Children adored Miss Harrison. She kept them in order because she never expected to be disobeyed. All, apparently, felt when she stood in her favourite attitude, looking upwards with her hands clasped behind her, that what she said was ‘given from above’. For these youngers ones she evolved an effective question-and-answer method, which she later published as Social Geography for Teachers and Infants.
Here is a picture of a church. Where is it standing? – ‘In the middle of a churchyard’ – Sometimes there is grass round the church, with trees and plants. How is the church separated from the street or road? – ‘By iron railings’ – When you walk up the steps or along the path, how do you get into the church? ‘Through the door’ – Sometimes when people die they are taken into the church which they attended while they were alive. How does the bell ring then? – ‘Very slowly. It is said to toll.’
In 1875 the headmistress, Miss Bolton, retired, and Lucy Harrison took over. Worshipped by all the visiting staff, men as well as women, she had no problems of organization: concentrating now on the senior girls, she made them feel what education had meant to her – an uplifting emotional experience. ‘You need not call anything a luxury that you can share.’ They were to love music and poetry. A book, even a book’s title, is a door into another mind, letting in light and fresh air, and in the pain and joy of poetry the soul has the chance to meet itself. As to what they read – and she read aloud to them untiringly – it must be what went deepest and lifted highest – Shakespeare, Dante in Cary’s translation, Blake, Wordsworth, and her own favourites, Emily Brontë, Christina Rossetti, the Brownings, Coventry Patmore, Alice Meynell. Carlyle, describing the hero as poet, insists that we ourselves have Dante’s imagination, though with a weaker faculty, when we shudder at the Inferno. This kind of thing gives endless scope to the teacher, and can end up as something like sentimentality. There was in fact a certain confusion in Miss Harrison’s interpretations between the windswept heights which Dante and Shakespeare were then thought to share with the Authorised Version, and the indulgence of hot tears in the dark. A reading which all her pupils heard often, and never forgot, was from Alice Meynell’s Preludes of 1875 – the sonnet To a Daisy, which ends
Thou little veil for so great mystery
When shall I penetrate all things and thee,
And then look back? For this I must abide,
Till thou shalt grow and fold and be unfurled
Literally between me and the world.
Then I shall drink from in beneath a spring,
And from a poet’s side shall read his book.
O daisy mine, what will it be to look
From God’s side even on such a simple thing?
This strange double perspective, the poet’s corpse buried beneath the daisy’s roots and at the same time contemplating the earth from God’s side, wouldn’t have been strange to Ruskin (who called the last lines some of the finest in modern poetry) nor to Christina Rossetti, nor, evidently, to the Gower Street girls. With all Miss Harrison’s liberality and fresh air went a certain morbidity. But hard work was called for, because it develops intellect, and intellect forms thought, and thought forms character. In this vein Miss Harrison returned to Carlyle, and to the idea of the heroic life as a model to imitate. She would speak of Sir Philip Sidney, and the girls sat and thought of Miss Harrison.
At the end of the summer term there was an Open Day, when the reports were read and there was music, and a French or German play. Miss Harrison approved of amateur dramatics, though not of low mimicry. Lotti, a born impersonator who could ‘do’ anybody, and did mimic, perhaps in a low way, Professor Kinkel, the venerable lecturer in geography, would not have been encouraged to take part. But as a brilliant pianist with a delicate touch she was needed for the concert, and, at this stage of her life, still frankly enjoyed being told that she played well.
The trouble was that she would only learn what interested her, and a number of things, including geography, didn’t. But in spite of these failures her one motive was to please her headmistress. In her plain black jacket and waistcoat, with her short hair and calm gracious voice, Miss Harrison brought into the room ‘the sense of august things’. Dissent would be shameful, and the ‘inexpressible charm of her presence’ made it impossible. There were no rules, as such, at Gower Street, although there were many precepts, from ‘if a pudding is begun with a fork, the help of a spoon must not be called in half-way through’ to Coventry Patmore’s
Love wakes men once a lifetime each;
They lift their heavy heads and look;
And lo, what one sweet page can teach
They read with joy, then shut the book.
