The Wandering Years (1922-39)

by Cecil Beaton

  ‘She wasn’t a servant. She had never been trained. She was only good at making a bed. She was the best maker of beds we have ever had.’

  I had not realised there could be such difference in the way a bed was made. But then, I am English. The French have a ritual of bed-making. The mattress is thrown one way one day, another way the next. The sheets are drawn tight as a board over this newly aired mattress, then tucked in by half the length of the whole sheet. Gertrude and Alice, when they come to England, have great difficulty sleeping in beds made by the servants in even so well ordered a house as Gerald Berners’s. And Francis Rose’s mother used to weep tears of rage when she came to England, as she could get no one to make the bed properly.

  There is no one more alarming than an optimist. Gertrude Stein is a great general and a great optimist. She will not hear of war talk. It is almost a breach of etiquette to mention the fact that events look black or the prospect horrifying. ‘Oh, no, no. War isn’t logical, no one wants a war. Yes, of course Hitler is making a speech tomorrow. He’s always making a speech. Of course, Roosevelt’s going to talk. Ha, ha, he’s always talking. No, no, things aren’t serious. Last year they were serious, yes. But last year, the postman had been called up by this time. He hasn’t been called this year, and they’re perfectly calm down at the village.’

  I didn’t want to contradict these obiter dicta. But the truth is, they are becoming anxious down at the village. One by one, the men have been mobilised. On the walls, the affiches or rappels have been posted. We go off in the car on expeditions to neighbouring towns, to Aix or Annecy, and almost in defiance of the ‘General’, we buy newspapers with portentous headlines: ‘Situation plus grave.’ By degrees, the peaceful existence we’ve enjoyed these last weeks has been shattered. And there is nothing to be done about it. For the time being, at any rate, all thoughts of peace are at an end.

  The ‘General’ faced reality when at last the butcher telephoned this morning, to say that the soldiers had requisitioned all the meat and he could not supply the joint that had been ordered. The household became panic stricken. Gertrude now felt she could no longer take the responsibility of our being there. Francis Rose, with nowhere to go, has tried to influence me to join him at Jean Hugo’s in the Dordogne. But there is an unwelcome taste in my mouth at the thought of the future. I do not wish to get further away.

  Tonight my nerves were awry. I had seen too much of even these delightful people. I’d been closeted in this small house, or in the small car overrun with dogs, all day. I decided to go for a walk by myself for half an hour before dinner. I followed the tracks that Gertrude had taken me on, then went further. I walked fast and long. Night came upon me, while I hastened to complete what I thought was a circle.

  Rain came down, as heavily as it does in mountain country. I ran. By continuing further I must surely reach the village, even if it should be less quickly than I had imagined. At any rate, I mustn’t retrace my steps now. So I continued for miles, running and walking.

  If I cut through this wood, perhaps it would lead me to the village. But the neighbourhood was unrecognisable. I realised I was seriously lost. I laughed a little to ward off panic. I must already have been walking nearly two hours!

  At length I spotted a house I had seen on the last lap of my walk out! The landmarks on the way back were like memories of middle age.

  My calves ached. Running only made them ache more. Then they no longer ached, but my feet were sore and the skin rubbed off my toes. To lose time sitting on a fence would be little help. I imagined the panic back at the General’s. What were they saying? Dinner must have been announced long ago. Every ten minutes that passed they would be talking of my disappearance. Soon they’d become really frightened.

  The night was black, the rain fierce. This was a living nightmare. I could prove its reality to myself, but it had all the sensations of a nightmare. Eventually I met a man under an umbrella. He told me the way back. I had come too far, and must retrace my steps.

  The last part of the adventure was almost the most unpleasant. Although I felt within reach of home at last, I had no idea of the cross-country routes. Small lanes forked in every direction. I became lost again in a maze of quagmired paths. At last I saw a light! I made a beeline for an isolated cottage. I banged on the door. A woman shrieked inside; a dog barked. The door opened to reveal a group of peasants staring in terror and amazement. They were listening in on their radio as their President made a fateful pronouncement.

