The water-cart was followed by a succession of dazzling sights. Three processions in all went to the Abbey that morning, and the first one consisted of Indian Princes driving in open landaus. As I read my diary, I see again their dresses and turbans ‘made of glorious silks and satins of all colours, and covered with diamonds and all sorts of precious stones’. Some of them, I said, ‘ seemed to be a blaze of diamonds’, and the obvious phrase does indeed recall to me the gasp of wonder with which one met the glare of those magnificent jewels burning in the sunlight of that wonderful june day. I can still see the dark proud mysterious faces of the princes, and their black beards.
A little pause, and then came the second procession, which I now feel sure must have been the most beautiful of all, although at the time I liked it least. In it came one after the other a succession of the gilt and painted state coaches from the royal stables; their four horses were harnessed with elaborate and most decorative trappings, and were driven by coachmen in eighteenth-century liveries, while royal footmen held the heads of every horse. In these coaches drove the European sovereigns who were attending the Jubilee, and to my regret I remarked that the coaches hid their faces. I did say, however, that ‘in the distance, the state coaches looked lovely, like a picture of hundreds of years ago’.
The queen drove in the last procession, surrounded by a mounted bodyguard of her sons and grandsons, and preceded by the English princesses in carriages. I tried with all my might to write down my personal impressions of each of these, though I lamented that they went by too quickly for me to see them properly. I thought the Duke of Connaught ‘very good-looking’, and the Duchess of Albany ‘very popular’, while Princess Maud was ‘ a dear little thing with a dear little tiny face’. The Prince of Wales looked ‘ very jolly’ as he rode on ‘ a splendid horse’ directly in front of the Queen, with the Dukes of Edinburgh and of Connaught on either hand; but I declared that ‘the most kingly man of all’ was the Crown Prince of Germany in his shining white uniform.
As the Queen drove to the Abbey, I was disappointed because she did not look up as she passed us, and I thought that her face was ‘very pale and sad’; but as she came back ‘she looked quite happy and smiled and bowed’. In fact, I added kindly, ‘she looked very nice indeed’.
I must have been a funny little girl, for I see by my diary that, except for the jewels of the Indian Princes, the gorgeous pageantry of the day did not much impress me. What I was looking for was the intimate expression on the faces of the people who drove by. I wanted to know what they were like. It was this which interested me.
The procession of Indian Princes was the last to leave the Abbey and we got off our stand and walked round to the West Door to see those glorious men get into their carriages. I enjoyed this close view of the jewels I had so much admired in the morning, but again, our easy approach to the Abbey door shows how simple the arrangements must then have been. People could move about the route with very little difficulty. Before we left our stand, we had seen the Bishop of London come out of the Abbey where he had been officiating, tuck up his robes, and run some way down the route to a stand where a seat was waiting for him. He did not heed the laughter and the cheers of the crowd who welcomed him as they had welcomed the dustman in the morning. He meant to see the procession.
When we reached Wilton next day, my sister Mildred had a sad story to tell. An important part of the Wilton Jubilee celebrations had been a dinner in the market place, when the whole grown-up population of the town had sat down to feast off steaming roast beef and ‘viggety pudden’, as the Wiltshire people call plum pudding. In the evening, when we had gone to London, Mildred had found a rather feeble-minded young labourer crying his heart out in his mother’s wash-house, because he had lost his ticket, and so had been shut out of the banquet. Mildred implored my father to do something about it, and the young man was accordingly sent one of the lavish meals which had been provided for invalids and old people who could not walk to the market-place. But it was no good. The boy shook his head and pushed away the plate. He could not eat. Indeed he did not want to. He was not crying for roast beef and plum pudding, but for having missed the fun of eating them in the market-place with the sun shining down upon his head.
Chapter Two
ECONOMIES
We sometimes think of the later Victorian and the Edwardian times as days of care-free opulence, when everyone was rich and secure, and when neither individuals nor nations knew what it meant to stand on the brink of bankruptcy. In a way this is true. Incomes seemed to be safe and secure when I was a child. Young people married possessing either a large or a small fortune invested in ‘the Funds’, and they knew just what that fortune was. Every year ‘the Funds’ produced the same income upon the investments. To this solid permanent foundation, professional men added the steadily rising incomes derived from their professions; and they were confident that as their families grew, their resources were bound to grow correspondingly.
