Night Thoughts of a Country Landlady

by Edith Olivier

  Now the scene of all those banquets, those wedding feasts, those gay and reckless festivals, and those royal palaces, where the men lived who mocked at Noah as he built his ridiculous craft, and drove into it his motley flocks and herds—all of these have shrunken into eleven feet of mud.

  Quoting from a book in which he himself has described this, discovery this learned seer said:

  “Below the deposit of sand left by the Flood we found two beads of amazonite, a green stone for which the nearest known source is in the Nilghiri hills of Central India, or in the mountains beyond Lake Baikal—and at once there is called up the astonishing picture of antediluvian man engaged in a commerce which sent its caravans across a thousand miles of mountain and desert from the Mesopotamian valley into the heart of India.”

  I watched the face of my lodger as he told me about this. His eyes seemed to scan the history of the human race, as calmly as if he were watching a child play with its Noah’s Ark; and then I thought that one’s sense of proportion must be greatly changed by an experience dating from before the Flood.

  Many architects are now in the Army, and several came to my house. One in particular had been known to me before, for he had designed the group of council houses which we were planning before the war, and now, instead, he was designing accommodation for A.T.S. Not with the amenities, I presume, that he would have provided for us, because the Army did not give him such a free hand as we had done. I realised this, when I appealed to him in vain on behalf of a company of girls in which I was interested, who were living in a camp not far away. They were accommodated in some out of date “Married Quarters”. If they wanted a bath, they were obliged to draw their water from an outside well; then they boiled it in the copper; then they carried it upstairs. They now asked for permission to have their baths in the kitchen where they cooked for the regiment to which they had been allotted; and where every day they were surrounded by an unlimited flow of hot water. This permission was refused, as it was evidently feared that the poor girls might be tempted to wash in the soup which they were sending up for the men. Their officer then tried to get the concession of having one day a week reserved for the A.T.S., in the fine large bath house lately built for the troops a few yards away. The answer was that this would necessitate a watch being put on to the bath house during the whole of that day. Army Orders did not allow for this. It was indeed a case of: “Water, water everywhere and not a drop to—’’—wash in.

  However, my friend the architect had no voice in the question of where he should build his bath houses, or for whom they should be built. His one responsibility was for their actual construction. I thought he was being wasted.

  Working in the same office was another architect, who had considerable experience of Town-planning on a large scale, and he delighted us all by telling us that he considered our village to be a perfect example of Planning. We immediately saw that he was without doubt a man of great taste, and we invited him to give us a lantern lecture starting from that text. Unfortunately, during the course of this, the lecturer went on to remark on certain flaws which later generations had allowed to creep into the original plan. We then changed our minds, and agreed that he had no taste at all. The general opinion was that we know what we like, and there’s the end of it. This frame of mind is not unusual, and many schemes for building a new England will founder on this rock when the war is over.

  Another architect who appeared in uniform in my house, was one who had designed a church in an adjoining county, which I had much admired, during a pre-war sightseeing tour. His special job in the Army seemed to be teaching languages—an odd thing for an architect to be doing, except on the assumption that the architectural profession dates back to the Tower of Babel. In character he reminded me of Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice; and this not only made him an amusing and witty guest, but I feel sure must have greatly increased his powers of keeping discipline in his class.

  And then there was the painter torn from his easel to view the landscape from a tank and to discover an unexpected new beauty in the world as he watched the dawn rise over a column of these monstrous black engines of war, after a dark night spent in a wood during manœuvres. But he did not altogether desert his easel, for he spent many a half-day’s leave sketching, and I now possess, among my mementoes of the war, an almost complete series of paintings by him of my house from every possible point of the compass. His brother officers must have enjoyed having among them this rare creature, who decorated their Mess Room with caricatures of them all in the guise of Roman Legionaries; and whose portrait of the regimental cook was the envy of the Sergeants’ Mess.

  One of my early lodgers was a Cambridge Don, who seemed always to have possessed at least one war-like taste, as for years he had studied and collected old weapons. When he gave the army of to-day, a lecture on Tanks, he traced these back to the Long Bows which won the day for the English Archers at the Battle of Agin-court. As he was a University tutor in English literature, we were always trying to floor him over identifying quotations, and we only succeeded once, when an A. T. beat him on the post. When he went on manœuvres he was inspired to write poetry when he looked upon the landscape with its many memories of fighting from the days of Ancient Britain; and he gained similar inspiration from the famous old house in which his office was temporarily placed.

  He was a man of over six feet high and proportionately broad, so I found him rather a handful one day, when a F.A.N. Y. suddenly laid him in my arms in a fainting condition. She had driven him back from an operation at the dentist’s, and then fled, guessing that his weight would be beyond her. It was also beyond me; but I resolved to put this F.A.N.Y. into her place by showing her what could be done in time of war by a representative of my own supposedly fragile generation. I hoisted the prostrate figure in my arms and carried it into the house where I laid it on the lodger’s bed.

