Night Thoughts of a Country Landlady

by Edith Olivier

  There stands Hardwick, among the coal pits of Derbyshire, speaking the language of an earlier civilisation than ours, going back to beyond the coal pits. Yet it does also belong to the year 1939, because it belongs to the family of its builders. They possess the Hardwick tradition, and though fashions may change, there is an unchanging element in the English aristocracy which continues to give the Cavendishes the natural run of the house.

  Nevertheless, at Chatsworth, ordinary people of our generation find it easier to step back into the past. The rooms are equally enormous, but the ghosts who live there are not terrific feudal figures like Bess of Hardwick. They are more human. For me, the Chatsworth ghosts are the eighteenth-century ghosts of Reynolds’ day. On the walls are the unforgettable portraits of the two lovely duchesses whom he painted. In the Library are countless letters written by that enchanting family group, which, beside the Devonshires themselves, included Lady Bessborough, Lady Caroline Lamb, Lady Granville, and others among the best letter writers of an age when letter writing was a fashionable art. Within Chatsworth you breathe the atmosphere of those letters.

  Life there in the eighteenth century was already growing nearer our own. The grandeur of Bess of Hardwick was a thing of the past. Eighteenth-century duchesses played parlour games; they gambled their fortunes away: they wrote brilliant familiar letters to their friends: we should not find them alien to us.

  There is an amusing letter from Lady Bessborough to Lord Granville Leveson Gower, written during one Chatsworth Christmas party, telling him of a “paper” which her niece Harriet had “written out” to amuse the guests. It purported to be “the request from the Duchess to her company”. Lady Bessborough goes on, “one of them is begging each Lady to confine herself to twenty volumes at a time, and thanking the Gentlemen for their care of the books, which they kindly abstain from ever opening or looking into at all, least [sic] they should injure them by their studies.”

  This little joke reaches the heart of any book-loving hostess of today.

  Chatsworth is not built on so formal and definite a plan as Hardwick, though its Park is a work of art of another kind. It recalls the French landscapes of the classical period—Poussin, Claude, and the rest; but in England the peak of landscape painting had not yet arrived. Instead, the English dilettanti of the time created in their parks actual landscapes, too vast for any canvas. Chatsworth possesses many of these on a magnificent scale. Great sweeps of parkland, ridges, waterfalls, fountains, statues—these are the visual memories one carries away. Also the figure of the Librarian, arranging and rearranging the drawings and letters in the Library, into so many portfolios that throughout the longest life of any one man, there could not possibly be time to look through, much less to catalogue, them.

  Haddon Hall belongs to the Duke of Rutland, and its beauty is supremely romantic. It is not on the great scale of Hardwick or of Chatsworth, and the woman with whose name it is for ever associated was no Bess of Hardwick. Haddon was brought into the Manners family by Dorothy Vernon, its lovely heiress who eloped with Sir John Manners in Queen Elizabeth’s day. Sir John was already “a young man of great possessions” for he possessed thirty manors, and was called the King of the Peak. The world has forgotten the names of those other thirty, in order to remember more vividly the manor of Haddon, down the steps of which the beautiful Dorothy ran to her lover one moonlit night. These steps are what most people remember best at Haddon Hall, and they are indeed the perfect setting for a romance of which they have continued to tell the story for nearly four hundred years. Personally I remember even more clearly the exquisite walled garden so beautifully laid out, and the Long Gallery with its delicately carved panelling of ashen brown, and its Tudor mural painting, which merges so naturally into its continuation by Rex Whistler. We sat talking in the Gallery for a long time.

  The present owners of these houses are none of them over middle age, and, naturally, their children are younger than they. There was a feeling of gay youth in the rooms, although their walls possessed the dignity of age. The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire have not long succeeded, they are a fine and ducal pair. The sheer size of Chatsworth might easily overpower a youthful successor, but the Duchess dominates the place by her grace, her height, her presence, and her beauty. She is also very amusing, a quality one dares not expect in a duchess. The Duke of Rutland might have walked out of the Castle of Otranto, and the Duchess has a delicate spiritual beauty. The younger generation was growing up handsome, happy and debonair. The neighbourhood still rang with the story of Lord Harringtons coming of age party, when once again all classes in the county had feasted together. It was a continuation of the historic past which lives on in the present in houses like these. Then, suddenly one shrank from the thought of the future. Had we reached the end of a period?

  Throughout the month of August various rumours floated about. We talked of them all the time and yet we never really believed them.

  “The Duke of Devonshire has gone to London for a meeting of the House of Lords.… He has sent for an estate lorry to bring away his valuable pictures from Carlton Gardens.… He has had secret intelligence that London will be bombed within the next few days.… He has counter-ordered the lorry.… Hitler is climbing down.…” We clustered round the wireless to hear Mr. Chamberlain’s speech in the House of Commons. It never came through. “ The Houses of Parliament have been bombed by a modern Guy Fawkes and at the very moment that the Members arrived.”

  After all, we were on the wrong wavelength.

