Silks and satins, the fabrics Mrs. Delany would have chosen for a wedding dress, were impossible to obtain under clothes rationing. But netting was not rationed at all. Ruth went down the aisle wearing a wedding dress sewn from white net household curtains, “with a wreath of artificial flowers around the bosom and another wreath around the hem.” They were married by her father on August 10, 1944, less than a year after they had first laid eyes on one another, at St. Margaret’s Church, Lowestoft, in Suffolk, the same church where, in a Delany-esque coincidence, Edward Smith, the founder of the Linnean Society of London, is buried, as I learned from botanist John Edmondson.7
Ruth carried a posy of sweet peas.
After the war Freddy stayed in the navy and Ruth became an unlikely navy wife. A terrible sailor, just like her ancestor, she got seasick almost the minute she set foot on any vessel. However, she stayed safely stowed on land, for on August 29, 1946, in extreme heat in the Lowestoft hospital, Ruth gave birth to their first child, Katherine, or Katy. Less than two years later, she gave birth to their son, Mark. Now she and Freddy had their family, and their separate journeys on land and water. “There were no naval quarters for wives whose husbands were at sea. We hadn’t got a home; we were living all over the place – in digs, rooms in people’s houses. Landladies!” she exclaimed in her high, clear soprano, then lowered her voice. “Awful places.” A far cry from Longleat or Bulstrode. “Our standards were so low in those days, we didn’t expect much.”
Ruth Hayden, artist unknown, ca. 1954 (illustration credit 11.1)
By 1955 the Haydens were living in Portsmouth, nowhere near family or friends. “We were not at all well off. One hadn’t the money for anything like a hotel room. Even taking trains was prohibitive.” At the age of thirty-three, she was all alone with her children, now aged nine and seven, one a year older and one a year younger than she was when her father took her to see her first Delany collage. Freddy was in command of the destroyer HMS Cockade in the Far East. “I didn’t see him for eighteen months.” Between food shopping, cooking, cleaning, walking her children to school, there lay a space of inactivity, something like the negative space that defines the relationship between flowers in so many of her great-great-great-great-great-great-Aunt Delany’s collages. Ruth had nothing to seize on. No energy to seize, anyway. Silence in the house. Children at school. Wheeze of the hinge on the mail slot. Stuck between the boredom of child chores and the anomie of house chores.
“You see, Molly,” Ruth said levelly, “I was severely depressed.”
One day, as she was feeding her children alphabet soup for lunch, she eyed the train schedule: Portsmouth to London. London. She had to do something. Suddenly she up and dressed Mark and Katy in their city clothes, got on her matching jacket and skirt, tied a silk print scarf around her head, and ran for the train, the children’s legs pumping. They were going to London, to the British Museum. She would show them the Delanys, as her father had shown her. From Waterloo Station she ushered her girl and boy down the steps into the Underground and from there to Russell Square. They hurried down Great Russell Street and careered across the front courtyard and up the steps through the portico of the museum. She pushed the children directly toward the back and the great staircase, which all three of them navigated. It was 4:01 p.m. The Prints and Drawings Study Room, then and now, closes at exactly 4:00 p.m. She stood there, flushed with disappointment. “Having come all this way!” Her herded children stared up at her.
To the side of the door is little electric buzzer.
She buzzed.
Slowly the inner door from the Study Room to the small entry foyer opened, and a kindly gentleman in a dark tie crept to the door. He opened it a crack. “Please, may we see the albums of Delany flowers?” Ruth asked, holding the hands of the two children, bringing them slightly forward.
“Madam, the Study Room is now closed.”
She looked down pathetically at the tops of her children’s heads. “But I’ve brought my son and daughter all this way!”
She could see him softening.
“To see the Delanys. We’ve come all the way from Portsmouth, and Mrs. Delany is my great-great-great-great-great-great-aunt.” She smiled with the full Ruth Hayden smile, expectant, subtly flirtatious, and with an accompanying slight jut of her chin – an in-the-bone connection to her distant, distant aunt. “I was hoping to give my children their first glimpse of the flowers.”