  It was rather surprising to find that a tutor from the severely scientific University of Cambridge should also have seen many a ghost as he walked through the Park, but this is probably explained by the fact that he was an Irishman before he became a Cambridge Don.

  So the Uniformed men, who have stayed in my house during the war, have turned out to be in no way uniform. I think they were no worse soldiers for that, and, during the years which are to come, it will be extremely interesting to see what they and the Army mutually make of each other.

  Chapter VI

  A GENTLEMAN EVERY TIME

  As I think over my lady lodgers, summing up my thoughts about them, I naturally set them against the background of professional opinion; for, quite early in my career as an amateur landlady, I asked a neighbour who has taken lodgers ever since her husband died some fifteen years ago, whether she preferred ladies or gentlemen.

  “A gentleman every time” was her prompt reply, and I find that this opinion is shared by most professional landladies. In my case, the decision has seldom been in my hands. I accept whoever is sent to me, and I keep an open mind. If I allow myself to think too much about the weaknesses which lodgers, like the rest of us, are bound to possess, those weaknesses gain strength. They grow until one can see nothing else.

  If I say that my lady lodgers have generally stayed longer than the gentlemen, that proves nothing; for their movements are determined from above, and those who stay the longest would possibly have fain gone first.

  For a short time, I had the pleasure of giving a home to two mistresses from our evacuated school. I loved these guests. I have seldom met anyone who more clearly gave one the sense of Vocation that did the headmistress. Hers was what is called a “ junior school” and all the children were under eleven years old. It used to be thought that anyone could teach the little children, and the really trained teachers should be reserved for the elder ones. The education authorities have now realised that the opposite is the case. Far more imagination is required from teachers of small children, but given that imagination, the mistress of a junior school is much to be envied. Th
ere is more skill in the technique of teaching small children, and if the foundations of knowledge are not assimilated before a child is eleven, they will never be assimilated at all. This too is the period when the love of learning is born. I believe it was Sir Robert Peel who said that everything he had learnt of any value in his life, was taught him by his nurserymaid; and there is no doubt that the success of every senior school greatly depends on the schools from which their pupils come.

  This lodger of mine was, as I have said, like a character from one of the broad-minded convent schools in seventeenth-century France. While she was with me, her responsibilities were great. The school was accommodated in three separate buildings, so the actual arrangement of the classes was a complicated business. She turned it into an advantage. When the children moved to a new classroom for a new subject, they had to run for some way out of doors, and I often watched the way in which they enjoyed this little break, though it must have been a troublesome matter for the headmistress and her staff. That staff worked wonderfully together, and they treated each other like the members of an Oxford Common Room.

  But the headmistress’s work was not only educational. The children had come away from their parents and were living in strange homes, but these homes were as familiar to the headmistress as they were to the children themselves. She made friends with the foster-parents, understood their difficulties, discussed sympathetically with them the characters of the children in their houses, and was a living centre of all those scattered groups.

  Then she had great responsibilities in the place whence she had come. She remained working under the Educational Authority of her own county, and she was in constant touch with the parents left at home. Her mind might well have been confused among all these conflicting ties; but I never had a more calm and collected companion than this remarkable woman when we met in the evenings in my sitting-room when her day’s work was done. I regretted her departure very much, but like everybody else, she was under orders, and they recalled her to tackle the difficult job of returning to her home town to reopen the school there, with reduced numbers of pupils and staff and with the continual danger of bombing.

  Rather a difficult job was the billeting in our village of the nurses attached to an Ambulance train, which had to be always ready to remove patients from bombed hospitals, and to convey them to places of safety. What added to our difficulties was that, at the same time, the War Office was seeking billets in the village, and that the Ministries involved had not agreed upon an equal rate of pay. One paid a guinea a week for a gentleman’s lodging, the other gave the same price for ladies who had to be boarded as well. No wonder that landladies more than ever preferred “a gentleman every time”. It really was tipping the scales unfairly.

  We sent a deputation to London begging the Ministry to allow us to put the nurses into a sleeping coach in the train, but we were refused on the double plea of comfort and discipline. Those of us who were on the spot saw that both must break down on very wet nights, when the train sometimes returned at two in the morning after a seventeen-hour journey, to find a furious storm going on. The girls funked the long walk to their lodgings in such weather, and they preferred to spend the rest of the night in the train on bare iron stretchers. Meantime, one landlady at least was pacing her house in great anxiety, fearing that some evil had happened unto them. There was a doctor and his wife in charge of the train and they were very charming and friendly people. He was hard put to it in filling up the hours for the nurses during the many days when, fortunately, the train was not sent off on “ operational” journeys. The phrase, “ spit and polish” got a new meaning in those smart little wards; and during the months they were here, the nurses beautifully embroidered the name of their unit on many hundreds of blankets and linen articles.