  I must confess that all this uncertainty made me uneasy. If there was to be war, I ought to be at home for my A.R.P. work; and once war had broken out, I might not be able to travel. I had my own car, and I determined to go home a week earlier than I had intended. I left early in the morning, being sure that the roads would be blocked by military traffic. I drove from Derbyshire to Wiltshire—a very large slice of England, and in all the way I saw not one single soldier. In peace-time, Salisbury Plain is full of them, but now they had all vanished. What could this mean? Had our troops left the country? There seemed to be more war on the wireless than in the world.

  And now I am back in my own bed, where I have written down this record of the past few days. Already my drive of yesterday seems to be a landmark. It lies behind me like a watershed, the rivers flowing from its summit in two directions. On the far side they go to the England of the past, an England which for many centuries has not known war, where the manors, the mills, the farms, and the commons have ever lain serenely around the towns with their cathedrals, their mayors, their factories, and their railway junctions. Even the growth of the great midland towns has left the country unaltered. But on the near side of this watershed, the streams already seem to flow fretfully, uneasily, and uncertainly. Yesterday’s drive was over a no-man’s-land. It lay between the past and the present and I know not where we are tending.

  I am thankful to have had that week in Derbyshire, for I believe that those stately days will never quite come back. The beauty, the history, the happiness, and the pervading sense of a great past brooding over each of those houses—all of these will suffer eclipse at least for a time. Yet those who have known what all this means, will surely be bigger people to face what is to come.

  I feel sad when I think of those young people I saw last week. I would be terrible if they were to die without knowing the best this earth can give them: they appear to be born with an innate right to it. I rebel against the idea that they may have to turn their backs on that noble civilisation which their forefathers created, and to strike out into a new world of which tanks and munition factories are the emblems. Still, they may be better able to lead the way into this new world because their fathers were the leaders of England in the past. Anyhow they will not be afraid. They can’t be. Noblesse oblige. But I am afraid, and that makes me feel ashamed. I dread what may be coming, and this shows me that I must be growing old. It would not matter if I were killed by a bomb. I have lived my life, and evidently, f
rom my unease this morning, I shall not be of much more use in the world. Mine is the elderly persons point of view, unable to cope with a world completely unlike the past. But the young will fearlessly face whatever comes and will prove themselves able to meet any unknown tests. Maybe, this is what those of us who survive will see most clearly, and admire most wholeheartedly, in the coming years—the rising generation rising to a task which we know to be beyond ourselves.

  Chapter II

  THE FIRST COMING OF THE LODGERS

  A year or more before the war began, the Government decided that our village was overcrowded. A good many houses were “condemned’’, and the Council agreed to begin by building fifty new ones. The land was bought. Our plans were made and accepted by the Ministry. The money was borrowed. We posted up in the village shop some drawings of the New Estate as we hoped to see it completed, and we fully expected that it would be lived in in a very few months.

  Then came the war. All our plans were stopped, and during that autumn between two and three hundred schoolchildren with their teachers and caretakers had arrived in the place. They were followed by over five hundred soldiers who were to train in the neighbourhood, and we also had the staff of an evacuated ministry. The nurses and doctors of a hospital train now descended upon us and gradually there arrived a number of people who had been bombed out of the large towns. Also many residents in the village invited their London friends to take refuge with them. We were already pronounced to be overcrowded. We had built no new houses. How then were these newcomers to be accommodated?

  The answer was “Hospitality”.

  By the first of September nearly every house in the village was prepared for guests, as the Government had decided to evacuate from the ports and large towns all children whose parents consented. This order was not compulsory, so in the country we could not be sure how many children we might have to receive. We accordingly did our best.

  On Friday afternoon a little crowd waited at the school for the first arrivals. This crowd consisted mainly of prospective “Uncles and Aunties” (as the children immediately decided to call their hosts and hostesses) and also of a throng of car owners who had been pressed into service to drive the children to their new homes. We waited for nearly two hours. At intervals, strings of buses appeared at the end of the street. Our hearts leapt with welcome. Cavalcade after cavalcade drove past us, laden with children going farther west. They sang and cheered us as they passed, while we waved to them. They looked very gay, and evidently treated this as an extended “children’s country holiday excursion” and as great fun.

  At last our line of buses drew up, and out of them stepped about two hundred children with their teachers and caretakers. A certain number of mothers had come on the understanding that they would help the hostesses by mending clothes and by generally caring each for a certain number of children. The space outside the school was now full of a swaying crowd. Its nucleus was the army of newcomers, looking a little confused and lost. The uncles and aunties pressed forward to make friends, and to try to walk off at once with this or that child or family of children, to whom they had taken a fancy. The Chief Billeting Officer sat scribbling at his table, sternly forbidding anyone to remove the smallest scrap of a child, until its name and new home had been registered by him. The general population of the village had by now increased the crowd, for everyone wanted to see what was going on. Among them appeared a curious little party which was at that moment arriving at the place—a platoon belonging to a labour battalion. They were very unlike our previous idea of soldiers, not being composed of vertical lines and curves, like most human beings, but built up of clumsy squares and right-angles. Rather like swastikas. They also stopped to look on.

