Miss Bolt called for the last time, looking even shabbier than usual, in the autumn of 1876. On this occasion Charlotte, aged seven, was sitting with three-year-old Anne (who must have been almost as tall as she was) clasped on her lap. Miss Bolt asked where Richard was, and it was Lotti’s responsibility, apparently, to tell her that he was dead. Miss Bolt, in return, confided that her niece, young Fanny, for whom she had done everything, had gone to the bad. She then withdrew downstairs to the kitchen, where the supper was, ‘leaving me, like the childhood in which I knew her, mysteriously and without farewell’.
Though Lotti clearly can’t have understood that Fanny had gone on the streets, she responded to the hushed tone of voice. Her fascination with the prostitute’s story seemed the first hint of an end to childhood. In Charlotte Mew’s original draft for her article there was a good deal more about Fanny: ‘Even at fourteen, she must have borne the indelible marks appointing her to be slain. I wonder sometimes if I have ever met her; if I and the unhappy girl, who was once such a real and well-known person to me, have since passed each other with a cold unmeaning stare.’ In this first draft, too, another of Miss Bolt’s odd connections appears – a female impersonator, for whom her sister-in-law made drag costumes which ‘suited ’im identical to the female shape.…’e nearly took me off my feet, when ’e put up ’is train hover ’is arm and offered to see me ’ome.’
The point of Miss Bolt’s visits, however, was to help in the process of mending and making do. The Mews were reasonably well off during the 1870s, though not within reach, of course, of the grandeur of Brunswick Square. Fred could confidently expect, in the course of time, to become head of the firm. There was Henry, too, to come after him, but then there were three daughters for him to support until marriage. Elizabeth Goodman’s stern economies were an investment for the household’s future. But they were also the product of that wondrously strong Nonconformist ethic which put thrift as high as charity. Waste was not only an ingratitude to the Creator and an injury in a world where so many went hungry, but an insult to the nature of substance itself – shirts were turned because ‘there was still plenty of life in them’, and the skin of boiled milk must not be thrown away because ‘it was perfectly good milk’. Furthermore, the squandered despised object itself might spring up and confront you in reproach. You might – and in the nursery’s cautionary tales you did – face total disaster one day, just for want of a few drops of that same boiled milk.
At 30 Doughty Street Anna Maria was protected from worry. It was agreed that she had suffered enough. But Lotti, a ‘noticing’ child, had a clear glimpse of the nether depths which Miss Bolt so narrowly avoided, and into which Fanny had disappeared.
To a family so closed in, the seaside holiday was a release, and almost unmanageably exciting. In late May or June every year the Mew children went to the Isle of Wight. This represented a very considerable victory for Fred, particularly since the Kendalls had a seaside house in Brighton (No. 6 Codrington Place). During the development of Kemp Town, in fact, they had become a Brighton family of distinction, and Mrs Kendall, with her unmarried daughter Mary Leonora, spent every summer there. Anna Maria, it seems, preferred to join them at Codrington Place. But the children went on by the Mid-Sussex Railway to catch the boat at Southampton for the Island, in the care of Elizabeth Goodman.
At Newport they were met by their aunt from the farm, with a wagonette for the luggage and a fly for the children. On one occasion the tiny, impetuous Lotti jumped up to take the seat by the driver (this, by rights, would have been Henry’s, as the eldest). When Elizabeth Goodman checked her by rapping her sharply over the knuckles with a parasol, Lotti is said to have seized the parasol and snapped it in half. She was intoxicated by the open air, the fields of standing corn, the estuary with ships made fast at the quay and the chequered lights and shadows of the Newport Downs. She wanted the driver to put on speed, or ‘go bomewish’ in the Island dialect which she knew perfectly well, but was not encouraged to speak.
