I don’t think anyone but Archie could have given me assurance under these conditions. He always took it for granted that I could do things about which I myself had a good deal of doubt. ‘Of course you can do it,’ he would say. ‘Why shouldn’t you? If you always think you can’t do things you never will do them.’
I gained a little confidence and after three or four days was able to penetrate further into London and to brave the dangers of the traffic. Oh the joy that car was to me! I don’t suppose anyone nowadays could believe the difference it made to one’s life. To be able to go anywhere you chose; to places beyond the reach of your legs–it widened your whole horizon. One of the greatest pleasures I had out of the car was going down to Ashfield and taking mother out for drives. She enjoyed it passionately, just as I did. We went to all sorts of places–Dartmoor, the house of friends she had never been able to see because of the difficulties of transport–and the sheer joy of driving was enough for us both. I don’t think anything has given me more pleasure, more joy of achievement, than my dear bottle-nosed Morris Cowley.
Though helpful with most practical things in life, Archie was of no use in my writing. Occasionally I felt the urge to outline to him some idea I had for a new story, or the plot of a new book. When I had described it haltingly, it sounded, even to my ears, extraordinarily banal, futile, and a great many other adjectives which I will not particularize. Archie would listen with the kind benevolence he displayed when he had decided to give his attention to other people. Finally, ‘What do you think?’ I asked timidly. ‘Do you think it will be all right?’
‘Well, I suppose it might be,’ said Archie, in a completely damping manner. ‘It doesn’t seem to have much story to it, does it? Or much excitement either?’
‘You don’t really think it will do, then?’
‘I think you can do much better.’ That plot thereupon fell dead, slain for ever, I felt. As it happened, I resurrected it, or rather it resurrected itself, five or six years later. This time, not subjected to criticism before the act, it blossomed most satisfactorily, and turned out to be one of my best books. The trouble is that it is awfully hard for an author to put things in words when you have to do it in the course of conversation. You can do it with a pencil in your hand, or sitting in front of your typewriter–then the thing comes out already formed as it should come out–but you can’t describe things that you are only going to write; or at least I can’t. I learnt in the end never to say anything about a book before it was written. Criticism after you have written it is helpful. You can argue the point, or you can give in, but at least you know how it has struck one reader. Your own description of what you are going to write, however, sounds so futile, that to be told kindly that it won’t do meets with your instant agreement. I will never agree to the hundreds of requests that reach me asking me to read someone’s MS. For one thing, of course, you would never do anything else but read MSS if you once started agreeing to do so! But the real point is that I don’t think an author is competent to criticise. Your criticism is bound to be that you yourself would have written it in such and such a way, but that does not mean that that would be right for another author. We all have our own ways of expressing ourselves. Also, there is the frightening thought that you may be discouraging someone who ought not to be discouraged. An early story of mine was shown to a well-known authoress by a kindly friend. She reported on it sadly but adversely, saying that the author would never make a writer. What she really meant, though she did not know it herself because she was an author and not a critic, was that the person who was writing was still an immature and inadequate writer who could not as yet produce anything worth publishing. A critic or an editor might have been more perceptive, because it is their profession to notice the germs of what may be. So I don’t like criticising and I think it can easily do harm. The only thing I will advance as criticism is the fact that the would-be writer has not taken any account of the market for his wares. It is no good writing a novel of 30,000 words–that is not a length which is easily publishable at present. ‘Oh,’ replies the author, ‘but this book has got to be that length.’ Well, that is probably all right if you’re a genius, but you are more likely to be a tradesman. You have got something you feel you can do well and that you enjoy doing well, and you want to sell it well. If so, you must give it the dimensions and the appearance that is wanted. If you were a carpenter, it would be no good making a chair, the seat of which was five feet up from the floor. It wouldn’t be what anyone wanted to sit on. It is no good saying that you think the chair looks handsome that way. If you want to write a book, study what sizes books are, and write within the limits of that size. If you want to write a certain type of short story for a certain type of magazine you have to make it the length, and it has to be the type of story, that is printed in that magazine. If you like to write for yourself only, that is a different matter–you can make it any length, and write it in any way you wish; but then you will probably have to be content with the pleasure alone of having written it. It’s no good starting out by thinking one is a heaven-born genius–some people are, but very few. No, one is a tradesman–a tradesman in a good honest trade. You must learn the technical skills, and then, within that trade, you can apply your own creative ideas; but you must submit to the discipline of form. It was by now just beginning to dawn on me that perhaps I might be a writer by profession. I was not sure of it yet. I still had an idea that writing books was only the natural successor to embroidering sofa-cushions. Before we left London for the country I had taken lessons in sculpture. I was a great admirer of the art–much more than of pictures–and I had a real yearning to be a sculptor myself. I was early disillusioned in that hope: I saw that it was not within my capacity because I had no eye for visual form. I couldn’t draw, so I couldn’t sculpt. I had thought it might be different with sculpture, that feeling and handling clay would help with form. But I realised I couldn’t really see things. It was like being tone deaf in music. I composed a few songs by way of vanity, setting some of my verses to music. I had a look at the waltz I composed again, and thought I had never heard anything more banal. Some of the songs were not so bad. One of the series of Pierrot and Harlequin verses pleased me. I wished that I had learnt harmony and knew something about composition. But writing seemed to be indicated as my proper trade and self-expression. I wrote a gloomy play, mainly about incest. It was refused firmly by every manager I sent it to. ‘An unpleasant subject.’ The curious thing is that, nowadays, it is the kind of play which might quite likely appeal to a manager. I also wrote an historical play about Akhnaton. I liked it enormously. John Gielgud was later kind enough to write to me. He said it had interesting points, but was far too expensive to produce and had not enough humour. I had not connected humour with Akhnaton, but I saw that I was wrong. Egypt was just as full of humour as anywhere else–so was life at any time or place–and tragedy had its humour too.
III
We had been through so much worry since we came back from our world tour that it seemed wonderful to enter on this halcyon period. Perhaps it was then that I ought to have felt misgiving. Things went too well. Archie had the work he enjoyed, with an employer who was his friend; he liked the people he worked with; he had what he had always wanted, to belong to a first-class golf club, and to play every weekend. My writing was going well, and I began to consider that perhaps I should be able to go on writing books and making money by it.
Did I realise that there might be something not quite right in the even tenor of our days? I don’t think so. And yet there was a certain lack, though I don’t think I ever put it into definite terms to myself. I missed the early companionship of our time together, Archie and I. I missed the weekends when we had gone by bus or by train and had explored places.
Our weekends now were the dullest time for me. I often wanted to ask people down for the weekend, so as to see some of our London friends again. Archie discouraged that, because he said it spoilt his weekends. If we had peopl
e staying he would have to be more at home and perhaps miss his second round of golf. I suggested that he should play tennis sometimes instead of golf, because we had several friends with whom he had played tennis on public courts in London. He was horrified. Tennis, he said, would completely spoil his eye for golf. He was taking the game so seriously now that it might have been a religion.
‘Look here, you ask any of your friends down if you like, but don’t let’s ask down a married couple, because then I have to do something about it.’
That was not so easy to do, because most of our friends were married couples, and I couldn’t very well ask the wife without the husband. I was making friends in Sunningdale, but Sunningdale society was mainly of two kinds: the middle-aged, who were passionately fond of gardens and talked of practically nothing else; or the gay, sporting rich, who drank a good deal, had cocktail parties, and were not really my type, or indeed, for that matter, Archie’s.
One couple who could and did stay with us for a weekend were Nan Watts and her second husband. She had married a man called Hugo Pollock during the war, and had one daughter, Judy; but the marriage had not turned out well, and in the end she had divorced her husband. She re-married a man called George Kon, who was also a keen golfer, so that solved the weekend problem. George and Archie played together; Nan and I gossiped, talked and played some desultory golf on the ladies’ links. Then we would go up and meet the men at the club-house and have a drink there. At least Nan and I would take up our own drinks: half a pint of raw cream thinned down with milk–just as we had drunk it down at the farm at Abney in early days.
