Though Duncan was born at The Doune, tradition has it that Ethel nearly gave birth to him on the hillside, the idea of which gave him as much pleasure as the truth itself. Soon afterwards Bartle took his family to Burma and subsequently to India, where Ethel was to learn how to become the memsahib that later earned her Clive’s unsympathetic comment. She must have acquitted herself well – numerous account books and collections of depressingly orthodox recipes, such as Queen’s Pudding and Chocolate Blanc-mange, testify to an innate sense of duty. Although a timid housekeeper, she was none the less successful in her duties, and an impeccable hostess. More intelligent and sympathetic than most, she and Bartle were both musical, he particularly so; not only did he shine socially, he was a botanist and amateur cook, and reached the rank of major in the army. Ethel was nevertheless conventional, and there were many subjects which one could not mention in her presence. But the fact that she preferred discretion did not mean she was ignorant or condemnatory, simply that she felt that the dangers of exposition might be too much for her. Rumour has it that Bartle was unfaithful to her, and that she fell deeply in love with another major and carried on an affair with him when, re-established in England, they lived near each other in Twickenham. Duncan himself was very discreet on this subject, and it was through Bunny, always incurably romantic about sexual irregularities, that I later came to hear of it.
Aunt Daisy was also, in her own very different style, a remarkable character. Though very like Ethel, Daisy was no beauty. Uninformed by reflection or feeling, her features expressed only energy and a desperate goodwill, as though she wanted to eat you from pure benevolence. She had a beneficent effect on those known as ‘the mad’, and was often accompanied by someone who was undergoing what might have been called the Aunt Daisy Cure, which it seemed was frequently successful.
It was through her that Vanessa was introduced to Peter Teed, who lived in the Château de Fontcreuse, a miniature château a couple of miles up the valley from Cassis. He owned the ruined shell of La Bergère, a small cottage previously inhabited by farmworkers, to which was attached a story about a miser and a shepherdess, of whom Vanessa painted a picture over the chimney-breast in the dining-room. She paid for the rebuilding of the house, consisting of five or six rooms, and in return was granted possession for ten years, which came to an end at the beginning of the war. The whole family used it, going there at different times of the year. Clive and Quentin enjoyed it in the hot summer months when the town was full of visitors and social life was amusing and, I gather, quite demanding. Vanessa, Duncan and myself went there in the comparative coolness of spring, when our translation from the dark English winter to the crystal clarity of the Mediterranean was a miracle. In spite of the fact that it meant my missing a term at school, we went every year of the first three. I can never forget the atmosphere there, so rich, vivid and varied: the sights, sounds and smells of the South, absorbed when I was still young and impressionable, acquired a power over me that lasts still. I shall always remember being wakened, after an uneasy night on the train, by the intensity of the early morning sun as it shone through my blind, and as I looked out, the sight of the first olive tree, the squiggle of naked vine on the red earth against a clear and glittering sky brought back with a rush the smell of drains in the narrow streets, the powerful voices, the strength and vitality of the people.
No sooner had we arrived than we were assailed by the frantic struggle of the porters who rushed for our bags and suitcases, easels and canvases, unrestrained by Duncan’s and Vanessa’s remonstrances. Finally, when the taxi had been summoned and we had been packed in with the luggage, the porter had to be tipped, an agony which in those days menaced all foreign transactions, and to my acute distress made Vanessa lose her self-possession. Once when we were in Marseilles, seeing something in her face which gave him hope, the porter shouted at her all the way from the train to the waiting taxi, and when in the end she gave him more, she did it with such an abject air that I could not bear it; whether it was worse to see her so weak or so bullied I don’t know. I wanted to chase the man away and protect her, but I would rather have seen her stand up for herself. Of this, however, there was no question.
