For awhile she still had nothing of her own, except responsibilities and the small fortune which she now allowed him to draw on for his children’s education. She soon won their gratitude by helping them with homework and inviting their friends to stay. And then at the age of thirty-seven she had a child ! A girl.
I am sorry to say that my mother did not greatly value daughters, having been one herself. Her view was: ‘girl babies are quite useful to practise on’ as her mother had told her. Boys were all that really counted in God’s eyes – could she hope for another child? She could. But it was another girl – to practise on!
And then the most wonderful possible thing happened to her. She had a boy. Which incidentally was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me. I unashamedly adore life. Nor was this the end of her triumphs. She seemed to get younger and younger, happier and happier, and bore my father two more sons, the last when she was forty-nine. And no more daughters, since practice had by now made her perfect.
They built a big house near London, where my father was now working, and another in North Wales where he had once taken her for a holiday by the sea. Stumbling on a peculiarly romantic spot near Harlech Castle she told my father: ‘Alfred, this is beautiful beyond expression. I should like to die here.’
‘Why not live here instead?’ he countered impulsively in her own practical language.
So they bought the site and built a big house on it, and when my father retired, sold the London house and went to live there. It was our holiday heaven, with a sandy beach, wild hills, blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, flowers, mushrooms, adventures. For as we grew older, she allowed us more liberty, though continuing as religious as ever and pleading with us to take no risks in rock-climbing. ‘I do not like broken children any more than you like broken toys.’
On a picnic one day she began singing a German song, to the effect that the person whom God wishes especially to bless He sends out into the wide, wide world. And afterwards, looking around us in pure joy, she said, ‘You can’t think how fortunate I feel, my darling children… There was a man once, a Frenchman, who died of grief because he could never become a mother.’
We had family prayers every morning, and as a rule went to church twice every Sunday, which was the day when we were forbidden to play cards or other games of chance. I remember persuading her to let us play charades on Sunday evenings provided that the scenes were wholly Biblical. None of us drank or smoked or had friends of the opposite sex until we were grown up. Yet somehow we never felt deprived, which is surprising when I look around me today. She trusted that eventually we should all meet together in God’s glorious heaven, long after her own death. As an equally sincere salvationist, I asked her innocently once: ‘Mother, when you die, will you leave me any money?’ ‘Yes, of course, darling.’ ‘Enough to buy a bicycle?’ ‘Yes, I hope so, but surely you would prefer having me to having a bicycle?’ ‘Well, but you’ll be having a marvellous time in God’s glorious Heaven, and I could ride the bicycle to put flowers on your grave.’
My mother (and this is no criticism of her) did not know how to dress, having been warned as a girl never to indulge female vanity and as a young woman having been unable, under Miss Briton, to experiment in fancy clothes. I only once remember her buying herself a present, and that was when I was about twelve and she showed me an antique shop where I could spend some birthday money on coins for my coin collection. There she found a gold Irish ‘Tara’ brooch, which she bought ‘to please your father’. It was a bargain at only a trifle more than its intrinsic value in metal, and she wore it for the rest of her life almost every day. In those years only royalty, actresses or prostitutes ‘made up their faces’; ‘rouge’ was a dirty word; and my mother actually spoilt her complexion by constant washing with carbolic soap. She also lacked any sense of humour except the simplest and most innocuous kind; but again this is no criticism of her. True humour is based on multiple meanings, and on a recognition that often only a hair’s breadth of truth separates complete opposites. To her white was white, black was black and every word, except parables and metaphors, must be taken literally. She did not understand irony, sarcasm, or jokes about other people’s misfortunes.
