Sylvia Townsend Warner

by Claire Harman

  He was also a ‘poet of no mean order’ (a description from a gazetteer which became a family joke) and had a facility for turning verses and writing skits, as the pages of The Harrovian, which he edited for fourteen years, show. According to one friend, Warner’s verse was ‘capricious […] but at its best it had an elfin delicacy’;34 he excelled at satiric and comic verse, the more specific the occasion the better. Left without an argument, his muse rapidly became emotional, which Warner could not handle so well. His was a polished and useful talent and had the distinguished young music master, Percy Buck, been a more school-song-minded man, there would doubtless have been many more collaborations in the style of ‘You?’, written two years after the end of the Boer War and still, occasionally, sung today:

  You go forth where your brothers went,

  And the shadows gather round;

  With last lights out, and the camp-fires spent,

  From the veldt dead voices sound,

  Voices that ask ‘Is it well with the Hill,

  Now as in the days that were?

  Is it well?’ And phantom sentries still

  Challenge you ‘Who goes there –

  You? –

  Pass, Friend – All’s well.’35

  Warner was an excellent fives player, ‘the most brilliant and dazzling exponent any of us have known’,36 and vastly improved the standard of fives in the school, occasioning great satisfaction at Harrow when a pair of fives players, trained by him, won all the major public school matches two years running. One of these boys, Ronald Eiloart, the captain of the first eleven, was a particular favourite of George’s and had no sooner left the school to train as an architect in 1906 than he began to spend holidays twice a year with the Warners. It was said of George that ‘what he wanted and what he got in his House was a set of good clean fellows, playing the game.’37 ‘Ron’ was just such a fellow: a wholesome, willing public school man.

  ‘Playing the game’ was paramount. George Warner abhorred sham and affectation and was quick to sniff them out. When an old acquaintance wrote to him ‘If you have a fault it is that you do not suffer fools gladly,’ he readily agreed; it was a characteristic he was most proud of. E.M. Butler, who had shared Dame Armstrong’s house with Warner and knew him from boyhood, described ‘a certain personal exclusiveness which made him formidable to the casual acquaintance. […] He was not intelligible to all; he had no love of popularity; at times a brusqueness of manner, a seeming want of interest in his surroundings, an apparent absent-mindedness with regard to those with whom he happened to be made him misunderstood. He had strong opinions and expressed them freely.’38 Brilliant intellectual, athlete, sportsman, artist and carpenter, hard-working, ‘clean’ and with a sentimental streak, Warner must have seemed to the boys an adult model of that unicorn, the ‘all-rounder’. And though no beak is ever spared a schoolboy’s humour, and all have nicknames, George Townsend Warner held the respect of most of his pupils and the adoration of many.

  Sylvia was, of course, excluded from the school life to which her father gave himself so wholeheartedly. He was up at 6.45 a.m. for First School, back with the family for breakfast, off again for the day, and often in his study at night. He and Nora took their responsibilities very seriously, and any boy who was looking peaky or troubled could be sure of a visit from one or the other of them. To have one’s parents so thoroughly in loco parentis to forty young men in whom one has little interest, and over whom no sway, must be galling to any twelve-year-old girl. In a story Sylvia wrote many years later, an elderly woman meets a former pupil of her adored schoolmaster father:

  It had touched her to meet this grey-haired man who still remembered his teacher with such living piety. But for all that he had been one of them, one of those special pupils who came thronging between her and her birthright, whose voices rose and fell beyond the study door, who learned, who profited, who demanded, who endeared themselves by their demands, who were arrayed for the ball while she, her father’s Cinderella, went barefoot like the cobbler’s child in the adage.39

  Whether this is wholly a fiction or based on her own feelings, the resentful – almost splenetic – note rings true and jars sharply with all the other evidence of what was certainly a secure and happy childhood. Her father’s time may not have been hers, but his affections were: ‘there is a bull’s-eye gravity about the way these people love’.40 When the voices were rising and falling beyond the study door, Sylvia was not ravaged by jealousy or rejection. She was looking forward to a time when she and her father, so alike in mind and manner, so admiring each of the other, would have themselves to themselves. The story was written in 1961. The spleen is retrospective, the echo of loss.

