She became a militant supporter of the Ladies Vegetarian League. Men were brutes because they lived like brutes, hunting and killing and feeding on flesh. The belly fed the brain and a man might be tamed, like any wild beast, with a diet of white fish, milk and honey.
Kingdom Swann pined for a hot beef pie but dared not complain about his suppers. It was a small price to pay to have his housekeeper in such fine spirits. Her temper improved and she seemed, at times, to be quite jolly. When she asked for an increased allowance he doubled the amount requested. He would never have guessed that it found its way into the coffers of the suffragettes. It amused her to know that the profits he made from the plight of women should be used towards their emancipation. And poor Swann, working hard for women’s rights, didn’t have the least suspicion.
He was preparing a new set of postcards. The wrestling craze had come to town. In an exhibition at Olympia, Madrali the Terrible Turk did battle with the famous George Hackenschmidt. Lord Hugo Prattle, always hungry for novelty, ordered two dozen wrestling scenes. He sent his request with a copious list of instructions. The studio to provide a pair of fighting fortresses, each no more than twenty years old and skilled in the ways of the noble art. The first to be fierce and very large with broad flanks and a fair complexion. The second to be a fitting opponent, the eyes and hair dark in the Spanish manner, the limbs inclined to be fat and delicious. The wrestlers once in the heat of battle should be turned at frequent intervals so that neither girl could be said to have the advantage. Long hair preferred. Large feet essential. The cards to be cut and coloured by hand.
They found gladiators in Gloria Spooner and a laundry-girl called Gladys Pickles. Gladys wanted to be a singer and dancer. She was a good-looking girl who had once been mistaken for Nellie Melba. Gloria had told her that lots of famous dancers had been discovered through private pictures. They took the stage with their hair in braids and their bodies gleaming with coconut oil. But the secret of wrestling eluded them.
‘I’m too old for acrobatics,’ puffed Gloria as they helped her into a head twist and strangle. ‘Why can’t you do me as Jezebel?’
‘Yes,’ piped Gladys. ‘It might be helpful if we understood the story.’ She was under the impression they had come to perform an erotic ballet.
‘Story?’ said Marsh, in a very superior tone of voice. ‘These days art don’t have stories!’
‘Think of yourselves as Amazons,’ said Kingdom Swann gently, ‘locked together in mortal combat.’
‘I was a Beauty from Bible Land,’ grumbled Gloria as Gladys practised her hammerlock.
It was a busy time for Swann, shut away in the studio, watching the girls rehearse their battle. He should have been watching Violet Askey. She ran riot in Smithfield Market, throwing stones at butchers’ boys.
15
‘I heard there were twenty thousand of them. And all shouting like socialists,’ said Lord Hugo Prattle, grinding his teeth with excitement.
‘More like two hundred thousand,’ said Swann. ‘I’ve never seen such a multitude.’
‘Were they angry?’ said Prattle. ‘Did they fight? What did they want, I’ve never seen one.’ He stopped walking and wiped at his whiskery face with a lace-embroidered handkerchief.
‘They look regular enough,’ said Swann. ‘Shop-girls, house-maids, mothers and daughters. It’s every size and shape of woman and all of them calling for the vote. They say they’re going to change the world.’
‘You can’t change the world with scraps of paper,’ snorted Prattle, looking perplexed. ‘You need cavalry. No work for women.’
It was late June 1908. Kingdom Swann had been invited to stay at Prattle House in Dorset to conduct a series of photographs. The house had originally been a priory, purchased during the Reformation as a breeding ground for the Prattle family. After fire and flood in the eighteenth century the house had been rebuilt with the help of too many architects. The architects had squabbled and the work had not been completed. Within its bulging walls there were rooms without doors and staircases running nowhere. It was a maze of back alleys and sunless corridors. Approached from the ornamental drive the house looked more like a factory disguised with a pagan temple façade and crowned by curious turrets and towers. But the ancient gardens and lakes survived. Lord Hugo Prattle, in pensive mood, was walking the old photographer through the gardens and asking for news of the suffragettes. Swann had been at the Hyde Park rally and was trying, in vain, to describe the event.