She was, however, a heroine in times of emergency. One day when we asked her whether she had ever ridden in a railway truck, she admitted that, yes, once after a severe railway accident she had helped in the rescue work, had administered first-aid, and taken the injured to hospital in a coal-truck. But our most splendid recollection was when we were very young, in the days before domestic electric light. At supper one evening, the kerosene table-lamp suddenly flared up. The screw that worked the wick had failed and a black pillar of smoke soon clouded the room. My father and elder brothers watched aghast, but my mother rose and said simply to my half-sister Susan: ‘Susan, open that door if you please, and then the door into the drawing-room, and then the drawing-room door into the garden. Make haste!’ She took up the flaming lamp, protecting her hands with a table napkin, and followed Susan through the hall, through the drawing-room, and into the garden where she set the lamp down on a path. Five seconds later it exploded. Not long afterwards she went to stay with a sister at Zurich, but in fact for a newly-invented throat operation there, with old-fashioned anaesthetics, insufficient analgesics, and only one chance in four of recovery. Yet she did not allow us to guess her anguish when she cheerfully kissed us goodbye. Later we learned that she had sustained herself with the hymn:
Faint not nor fear; His arms are near,
He faileth not, and thou art dear.
After that, all went well with her and us until, soon after my nineteenth birthday, the First World War broke out. The news dismayed my mother. She could not at first believe that the Germans could really have invaded Belgium in breach of a sacred treaty. ‘My people must have gone mad,’ she cried. I had just left school and would have gone on to Oxford University that autumn, but instead volunteered for the Royal Welch Fusiliers, our local regiment. Within a few months I found myself a young officer in trenches that faced Bavarian troops; Were my uncles and cousins among them? This fratricidal situation was so horrible that for a while my mother broke down and lost her faith in God. How could He allow her to suffer so? For which, a year later, her punishment was a letter from my Colonel, after our battalion had lost over two-thirds of its strength at High Wood, to the effect that I had fought very gallantly but had died of wounds, and that the doctor believed me to have suffered very little pain.
So she opened her heart to God with the Biblical: ‘The Lord hath given, the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.’ And the next thing was a letter from my Aunt Susan – Janey’s sister, who lived in France and had noticed my name on a list pinned to a hospital ward door; she was visiting her son who had lost a leg in the same battle. I had been left for dead and escaped burial only because everyone was too busy fighting, or looking after the wounded, to spare the time. My mother’s faith returned, and after another spell in the trenches, I got pneumonia, was forbidden further active service, married and had a child – ‘a daughter to practise on’ as she told my wife. Eventually the war ended and all again was well. But my mother’s four sisters, with whom she had shared her inheritance, had been ruined by patriotically investing it in German Defence Bonds. So of course she helped them as far as she could, all but one of her own brood being by now more or less independent. And when my father died at eighty-six, she became the most respected woman at Harlech, with nobody to obey except God: meaning her noble conscience. At the age of eighty-eight she was found to have cancer, but since at that age it is seldom fatal, she continued unperturbed to practise her good works, which were many.
Her death was sad. One of her many descendants – though married at thirty-six, she was already a great-grandmother – got involved in a libel action which threatened crippling damages, and came to her for help. The worry caused a nervous breakdown, the local doctor could not deal with the case, and my once ‘
practised-on’ elder sister, who had become a very good doctor, happened to be holidaying in Austria and got back too late to save her life.
What lessons I learned from my mother can be told in very few words. She taught me to despise fame and riches, not to be deceived by appearances, to tell the truth on all possible occasions – I regret having taken her too literally at times – and to keep my head in time of danger. I have inherited her conscience, her disinterest in sartorial fashions, her joy in making marmalades and jams, and her frugality (I hate throwing away crusts) though it often conflicts with a spendthrift extravagance learned from my father. I have not inherited her dogma, which was the cause of her sadly cutting me from her will when my wife and I separated – but she remembered the children instead, and eventually welcomed my remarriage. One word of wisdom, which she whispered to me when I was seven years old, has always stuck in my mind, and I pass it on to my children and grandchildren – by the way I became a great-grandparent last year.
‘Robert,’ she said, ‘this is a great secret, never forget it! Work is far more interesting than play.’
Hence my obsession with work, which is also my play.