The curator caved in to her request, of course. He did not give them white gloves to turn the pages of the thick volume he brought. Ruth and Katy were already wearing their white travel gloves, and Mark was too busy being distracted by the switches on the table lamps. The curator brought only the first volume of one hundred flower mosaicks. Slowly Ruth turned the pages for her children. They saw the four Alliums, the two Aloes, the two Alstroemerias, the three Alyssums, the twelve different Amaryllises, the seven different Anemones, and the first two of the Asters. Somehow, with the hour, with the children wriggling in the same chairs in which she had squirmed as a child, with the curator’s hawk eyes watching, hearing the ghost of her father saying, “Careful, careful!” and telling her children the story of their ancestor, whom Ruth knew only as a grand lady in a great ballgown who curtsied for three Georges and who cut out such evanescent flowers, she thought that the first volume of mosaicks was all there was. The nine others unknown to her dozed in a cupboard.
But what awoke in Ruth was a power of amazement, a thread to her original awe as a child. As she viewed the flowers for the first time in twenty-five years, a forgotten feeling of wonder surfaced again in her, an emotion she saw in the eyes of her children as they settled down and gazed at the tiny handwritten labels and the tinier dots, squiggles, and loops of color. “Amazement of this kind is rarely felt twice,” French philosopher Gaston Bachelard said of the experience of the naive observer.8 But, sitting between her two children, she realized she had felt it twice, once at the age of eight, and now. And that was that, for fifteen years.
Ruth went back to housework. Her children grew up. Freddy retired from the Royal Navy and got a job as a management consultant. Just before her fortieth birthday, in 1962, the family moved to a rambling house in Bath. She joined the Heather Society and started a garden. She took in foreign students for extra income. Freddy’s company kept a flat in London where he could stay on business and where sometimes Ruth would stay. In the early 1970s, she braved her luggage room to find a suitcase for Freddy, stumbling over the Sainsbury’s box where she had dumped the six volumes of Mrs. Delany’s letters in Lady Llanover’s edition that her sister June had asked her to store after their father died. Now her children were both at university. “I was never a great reader,” she told me, but she stood there, starting to read about the Granvilles, the Jacobites, and Aunt Stanley. The choirboys at All Saints Weston church needed new cassocks, however, and Freddy needed to pack, and both her grown kids would be coming home on university break. She grabbed the suitcase and Volume 1, then turned to the next matter at hand: a fundraiser for the cassocks. She was stumped.
She felt stumped a great deal. She was no longer depressed the way she had been when she’d sat in Portsmouth all alone with two kids and Freddy at sea, but still, nothing seized her. She finished cooking for the evening meal in the tamped-down haze she seemed to operate in, efficient but clouded. At last she sat down. She turned back to Volume 1 and read the terrible story of Pendarves and the castle.
The next day she tied her scarf beneath her chin, cinched the belt on her raincoat, and walked more briskly than usual to catch a train to London. The lure of that flat sparked her imagination. She could stay in the city. She could visit the British Museum, inspect the Delanys. This time when she rang the bell at the Prints and Drawings Study Room she was alone and nearly fifty years old, and when she requested the flowers again, this time several volumes of the mosaicks came up. Oh, so there were lots of these flowers. At first they were crisp and individual. Then, after two volumes, they beg
an to blur.
On her way to get a cup of tea, she passed the gift shop, where she discovered that the museum had printed postcards of a Mrs. Delany rose and a Mrs. Delany lily. On impulse she bought all they had. She’d give a talk about her ancestor in aid of the choirboys and sell the postcards with a twenty-pence-each markup for the fundraiser. “Everyone loves a flower,” she thought. She hurried home, sold all the postcards, and, with the other churchwomen’s contributions, the choirboys got the cassocks. The lecture she gave “went down very well indeed. It was after that lecture that I was asked to speak at the Bath Festival of Music and Art.” Then, for the first time, she really looked at her framed portion of her Aunt Delany’s gown, and at each of the exquisitely embroidered Lilies of the Valley and Roses and many other species. Suddenly she became more interested in needlework.