‘It was worse than the Coronation. They filled Hyde Park and all the surrounding streets. They stopped the traffic for miles around. Hundreds of thousands of them. There were marching bands and flags flying the green, white and purple. A great, foaming ocean of petticoats.’
‘So many women in the world,’ sighed Prattle, pausing to snap a rose. ‘So many women and so little time. Vita brevis. It breaks a man’s heart.’
He twirled the rose between finger and thumb, wafting the perfume under his nose. ‘I don’t suppose you have any studies?’ he said hopefully. ‘The Suffragette Surrenders? Suffragette in a Silk Wrapper? I don’t yet have a suffragette.’ He might have been an entomologist, discussing a rare and exotic beetle.
Kingdom Swann shook his head.
‘“Alas! The love of women! It is known to be a lovely and a fearful thing,”’ grieved Prattle, throwing down the flower. ‘Who said that?’
‘Byron,’ said Swann.
‘Was it, by thunder!’ said Prattle. He seemed surprised.
There was a splash from the far shore of the lake that shook the crows from the trees. Prattle trampled to a hole in the hedge and pulled a telescope from his coat.
‘What is it?’ said Swann, peering anxiously over his shoulder.
‘The housekeeper,’ said Prattle, twisting the telescope against his eye. ‘The housekeeper’s in the lake again!’
‘Has there been an accident? Is the woman in trouble?’
‘Miss Petersen in trouble?’ laughed Prattle. ‘Couldn’t sink Miss Petersen. Learned to swim with the porpoises.’
‘But how did she come to fall in the lake?’ cried Swann.
‘She didn’t fall,’ said Prattle. ‘Jumped. Always jumping into the lake. She came across on the boat from Norway.’
‘What?’ shouted Swann in confusion. ‘What?’
‘She’s a Norwegian. They’re devils for theories of organic vigour. The sort of women who eat fruit for breakfast and like to suffer cold-water plunges. Whenever she thinks I’m out of the way she slips down here for the exercise.’
‘Swimming in the lake?’
‘Well, sir, I’ll admit it’s a queer sort of habit,’ grinned Prattle. ‘But she’s a damn pretty sight, for all that, and she leads the other girls a dance. One night, last summer, caught her down here with the kitchen-maids, splashing around like fishes.’
He turned away and rubbed his face, his eyes dazzled by the sunlit water. She was too far away to be admired with any degree of satisfaction. ‘No more time to waste in the garden,’ he said briskly. ‘Take you into the library – show you my collection.’ He turned and marched through the shrubbery, hacking out a path for himself with strokes from the big, brass telescope.
The library was a long hall with a marble floor, the walls lined with shelves and glass cabinets. Heavy damask curtains had been drawn at the windows to guard against the light. Swann stepped forward slowly, blinking into the gloom. Here was Lord Prattle’s notorious hoard of erotic books and manuscripts, prints, paintings and photographs.
Among the groaning shelves were portfolios of work by James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson, a sketchbook of dreams by James Henry Fuseli, priceless Japanese pillow-books and a set of rare engravings by the Belgian master, Felicien Rops. These treasures rubbed shoulders with badly printed confessions and poor translations of lewd French novels, and all the shelves had a fine bloom of dust, since his lordship thought of nothing but camera studies.
An oak gallery ran around the library and,
upon this second level, the bookshelves continued, fading into the cobwebs that clouded the vaulted ceiling. At the far end of the hall stood a black marble fireplace, its chimney-piece stuffed with fetish objects and its hearth girdled by large armchairs. A table, crowded into a corner, supported a heavy Hindu bronze of a monkey and woman locked in love. Beside it an oak lectern, carved in the shape of a grinning, ithyphallic satyr, held open a volume of photographs. Prattle had contrived to gather photographs of every class and colour of woman, laid bare, Acrobat to Zulu, in one hundred leather volumes. It had taken nearly twenty years and there was always some new work to be done. Women frustrated him by getting everywhere. There was no end to his labour.
His lordship guided Swann around the museum, pausing here and there to discuss an exhibit. In ten of the big glass cabinets were souvenirs and tokens from a thousand brief encounters with women. There were button shoes and silk slippers, stockings, hat-pins, locks of hair and various scraps of underwear. Every item in the remarkable display bore a neat paper label inscribed with a number according to some obscure classification of Prattle’s own invention.