After her death I was sent that gold Tara brooch, which arrived in the mail with its pin missing. I took it to a Spanish jeweller to have a new gold pin fitted, but he assured me that a gold one would be unnecessary, since the brooch itself was not gold but pinchbeck. That surprised me. My mother had always worn it for gold, we had always accepted it as gold, and so gold it had remained until her death. It would have distressed her to know that she had not merely been cheated by the dealer but made party to a fraud on the public… Or would she have taken this as an instance of God’s just punishment on her for indulging female vanity?
There are, I find, variant traditions in our large family about my mother’s life with Miss Briton. Some say that the old lady got justly scared about money when defrauded of £5,000 by a wicked solicitor, but that life with her was by no means so dreary as in my account. There is even talk of musical evenings: my mother, at the piano, delighting a wide circle of friends with her powerful contralto singing. It is said, too, that my mother cancelled her voyage to India not for my father’s sake, but because of a peremptory letter from my grandfather at Munich: ‘If you take this foolish step, my dear Amalia, we, your loving family, are resolved to forget you.’ And that Miss Briton herself, though perhaps at my mother’s insistence, divided her inheritance among all five sisters. They even give the house a different address and disregarding the evidence of a photograph dated 1857, which shows her at the age of two, knock a couple of years off her age.
Let them say what they like! She was my mother as well as theirs, and every legend of this sort has many variants.
My First Amorous Adventure
‘MY FIRST AMOROUS adventure?’ repeated Lord Godolphin thoughtfully. ‘Well, in our family the tradition never varied much. There was always Miss Crewe, who had inducted my father and probably also my younger granduncle, Charles Martello, into the mysteries of sex. She had kept her little figure astonishingly well. That was due to her fruit diet, someone told me. In a sense, the tradition was, I agree, somewhat incestuous.’
‘Did Miss Crewe attend to many families?’
‘Not more than a dozen or so, and all in this county. Families like ours. Miss Crewe despised the lesser landed gentry to which she belonged.’
‘May I ask what was her procedure?’
‘It was no secret and, as far as I know, never varied. It began with general theory. The next lesson was sexual anatomy. The third was amatory practice. The fourth was deportment, or bed manners. The fifth, sixth and seventh were variety, based – I have since discovered – on Sir Richard Burton’s translation of The Perfumed Garden, but omitting the chapter on homosexuality.’
‘Did you ever meet Miss Crewe afterward?’
‘Of course. She was a frequent guest at the castle, exceedingly witty and with perfect manners.’
‘Did she educate the girls, too?’
‘Heavens, no! In those remote days a girl had to be virgo intacta and innocent as a mountain primrose. But I gather that, just before the wedding night, the bride would manage to extract at least the general sexual theory from her favourite and least discreet brother. I don’t know – we had only boys in our family. By the way, I have often wondered whether Miss Crewe’s name derived from the act, or vice versa?’
‘What became of her in the end?’
‘She died in harness, so to speak, and – they say – with a saintly smile on her face.’
‘Tell me, though, Godolphin: What was the tradition among your tenantry?’
‘The tradition of first amorous adventure? I found it a trifle ambiguous. I mean that the women were, or pretended to be, not quite so practical as the men. Take Jock Miller, for example; he was our head cowman and a Scot. One Sunday his wife approached him shyly: “Husband, dinna ye conseeder it high time that oor Duncan should be instructed?”
‘“What do ye mean by ‘instructed’, wife?”
‘“I mean instructed into God’s holy mysteries o’ natural reproduction. Hoo bairns are made… Ye maun begin wi’ the pollination o’ flowers.”
‘“Och, aye, wife! Mebbe I maun do as ye advise me.”
‘A week later, she asked him: “Husband, hae ye done as I asked wi’ oor Duncan? Or did it slip your memory?”
‘“Aye, wife, it did sae. But I’ll gae to him the noo wi’ the instruction.”
‘He found Duncan: “Duncan, laddie” he said, “ye mind what we did wi’ they twa bonny lassies ahint the kirk wall last Sabbath eve?”
