Bunny loved Nellie almost as much as his parents. He was troubled neither by the way his parents conducted their lives, nor by the disapproval that their lifestyle sometimes elicited. He never felt, as he might have done, that Constance had been betrayed in any way by his father or by Nellie. For Bunny, the triumvirate of Connie, Edward and Nellie exemplified conjugal contentment, familial warmth and fulfilled creativity. It was a pattern he would continue to seek as an adult, with variable success.
Chapter Two
‘Perhaps I am exceptional in feeling the horror of institutional life so strongly.’1
In December 1895 Constance and Edward had a terrible shock: Stepniak had been killed by a train. Perhaps he hadn’t heard the engine’s approach, as he had learnt to block out sound in prison. Constance had barely recovered from this loss when Edward became seriously ill with typhoid. She nursed him until he eventually recovered, but meanwhile Bunny was sent to his uncle and aunt, Ernest and Minnie Black, in Brighton. There he found the atmosphere very different from that of The Cearne. Sitting one morning upon his chamber-pot, the four-year-old was accosted by Uncle Ernest who protested that such a position was unmanly, instructing Bunny to either stand up or to kneel before it. Bunny did what he was asked, but even at that age, contemptuous of convention, he considered his uncle a fool.
Bunny was a bright child, composing his first story aged three, about a little horse which became lost and was found by a big horse which carried it home in its mouth. Already sharp-eyed and inquisitive, Bunny ran to Constance excited that their neighbour’s sow had twelve piglets, ‘ “And how could there be room inside her for all of them?” ’ he enquired, having evidently absorbed the rudimentary facts of life.2 He learned to read aged four, but with reluctance, determined that once he had mastered reading, he would never do it again. His writing at that age, both as script and narrative, was already assured, although unpunctuated. ‘Dear Grannie’, he wrote to Narney, ‘Will you come down to see me on Saturday Mother is coming to London tomorrow and will tell you your train.’3
Narney had given Bunny a fine wooden rocking horse, which he called Chopper. He and Constance composed a poem about Chopper which opens a delightful window into the nursery world they shared, revealing that pleasure in words and composition was part of their relationship.
When Daddy-Dumdy-Dee is cross
And Mum’s at work or ill
I saddle Chopper my good horse
And ride off to Leith Hill.
We trot along the roads so fast
That people cry as we go past
‘I never saw a horse go faster,
I wonder who’s that Gee-gee’s master.’
‘I’m David Garnett, Chopper’s master!
I shout and gallop on the faster […]4
In October 1897 Constance wrote to her father-in-law: ‘The great household event is David’s going to school’, and that this ‘so far has been a great success. He likes it & is reported as good & intelligent.’5 The school was at Limpsfield and there five-year-old Bunny was immediately broken of writing with his left hand. It was also there that Bunny began a lifelong friendship with a handsome little daredevil, Harold Hobson, J. A. and Florence Hobson’s son. According to Bunny the friendship was cemented when he took Harold to a nearby field to watch a pair of geldings mate.
The ‘great household event’ did not last. As Bunny’s initial enthusiasm rapidly diminished, Constance decided to teach him herself, though immersed in translation she often left him to study alone. Nellie’s brother, Carl Heath, was drafted in as tutor, and Bunny was joined in his lessons by Harold Hobson and his sister Mabel, and by the four daughters of Sydney and Margaret Olivier, who had recently settled nearby. (Olivier had returned from the post of colonial secretary of British Honduras and would later become Governor of Jamaica.) Sydney Olivier believed in imperial reform and had written Fabian Essays on Socialism (1889); he and Margaret fitted perfectly into the political and intellectual community around The Cearne.
The Olivier sisters were ideal companions for Bunny. These beautiful, intelligent and untamed girls loved the outdoors, were experts at cricket, champion hut-builders and practised tree-climbers. According to Bunny, ‘coming to the row of beech-trees that divided Limpsfield Common from the High Chart, one would see them in white jerseys and dark blue knickers, frocks or skirts discarded, high above one’s head’.6 Margery, the eldest, was tall, brown-eyed and brown haired, impulsive, but with an underlying vulnerability. Brynhild was a great beauty, with fairer hair than the others, and ‘starry eyes that flashed and sparkled’.7 Daphne was dark and rather dreamy. It was with Noel, his exact contemporary, a pretty girl with a serious expression and steely determination, that Bunny had a particular bond, for they shared a fascination with wildlife, collecting animal skeletons, stuffing birds and skinning rabbits together.