Installed eventually in La Bergère, Vanessa and Duncan were both completely happy, able at last to combine the pleasures of French life with the comfort of being in their own house. Our existence was always quietly domestic, and Vanessa’s responsibilities scarcely diminished, but the fact that everything was French made it automatically delightful. Vanessa was an ardent Francophile and believed that the French were vastly superior to the English in all departments of practical life: better mechanics, electricians, dressmakers, cooks, better at inventing domestic gadgets, at making easels, stretchers, canvases and paints. So sensible to have paperback books, to dress their children in black pinafores and allow them to stay up late, to have invented the siesta and go to market every day returning with such delicious bread, to have invented champagne, Petit Larousse and mayonnaise. She could not say their plumbing was as good as that of the English (those were the days when there was often no more than a hole in the ground and usually a smell of human excrement near one’s picnic site), but in every other way they were a more refined race, not least in their sympathy for artists. The fact that the French Impressionists went unrecognised by their compatriots for more than thirty years was forgotten; when she was in France Vanessa felt that she was taken seriously as a painter, not only by fellow artists but by the landlady and the man in the street. It was a sensation she never had in England.
Our cook, Elise Anghilanti, came from the crowded Italian quarter beyond the port; she had a large family, the youngest of whom had been unwanted but was all the more adored. She was brown-skinned and handsome, with the beautiful carriage of those who are used to supporting heavy loads on their heads. She was devoted to Vanessa, who became very fond of her and listened to her stories of woe with more sympathy than she would have given to those of Lottie. It was through Elise that I became aware of the fatalism of southern women who, knowing they are exploited, can only oppose it with the tears and resignation of Catholicism, so different yet no more efficacious than the grim repression of the Protestant. She was an excellent cook, her speciality the traditional boeuf en daube. As great a treat was my favourite, beignets; she used to dip a gauffering iron first into batter and then into steaming olive oil, then the liberated fritter would slip its moorings and float off to sizzle on its own. At lunchtime, Elise would bring a whole pile of them onto the terrace, where we devoured them as quickly as possible, since they had to be piping hot.
Our landlord, Peter Teed, made wine; from modest beginnings he had become an expert, winning several medals of distinction. A man of warmth and simplicity, he had spent most of his life in India, and as a colonel in the Bengal Lancers had known Aunt Daisy. His eyes were small and dark, rolling in yellowish whites, and his large, bulbous nose pitted, so I believed, with gunpowder; his smile was enchanting, his French accent Churchillian. Completely honest himself, reliable and trustworthy in all matters of business, he deeply relished the subterfuges and sharp practices of his neighbours and rivals, to which he was, rather to their surprise, entirely equal. He lived in the château with Jean Campbell, a New Zealander. They were unmarried – a fact that had to be mentioned to show where one’s sympathies lay. As a soldier in a hospital where she was a nurse, Peter had fallen in love with her, and as his first wife wouldn’t hear of a divorce they settled in France, where they became highly respected members of society.
Jean, gentle but shrewd, had all the open-handed generosity that one associates with settlers and pioneers. She would have loved children but, for whatever reason, did not have any. Always busy, she was most often to be found in her kitchen, the door of which opened off the terrace, stirring a steaming lake of cherries or quetsches to be made into jam. She also made jars of brandied cherries, offered to her guests after lunch in the cool, dark sitting-room, producing a euphoria only to be cured
by a siesta. She was small and slightly lame, and had dark hair which fell in a fringe; from beneath it her calm, friendly eyes looked at me, not without a suspicion of criticism. She allowed me to play round the two formal ponds that lay just below the terrace. Enclosed by slabs of stone, their shallow waters supported innumerable lily leaves on which, with a thud, there occasionally fell a tiny palpitating tree frog, descended from the magnificent row of cypresses which bordered the garden. As I watched, they would change from a dark to a bright green, and with one spring disappear again. In the narrow beds grew multi-coloured tulips, their petals forming fleets of boats which I piloted from one lily-leaf harbour to another.
At lunchtime I would be sent to fetch a jug of water from the Roman spring at the château. Jean once took me into the tunnel hollowed in the cliffside from which the house took its name. The entrance was fringed with ferns, and from the intense heat of the vineyards we entered the cool tunnel, low and dripping with moisture. It pierced the hill for maybe a hundred yards, where it stopped without having found the spring. Instead there was an iron cross, and the water, accumulating, was carried from this symbol of Christianity in a conduit which ended in an unfailing spurt of silver gushing into a stone basin from the gross lips of a pagan god.