Lotti could not dress like Miss Harrison. She had of course, at the age of fourteen, no choice as to what she wore. She had a black-and-white checked dress, with a plain silver chain and cross, for weekdays, and a brown dress with a gold cross on Sundays. But she was allowed to keep her hair short, like Miss Harrison’s.
Her best friends were sober, hard-working girls. The three Chicks – Elsie, Margaret, and Harriet, from Ealing – seemed set to become teachers. Ethel Oliver was the daughter of Professor Daniel Oliver, the curator of Kew Herbarium, and a friend of Ruskin and the painter Arthur Hughes. Maggie Browne, also a professor’s daughter, was the dull one, always the last to be told anything, but the most faithful and stolid of friends. All these girls had good, quiet homes – the Olivers were Quakers – and were not much disposed to question things. Lotti amazed them. They saw at school her wild side, her inquisitive, flamboyant, head-tossing, parasol-snapping side. The beloved headmistress could not be disobeyed, but Lotti seemed to pass her days in a state of painful emotion, as though listening to something they could not hear.
In 1882, when Lotti was on the verge of adolescence, Miss Harrison, the undisputed centre of life in Gower Street, began to behave oddly. Her behaviour showed signs of overwork and strain. She was becoming what was then called (in reference to schoolmistresses) ‘unhappy’. It was felt by the governors that she must leave the school, and try what a rest would do. She was going, it was decided, to retire for the time being and take rooms in Hampstead, half-way up Haverstock Hill. During the daytime she would work in the British Museum, grimly persevering with her History of England, never, as it turned out, to be published.
When Charlotte heard this news, she was practising the piano. She sprang up and ‘in a wild state of grief began to bang her head against the wall’. This recollection came from a much younger girl, Amice Macdonnell, a niece of Miss Harrison’s. Amice was dismayed, and wondered whether she ought to bang her head, too.
Lotti was sick with one of the most cruel of all preparations for adolescence, the passion for a teacher, confusing intense sexual anxiety with the duty of loving the highest when we see it. Wisely or unwisely, Miss Harrison now offered to take some of the older girls from Gower Street as boarders, and to teach them English literature in the evenings, when their school day was over. Anna Maria was quite unable to face such a crisis, Lotti grieved wildly, Fred was called in to make a decision, and to put his foot down, and do something. He was frightened by his daughter’s condition. He is described as ‘going down on his knees’ to persuade Lucy Harrison to take Lotti with her.
But if he had done the best he knew for Lotti, he can hardly be said to have understood her, for he believed the move would ‘stabilize’ her. For the next two years she was separated from her elder brother and her two sisters, Anne and the baby Freda. Anne continued placidly in the Gower Street junior school, ‘good at art’, giving no trouble of any kind. Miss Harrison’s boarders, on the other hand, had to undertake, twice every day, the three-mile walk to and from Gower Street, down Haverstock Hill and Chalk Farm, through Camden High Street with its markets, down Hampstead Road to school. In the evening the walk was uphill. But Lotti’s spirits were now so high, and she was so unpredictable, so entertaining, seeming sometimes to dance rather than walk, that the way seemed short.
; Two of the Gower Street assistant teachers walked in front, as chaperones. Behind came the two sixteen-year-olds, Edith Oliver and Edith Scull, the daughter of an American professor. The two Ediths, then, walked ahead; next came Lotti, in the highest spirits, with the puzzled little Amice Macdonnell. When the little party arrived at Haverstock Hill there was a gracious reception, but also plain cooking of the cold meat and rice pudding variety. Mrs Newcombe, the Gower Street housekeeper, who regarded Miss Harrison with love and reverence, had come to Hampstead to look after her.