He was very proud of the museum. It was a rare life’s work. He had never married although he thought there might be children scattered somewhere in the world. He was the last of the Dorset Prattles. He didn’t know what would happen to the house, or the collection, when he died. He supposed the bastards would fight for them.
The thought threw him into a melancholy. Swann had been brought from London for a special series of photographs to be used as studies for a monument, a memorial in stone. When Prattle passed from the world he wanted to be sure that something of his work survived. They might demolish the house but they wouldn’t rob his tomb. He planned to be buried, with his one hundred leather albums, beneath a massive weight of stone. Kingdom Swann would take pictures as a guide for the sculptor. Nothing elaborate. A study of Prattle, dead in bed, surrounded by seven of the upstairs maids.
‘Large as life and twice as natural,’ he said, sketching on the air with his hands. ‘Gone to sleep for eternity in a circle of snow-white bums.’
It made Kingdom Swann feel uneasy. ‘I don’t like to hear you talk of such things,’ he said. ‘It’s a long time before you’ll have to make arrangements.’
‘Drop dead tomorrow,’ said Prattle, puffing out his cheeks. ‘Who knows? Marked the grave beside the lake. Fine view of the house.’
‘You’ll live to be a hundred,’ said Swann.
Prattle considered the possibility, closed one eye and pulled on his moustache. ‘Nineteen hundred and fifty four,’ he said at last. ‘We might all be living under the sea like Captain Nemo or taking flights around the moon. The world will have changed almost beyond our recognition. They’ll look back at what we’ve achieved and laugh. There’ll be no crime, no poverty and they’ll probably have found an innoculation to cure every known disease. The French will have ceased to exist, that’s certain. There will be an innoculation for ’em. We’ll grow into a race of giants where the women are always willing, softly spoken and ten feet tall.’
‘And a man will grow two heads in order to conduct a conversation with himself,’ said Swann.
Prattle eyed him suspiciously. ‘They’ll be exciting times,’ he declared, locking the museum.
‘I’ll not live to see it,’ said Swann. He sniffed. ‘Don’t care for it. You can keep tomorrow and good riddance. Live in the past. That’s my advice. You know where you are with yesterday.’
Prattle didn’t like to argue with him. He retired to the master bedroom and practised the look of the dead.
‘A man looks his best when he’s dead,’ he declared. ‘Saw plenty of it during the war. Old men looking as sweet as babies. No reason. One of God’s little jokes.’
Swann set up his equipment and when he was ready Prattle rang a bell. The maids, coarse and well-fed country girls, shuffled naked into the room and settled themselves on the floor. None of them seemed in the least surprised by their master’s odd request. They’d been washed and powdered for the event and their heads neatly wrapped in black silk veils. They knelt beside the funeral bed and did their best to look bereaved.
They were chaperoned by Miss Petersen, the amphibious housekeeper, wearing a modest afternoon dress and a lace cap pinned to a bundle of fine, blonde hair. She was a tall, athletic woman who quietly sat in a chair beside Swann to monitor the proceedings. She saw the event as a frank display of English physical culture. It was rather a morbid presentation but you couldn’t expect too much from these curious, red-faced foreigners.
‘Mr Swann is an artist,’ said Prattle, by way of introduction. ‘A great man. A photographer. He’s going to turn you into angels. Follow his instructions.’
‘Thank you,’ said Swann and settled down to work.
But Prattle could not rest in peace. How were the maids arranged? He couldn’t see them from his pillow. Should they swoon in a circle with their arms outstretched or throw back their heads to heaven? Several times Kingdom Swann was made to occupy the bed while the corpse climbed out to view the effect.
As the afternoon deepened the maids became bored, began to yawn and whisper and fidget. It was suffocating in the veils and the threadbare carpet hurt their knees. Prattle tried to revive their interest. He spoke to them like a general addressing his troops before battle. Think of the glory. Eternal youth. Solid marble. Tits like tusks. Every bum a work of art. Something to make your mothers proud. And he promised them each an extra five shillings. Vita brevis, ars longa.