  IV

  She was too tall, she was too skinny, said Nora, herself very short and rounded, and even those terrible glasses didn’t stop her peering short-sightedly at music. George on the other hand applauded his daughter’s excellent playing. He also admired the long legs, wading in and out of the March Burn at Ettrick, and had the good sense to tell her so. After 1904 the Warners went every winter to Lenzerheide in Switzerland, where George taught Sylvia to skate, and every summer to the Tushielaw Inn in the Ettrick valley. They took Friday’s successor Pooloo with them, an enormous blue-black poodle with a lion cut. George was a keen dry fly fisher and Nora a watercolourist. Each would spend whole days at these pursuits, for holidays were sacrosanct: there was to be no work and no fluster. Sylvia was by this time old enough to spend the day alone walking. It was a landscape familiar to her from the Border ballads and legends Flora and her father loved. She would walk along the Ettrick admiring the peculiar clarity of the water and the look of the stones under it and, above the clamour of the river, the sound of curlews. When it was fine she would lie for hours on the heathered side of Craig Hill, watching sheep on the slope of Cacrahead opposite. And when it rained – it often rained – she would go bathing or sit under a waterfall on the reasoning that it was better to be wholly than partially wet. ‘It was the first hill-landscape I knew; and though I have loved other, grander landscapes since […] it is still the authentic country of my mind.’41

  The young men who came on these holidays for a week at a time came to be with George, to fish, walk or sketch with their old teacher, and Sylvia had little or nothing to do with them. It was the same at Harrow, where only formal occasions called out masters’ families. Speech Day would see her in her best dress – often a utilitarian one, as Nora’s ideas about high fashion did not extend downwards to daughters – and school concerts saw her wincing under the blows of a treble solo. She made no friendships among the boys (not that it was encouraged) while she was their contemporary, indeed she disdained them. Vivien Elgood, the longest-surviving Harrovian from the pre-war generation, was Head of House at High Street in 1906 and sat next to Sylvia at certain house meals. They found each other dull – conversation began and ended with the salt – but even through this adolescent fog, Elgood perceived that his neighbour was self-possessed, isolated and ‘unusual’.

  As she grew up, Sylvia’s education became more diverse and even less formal. Nora still read with her – mostly Dickens (whose works Nora’s family all loved and knew backwards) and the newly-translated novels of Tolstoy, Dostoievsky and Turgenev. She also taught Sylvia to sew skilfully and, by observation, to become like her an accomplished and exotic cook. A French governess came twice a week, taught grammar and conversed with Sylvia on a wide variety of subjects, discovering in the girl a natural aptitude for the language. Early attempts to teach Sylvia German had not come to much and George was reduced to sending her to chapel with the German Bible. If anything would drive her to attend to German, he maintained, the Harrow School chapel sermons would. But apart from the discovery that Samson’s name in German was Simson, and that God said let the earth bring forth cabbage, she did not progress far by that method. Later she had tuition in German from Constantine Moorsom, a colleague and friend of George’s, who was amazed at the speed with which she l
earned and at her intelligence. He used to say that he had never had a better pupil.

  It was George, though, who was most completely responsible for the shaping of Sylvia’s intellect; he ‘made’ her. ‘To receive from him a private lesson in history or literature’, wrote a pupil, ‘was an illuminating privilege, long to be remembered’.42 All Sylvia’s lessons were private lessons and, being unconstrained by timetable, examinations or schoolroom discipline, allowed full scope for George’s imaginative and fanciful side. It was a conversation rather than a lecture which took place between ‘Ruzzie’ and Sylvia in the drawing-room, over the breakfast table, on a walk or working together on one of his meticulous maps intended for the classroom. The cobbler’s child in this case was very well-shod. By the age of seventeen or so, Sylvia’s erudition was both phenomenal and perfectly natural. In the opinion of some, she was ‘the cleverest fellow we had’,43 to others she was known – somewhat disparagingly – as the best boy at Harrow.