  Most of my military lodgers were gentlemen, for, as a rule, the members of the women’s Service were lodged in hostels, but for many months I did have a most charming A.T. in my house. She worked in an office nearby and liked it so much that she had to call upon all the strength of her patriotism when she was ordered to accept a commission. She had loved the practical work and the feeling that she was actually releasing a man for fighting.

  But the authorities were right in insisting that more officers should be commissioned. The Corps had grown so immensely since it was first instituted that it was completely under-staffed with officers, and the results of promoting the best of the rank and file has amply justified the determination of the authorities.

  But in those early days, the A.T. S., who issued from their rough and ready sleeping places were nevertheless extremely smart—shoes and buttons polished, hair permed, lips a solid bar of lipstick. And they were immensely patriotic. At this time they were all volunteers, and they never grumbled at their hard conditions, realising that these inconveniences were due to the Corps being raised so quickly to do such important work.

  For much too short a time, I had as a lodger a very lovely young actress, who was recovering from a serious illness, and whose poet husband (now in the Army) was quartered a few miles away. The marriage of this romantic pair is the one memory of radiant unmixed happiness which stands out in the first fortnight of the war. They were married in Salisbury Cathedral, and the family wedding party was a very august one, consisting entirely of Bishops, Generals, Poets, Sculptors, Painters, Writers, Fellows of Colleges, and Curators of Museums.

  Then, beneath the soaring arches of the most Heavenward of English cathedrals, and into the presence of this assemblage of distinguished people, the bride had appeared, floating up that long reach of nave, like a spirit form. Her wedding dress seemed to be made of pale mist; and upon this diaphanous material there was indicated a faint pattern of human hands from which escaped a dove of Peace. Her face spoke dazzled wonder, as though, in this dark week of the world’s history, she hardly dared to be so happy. Those who looked on shared her feeling, though lacking the power to express it with a like beauty. But I still remember the half-hour beginning with that bride’s apparition, as one of the times in my life when I saw, brought into being, the promise of which one dreams in every lovely dawn of the world.

  And now, nearly three years later, this bride was my lodger. Could any landlady be more fortunate than to find that the war had brought to her door, as well as the expected khaki figures, social workers, or bombed-out babies, this exquisite being from the land of play acting? With so magic a suppliant pleading for shelter at her door, not even the most professional of landladies could have held out for “ a gentleman every time”.

  Like many of our wartime visitors, this lodger had lost her home by fire, though, strangely enough, not through an attack by enemy raiders. She had been “resting” with her baby in a remote country cottage lent her by her parents, when the God of Fire descended upon it of his own volition. This fragile creature had gone to her bedroom late one night, to find it filled with smoke, and the baby seemingly unconscious in its cradle. She took it in her arms, and ran with it into the garden, where the air soon counteracted the effects of the smoke. The firemen were quickly on the spot, as indeed they usually are, even in the depths of the country, now that every man is ready to defend his own town or village. The baby’s mother took a hand with the hose, and they worked successfully at keeping the fire down, till they were faced with a new and unforeseen horror. The water was exhausted. There was nothing left to do, but to let the house go, and to concentrate on saving what was possible of its contents. The actress-turned-firewoman began with her parents’ belongings; and this dutiful, though perilous, undertaking prevented her from saving her own wedding presents, or her husband’s manuscripts. This adventure had resulted in an attack of rheumatism, from which she came to me to recruit. When the doctor first arrived to see her, I warned him to look for her carefully in her bed, as she had shrunk to the size of a slim stem of bamboo, and he might possibly overlook her.

  The poet-husband came to spend most of the evenings with her, and, in spite of her vigorous prot
ests, to push her about in an invalid chair. We made the best of having an actress in the house, by a great deal of reading aloud in the evening; so, once again, I had lodgers who fitted perfectly into my ideal pattern of life. But every morning, the husband distracted me by starting almost too late for the workman’s bus by which he had to travel in order to reach his camp for early parade. I suffer badly from Train Fever, Bus Fever, Boat Fever, and every other kind of transport fever; but I notice that poets and painters invariably catch trains, however late they leave for the station. I conclude that Providence, proverbially kind to drunken men, is equally considerate towards men intoxicated by the Muses.

  As the months of the war went on, my household became stabilised with three or four permanent women occupants, over and above the male lodgers. The first of these was a lady who combined great natural beauty with a mastery of all its accessory arts. She had rather an eighteenth-century appearance—hair poudrée (or rather, not poudrée, but naturally of a very beautiful white). Her skin was dazzling in colour and texture, and her lips were perfectly made up. Her nails too were touched with a lovely rose colour. As for her clothes, they were sans reproche—expensive materials, of faultless design, and beautifully cut. She knew how to put them on, and also how to hang them in her cupboard, so that they should last well and look soignée (she liked that word) when she put them on. None of this is surprising when it is added that this lady was a fashionable London dressmaker.