This circle of playmates was occasionally joined by Edward and Marjorie Pease’s sons, Nicholas and Michael. The boys were never part of the inner circle of Oliviers and Hobsons and did not inspire Bunny’s loyalty. His tepid feelings might be explained by a passage in his draft autobiography, scored through and with the word ‘OMIT’ added, where Bunny recounts walking, one day, near The Cearne, with Michael Pease. On seeing Nellie with Edward, Pease denounced them to Bunny as ‘immoral persons’.
Edward delighted in Bunny’s friends, writing plays for the children to perform. In ‘Robin Hood’, with a cast comprising the Olivier girls, Harold and Mabel Hobson, and Bunny’s cousin, Speedwell Black, nine-year-old Bunny was padded out and topped with a bald pate, as Friar Tuck. The play was performed at The Cearne before an audience which included George Bernard Shaw and the writer E.V. Lucas.
As an only child, Bunny enjoyed the avuncular friendships of his parents’ circle, including Constance’s Russian émigrés and Edward’s stable of writers, first among them, Joseph Conrad. One windy day at The Cearne, Conrad made Bunny a sailing boat, tying a sheet for a sail to the top corners of the clothes-prop. Conrad sat in a linen basket, steering the ‘boat’ and issuing orders to Bunny to take in the sail. A frequent guest at The Cearne, Conrad was particularly fond of Bunny, signing off his letters to him ‘Your affectionate friend’. For Christmas one year he sent him three volumes of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leather-Stocking-Tales with an accompanying note: ‘I read them at your age […] and I trust that you, of a much later generation, shall find in these pages much at least of the charm which delighted me then and has not evaporated even to this day.’8
For a time Ford Madox Hueffer and his wife Elsie rented a cottage near The Cearne. On one occasion Bunny went with them to visit Stephen Crane, accompanied by Henry James riding a bicycle. It was with W.H. Hudson that Bunny had a particular affinity, for both were absorbed in the natural world, and Hudson admired Bunny’s youthful skills as a naturalist. The tall man and young boy went on excursions together, once crouching uncomfortably in a gorse hedge, where Hudson mimicked birdsong and called the birds towards them. Hudson gave Bunny books, including his own British Birds, which Bunny always treasured, although he was less keen on J.M. Barrie’s Little White Bird, which he had the effrontery to return to his benefactor.
A regular visitor to The Cearne, John Galsworthy always remained calm in the face of a crisis, and there seemed often to be a crisis when he visited. On one occasion he captured a savage cat which had torn Bunny’s brow, and on another he remained calmly detached when the dog, Puppsie, brought a stinking maggot-ridden rat indoors. Galsworthy removed the offending object, which he buried, afterwards washing his hands and then dusting his knees with an Eau de Cologne scented handkerchief. Bunny rewarded Galsworthy’s unfailing kindness with the honorary title ‘Running Elk’.
Although Bunny’s schooling remained limited he nevertheless acquired considerable learning, but his knowledge was idiosyncratic, based upon the accidents of influence rather than benefiting from any formal curriculum. He had a precocious knowledge of Russian literature, an unusually deep un
derstanding of natural history, a taste for English and French literature, but otherwise great gaps in his education. At the age of seven he either read, or more likely had read to him, Constance’s translation of Turgenev’s A Desperate Character, which, Edward informed Conrad, prompted Bunny to exclaim: ‘ “I love him. I ENVY him”, and on the maternal warning that a D[esperate] C[haracter] came to a bad end he remarked scornfully “Yes, at the end, we all come to a bad end!” ’9
Bunny loved to be taken to London, which for him consisted of ‘hansom cabs and the galleries of the British Museum’.10 Here, under his grandfather’s supervision, he pored over illustrated books in the King’s Library and was let loose in the galleries. His grandparents lived in a house within the museum which opened directly into the Manuscript Department and Bunny considered it a great privilege to have such immediate access from the domestic to the public sphere. On being taken to the forecourt of the museum by his grandfather, Bunny was thrilled by the saluting porter in his gold-laced top-hat. He felt a particular frisson when his Grandpapa led him into the Reading Room, for he knew it was forbidden to anyone under the age of twenty-one. ‘I kept close to him, and we passed the policeman, but he made no move to stop me.’11
From the outset of the Boer War in October 1899, Constance and Edward were pro-Boer, as was J.A. Hobson, Harold’s father. The two boys shared their parents’ sympathies in this respect, and in consequence were stoned by village boys on Limpsfield Common, where they were pursued by angry cries of ‘Krujer!’ Bunny noted ruefully: ‘Having to run the gauntlet to get to Carl Heath who lived unfortunately only a ‘stone’s throw’ from Limpsfield elementary school.’12 A year later, walking through the woods, Connie invented a game in which she and Bunny were a Boer mother and son, escaping a farm burned, under the ‘Scorched Earth’ policy, by General Roberts. Bunny was being educated to think independently, an education he might not have received at school.
