of an excess of zeal, I asked to be introduced to one whom I already knew, who merely smiled benevolently, saying, “But cara, I am Fiammetta’s grandmother”; often I stumbled over their feet. (These ladies sat in a formidable row, on chairs of golden or crimson damask, at one end of the room, watching the young people dance.) But the worst occasion was the one on which, in Casa Niccolini, having shyly made my farewells to my hostess in an interval at a tea-dance, I turned and made for the door in such a hurry that—having forgotten how well the floor was polished—I slipped and fell down, but continued to skid at full speed across the ballroom, with such impetus that I was hurled through the door on to the landing outside. As the door swung back a shout of laughter followed me—or did I simply imagine it? I took to my heels and ran down the wide marble staircase. Never, never, I swore to myself, would I go back again!
The only dance that I remember with unalloyed pleasure—since for once I did not fear a lack of partners—was my own, which my mother gave for me at Villa Medici on a moonlit night in June. For the first time I had a ball-dress from a real couturier, with full skirts of varying shades of blue tulle and silver shoes, and my hair was properly done. For a moment, as Doody fastened my dress and I saw my excited face and shining eyes in the glass, I thought, with an exultation surely denied to any recognised beauty, “I really believe I am almost pretty!” The terrace, where supper was laid on little tables, was lit with Japanese lanterns; the fireflies darted among the wheat in the podere below; the air was heavy with jasmine and roses, and at midnight fireworks from the West terrace soared like jewelled fountains between us and the valley. It was the night which every young girl dreams of having once in her life—Natasha’s first ball—and perhaps all the more glamorous because I was still heart-free and ready to see my Prince André in every partner in turn.
My first English party was a very different matter. It was a week-end at Lord Ilchester’s country house Melbury, in Dorset, for a hunt-ball, to which I had been invited because the daughter of the house, Mary Fox-Strangways, had been asked up to Villa Medici the summer before, when she was studying Italian in Florence. Though life has certainly often made me more unhappy, I do not think it has ever given me three days of more unrelieved discomfort. I arrived knowing no-one but Mary—and her only slightly—one day later than the rest of the house-party, when the other guests had already made friends, and was led by my kind but somewhat overwhelming hostess into a drawing-room in which a lot of strange young people were sitting at a round table, playing Animal Grab. Thankful to sink into anonymity, I chose the mouse as my animal and contributed only a few small squeaks. But when, at the game’s end, Mary took me upstairs and through a labyrinth of passages to my cold, Victorian bedroom to dress for dinner, and I had to put on the hideous satin dress of electric blue with spangles (suitable for a circus-rider of fifty) which I had injudiciously bought for myself in a small shop near Hanover Square, my first problem arose: how could I find my way downstairs again? In the far distance a gong was booming, but run as I might in my tight high-heeled slippers down one passage after another, none brought me to any stairs. Breathless and dishevelled, I at last returned to my own room, where Mary had been sent to fetch me. “Let’s be quick, Papa’s waiting,” was all she said; but, as we entered the drawing-room, the whole party was already assembled. I knew that I had begun badly.
The ball itself was not—not quite—as bad as I had feared. There was a disconcerting moment before starting when Mary, charmingly and suitably dressed in white tulle and gardenias and watched by an adoring group of nannies, nursery maids, and house-maids, came down the grand staircase (for it was her first ball) followed by a galaxy of her friends in equally suitable dresses in varying shades of pale blue, yellow, and rose tulle, which I compared with my middle-aged satin.
“How … how gay you look, my dear child!” said my kind hostess—but I was not deceived.
When, however, we actually reached the ball, the crowd was so great, the scene so novel, that my self-consciousness subsided. All the way in the car I had been absorbed in silent prayer that someone, anyone, would take me in to supper. But almost as soon as we arrived, a tall, fair young guardsman, who had sat next to me at dinner and had told me that he was in my cousin Gerald’s regiment, came up and asked me to supper. Has Lady Ilchester told him to do so, or Gerald? I wondered, too deeply grateful for any pride. With my chief anxiety set at rest, I was even able to enjoy the amusing spectacle: the good-looking men, in their pink coats; the hearty, self-assured girls; the general sense of being at a great family party, which increased with Sir Roger de Coverley and the wild gallop at the end. Almost all the young men of our party danced with me and I came home flushed with relief and pleasure, feeling that I was, perhaps, just like other girls after all.
The next day, however, dispelled this belief. No-one had told me that one cannot go to an English country house without a tweed coat and skirt and sensible country shoes, and when I came d
ownstairs in the rather shiny dark blue serge, which was left over from my schoolgirl wardrobe, and black town shoes, I felt like a pekinese in a pack of hounds—only treated with indulgence, because so manifestly belonging to a different species.
“Do let me lend you my brogues,” urged Mary with transparent tact, “as you’ve forgotten yours.”
I miserably thanked her and, since they were a size too large, returned from our walk across the turnip-fields with a blister on my heel.
There was a reprieve when my host kindly took half-an-hour in his busy day to show his youngest and most awkward guest the books and treasures of Melbury: in his library and looking at his fine pictures, I was once again in a familiar world. But the only really happy moment of my visit was when, on Monday morning, I climbed into the train that was to take me away.
My first London season, in the following summer, is very vague in my memory—except for the leitmotif of anxiety. My mother reluctantly but dutifully had borrowed from Aunt Constance her charming house in Portland Place, and here we gave a series of dreary little dinner parties, mostly attended by very pink and tongue-tied young men whom I had never seen before and whose only claim to be there was that they, too, had been invited to the same ball. One of them, however, a good-looking, red-haired young man in the Guards,—considered much too ‘artistic’ by his brother officers—seemed to me delightfully unconventional because, instead of asking me to tea at Gunther’s, he took me for a bus-ride to the City to see the Wren churches, and it was a great pleasure to find him again, looking very grand in his dress uniform, at the Buckingham Palace Ball. Like Catherine Morland, I felt that I had ‘some acquaintance in Bath’.
Indeed I enjoyed the Court Ball immensely: my conventional long white dress with its train, my absurd headdress with feathers, the snobbish satisfaction of having the privilege of the ‘entrée’ (because my aunt was then lady-in-waiting), the gaping crowds as we got out of the car, the fine uniforms, the fender-like tiaras of the dowagers and the jewelled turbans of the Indian Princes. And I enjoyed some of the other balls, too—beforehand, if not while they were going on—since an incorrigible strain of hopefulness still whispered before each occasion that tonight would surely be different: tonight would be the night!