Eighteen months later, however, the situation totally altered when Miss Harrison herself fell passionately in love with Amy Greener, the teacher who had taken over the Gower Street School. When she recognized that her nerves had given way, Lucy Harrison had bought a piece of land, Cupples Field, near Wensleydale in her native Yorkshire. She had planted trees on the site at once, but waited for the right moment to build herself a house. Now, at one stroke she realized that the house must be shared. All the strength of ‘the fairest hill and sweetest dell’, she wrote to Miss Greener, ‘without you leaves me longing’, and again, in 1886, ‘Oh, for one hour with you again!’ and ‘Dearest, I do not feel at home anywhere without you now … with the person you love comes a halo and glow over everything, however miserable and poor, and without that presence the light seems to leave the sun itself. This is a trite remark, I am afraid.’ As she drove across the rough Yorkshire moors she recalled her walks with Miss Greener in the Tottenham Court Road. ‘Dear, dear love, there is nothing in the world that could satisfy me or fill your place for me, but if separation by death had to come, I think one could fly to the hope and thought of meeting hereafter; it would, I think, be impossible to live without that hope at any rate.…’
These letters are quoted in Amy Greener’s biography of her friend, which treats a delicate subject delicately. Miss Greener had asked herself whether some people, knowing that the idea of marriage had never attracted Miss Harrison, would wonder ‘whether her life lacked the perfect rounding that love could bring’. ‘Well!’ commented a friend, who had been allowed to read the manuscript, ‘the love she needed came!’ And indeed the two of them were to live in perfect concord at Cupples Field for nearly thirty years. Lucy became the revered headmistress at the Mount School, York; Amy joined her staff. They retired together. On her deathbed Lucy asked Amy to read to her from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Catarina to Camoens, in which Catarina, ‘dying during the poet’s absence abroad’, tries to reconcile herself to the idea of his falling in love again. She wavers, but finally gives her blessing. It must have been painful for Miss Greener to read these words aloud in the whitewashed bedroom, among the plain oak furniture which her friend had knocked together.
Meanwhile the boarders at Haverstock Hill were left to face their entry into life without their headmistress. It was the end of Lotti’s schooling, and part of her education had been to know what it was to be totally obsessed by the physical presence or absence of another woman. This for her was something more than the ordinary condition of being sixteen. It can be recognized in an early sonnet, Left Behind:
I wait thy summons on a swaying floor,
Within a room half darkness and half glare.
I cannot stir – I cannot find the stair –
Thrust hands upon my heart –; it clogs my feet,
As drop by drop it drains. I stand and beat –
I stand and beat my heart against the door.
Of course, large numbers of schoolgirls all over England, at the turn of the century, felt passionately about the teacher. Schwärmerei was a calculated risk for those who educated in Lucy Harrison’s way. It passed, and was supposed to refine and ennoble. But for Lotti, the changeling, the odd one out, it proved to be an initiation into her life’s pattern. She would always be physically attracted to women rather than to men, and she would always choose wrong. She was marked out to lose, with too much courage ever to accept it. From adolescence she was one of those whom Colette called ‘restless ghosts, unrecovered from wounds sustained in the past, when they crashed headlong or sidelong against the barrier reef, mysterious and incomprehensible, the human body’.
CHAPTER THREE
Lotti
LOTTI, everyone said, had changed. She was still unpredictable and passionate and could still, if she wanted to and was in the vein, make everybody laugh until they cried. But the innocent desire to show off had failed her. She was often fierce with strangers. Her wild impulses no longer turned all the same way, outwards, to meet the world. Once she had been driven to wild happiness at any kind of celebration; now, it seemed, she had hardened. ‘It is a legend in my family’, she wrote, ‘that at festive seasons I am cynically indifferent to the pile of good wishes and parcels that come my way – but this may merely be a self-protective mask for the “emotional nature” which you insist on crediting me with … I am credited with a more or less indifferent front to these things – the fact is they cut me to the heart.’ The storm within had to have an outlet. She needed exhausting music, not her piano pieces, but Wagner, Tannhäuser above all. Meanwhile the silver cross round her neck (and the gold one on Sundays) was an outward sign that she had entered an Anglo-Catholic phase, and, with her mother and Anne, was attending Christina Rossetti’s church, Christ Church, Woburn Square. But whereas Anne continued in the same faith till death, Lotti suffered from all the spiritual nausea of belief and unbelief. Her family were at a loss, her friends still more so. They knew only that Lotti was very brilliant, and out of them all must be the one who would do great things. In appearance she was still a tough, delicate miniature – her boot size was number 2 – her smallness making an immediate appeal, wherever she went, to the toy-loving human race. Her voice had become rather chancy, sometimes hoarse, like a boy’s breaking, but very flexible, and fascinating to listen to.