With Edward’s encouragement, Bunny undertook his first paid work aged eleven, drawing a map of the ‘NEW SEA and the BEVIS COUNTRY’, to illustrate Richard Jefferies’ Bevis. The map was labelled with the legend ‘D.G. FECIT’, and the publisher George Duckworth paid Bunny five shillings for his labours. If this made him feel grown-up, he was brought sharply down to earth when Constance sent him to Westerham Prep School, some five miles from The Cearne, the fees paid by Edward’s father. Bunny travelled to school by archaic means even for those times, riding high upon a Bantam, a diminutive version of a Penny-farthing, which had been ridden by his uncle Arthur Garnett as a boy. ‘It was typical of my family,’ Bunny later commented: ‘Mounted on this museum specimen and wearing a French beret over my untidy mop of hair, I presented myself to the critical inspection of the other little boys and was at once christened “Onions”.’13
It was not, however, the boys who bullied Bunny, but a master, Mr Hunt. When Bunny employed the words sarcasm and irony in an English essay, Hunt sneeringly suggested to the class that Bunny did not know what he was writing about. Too clever by half, Bunny replied that ‘sarcasm was making fun of people, as he was making fun of me, but that irony was when the truth was funny, because it was quite different from what people pretended’. Hunt caned Bunny, who, furious at this affront, ‘begged so hard’ that Constance and Edward agreed not to send him back to school.
Freedom from the constraints of the academic year made possible other educational adventures. In May 1904 Constance promised her father-in-law: ‘I will be careful that not a word of criticism shall be heard from David or me that could wound the most sensitively patriotic and orthodox ears in Russia.’14 The promise was occasioned by Constance’s decision to visit Russia, this time with twelve-year-old Bunny. She felt the need to reassure Dr Garnett and Edward, who were concerned that she had chosen to go at a politically sensitive time, after the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war and when typhoid was endemic. They would stay in St Petersburg then spend a few days in Moscow, before setting out for Yablonka, in Tula Province, south of Moscow, to stay with Constance’s old friend Sasha Shteven with whom she had travelled in Russia on her first visit. Sasha (Baroness Aleksandra Alekseeva Shteven) had since married a landowner called Yershov, of whom Constance knew little. Finally, she and Bunny were to stay in Tambov Province further away to the south-east, with the family of Aleksandr Ivanovich Ertel, an estate manager whom they had not previously met.
On 11 May they sailed from Hull in a Finnish boat, Bunny carrying a treasured pocket compass and magnifying glass, which Conrad had given him. For the first twenty-four hours, both Connie and Bunny were seasick, too ill to undress at bedtime. Reaching calmer waters, Bunny spent his time on deck with his telescope and admired the sailors’ Finnish knives. At Copenhagen where they remained on board while the ship took in cargo, Bunny was enthralled by the cranes and mechanics of cargo-loading, although once again afloat and sea-sick, he declared he would ‘give all to possess the sight of a beech-leaf!’15 They reached Helsingfors on 16 May, where they waited twelve hours to find a train to St Petersburg with sleeping accommodation. This afforded Bunny the opportunity to buy a little Finnish knife, and to practice his Russian by purchasing fruit from a Finn who spoke less Russian than he did. On the train, the lack of ventilation made Bunny so faint that Constance stood him at an open door at the end of a carriage. They arrived at St Petersburg the next day, relieved to find Constance’s friend Madame Lavrov waiting on the platform.