  Bolstered by fresh instructions, I started to run again. Then I was blinded by some car lights. I heard Gertrude shouting. The nightmare was over.

  Never have I enjoyed a hot bath and fish more. The household had been overwhelmed. The Chinese boy and the French cook had gone out to reconnoitre; Francis was beside himself. But we were all gay again. Gertrude felt relieved to have forgotten the prospect of war for three hours! A friend had telephoned to ask, ‘Have you heard the latest war news?’

  ‘War?’ replied Gertrude. ‘Who cares about war? We’ve lost Cecil Beaton!’

  War was now imminent. The journey home was precarious. But Francis Rose and I managed to make an earlier departure than we expected, as all trains were late. For hours we travelled in the dark, stopped at each small station where more and more people bundled into the little space available. The people were optimistic or else resigned, and they behaved with a dignity and courage that was very pleasant. The English more probably would have hidden their alarms under gales of raucous laughter, or community singing.

  The atmosphere of Paris was gloomy and quietly panic-stricken; and the days dragged on in a dislocated fashion. One could not enjoy the company of friends: museums were shut.

  In England some people were still saying that there must be a way out. Others felt they would rather face the issue now.

  Randolph Churchill, with eyes blazing and voice hoarse with prolonged enthusiasm, banged the table and exclaimed that he was enjoying to the full the last lap of gaiety. Life, in fact, did continue in much the usual way; the same friends would meet together, and the same food was eaten; but for most people the threat of war had already dimmed the lustre of existence. The desire for pleasure had gone.

  There was already a movement to find available jobs should war break out; and suspecting how useless I should be in any of the fighting services, I made efforts to get into ‘camouflage’. I was told to return home and cultivate my garden.

  At Ashcombe, in fact, I worked while listening to the Radio News bulletins — on designs for a film. Korda’s intended production of ‘Manon Lescaut’ should have been my initial foray into the world of the cinema. But, the film was never made, and the costumes mouldered away in packing cases.

  The lease of an old-fashioned flat in Rutland Gate, in which my parents and I had for the last couple of years existed rather than lived, was now given up. My father had died in that small dull bedroom. My mother and I left without regret those impersonal rooms and the superannuated clanging lift. My mother, with only a few of her most loved possessions around her, temporarily lived with her sister Cada. I was offered a room in Gerald Berners' house in Belgravia.

  But whereas at an earlier period, this house, with its birds-of-paradise on the half-landing, and the Corots on the wall of the drawingroom, had been the scene of much festivity and gaiety — no chef could surpass the artistry of Gerald’s Mrs Nelson — now a change had taken place. The house had suddenly become shabby and sad — and saddest of all was to see the change that had taken place in my host. Appalled at the prospect of war, Gerald, already prone to fits of melancholia, became convinced that he was going insane. Although even to his intimates he had seemed so aloof from human suffering, now he became only too keenly aware of what misery another war would bring. Overnight Gerald became old.

  It was while I was about to step into the olive green bath that one morning, Nelson, the deaf butler, came upstairs and shouted, ‘The war’s started.’ I felt as if a strong electric current h
ad run through me. When recovering from the shock I telephoned to Kaetchen Kommer to ask this most sanguine of friends if such tragic news could be true. Sadly he replied, ‘Yes, the Germans have started the war on a lie: they pretend their offer of negotiation has been rejected, but the offer has never been received by the Poles. Without declaring war, they have invaded the country, and bombed Warsaw.’

  But I am skipping too far forward. There were still a few days left to us of peace, Meanwhile, a dentist’s appointment, and a journey into the past.

  Visiting my former home, it was strange to notice that only the unimportant events were brought to mind, not the moments of decision, the memories of unconscious fears and anxieties and all the half-truths of youth.