During the holidays the children had the chance to tour the Island from Newfairlee. ‘Past the white points of the Needles,’ Charlotte wrote, ‘over the Island sea, the pigeons of woods and other worlds flock home in autumn, dashing themselves sometimes at the end of the journey against the pane of St Catherine’s light, dropping dazed and spent on the wet sand.’ Shipwreck stories she could hardly have avoided, since they had more relations living ‘back of the Wight’, that graveyard of shipping; old Mrs Mew of Blackgang had once rowed out to take Christmas dinner to a crew stranded on what was left of their ship in Chale Bay. But Lotti’s was the summer and early autumn sea, and the phosphorescent darkness of the summer beach at night.
Tide be runnin’ the great world over:
T’was only last June month I mind that we
Was thinkin’ the toss and the call in the breast of the lover
So everlastin’ as the sea.
Heer’s the same little fishes that splutter and swim,
Wi’ the moon’s old glim on the grey, wet sand;
An’ him no more to me nor me to him
Than the wind goin’ over my hand.
Ellen Mary was the farm cousin nearest to Charlotte in age, though not in temperament. In later years she joined an Anglo-Catholic community as Sister Mary Magdalen; she described Lotti as a child as ‘full of the joy of life’, and, less cautiously, as ‘hard to manage’. But on Sundays the whole party walked by the field-path, thickly edged with dog-roses, to the new church of St Paul’s, Barton, for Evensong. On the way they usually passed a blind man, who ‘would put his fingers to his ears and tell me they were his peepers’, with ‘the piteous smile of one doomed to find no answer to it in the faces of his kind’. At St Paul’s the vicar sometimes muddled up the responses, and Charlotte told, or more probably overheard, that he had been driven partly out of his wits by a young woman who was also pointed out, dressed in her white Sunday best, on the path to church. The blind man and the distracted priest, who would have been frightening to most children, fascinated her.
These were the days and nights, she said, ‘of a short life when I could pray, years back in magical childhood’. But Sunday at Newfairlee, when she was not allowed to race through the cornfields or get soaked on the beach, was ‘a day of eyes’. ‘This was the thought that claimed my childhood,’ she wrote in 1905, ‘and in another fashion, claims it now. “A day of eyes”, of transcendental vision, when the very roses … challenge the pureness of our gaze, and the grass marks the manner of our going, and the sky hangs like a gigantic curtain, veiling the face which, watching us invisibly, we somehow fail to see. It judged in those days my scamped and ill-done tasks. It viewed my childish cruelties and still, with wider range, it views and judges now.’ From the age of six or seven Lotti, ‘full of the joy of life’, knew that she was guilty.
It seemed to her that she was self-convicted. But, strangely enough, it was the loyal and loving Elizabeth Goodman who had deeply imprinted on Lotti’s mind the certainty of God’s retribution. Every day she had to read a fixed number of pages from Line Upon Line, a book which re-tells the Bible stories extremely well, only after each one comes the sting. ‘You remember how proud Absalom was of his hair. God let that very hair be fastened to the tree. We should pray to God not to let us be proud of anything we have.’ Always we must be ready for judgement day, watch and prepare. ‘Then you too will live with Jesus in heaven. You will sit down with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and Joseph, and Moses and David.’ This last prospect terrified Charlotte. But she did her best to prepare for it.
‘In early years the rite and reality of daily prayers were for us strictly insisted on,’ she wrote, ‘and “Forgive us our trespasses” was no idle phrase when after it, each night at bedtime, we had to specify them.’ Not only every sin (she was taught) but every moment of happiness has been given its fixed price in advance – though not by us – and must be paid for. That is why the roses and the grass, which she loved, seemed to challenge Lotti an
d ‘mark the manner of her going’. Guilt of this nature can never be eradicated, a lifetime is not long enough. Unfortunately it will survive long after the belief in forgiveness is gone.
The Mew children sometimes stayed on till mid-September, long enough for the first of Newport’s ‘Bargain Zadderdays’ or Saturday markets. These were hiring fairs, when hundreds of men and women farm servants, dressed up to the nines, crowded into Newport to get harvest work. The town was en fête, with stalls for ribbons and gingerbread. In the evening there was dancing, people got drunk, fighting raged up and down the High Street and if it was fine enough lovers rolled about the cornfields. Lotti was certainly kept clear of everything except an early look at the fairground and the stalls. But Saturday market ‘grinning from end to end’ remained with her as an image of terror.