Throughout the 1970s, in her fifties, Ruth made repeated return trips to the Study Room. First she looked for the heathers, just to satisfy her membership in the Heather Society. Then it became a routine, almost like going to church. There is a bit of a church-like silence in the Prints and Drawings Study Room. And a bit of the smell of wood polished over and over and the seats of wooden chairs shined by the wool derrières of hundreds of skirts and hundreds of trousers. Over time she viewed all 985 mosaicks. Probably no one had viewed every single one of them since Lady Llanover donated them. But Ruth was just looking. She had nothing particular in mind. Yet an impulse had seized her. Despite herself, the dummy she was, the non-reader, the woman who divided her irises, the soup-maker, she went back to the Prints and Drawings Study Room. Nothing special in mind. Just looking. But she had never looked in quite this way. Despite herself, she was developing a gaze. The gazing was allowing her to become an expert. One of the antidotes to depression is actually doing something, provided you can manage the energy to put one foot in front of the other. And expertise is an antidote to a poor self-image. In 1975 she came across the Antique Dealer and Collector’s Guide and read an article by Mary Gostelow called “A Talented Lady of the Eighteenth Century,” all about Aunt Delany’s paintings, shellwork, collages, and embroidery.
“You know, Freddy,” Ruth said to him after supper, her voice infused with a confidence that surprised her, “I could have written that article.”
“Yes, darling,” she remembers he said, “I think you could have done.”
By now they were familiar with Ruth in the Study Room. She signed in routinely and everyone said hello. She met Dudley Snelgrove, a retired curator who was a great admirer of Mrs. Delany’s collages and who also happened to be philanthropist Paul Mellon’s agent in England. She chatted with other curators, she slung her tray on the metal shelf when she had lunch in the cafeteria, and, having given those successful lectures, she had ideas. “There was something in my mind: talks. Talks for the Women’s Institute. I was just thrilled that the Women’s Institute might listen to me.” She did give the talks, but she wasn’t paid; she loved giving them, but somehow she had to make her expenses for doing it.
Unexpectedly, one day Freddy turned to her and said, “What would you say if I retired completely?”
“He must have known,” she mused; he must have felt his energy depleting. His jaw had squared, his profile thickened. When he retired, his finances were further stretched, and the Haydens would have to continue taking in student boarders. Daily Ruth strode to the shops, bought her groceries, and returned to cook for Freddy and the students. She worked in her garden. She called her children. She volunteered at church. Six weeks after Freddy retired, she got an idea of how to meet her expenses for the talks: Delany postcards. She could sell them after the talks. But when she called the museum to order some, she learned they were going to be discontinued. “Oh dear, I wanted lots of them!” They said they would scour their cupboards for as many as they could find. Could she pick them up the next time she came in from Bath? She could run to London easily now that her children were grown.
When she was next at the Study Room, the telephone rang. Shockingly, it was for her. The voice on the other end of the line was Celia Clear, the editor at the British Museum Press, wanting to know more about the paper flowers. “We must have a good number of Mrs. Delany’s works, twenty or thirty of them?” the editor guessed. “Heavens, there are nearly a thousand!” Ruth exclaimed. Ruth knew the holdings better than the professionals now.
“She’s asked …” Ruth said at home, slowly walking toward the fireplace and the slumpy chair Freddy always sat in to do the Times crossword puzzle. She could hear that old word “Dunce!” echo in an extra track in her head. “They’ve asked me to write a book about Mrs. Delany!”
“Who has?”
“The British Museum Press, darling,” Ruth said with slow amazement and delight. “The editor, Celia Clear.”
Freddy looked up from the sports pages and directly into the eyes of his wife who had no formal education whatsoever.
“Did you say yes?” she remembers him asking her.
“Yes,” she said slowly, and then the bright hysteria charged up. “But all I’ve ever written is a shopping list!”
Freddy went immediately to business. “Now, what’s your deadline?” He put the paper down and rose out of the chair.
“I have two years.” Ruth spoke it like a death sentence. Then they both went upstairs to bed.
“How do you propose to do it?” Freddy’s voice, with a slight note of his old naval officer’s command tone, emanated from the next pillow.
“I shall …” Ruth stopped. Through their bedroom window the few lights of the village blinked through the heavy embrasure of the tree branches. “I shall go right through her life,” Ruth remembered she whispered.
“That’s right. Reread all the six volumes.”
“And I shall go to Wales, too, and read her original letters there.”
“We’ve got to map it out,” he said sleepily.
And so they did. Fifteen months on research, Freddy ordered. The captain was back. The next eight months writing, six days a week. Four days’ holiday at the end of each chapter. All letters fine-tooth-combed for six categories: shellwork, needlework, silhouettes, flowers, gardens, social history. Notes taken in columns.