  The last item in the appendix to George Townsend Warner’s On the Writing of English is a short essay called ‘Upon the Quality called “Romance” ’. It is the latter of two pieces included by Warner as examples of youthful essay-writing, the other piece being the work of a sixth former at Harrow, N.A. Walton. ‘Upon the Quality called “Romance” ’ is kept deliberately anonymous, both in the text and in the contents pages, and a prefatory note by Warner avoids revealing the author’s sex or station: ‘Here, finally, is an even younger piece of stuff, the work of a fifteen-year-old. Its writer would now criticise it ferociously on the ground that it is altogether too elaborate or fanciful: might even condemn it as sentimental. But it serves my purpose to illustrate two or three things […]’ This is the first paragraph of the essay that follows:

  It is difficult to define Romance; it is like attempting to describe the air, it is so universal, so all-embracing. In everything done alone, and out-of-doors there is much Romance. It lies in walking alone over the broad curving moors, in the tracking of a stream, in the discovery of some narrow rocky hollow, hidden away in the cleft of the hills: in a lesser degree, in the opening of a new book. Romance comes upon one suddenly in the friendly buffeting of the North Wind, in the tinkle of flowing water heard far off, in the sailing of a cloud’s shadow down the opposite slope, across the valley between, and up the hillside where one stands watching.44

  ‘Upon the Quality called “Romance” ’ could very well be Sylvia Townsend Warner’s first appearance in print.

  Music was increasingly important to Sylvia. Her early piano lessons had been uninspiring: ‘My hands were set on the keyboard and coerced into playing scales in unison – a hateful proceeding – and in contrary motion which was enjoyable.’45 A later teacher ‘took me by the scruff of the neck and dropped [me] into a Haydn sonata’ and Sylvia never looked back. Once she had ‘discovered’ music, she became completely bound up in it, went to every concert, opera and ballet available, and got up at 7 a.m. to practise the piano. When she was sixteen she began to study music with Dr Buck; piano and organ (at both of which uncomplementary skills he was expert) and also the history and theory of music, and composition. By 1911 she was composing regularly, setting favourite poems to music and writing among other things a set of piano variations.

  The fact that music was an area into which neither parent could follow far may have influenced Sylvia, but it is unlikely that she would have chosen to specialise in music without the encouragement and example of Percy Buck. He was an urbane and witty man with a remarkably wide-ranging mind, more than a match for George Warner, whose close friend he became soon after joining the staff at Harrow in 1901, aged thirty. He had previously been organist at Wells, then Bristol and later held two chairs of music, one at Dublin, where he was non-resident, and the other at London. The master who introduced Buck to Dr Wood, the headmaster, for the first time had said, ‘Don’t you think Dr Buck is the best-looking man you’ve ever seen?’46 He had prematurely silver-grey hair and an easy, placid manner and soon became a school favourite, despite a marked preference for spectating rather than partaking in sports. Apart from playing in chapel, Buck gave an organ recital every week and played the piano at High Street’s regular house-singing, rather rollicking, informal occasions where the house song, ‘Rome was not Built in a Day’, written by Warner and Buck, provided a final flourish before ‘Forty Years On’ and the National Anthem. To Sylvia he was both a family friend, known by the nickname ‘Teague’ on account of his Irish blood, and her personal mentor, one of the few people she could talk to as an equal.

  Sylvia’s closest friends at this time were among people of her parents’ age. Maud Moorsom, the wife of Constantine, was a woman with a caustic wit, rather like Nora Warner in temperament, only without the sting of the blood-tie for Sylvia, who was always very close to her. Ruth, Maud’s young daughter, was in much the same situation as Sylvia had been; an only child, and a girl-child, living on the fringes of a world given over to Boys. Though Sylvia had many closer friends in her life, she retained a uniquely protective and maternal affection for ‘Puss’, as if the conditions of childhood they shared provided more than just cementing memories, provided a bond of sympathy too. Ruth had piano lessons from both Sylvia and Dr Buck: Buck would play for her – or himself – rather than for her tuition while Sylvia, the lesser pianist, was the better teacher for a small child. Sylvia explained herself clearly, though Ruth found her expression, squinting and angular, as off-putting as Percy Buck’s chain smoking.

  In 1911 and 1912 Sylvia was at an age when all good upper middle-class girls should ‘come out’. Her long hair was now dressed and worn ‘up’, her shoulders were exposed at suitably grand dinner engagements and one or two dances were attended. This was the absolute minimum, but somehow even modest Social adventures were sabotaged by Sylvia not adjusting her demeanour in the least to the requirements of coquetry. Her coiled hair only emphasised an angular jaw, at the grand dinner she would turn the conversation round to theology and at her first ball she was only happy when dancing with Ruzzie, and then she was in heaven. To Nora, this must have been extremely galling. On every count which she held dear, her daughter did worse than fail; she deliberately refused to take part.