Childhood has no escape from the random impact of images, however little wanted. They come before the emotions which will give them significance, as though lying in wait. As a child, and later as a writer, the idea of a coffin carried out at the door and a ship going down with all her lights, but without a sound, haunted Charlotte Mew. So too did church bells, a high wind, rooks flying, broad moonshine, and an ugly sight at Newfairlee.
I remember one evening of a long past Spring
Turning in at a gate, getting out of a cart, and finding
a large dead rat in the mud of the drive.
I remember thinking: alive or dead, a rat was a godforsaken thing,
But at least, in May, that even a rat should be alive.
This rat was never exorcised and in her last, unfinished story she described it again, the dead bristling body, the finer texture inside the ears. The worst thing about it was its silence. It couldn’t state its own case. And, as a poet, she was struck by the image’s self-recall. She had remembered the rat many years afterwards, not for its own sake, but because she had seen a tree cut down.
At home in Doughty Street there was one picture in particular (although all the walls were hung with Fred’s sketches) which fascinated Lotti. This was a drawing by her grandfather Henry Kendall, the picture of the Shining City. In the 1830s, when old H.E.K. had been developing the waterfront at Rosherville, on the Thames, in a modest and sober style, young Kendall had produced his own ‘fancy composition’ for the river entrance to the site. He could never have expected his father to take his design seriously, but in 1851 he developed it as a dessin libre and showed it, first at the Academy, and later in the English section of the Paris Salon, where Baudelaire had raved over it. The drawing showed marble staircases and monuments dwarfing the tiny human beings, and whole fleets at anchor by the golden gates. To the Mew children this was Jerusalem, all the more because it was a Kendall image, hung in the drawing-room, and could only be seen on special occasions.
Certain colours, particularly white and red, always obsessed Charlotte Mew. She was more sensitive to colour than she wanted to be. She ‘knew how jewels tasted’. There was also a favourite repeated movement, ‘tossing’. In her poems there are tossed heads, ‘tossed shadow of boughs in a great wind shaking’, the toss in the breast of the lover, new-tossed hay, tossed trees, tossed beds. It can be active or passive – ‘you will have smiled, I shall have tossed your hair’. Charlotte herself was a head-tosser. Everyone who knew her noticed this. Neat in all her movements, she could carry the gesture off, even in middle age. It expressed contradiction, relief from tension, and a defiance of what the tension meant. With ‘tossing’ went an obsession, which in itself seems mid-Victorian or Pre-Raphaelite, but probably had a more complex origin, with a woman’s long hair. Her own hair was cut short; Miss Bolt, she had noticed, had ‘only a small allowance’; Elizabeth Goodman’s was decently hidden under her cap. Like nearly all her range of imagery, the vision of long, or rough, or flying hair came to her early, to be understood later. It was part of what she called ‘the dazzling lights and colours of childhood’s enchanted picture’.
CHAPTER TWO
Love between Women
MISS BOLT had warned Lotti, from time to time, never to take lemon juice in the hope of growing thinner, because dieting would do no good – ‘what you’re made, that you will be’. Lotti did not want to believe this last remark; in any case, what she needed was something to make her stouter. She grew out of early childhood still small-boned and tiny, with her face a perfect oval, the ‘moonfaced darling of all’, but given to sudden withdrawals. She had become a reading and writing child, retreating under the nursery table and producing ‘sheets of pathetically laboured MSS’. These Elizabeth Goodman swept into her dustpan. Much of the faithful servant’s time was spent in planning small treats and great careers for the four children, but she didn’t hold with this writing rubbish. Poetry, in fact, she maintained, was ‘injurious to the brain’. Lotti turned to imagination’s refuge. Evidently, she deduced, she was misplaced and alien, her father and mother were not her real parents. ‘Never, I know, but half your child’ she wrote in The Changeling:
Times I pleased you, dear Father, dear Mother,
Learned all my lessons and liked to play,
And dearly I loved the little pale brother
Whom some other bird must have called away.