Every day Grace would take me and my friend Judith Bagenal to French lessons in the town, about two miles distant. We either walked or were given a lift in the Teeds’ old car, or harnessed Coquet the donkey, whose precise but reluctant hooves we goaded in the right direction. After a storm we found on the road quantities of squashed frogs flattened by passing motorists; turned to leather by the sun they were larger than when alive, and we would stand them up against the wall, as Grace said, like preaching clergymen. Once in the town, which smelt strongly of drains and fish, we stopped in a narrow street where, up a flight of stairs, we were welcomed by the intensely respectable Mlle Chevalier, in grey cardigan and laced boots like those worn by the girls of the Folies Bergères. Her mother, white-haired and bunched up in black, was turned out of the room where we had our lesson, and, after our ‘Bonjour, Madame,’ would disappear into the kitchen.
In the parlour, the table took up most of the room and was covered with a green chenille cloth, which hung in a fringe to the floor, tickling our bare legs. Artificial flowers on the sideboard, florid wallpaper and two thicknesses of curtain made up a claustrophobic atmosphere where, like butterflies, we were pinned down to our lessons. They began with difficult things like verbs and ended with a game of snakes and ladders and a little bribery in the form of sweets. Oppressed by heat, hunger and respectability, we found it more and more difficult to sit still and show the decorum Mademoiselle required. At last, yawning and wilting with excessive concentration, we were liberated and went straight to the pastrycook’s where we could choose between brioches, chaussons aux pommes and millefeuilles. Mme Coulain was dressed like an Arlésienne on a postcard; her sister, with a snowy chignon and transparent white apron over a black dress, had the cheeks of a china rose and pink fingers which curled interrogatively over the buns and cakes. All her life she seemed to have dealt in cream and sugar, and had never married, remaining to help in the shop under the eye of her elder sister. Mme Coulain’s son proposed marriage to Grace, and became one of her numerous victims; had she accepted him she would have led a very different life.
One day there was feverish excitement in the town. The air was thick and dark as doomsday. Shop people were rapidly putting up their shutters and others were running for shelter. When we asked what was happening, they pointed to the sea and said, ‘Can’t you see the waterspout?’ I looked and saw three of them, whirling grey columns connecting sea to sky and moving rapidly over the Mediterranean. Boats out to sea were making for the harbour; I was told that if one was hit it would be split in two. As we watched two of the waterspouts smoothly and majestically converging, as though in some ballet of the elements, we were startled by the first fall of rain. Huge drops came down, splashing singly on the pavement, becoming almost at once a deluge. We were hurried into the Coulains’ shop and stood looking at the now empty street, which had become a torrent of yellow water carrying with it all the rubbish, sticks and stones from higher up the valley. The violence of the event was exhilarating; Judith and I were delighted when we had to cross from one side of the road to the other on a plank – and at this moment Mr Wyndham Tryon appeared, brandishing a canary-coloured broomstick with purple bristles. He was one of many foreigners who retired to Cassis, where their harmless eccentricities provided the town with plenty of amusement.
Insect life was interesting. The giant moth beating against the window pane, and Nessa in an unusual state of excitement, with her hair streaming down her back, catching it in a jar. There it was for me to see the following morning, its enormous wings closed over its furry body, trying with its velvet feelers to find a way out of its glass prison. Then there were nearly always columns of ants whose activities enthralled us, and once we caught a pair of scolopendres or giant centipedes. Julian put these too under an upturned glass and we watched them fight to the death. My attitude was a reflection of my brothers’ – a mixture of soi-disant scientific detachment and that of the aficionado of the bullring.