It was a great blow when Site left us, but she took her career seriously, and for some time she had wanted to take a post abroad. Rosalind, she pointed out, would be going to school the following year, and so would need her less. She had heard of a good post in the Embassy in Brussels, and would like to take it. She hated leaving us, she said, but she did want to get on so that she could go as a governess to places all over the world and see something of the life. I could not help being sympathetic towards this point of view, and sadly we agreed that she should go to Belgium.
I thought then, remembering how happy I had been with Marie and how nice it had been to learn French without tears, that I might get a French nursery governess for Rosalind. Punkie wrote to me enthusiastically saying that she knew just the person but she was Swiss, not French. She had met her, and a friend of hers knew her family in Switzerland. ‘She is a sweet girl, Marcelle. Very gentle.’ She thought that she was just the person for Rosalind, would be sorry for her because she was shy and nervous, and would look after her. I don’t know that Punkie and I agreed exactly in our estimate of Rosalind’s character!
Marcelle Vignou duly arrived. I had slight misgivings from the first. Punkie’s account of her was of a gentle, charming, little thing. She made a different impression on me. She seemed to be lethargic, though quite good-natured, lazy, and uninteresting. She was the sort of person who was incapable of managing children. Rosalind, who was reasonably well-behaved and polite, and on the whole quite satisfactory in daily life, became, almost overnight, what I can only describe as possessed by a devil.
I couldn’t have believed it. I learnt then what no doubt most child-trainers know instinctively, that a child reacts just as a dog or any other animal: it knows authority. Marcelle had no authority. She shook her head gently occasionally and said ‘Rosalind! Non, non, Rosalind!’ without the least effect.
To see them out for walks together was pitiful. Marcelle, as I discovered before long, had both feet covered with corns and bunions. She could only limp along at a funeral pace. When I did discover this I sent her off to a chiropodist, but even that did not make much difference in her pace. Rosalind, an energetic child, strode ahead, looking extremely British, with her chin in the air, Marcelle trailing miserably behind, murmuring: ‘Wait for me–attendez-moi!’
‘We’re going for a walk, aren’t we?’ Rosalind would throw back over her shoulder.
Marcelle, in an extremely foolish fashion, would then buy Rosalind peace offerings of chocolate in Sunningdale–the worst thing she could have done. Rosalind would accept the chocolate, murmuring ‘Thank you’ quite politely, and afterwards would behave as badly as ever. In the house she was a little fiend. She would take off her shoes and throw them at Marcelle, make faces at her, and refuse to eat her dinner.
‘What am I to do?’ I asked Archie. ‘She is simply awful. I punish her, but it doesn’t seem to make her any better. She is really beginning to like torturing the poor girl.’
‘I don’t think the girl really cares,’ said Archie. ‘I’ve never seen anyone more apathetic.’
‘Perhaps things will get better,’ I said. But things did not get better, they got worse. I was really worried because I did not want to see my child turn into a raging demon. After all, if Rosalind could behave properly with two nurses and a nursery governess, there must be some fault on the other side which led her to behave so badly to this particular girl.
‘Aren’t you sorry for Marcelle, coming to a strange country like this, where nobody speaks her language?’ I asked.
‘She wanted to come,’ said Rosalind. ‘She wouldn’t have come if she hadn’t wanted to. She speaks English quite well. She really is so awfully, awfully stupid.’ Nothing, of course, could have been truer than that. Rosalind was learning a little French, but not much. Sometimes, on wet days, I would suggest they played games together, but Rosalind assured me it was impossible even to teach Marcelle Beggar My Neighbour. ‘She just can’t remember it’s four for an ace and three for a king,’ she said with scorn. I told Punkie that it wasn’t being a success.
‘Oh dear, I thought she’d simply love Marcelle.’