In St Petersburg they stayed with Madame Lavrov’s daughter, Madame Sliepstov, in a fine flat with huge rooms overlooking the Neva. Unfortunately Constance was instantly plunged into confusion and uncertainty: she found a letter from Sasha waiting, informing her that Sasha’s daughter had typhoid. Constance was torn by her desire to see her friend and her need to protect Bunny. She wrote to Edward asking him to ascertain whether it was possible to protect against typhoid by drinking only boiled water and by avoiding butter, milk and raw vegetables. ‘It will be a cruel disappointment’, she added, ‘to have come to Russia & not to be able to see Sasha!’ ‘Don’t be anxious’, she reassured him, ‘If you knew how I feel the responsibility here every moment of the boy, you would not be afraid of my doing anything silly.’16 Constance was reassured when a physician explained that typhoid was not infectious but contracted by drinking polluted water and that all would be well if their water was thoroughly boiled.
Bunny wrote to Edward, telling him, excitedly, that he had seen some Cossacks and had crossed the Neva in a river steamer and was soon to go to the Hermitage. Later he recalled that: ‘Of the many things which impressed me, the most exciting was seeing a fashionable lady driving down the Nevsky Prospekt, in an open troika with an enormous bearded coachman on the box, while beside her on the seat of the carriage was a large bear cub, about half-grown.’17
Bunny kept hugging himself with delight, exclaiming “How I love it! It’s like a dream!” Constance found him an ideal travelling companion, ‘always catching every impression & sensation & eager & interested in every detail’.18 But Bunny could not fail to notice signs of disorder and military bustle everywhere. In St Petersburg his chief impression was of soldiers and uniforms: ‘The streets were thick with officers in white blouses, peaked caps and epaulettes, high boots of Russian leather, jingling spurs, sabres worn in the Russian manner, back to front, and rolled grey overcoats worn slung round the body like bandoliers. There were Cossacks, Circassians, Generals of enormous size, military of all arms and all ranks, and the saluting was incessant.’19 He was too young and impressionable to understand the implications of the military presence which had been called in to control escalating civil unrest in the face of rising prices, poor working conditions and the Tsarist government. Watching a review of cavalry before the Winter Palace, Bunny longed to handle the sabres and revolvers, but knew better than to confess this to his mother.
In St Petersburg, according to Constance, Bunny ‘had fallen in love with more than one new friend’.20 He was so enamoured of a bearskin in Madame Lavrov�
��s apartment that he wielded his handy Finnish knife to secretly lop off its smallest claw as a souvenir. After St Petersburg they stayed a few days in Moscow before leaving not as planned to visit Sasha, but to take the longer journey by rail to Morshansk in Tambov Province, to meet the unknown Ertels.
The journey was tedious. Owing to the war, ‘the lines were crowded with trains of wagons filled with men and horses and hay – trains which bumped along at ten miles an hour interminably while we waited for an hour in one siding, and an hour in another, watching them go past’.21 At Morshansk Constance and Bunny were met by the Ertels’ carriage, which conveyed them the half-day drive to the estate where Ertel lived with Marya Vasilievna (his wife in all but name), and their teenage daughters Natalie (Natasha) and Elena (Lolya), an adopted daughter Elena Grigorievna Goncharova (Lenochka), Miss Haslam the English governess, and Kirik Levin, a young man whom they had found as a baby, lying in the road. The Ertels lived in a large, white, brick and wood house, with a green-painted roof. Bunny and Constance immediately felt at home, comfortable in the company of a family with whom they formed an instant, affectionate, rapport.
Bunny enjoyed the extended-family intimacy the Ertels afforded, and he introduced a particularly British pastime to his new friends, one which rather perplexed them: a paper chase. As he later commented, ‘The Russians were a good deal astonished at people running on a hot summer’s day of their own free will and without an object’. A few days later the Ertels were paid an unexpected visit by the District Commissioner, who had received reports that they had been scattering revolutionary leaflets all over the countryside.
Ertel gave Bunny a pony, Moochen, which he quickly learnt to ride. He wrote to Edward:
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