  To Sylvia, as to Lolly Willowes, the heroine of her first novel, ‘coming out’ was really the beginning of ‘going in’, and the process ended in marriage, an institution towards which she had no inclination whatever. A passage in Lolly Willowes nicely describes the redundant position of young men in the life of a girl who adores her father:

  Laura compared with her father all the young men whom otherwise she might have accepted without any comparisons whatever as suitable objects for her attentions, and she did not find them support the comparison at all well. They were energetic, good-looking, and shot pheasants with great skill; or they were witty, elegantly dressed, and had a London club; but still she had no mind to quit her father’s company for theirs, even if they should show clear signs of desiring her to do so, and till then she paid them little attention in thought or deed.47

  Being unmarriageably intellectual was not completely a comfort to Sylvia, for she still had unwanted admirers to deal with, some of a particularly unwantable stamp. On one occasion, at a dinner, Sylvia became impatient of the repeated advances of a cleric (she was fatally attractive to elderly clerics) and his sepulchral breath chilling her shoulder. Nora had boxed the ears of married men; Sylvia attacked with erudition. She unloosed an astonishing flow of language at the hapless man, making some chance remark of his the occasion for a closely-argued exposition of the life and work of Aloysius Beza, jurist of the Counter-Reformation. She must have done this in part to entertain Buck – who was also present – and no doubt he was entertained.

  Despite, or perhaps because of, Nora’s policy of non-cooperation on the matter of clothes, Sylvia became, as soon as she had an allowance, a young woman of fashion. Often her choice – of hats especially – emphasised her extreme individualism and soon made her as much o
f a joke among the boys as Nora had ever been. More, indeed, for Nora was considered to be a very good-looking woman and Sylvia was not. Once Sylvia appeared in the Hen-coop – the transept of Harrow School chapel reserved for masters’ wives, daughters and other stray women – in an almost unbelievable hat from which protruded an artificial lily on a tall stem, inspiring joy in many schoolboy hearts that morning, and as a fashionable bridesmaid she wore a ‘tea-tray’ hat so wide that she could only get into the car by holding her head on one side and letting it in vertically. She remembered herself at this time as being ‘in outline like a kite, an immensely wide hat and a skirt measuring four inches round the ankles, or wearing one of those cache sex muffs that hid my young form from waist to knees. It was the largest muff in Harrow, and Oh! how I fancied myself: and a very amiable man who was then engaged in making love to me asked me tenderly if I curled up in it at night.’48

  The very amiable man was Percy Buck and he succeeded. A love affair between them began in 1913, when Sylvia was nineteen. The considerable difficulty of keeping this secret in the closed society of the Hill was partly assuaged by the satisfaction Sylvia derived from conducting such an affair (Buck was married, had five children and was twenty-two years her senior) under her mother’s nose. Sylvia remained Buck’s mistress for the next seventeen years, during which time he was, in his unassuming way, immensely influential over her, and though she had several other lovers as a young woman, none was so much her equal as ‘Teague’.

  V

  Ronald Eiloart, now qualified as an architect, still came to Ettrick every summer with the Warners, who usually set out from Harrow on or near 30 July, Nora’s birthday, and stayed in Scotland until the middle of September. George would go out fishing immediately, and kept tallies of his total holiday catch, comparing year with year. In 1913 Ron was nearly outdoing him with the dry fly and when not fishing was off on enormous walks across the moorland with Sylvia and the somnolent Pooloo, who being the least hardy of the three had to be lifted over fences on the way home. Other guests came and went, including the Sturts – family friends of whom Sylvia was particularly fond – but it was Ron who stayed longest and at the end of the day was ‘hobnobbing in the pub’ with Sylvia. Nothing would have pleased George better than to see that particular young couple in each other’s company, though he can hardly have thought that the hobnobbing would lead to anything permanent. The holiday continued in the accustomed way; they all picnicked in Peter’s Wood on curries and risottos heated over a spirit-lamp, went bathing in the burn (where a bathing-tent collapsed on Nora and Sylvia) or wandered round the Yarrow Show, snuffing up the smell of wet wool. On a couple of occasions, however, George had to stay indoors and rest, which often meant working on the articles and books and proofs of books he had constantly in train. He was feeling, he said, ‘rather seedy’. What appeared to be bad digestion had been troubling him for several years.