  “Schoolchildren?” said one of them to me, “ so this is a safe area.”

  “It will be, now you soldiers have arrived,” I said to him. Whereat he laughed a gorillian laugh and went on his way.

  Meanwhile the headmistress of the visiting school was sorting her flock into families, or parties of friends, in order to help the Billeting Officer.

  That headmistress was a marvel—a combination (hitherto unknown to me outside French seventeenth-century memoirs) of statesman and Mother Superior. She had not arrived intending merely to control and to teach in her school; but to make sure that, whatever were their new homes, her children should know (and they did know it) that their lasting home was in her large heart and her wise brain. She loved them, planned for them, and never failed them.

  This school was a “junior school’’, all the children being under eleven, and they were a touching little crowd as they stood in the large semicircular entrance to our school. Every child carried in its arms a large bag or bundle containing its luggage, and each had a small package of emergency rations. Slung over every shoulder was a gas mask—then a new sight for us, and because we were not accustomed to it, it seemed all the more horrible that it should be necessary for these tiny children to bear this fresh burden.

  For an hour or two, I joined the other car drivers in conveying children to the more distant houses; and at last I returned to find that my own allotted party consisted of three small girls—two sisters, Beryl and Yvonne, and a little friend Rosemary, who was five. The biggest room in my house had been converted into a dormitory, and after a supper of milk and biscuits we soon tucked them up into bed. They knelt down first to say their prayers. They were very winning.

  Two hundred more children arrived the following day to be met and allotted to their uncles and aunties in the same manner; and then we were warned to be ready for fifty blind people who had been dispatched to us. It was not easy to find homes suitable for these somewhat difficult guests, but at last we succeeded in finding hostesses for them. We waited for six hours for the blind people to arrive. No sign of them. At ten o’clock we went home, leaving instructions with the police to guide them to the shakedowns which we hastily extemporised for the night in the Village Hall. The policeman promised to telephone to some of us, directly our blind guests arrived. We heard no more of them, but it was rumoured that they had been driven to another place of the same name where even shakedowns were not immediately available.

  We grown-up people were accordingly very busy all that Saturday, but whenever I got home for a few minutes, I heard the gay voices of my new family playing games in the garden, supervised by my delightful cook, who turned out to possess a genius for managing children.

  On the Sunday we were told to go to the nearest junction, to meet another two hundred children. Here we waited for some hours, while the billeting officers bustled about arranging meals for the seven hundred who were the total number expected, and whom they were to allot to the various villages. Late in the afternoon, we learnt that none of these children were coming, and I never saw better-tempered people than those billeting officers, who had so fruitlessly given up their whole day. Such mistakes were bound to happen during this sudden exodus, unparalleled in all of our minds since the days of the Pharaohs; but in spite of small blunders, many children had been successfully removed from danger. Would that all had reached safety, instead of such numbers remaining, at their parents’wish, in the towns, to be murdered by German bombs.

  In the next month or two, the small welfare committee we formed to look after the children, had a very busy time. Naturally, the arrangements made in those hurried hours while the bus loads were arriving, were not all quite suitable; and in the first few months, nearly half the children were moved from one billet to another. This meant much work for our committee and it also was a great bore to the Chief Billeting Officer, who would fain have “let sleeping dogs lie”. But we found too often that they were not “sleeping’’, and would not “lie”.

  One complication was that a party of mothers and “ expectant mothers” whose children were sent here, had been themselves evacuated to another place beginning with the same letter. The authorities had imagined that this alphabetical proximity naturally carried with it a geographical one,
but unfortunately this was not the case, and the other village was about twelve miles off. For some days this caused a ferment. First of all, one of the mothers (who farther happened to be “expectant’’) having been located in this remote spot, arrived at our school screaming for her children who had been sent here. She and her two children made a terrific scene, yelling and shrieking in the school yard, while I tried to explain that as the two places were in different rural districts the exchange must be arranged by the two councils. I promised that this would be done as soon as possible. No good. The yells grew louder. The Chief Billeting Officer, being a stickler for law-abiding, refused to let me take the matter into my own hands. I therefore conveyed the party to his office, where I pointed out to him that, unless we made an exception in this case, the “expectant mother” would soon be “expectant” no longer, and that the alteration in her status might take place in his very office. This changed his opinion, and he delightedly consented to our sending the whole family, as quickly as possible, at least twelve miles away.

  The next day I had my hands full with another woman, who had come from Gibraltar with three children committed to her care, and had lost them all. She was billeted in this same remote village with one screaming boy of her own; and hearing that the “expectant mother” of yesterday had been successful here, she arrived demanding that we should now produce her lost ones. We couldn’t. We telephoned to every place in the neighbourhood and those children could not be found. I at last committed the party to the care of the W.V.S., who I am sure were more successful.

  But on the following day, our welfare committee succeeded in bringing nine mothers from our “ opposite number” village to join their children here, and then things became easier.