Vestry Hall, Hampstead (now the Old Town Hall) by Kendall and Mew. A drawing by Fred Mew.
Freda was still a little girl, Anne continued placidly at the Gower Street School after Miss Harrison had left. Charlotte was now the daughter at home. Although Fred, as has been seen, was called upon as head of the household in all business matters, and when it was necessary for someone to be ‘spoken to’, it is doubtful if he saw much of his daughters. Still a complete failure from the point of view of gentlemanliness, he had had to put all his energy for some time past into the affairs of Kendall and Mew.
H.E.K. relied by now almost entirely on Fred. Old Kendall had died in 1875, leaving very little (he had entertained lavishly all his life) beyond the Brighton property, and in The Builder’s words, H.E.K. ‘during his own later years, was greatly assisted in his professional engagements by his son-in-law Mr Frederick Mew’. The two of them were associated at Gordon House, Isleworth, for the Earl of Kilmorey; at Madingley Hall, near Cambridge, at Staunton Harold, for Earl Ferrers; and, in 1876, in the new Hampstead Vestry Hall. So far, so good. This commission should have been the high point of the firm’s success, ensuring a prosperous future for Anna Maria and the Mews.
Hampstead in the late 1870s was a rapidly extending rural suburb, with a population of 40,000. The Hall (now the Old Town Hall, Rosslyn Hill) was intended to house the sixty Vestry members in dignity and comfort, but it was also to be ‘a centre of social life and healthful activity’. By this it was meant that the Vestry could recover some of the expenses by letting it out for concerts. From the outset it was stipulated that the main hall must hold 800, and, although the total costs were not to exceed £10,000, the building must be ‘appropriate’ and ‘worthy’.
In April 1876 the contract was offered for competition. Kendall and Mew’s entry, under the disarming motto Cavendo tutus (caution means safety) was accepted by a majority. Their design was for a handsome edifice in one of their ‘Italian’ styles, faced with red brick and dressings of Portland Stone, centrally heated and lit by gas. But almost at once the familiar unpleasantness began. ‘Sir,’ wrote an unsuccessful competitor, a few weeks after the award,
to the Hampstead & Highgate Express, ‘while inspecting the drawings for the above, prior to the decisions of the Vestry, my attention was called to a gentleman with a foot-rule, pointing out the merits (?) of the design marked ‘Cavendo tutus’ to all comers. Upon speaking to him, I discovered he was a vestryman, and he stated to me that he knew whose design it was, and had seen it prior to its being sent in … ‘Cavendo tutus’ appears to have ignored all the conditions – the large hall showing to hold about 400 people (if I mistake not) instead of the 800 required.’ This was quite true, and nobody believed, either, in the accepted estimate of £9,375. The suggestion was that H.E.K., as Hampstead’s district surveyor, had got his foot in first. Criticism grew louder when the work was held up for month after month. The Vestry, obliged to meet in one of the dining-halls of Hampstead Workhouse, were restive. By midsummer the partners had to issue a statement ‘that though the work had not been proceeded with so rapidly as it might have been, the architect was of the opinion that this was all the better for the building’. This sounds more like Fred than the suave and experienced Kendall, who in fact, at the age of seventy, had entered the slow deterioration of his last illness. Reports and certificates were no longer dated from his office, which was closed, but from 30 Doughty Street. With his wife Maria and daughter Mary Leonora, he had moved from expensive Brunswick Square to 34 Burlington Road, near Paddington railway station. Where had the money gone, from the long series of country mansions, Gothic parochial school and Domestic Elizabethan lunatic asylums? On 10 August 1878 Fred was obliged to apply, on the partners’ behalf, for ‘£100 on account’, suggesting that they were operating on a very small margin.
Charlotte Mew Page 4