‘She doesn’t,’ I said. ‘Far from it. And she thinks up ways of tormenting the poor girl, and she throws things at her.’
‘Rosalind throws things at her?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And she’s getting worse.’
In the end I decided that we could not bear it any longer. Why should our lives be ruined? I spoke to Marcelle, murmuring that I thought things were not being a great success and that perhaps she would be happier in some other post; that I would recommend her and try to find her a position, unless she would rather go back to Switzerland. Unperturbed, Marcelle said she had quite enjoyed seeing England, but she thought on the whole she would go back to Berne. She said goodbye, I pressed upon her an extra month’s wages–and determined to seek someone else.
What I thought I would now have was a combined secretary and governess. Rosalind would go to school every morning when she was five, at a small local school, and I could then have a secretary shorthand-typist for some hours at my beck and call. Perhaps I should be able to dictate my literary works. It seemed a good idea. I put an advertisement in the paper, asking for someone who would look after a child of five, shortly to go to school, and act as secretary shorthand-typist–I added ‘Scottish preferred’. I had noticed, now that I saw more of other children and their attendants, that the Scottish seemed to be particularly good with the young. The French were hopeless disciplinarians, and were always bullied by their charges; Germans were good and methodical, but it was not German that I really wanted Rosalind to learn. The Irish were gay but made trouble in the house; the English were of all kinds. I had a yearning for somebody Scottish.
I sorted out various answers to my advertisement, and in due course went to London to a small private hotel near Lancaster Gate to interview a Miss Charlotte Fisher. I liked Miss Fisher as soon as I saw her. She was tall, brown-haired, about twenty-three, I judged; had had experience with children, looked extremely capable, and had a nice-looking twinkle behind her general decorum. Her father was one of the Chaplains to the King in Edinburgh, and Rector of St. Columba’s there. She knew shorthand and typing, but had not had much experience recently in shorthand. She liked the idea of a post where she could do secretarial work as well as looking after a child.
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�There’s one other thing,’ I said rather doubtfully. ‘Do you–er–do you think you can–I mean, are you good at getting on with old ladies?’
Miss Fisher gave me rather an odd look. I suddenly noticed that we were sitting in a room containing about twenty old ladies, knitting, crocheting, and reading picture papers. Their eyes all slowly swivelled to me as I put this question. Miss Fisher bit her lip to stop herself laughing. I had been oblivious of my surroundings because I had been wondering how to frame my question. My mother was now definitely difficult to get on with–most people are as they get older, but mother, who had always been most independent and who got tired and bored with people easily, was more difficult than most. Jessie Swannell, particularly, had not been able to stand it.
‘I think so,’ Charlotte Fisher replied in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘I’ve never found any difficulty.’
I explained that my mother was elderly, slightly eccentric, inclined to think she knew best–and not easy to get on with. Since Charlotte seemed to view this without alarm, we settled that she would come to me as soon as she was free from her present job, which was, I gather, looking after the children of a millionaire domiciled in Park Lane. She had a sister rather older than herself, who lived in London, and she would be glad if the sister could occasionally come down and see her. I said that would be quite all right.
So Charlotte Fisher came to be my secretary and Mary Fisher came as a help in trouble when necessary, and they remained with me as friend and secretary and governess and dogsbody and everything else for many years. Charlotte is still one of my best friends.
The coming of Charlotte, or Carlo, as Rosalind began to call her after a month, was like a miracle. She had no sooner stepped inside the door of Scotswood than Rosalind was mysteriously transformed to her old self in the days of Site. She might have been sprinkled with holy water! Her shoes remained on her feet and were not thrown at anybody, she replied politely, and she appeared to take a good deal of pleasure in Carlo’s company. The raging demon had disappeared. ‘Though I must say,’ said Charlotte to me later, ‘she looked a little like a wild animal when I arrived, because nobody seemed to have cut her fringe for a long time: it was hanging down in front of her eyes, and she was peering through it.’
An Autobiography Page 43