16
It was during his time at Prattle House that Swann met Stanley Gaunt, the pioneer balloonist. Gaunt had been on the maiden flight of his new dirigible, Ostrich, when a summer storm had driven him down on Lord Hugo Prattle’s estate. He’d arrived at the door at midnight, exhausted, bleeding and covered in mud. They could see no sign of his ship through the rain and assumed that he’d fallen overboard and tumbled out of the sky.
But the next day Swann woke up to find the Ostrich floating in the trees beyond the ornamental lake. He leaned from the bedroom window and squinted into the sunlight, unable to believe his eyes. It was an inflated canvas sausage, some thirty feet in length, with a metal contraption strapped to its belly. The sky was fresh and clean. The airship pulled at its anchor as the big, blunt nose nudged the morning breeze.
At breakfast he could barely contain his excitement as Prattle introduced him to the brave young aviator. Stanley Gaunt, heir to Gaunt’s beef gravy empire, was sitting at table eating a kipper. He looked as pretty as a young Greek god. His eyes were bright and very blue and his teeth were as dainty as pearls. He was dressed in riding breeches and a leather coat. The top of his head was wrapped in a bandage. He greeted Swann warmly and apologised for his rather untidy appearance. He had been sailing from Glastonbury to Dorchester when a freak gust of wind had driven the ship from her course and damaged part of the rigging.
‘Knocked me clean from the saddle!’ he laughed, tapping his bandaged head. ‘It was lucky I didn’t drown in the lake.’
After breakfast he took them down to admire the ship.
‘She’s beautiful!’ cried Swann as they approached the Ostrich through the trees. The balloon creaked and pulled at her moorings. The rigging supported a bicycle frame mounted above a petrol engine. The engine drove a wooden propeller. The pilot, sitting on the bicycle saddle, could steer the craft by manipulating a primitive rudder.
Stanley Gaunt grinned. ‘She’s beautiful,’ he agreed. ‘But she’s also inclined to be temperamental.’
Prattle was less than impressed. He surveyed the ship and shook his head. ‘She’s just a big bag of wind!’
‘I’ve seen some changes in my time,’ said Swann, shielding his eyes against the sun. ‘I was born before the public railways. Can you believe it? Yes. It’s true. I’ve seen some changes but I never thought I would live to see men fly.’ He turned and grasped the aviator’s hand.
‘Oh, this is nothing! One day there will b
e airships serving the empire,’ laughed Stanley Gaunt. ‘Airships the size of Cunarders, seating a thousand people in comfort.’
‘I won’t see it,’ said Swann.
‘It’s not far away,’ said the aviator. He planned to hang a cabin from the rigging with room enough for his first passenger. The cabin had been ordered from a Coventry coach builder and would bear the legend: COOKS LOOK UP TO GAUNT’S BEEF GRAVY.
‘None of us will live to see it!’ snapped Prattle in a cantankerous mood. ‘The Americans are building aeroplanes.’ He turned to the aged photographer. ‘What’s their name? The White brothers.’
‘Wright,’ said Gaunt.
‘Yes,’ said Prattle. ‘The White boys are having a lot of success with their heavier-than-air machines. That’s the shape of the future. Machinery in the shape of birds. They’ll soon build ’em big as locomotives. And there’s an end to your gas sausage.’
‘There’s no future in aeroplanes,’ smiled Gaunt. ‘I’ll admit they look very dashing. But give ’em a nudge in the wrong direction, the tail twists and they start to spin. They’re a menace in the sky.’
‘They’re flying,’ said Prattle stubbornly. ‘Despite what you say, sir, they’re flying.’
‘A fluke,’ said Gaunt. ‘No more than a lucky accident that turns the natural laws upside down.’
‘Isn’t that enough?’ said Prattle.
Gaunt shook his head. ‘It can’t last forever,’ he said. ‘They’re too heavy to hang in the clouds. I went to the London Aero Club Trials last year. Everything they threw in the air fell down again.’
‘Accidents?’ whispered Swann, fearfully.
‘A regular firework display,’ said Gaunt.
Kingdom Swann was shocked. He felt convinced that airships, alone, were destined to conquer the skies. He looked up and saw a miracle. A slow and buoyant leviathan. And it seemed to him, standing that morning in the long, wet grass beneath the tethered canvas cloud, there could be nothing more beautiful in the whole of the world than the sight of this silent airship.
Kingdom Swann: The Story of a Photographer Page 6