If in the Cassis countryside there was no grass and no streams or ponds, there was the pervasive fragrance of woodsmoke, the sudden whiff of rosemary and thyme and the delicious smell of resin. When the wind blew strongly the pines swayed and moaned with self-flagellating pleasure, imitating the sound of the sea, as though they who were rooted to the spot were overcome with longing to see the furthest corners of the world. The little road which ran past the Villa Corsica climbed towards the Couronne de Charlemagne which dominated the town. Beneath it lay the Baie de la Reine, a lonely half-circle bitten out of the pine-waving cliff, carpeted with black straps of seaweed which stuck to one’s wet skin and got into the picnic basket. It was like fodder for horses, and we sank up to our ankles in its dry, carbonised straw. Grey boulders clustered at either end of the bay; if one clambered among them one might find shells, dried sea-horses, coloured pebbles or desiccated starfish. Once, to my still-felt shame, I tried to kill an octopus discovered on the beach. Its suckers opened and closed in multiple agony while its arms refused to lie still as, with Julian’s help, I piled on stones, trying with youthful inhumanity to shut out its desire to live.
One had to be careful not to tread on the sea-urchins lurking under the blue and purple water. From a boat one could see every wrinkle of sand at the bottom of the sea, tantalisingly visible and yet inaccessible, as though one was staring into a foreign world. Hanging over the side, the temptation to plunge in was strong, and yet stronger still the fear that held one back. Donald Curry, one of the English colony, swam underwater with his eyes open, his white body flashing in the green shadow of the rocks. He seemed more fish than man, whereas we, waiting for our picnic in the sun, were warm-blooded and human, unable to perform such spectacular gyrations.
Back at Charleston my cousin Judith Stephen came to stay. Almost the same age as myself, she was robust, handsome and intelligent; she looked at you frankly and honestly out of blue eyes, one of which was half-brown, reminding me of a collie dog. She was jollier, tougher and more independent than me – hardly a difficult matter since in my case such words were almost meaningless. Nessa said Judith had been neglected, and felt a vague solicitude because she had at least once been locked out of her house and left to roam the streets of London. Either at that time or later she became a pupil of Bertrand Russell, a fact which impressed the grown-ups, though it meant little to me as I had no idea of who he was.
At the time of her visit we were about eleven or twelve, an awkward age. It was summer, sultry and dry. The garden had ceased to be a place of magic, and in any case my pleasures there were private; in the presence of a more adult companion they evaporated. Apart from the temptation to spend money in Lewes, what was there to do? In the presence of Judith, polite and a little shy of her Aunt Nessa, I felt a
certain shame at making a nuisance of myself in the studio. Judith had a reputation as a tomboy; at home she spent her time in ‘real’ occupations, such as sailing the River Blackwater with her father, obeying commands, preoccupied with questions of life and death, whereas I did nothing more vital than dressmaking, or reading one of my Charlotte M. Yonge novels.
I had a sudden inspiration. Surely if Judith could sail boats and command the interest I saw in the eyes of the grown-ups, It was time I grew up! In one of the cupboards there was a hoard of dolls, previously much loved, and it occurred to me that it would be splendid to make a gesture in front of Judith – whether she understood it or not. I brought them out of their oubliette, but a fear of discovery and the resulting questions mushroomed inside me: I decided that the sacrifice must be a secret.
So, on one of those September days when charabancs of holiday-makers forge their way between the dusty hedges to disgorge their passengers at four in the afternoon outside Drusilla’s Tearooms, we went to Cuckmere Haven, a gap in the downs where the river emerges from the watermeadows, flowing beside the towpath to the beach. We arrived at about midday, jaded from the heat, our bottoms sore from the scratchy pile of the bus seats, and stood on the road with our two baskets, one full of Lottie’s picnic, the other of my dolls.
Watching the bus recede up the hill, I realised I had no idea what to do. The dolls had become a burden, out of place, no longer a symbol of emancipation: impossible to abandon, still more to take home again, pointless to take to the beach. At that moment some gypsy children appeared, materialising like small sharks from the shadows. Embarrassed, though conscious of conferring a benefit, I approached one of the girls and thrust the basket full of rigid limbs and staring eyes into her hands, saying almost inaudibly, ‘I thought you might like them.’ But the gypsy, probably afraid that she would be accused of theft, refused them and ran off. This was inconceivable, quite outside my capacity for improvisation. Disconcerted, I left the basket on the ground and fled to join Judith, who had remained uninvolved, an onlooker. We trudged off to the beach in a deflated mood, secure, however, in the knowledge that the gypsies were unlikely to follow us.
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