Yet that old prosperity rested upon a background of frugality unattempted to-day, although everyone complains of poverty, a thing which nobody used to do. It was considered bad form to talk about money, whether to say you had too much or too little of it. You were expected to live up to your position and under your Income, and to say nothing about it: you tacitly kept a watchful eye on your bankbook to make sure that this precise balance was always maintained.
My father was a country parson with a large house and a small living, and he had ten children. He also had a great sense of ecclesiastical dignity. The population of Wilton with its little hamlet of Netherhampton was about two thousand. There were two churches and two curates. Nowadays this would be an excessive staff, especially as my father hardly ever left home even for a day. But in his eyes it was essential that at least two clergymen should always be present at the Sunday services in Wilton church, he thought a solitary parson so inadequate as to be almost ridiculous there. He was extremely active in mind as well as in body, and he was for ever thinking of new mediums for Church work, all of which cost money; and yet he was determined that the old things should always be done in the old opulent way, however many new things arose to be paid for too. Nothing would induce him to cut the cassock according to the cloth. So it came about that most of the small acounts published annually in the parish magazine ended with the words: ‘Balance paid by Rector.’
Then there were the expenses of his family and household, by no means small ones. Although there was no bathroom at the Rectory, everyone had as many baths as they do to-day, taking them, however, in tubs in the privacy of their own rooms. My father was revolted by the idea of people meeting and passing on the threshold of a bathroom, or of anyone’s stepping into a bath just vacated by someone else. Such things were not tolerated under his roof. Extra baths had therefore to mean extra work, and we had a constant succession of under-housemaids, nursery-maids, and between-maids, whose chief work was to carry cans of water upstairs. A dim background was built up of charwomen doing the ‘heavy work’—raking out stoves, or scrubbing passages and back stairs.
At one time, six of my brothers were simultaneously at public schools, which must have meant an enormous annual expense; but in spite of these fresh calls on their income, my parents continued to live in the style of their parents before them—formal dinners, with a good many courses, and two waitresses if the number of diners was more than three. My father was an ascetic man with a small appetite, and the length of a dinner was for him purely a matter of decency and good manners. For instance, when one of his friends sent him a present of game, he would never allow it to be treated as a main course. Game had always to appear as an extra following the joint. I remember the pained surprise with which I once heard him say to my mother: ‘Is this our dinner?’, when she once broke this rule and allowed a brace of pheasants to be served as the pièce de résistance. What was in my father’s mind was this. He would not live on his friends, and they would not expect him to do so. Their presents were enjoyable
bonnes-bouches: nothing more. In those days no decent people bought game in shops. Owners of shooting did not sell their game, but gave it away in lavish presents to their friends; and it was generally believed that bought game had been killed by poachers, so that its buying ought to be discouraged.
When I remember the number of joints which hung in the larder at Wilton Rectory; and the huge unpacking when ‘the stores’ arrived—tin canisters and earthenware jars of sugar, coffee, cocoa-nibs, tea, rice, raisins, sultanas and prunes—I see that our establishment was run on a scale unknown in the country rectories of to-day. Yet this lavishness was accompanied by economies even more unknown.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, there was of course no central heating at Wilton Rectory; but the hall, the passages, and the wide upstair corridor were all warmed by a huge, hideous, and miraculously effective stove which stood foresquare in the middle of the hall. It was taken away in the summer, and however cold the autumn might be, it never reappeared until after the Confirmation in the middle of November. There was a good reason for this. The Bishop robed in the study, and from there he always began his ceremonial procession to the church, my father marching before him, clad too in his robes, and carrying the Pastoral Staff. Bishop Wordsworth was built on a large scale, and it would have been impossible, with any safety, to manœuvre the vast expanse of surplice and lawn sleeves round the often red-hot stove, so we shivered till the Bishop had paid his visit.
After that, the blacksmith carried in the elephantine black monstrosity, and planted it in the middle of the hall, its long chimney being carried horizontally to a hole in the wall over the door which led to the kitchen regions. From that moment till the end of the winter, the house was bathed in the soft diffused warmth which spread from the stove in all directions. Except for its appearance, it was the best stove I ever knew, but nowadays no house-proud family would tolerate such a hideosity in their midst.