Why did They bring me here to make me
Not quite bad and not quite good,
Why, unless They’re wicked, do They want, in spite to take me
Back to Their wet, wild wood?
These are verses for children, written in 1912. Charlotte used to read them aloud, when the time came, to children of her acquaintance, giving no explanation, because she believed (quite rightly) that none would be needed. They understood her at once.
Anne was taller and prettier, but in spite of her brilliant violet-blue eyes, more usual-looking. She hadn’t Lotti’s strangely arched eyebrows, or her disconcerting look of astonishment, which might be sarcasm. Anne never wrote anything, but drew, or painted; she was the little sister, quicker to make friends than Lotti, but quite contentedly under her influence. Freda, the youngest, was the most striking of all. She was ‘like a flame’. Anna Maria took pride in this youngest, and, determined to live through her daughter, liked to take little Freda about herself, particularly to dancing classes. For these Anna Maria dressed elaborately, appearing, for example, in a pale blue boa, an awkward thing for a very short woman to wear.
Henry, four years older than Charlotte, at a time of life when four years make the most difference, was the looked-up-to elder brother. In the room reserved as an office, he worked away at his drawing-board, but with an eye, quite naturally, to his own amusements. At the age of sixteen or so he began to go out dancing, and now, apparently, Elizabeth Goodman, ‘when she was called upon to deliver the secret note or the unhallowed bouquet, would stand stiff-backed and sorrowful-eyed, holding it in her strong, beautifully-shaped rough hand to “receive instructions”, with an impressive “Very well, sir”, which was not convincing.’ Why poor Henry shouldn’t send a bouquet, which seems harmless enough, or why it should be unhallowed, is not explained. Possibly Goodman was doubtful of any form of communication between the sexes, as leading, in the end, to trouble.
In 1879 Lotti made her first venture beyond the family in Doughty Street and the cousins in the Isle of Wight. She was entered as a pupil in the Gower Street School. The school was not more than twenty minutes’ walk away up Guildford Street and past the British Museum, so that she was able to come home for her mid-day dinner, but the headmistress, Miss Lucy Harrison, made a profound impression on her, which might be described as a revelation of a kind.
Lucy Harrison left a strong mark, in fact, on several thousands of young girls who passed through her hands. It couldn’t be said of her – as it was of Miss Buss, at the North London Collegiate – that she was ‘a great educator who should never have been allowed to come into contact with children’. There are very many tributes to her good influence, intellectual and moral – she would never have distinguished between the two – but there was, in Octavia Hil
l’s words, ‘something Royal’ about her which perhaps exempted her from criticism. She may not always have known what she was doing.
She had been born in 1844, in Yorkshire, of Quaker parents, the youngest of eight, and grew up into a top-whipping, boat-building tomboy, such as many large mid-Victorian families produced. A good shot with a stone, she felt, when she killed her first robin, ‘after the first start of joy in the success of the action, a revulsion like the horrors of Cain’ when she held the warm body in her hands. When she threw her favourite pocketknife into the water (apparently by mistake) ‘I felt’ – she wrote – ‘as if I had thrown my heart in.’ Hers was the excess of guilt attributed to Maggie in The Mill on the Floss, or Cathy Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights, or Jo in Little Women, when their behaviour was not only passionate, but masculine. Lucy Harrison had to come to terms with it in order to control her own life and those of others.
She was educated in France and Germany and at the liberal and unsectarian Bedford College. Languages came easily to her, history and poetry were her passion. Coming as she did from a broadminded Ruskinian background, she prayed to be serviceable. This meant the Octavia Hill Settlement, temperance clubs, the Suffragists, prisoners, exiles. Mazzini, when she visited him in his wretched rooms, gave her a cigar which she kept as a souvenir till it fell to pieces. There was still a wealth of undirected energy which had to be worked off in heavy carpentry and amateur dramatics. Then, when she was twenty-two, she was asked to help out at the Bedford School, then attached to the college. In 1868 the college gave up the school, and it moved to Gower Street, with Lucy Harrison as assistant.
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