I was writing notes furiously in Ruth’s living room, looking at a photo of Freddy in his Royal Navy uniform as Ruth remembered what he said and mimicked his voice. Good ideas, I thought: organized, businesslike. Capable. Breaking it all down. Just what I need to do, I thought, though I was entirely incapable of it. I had to contend with the leaps of the poet’s mind.
“But Molly, you see, I had never had any serious tutoring or formal education past the age of twelve!”
By the end of the first week, Freddy found her at the kitchen table in tears. Where else would a woman research a book about her great-great-great-great-great-great-aunt except at her own kitchen table? Each day she did a portion of the housework, ran to the market, whipped up lunch for Freddy and the students, squeezed in the note-taking, and cooked the evening meal for herself and Freddy as well. “I can’t do it!” she sobbed. “I’ll never get it done!” Freddy put his hand gently on her shoulder. She felt the firm comfort of it. Suddenly he insisted on doing the shopping. And after that he whipped up some of the lunches, too.
“You cannot have too many innocent amusements,” Ruth reminds me that Mrs. Delany wrote to her niece, “provided you do not neglect what is essential to learn.”9 She was learning the essentials. She had begun her life’s work. “This gripped me intellectually and emotionally.”
It also helps when the person who loves you is the former captain of six ships, footloose, retired, and ready to sink his teeth into something. Through the next two years they kept to their schedule. At lunch they would sit down and discuss what Ruth had written. Michael Hoare, the director of the British Museum Press, was gathering the budget for the book. Periodically both Ruth and Freddy went to London to pore through the collages, to take notes, and to confer with Celia Clear. What a shame that so many
of the flowers were going to have to be reproduced in black and white. But Dudley Snelgrove, Mrs. Delany’s advocate, told collector Paul Mellon about the project, and Mellon offered to up the budget for the expensive color plates.
After the fifteen months of research came the eight months of writing. The new schedule was to write for four weeks straight, then to break for four days. They kept to the plan: seven chapters on her life, one on the collages. All the while the foreign students went to and fro, talking of, well, probably Mrs. Delany. Freddy tackled the indexing.
Neither of them had academic training. Neither of them had written a book. But Ruth had developed an eye. Freddy had a passion for detail and structure. The book was the project of a marriage, of the kitchen and the talking. Of the talking on the train and the talking in the Study Room. Of the looking and examining and collecting and exclaiming. Of the conclusions. Of the voice of Mrs. Delany in her letters. The voice of Anne. Of the Duchess of Portland. Even of Queen Charlotte. They ventured everywhere an artifact of Mrs. Delany’s surfaced. It was absolutely a family affair.
“I didn’t realize he was so ill,” Ruth said to me, though she was looking toward the picture window in her living room. “He’d be dead in two years from when we started.”
They did not know that the storm of activity they whirled in was also the culminating project of their lives together. Freddy Hayden, born on March 31, 1916, died of lung cancer on June 9, 1980. He was sixty-four. Ruth was fifty-eight. Two months after his death, in August 1980, Mrs. Delany: Her Life and Her Flowers was published.
Sanguinaria canadensis, detail (illustration credit 11.2)
Mrs. Delany’s portrait of the Bloodroot plant projects the feel of something useful. It’s not a dramatic flower, just an elusive and effective one. In her world of illness and death, where a walnut-sized bit of bread first thing in the morning was a headache fix, the fact that a plant could cure something as dramatic as a snakebite or something as ordinary but nagging as constipation was a wonder – and it reminds us that that our twenty-first-century pharmacopoeia derives from plants. It also reminds us of the extreme importance of the Chelsea Physic Garden, originally called the Apothecaries’ Garden, begun before Mrs. Delany was born, in 1673 – more than a hundred years before she cut out the Sanguinaria canadensis. Medicine was a major prompt for the study of plants. When Mrs. D. pasted a specimen of a Bloodroot’s lobed leaf prominently in her composition, it was as a full partner of the other leaves and flowers – not a hidden mystery or a witty fillip, but a piece of the plant immediately noticeable to the eye. This portrait does not say beauty; it says medicine. The Chelsea Physic Garden functioned as the preeminent medical research garden for physicians and apothecaries. Dr. Hans Sloane, that phenomenon of a museum founder and physician who happened to have been born in County Down, Ireland, bought the Manor of Chelsea, which included the Physic Garden, then leased it to the Society of Apothecaries in perpetuity.
The Paper Garden Page 23