‘“Aye, father!”
‘“Weel, Duncan, your mither would hae ye ken that that was preecisely what the bees do wi’ they bonny primroses on the mountain.”’
At this point, everyone in turn began detailing his own first amorous adventure – some comic, some sad, some horrific, few reprintable in a decent family journal. One poor fellow had found himself in bed with an ancient prostitute – brought there, while he was drunk and fast asleep, by witty Cambridge friends – and got a bad dose from her. Another unfortunate, a clergyman’s son, had been raped by a little flaxen-haired monster for the bet of a box of chocolates. Another had been lured by nuns into a nunnery, very early one morning, at the back of a famous surfing beach at Sydney: apparently that was common practice.
Then, because I had kept silent and was clearly more than a little embarrassed, they mobbed me: and Lord Godolphin insisted on hearing the very worst.
‘Very well, gentlemen,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to be a spoilsport…’ And this is what I told them:
‘I apologize for being the odd man out, but, as my mother used to say, “Tell the truth and shame the Devil.” I was born in July 1895 of what was then called “good family” – meaning a coat of arms and no recent surrounding scandal. As Godolphin will tell you, before World War One, only cads slept with unmarried girls of good family, and divorces in good families were all but unthinkable. When the war broke out and death was soon heavy in the air, such old-established conventions often broke down. Indeed, the phenomenon of “war babies” engendered by lovers just off the trenches – with three-to-one odds against their unmaimed survival – won almost universal sympathy in the not-so-good families.
‘One day, when I was a nineteen-year-old lieutenant, at our fusiliers’ mess near the ruined village of Laventie in France, our caddish colonel announced that he was ashamed to hear that he still had cock-virgin warts – warts meant lieutenants – under his command. All such had to parade under the assistant adjuntant that evening to be duly deflowered at the red-light establishment at Armentières reserved for officers. I did not admit to my cock-virginity. That was because I held a strong superstition that its loss would prejudice the magical power of survival that had so far taken me through five months of trench warfare – the average life of a wart was six weeks at that time. This parade order had been given shortly before the battle of Loos
, where all our four company commanders were killed, with hundreds of other ranks, and the caddish colonel himself got wounded, not to return. I escaped with a slight cut on the hand from a shell splinter and was left to command a much reduced company without even a second lieutenant to help me.
‘I remained a resolute C.V. for the next year. In July 1916, at High Wood, I got five wounds from an eight-inch shell, including one through my right lung, half an inch from my heart. I was left bleeding to death but knew I would survive; and did, though officially reported “died of wounds”. They patched me up for another return to the trenches in 1917: and, now a captain but still a C.V., I found myself temporarily commanding the battalion, everyone else having been killed or wounded. Then I got bronchitis and pneumonia and was soon reported medically unfit for further service overseas. So I fell in love with an eighteen-year-old girl – of good family and therefore also a virgin – and married her. It would be embarrassing to recall our embarrassment and amorous gropings when we found ourselves naked in bed together at Brown’s Hotel on January 23, 1918. But at least we were not persuaded by the warning hoots of sirens and the crash of bombs – during one of the zeppelin raids on London – to take refuge in the hotel cellars.’
Lord Godolphin cast me a baleful glance in the silence that followed. Then he said slowly: ‘In our family, we considered it bad taste to discuss marital intercourse… Still, my dear fellow, I suppose it was my own fault for insisting.’
Notes
The Shout
‘“The Shout” had been written in 1926, but I could not find a publisher until 1929, when it appeared in a signed limited edition as one of The Woburn Books. Unfortunately, the publisher insisted that it should be reduced from eight thousand to five thousand words, which was too drastic a condensation, and I have since lost the original version.’ – R.G., introduction to Occupation: Writer. This ‘drastic condensation’ would account for Graves’s erroneous reference to ‘Friday’ in the original text, when Richard speaks to the cobbler, and which I have amended to ‘Monday’.
Complete Short Stories Page 45