  TEMPLE COURT

  September, 1939

  I usually find time to pay the dentist a long-standing visit before the summer holidays, ‘just in case’. This year it had to wait for my return from Gertrude’s. Mr Tattersall, our dentist, has been filling family teeth for years, is considered without peer by the Beatons. He still lives in Hampstead where we were brought up; so back to the scene of my childhood I went, dutifully entering the little red brick house in Finchley Road.

  The necessary tooth drilling took up less time than I had allowed for, and I was out in the street with an hour to spare before lunch — a situation in which I practically never find myself. Rather than hurry back to my secretary and unending business, I decided to enjoy my leisure.

  Nor did I feel guilty in doing so. After all, I’d been promising myself a sightseeing day in London for a long time. At best, I seemed only to glimpse my city through the windows of hurrying car or cab. It looked more romantic and beautiful than ever now at the end of the summer. When would I find that free day to walk in the parks, visit the City churches and perhaps even go to Greenwich? The day might never arrive; but anyhow, here was an hour suddenly offered to me on a platter. What better place to spend it in than Hampstead — two minutes away from the road I was born in, five minutes from those haunts where most of my early years had been spent?

  I remember so well that, as I grew older, my chief desire in life was to quit suburbia and ‘come down’ to London. When I reached adolescence, postal address marks and the names of Telephone exchanges loomed as things of vital interest. I considered there was all the difference in the world between plums bought on Avenue Road, N.W. or South Street, Park Lane; or between someone living in W.1 or W.2. When we eventually moved to Hyde Park Street, I even induced my poor father to write to the telephone authorities and inquire whether our number could not be altered to a Mayfair exchange instead of the inevitable Paddington one.

  Today, having passed on to higher forms of snobbishness, I remembered, with a certain sly patronage only, the pleasanter aspects of living in a bourgeois community like Hampstead. I noticed wistfully how fine the flowers were in all these little gardens. It now seemed very agreeable to breathe the atmosphere of an arcadia where, only twenty minutes from the West End, families enjoyed country pleasures. Hedges were being trimmed by gardeners; flower borders were being watered, and oak trees flourished in back gardens.

  As inevitably happens when one visits the scene of one’s childhood, things seemed ridiculously small. Every landmark, however familiar, had shrunk to Lilliputian scale. The long walk up Heath Drive could no longer be reckoned the dragging climb it once was. Even the width of the pavement had diminished.

  This was where we used to walk to Miss Dale’s school. I conjured up the water-colour class. Clean, wet paints were prepared for each lesson, the necessary colours already squeezed out on to an individual saucer. How exciting that class had been, how full of promise were three daubs of paint! Once I glorified a spray of ivy in a very bold way, making glutinous use of prussian blue and raw sienna.

  We had been allowed, Reggie and I, to walk to school unaccompanied. This always rather surprised me, for it was quite an adventure. Yet today I noticed that the distance from the door of our home to the front door of Miss Dale’s school was less than a few hundred yards, even with two corners to turn.

  By now the car had stopped outside Temple Court, the house that more than any other could be called our home. Here I spent all my remembered childhood; and I had almost grown up when we left. Here Nancy and Baba were born. Daddy’s business affairs had flourished in those days. And there was a lot to keep him interested, with his four children, billiards, cricket, riding on the Heath.

  Today, the familiar house stood deserted. A board had been erected with the inscription ‘Property for Sale, Caretaker Within.’

  Cautiously, I walked up the drive to the porch I knew so well. With a heart that had stopped beating, I rang the bell for perhaps the ten thousandth time. It still had the same ring, though twenty years must have elapsed since I last rang at this door.

  The door itself seemed unchanged; the wood had not acquired an appearance of greater age. Even the letter slot, as in the old days, still wore a new and rather fashionable look.

  Near to the door, gusts of wind blew through the creeper I had so often studied as I waited for the door to open, scrutinising the delicate, immature quality of new tendrils. How was it that, after the plant settled down to thrive, as so obviously it had done, it did not grow more sturdily? Today, at last, the old creeper had managed to climb higher. The leaves in the centre of the wall seemed larger; but the tendrils framing the door lintel were still weak and delicate, pale yellow in colour, sticky and shinylooking as though cut from a yellow oilskin southwester.

  No one answered the doorbell. And I dared not bang the knocker, though I suddenly remembered exactly the sound it would make. There was no caretaker, no one at home. As I peeped through the letter slot, I could see the hall floor littered with letters and circulars that had been plopped in by the postman and now lay unheeded on the parquet we had laid down so proudly.

  Nothing can be more haunting and tragic than an abandoned house. Since we deserted it two separate families had lived here, each adding their own little touches in the way of alteration or decoration. But it was us the house remembered; it was our irrevocable memories that vibrated there. These walls still gave forth the vivid atmosphere of my childhood; these rooms echoed a past whose least detail, whose very smell, I could once more savour. There was the ‘cloak room’ by the front door, with hanging rows of riding crops and an interesting assortment of caps, hats, riding coats. This was where Daddy’s cricket bats had been oiled; there the sticking plaster had been kept for mending the bats. Just off the ‘cloak room’ was a lavatory with bright red-tiled floor. Down the main hall ran a long path of Turkish carpet, and on it stood a table that was as much of a focal point in the house as Piccadilly Circus is to London. It was, I remember a Kentishly carved table, said to be Irish eighteenth century, with a tray of calling cards on it. Leading off from the hall were the library with never a book in it; the drawing-room, whose apple-green taffeta curtains had been embroidered in Paris and whose occasional tables held enamel and silver objets d’art which had once been stolen by a burglar; lastly, the dining-room, with a strip of material under the floating bowl on the dining table. From the dining-room, one could enter the garden.

  As I peered through the bolted windows at these changed but familiar rooms, nostalgia was suddenly dispersed by the feeling of being unwanted, a stranger. Again the telescope was reversed, making everything seem minutely proportioned in comparison with the memory of it.

  Yet I felt impelled to complete my tour. Since the house was so obviously deserted, what prevented my exploring the garden? At worst a policeman or stranger might appear, in which case I could always offer the excuse, ‘I’ve come back to see where I once lived.’

  But no one interrupted my sentimental musings. Through the side garden I walked around to the back. The main garden seemed much smaller now. Weeds flourished, and everything was so overgrown that the lawn had become a field. Yet I recognised the traces of happy days. Here were the London pride and other rock plants I k
new so well, from which cuttings had been made for our window-boxes when we moved into town. What a vast expanse this lawn had once seemed, when Reggie practised cricket in his cage of netting, when we had learned to putt. Untended now, the grass grew so thick and long that hay could be made from it. Here I took my first snapshots; here we played Catch-as-catch-can, and Nancy and Baba wheeled their dolls’ prams.

  The old oak tree remained unchanged. The day of the storm it had lost an arm and never recovered its symmetry. As I walked towards this amputated relic, two startled blue pigeons flapped out of the branches with a throaty squawk, causing dead leaves and twigs to fall.

  My mother’s garden seemed especially small. Long ago, it was quite a promenade to walk from the rose garden to the bed where lilies of the valley grew. Yet now these two gardens appeared to be part of the same bed. The standard roses my mother had planted used to grow in rich profusion. A few still bloomed, rather undernourished and poor-looking compared to the large pink and red and salmony-yellow blooms that once filled the house.

  It was no good to linger too long. I felt choked and mawkish. However much I still thought of myself as a boy, I was a grown man now, with an unlived life stretching before me. It could never be healthy to regret the past, to cast a haunted eye on a house and garden ‘as fugitive, alas, as the years’. I tore at a few of these roses for my mother, then fled from the memory-filled spot like a thief.

  I motored home with the handful of flowers lying on the seat beside me. I was thrilled with anticipation at the prospect of being able to surprise my mother.

  When at last I arrived, my mother was in a busy mood. But she stopped, alert to hear my news. ‘You’ll never guess where I got these!’ I held up the bunch of now rather drooping roses. ‘They’re from Temple Court. I’ve just picked them!’