Not one ounce of fuel was ever bought to feed the stove. The ashes from all the grates in the house were collected to be carefully sieved by the garden-boy in the back yard. He threw them against an upright sieve which looked like an easel. The fine dust made the kitchen garden path, and the large cinders were burnt in the stove. Nothing else. In fact the stove shared the economical standards of the day. It refused to burn anything but those old ashes. If a housemaid hoped to start it more quickly in the morning by beginning it with a shovelful of coal, the stove at once ‘clinkered up’ and went out, and all the world knew what she had done. Never was there a more cosy, more permeating, or more effective system of heating.
There was no electric light in Wilton, and when we moved from room to room, we carried our oil lamps with us. A characteristic memory of my father is the sight of him coming from the study, carrying a lamp through the hall to the drawing-room, or leading the way in to dinner with a lamp in his hand, to be placed on the sideboard for the parlour-maid’s use. Candles burnt on the dining-room table, and in the bedrooms only candles were used, so at sundown a row of flat silver bedroom candlesticks was placed on a small cabinet in the hall. These were carried by anyone who went upstairs after dark. A box of matches stood beside the candlesticks; and indeed, as is the case to-day, matches were to be seen on the tables in every room, though they were not then used for lighting cigarettes. Smoking was only allowed in the room which had been the schoolroom, and which was well out of the way; though when the servants were safely in bed, my father and his male guests used to perambulate to the Servants’ Hall where they smoked in secrecy for an hour or two.
Matches in the sitting-rooms were meant only for lighting candles and for sealing letters; and as soon as the winter fires were lit, the matchboxes were moved into the background, and in front of each was placed a vase (‘vause’ my father called it) containing paper spills. How near we then were to the poetry of life! A girl lighting her candle with a spill, lit from a stove in which burnt the ashes of last winter’s fires, was in the tradition of the Vestal Virgins: while the man who carried the light to his pipe from the fire in his grate, was of the family of Prometheus.
Then there were economies in journeys. To begin with, their number was limited. Travelling by train now costs if anything rather more than it did before the war, but it was then looked upon as quite an exceptional expense. Country people did not think of running up to London every week, or of staying in a different house every week-end. Many engagements were fitted into one journey. When I once developed an alarming cough, and was taken to London to see a specialist, my mother and I left Wilton station at half past seven on a winter morning, so that we might get full value for our tickets, as we should thus have time to see not only the doctor, but the National Gallery and the South Kensington Museum as well.
People stayed in each other’s houses more seldom, but when they came, they stayed longer. They ‘saved their pockets’ by making a round of visits arranged on an elaborate plan worked out with the help of Bradshaw. Many visits lasted a week or a fortnight, and some of my uncles and aunts always came for a month every summer.
When our guests arrived, only very honoured or very lame ones were met at the station by a cab. Everyone else was escorted on foot, to and from the station by a large or small contingent of the family, their luggage being brought to the house in the donkey-cart, or pushed by the garden-boy in a wheelbarrow or a pair of trucks. Those walks to and from the station helped to keep us and our guests on easy terms with the townspeople. Everybody knew who had come to stay. When my sister came home for the first time after her marriage, we, most of us, met her at the station, and a jolly old dame called out as we passed her house:
‘Any family, Mrs. Collins?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Never mind. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again.’
These friendly greetings cannot reach a passing motor car.
I remember one funny little economy which I am sure has been now outgrown by even the most old-fashioned of nannies. When we learnt to sew, our nurse would place the hem or seam for us, and then tack it. When we had laboriously and clumsily crawled down our piece of work with the needle, we were taught to draw out the tacking thread, and wind it upon an empty reel. It was then used again and again.
Perhaps cotton was very expensive in those days, for when my mother gave out garments and children’s clothes to be made before Christmas by poor seamstresses out of work, she always gave them too the cotton to sew with. But no one was given a whole reel. It was our part as children to wind off on little twists of paper the quantity allotted for each garment, and this allowance, and no more, was given away with the material.
Paper and string were, of course, carefully saved from all parcels which came to the house, and the string was made into neat loops and kept in a drawer in the dining-room. In an adjoining drawer were placed the half-sheets of unused notepaper, torn from the backs of letters. We played an enormous number of word games at Wilton, and these were written on the large sheets of paper which had contained parcels from the grocer. To this day, the mention of certain games calls up for me the faint far-distant aroma of Mr. Gidding’s brand of China tea, and I see again the very pretty early nineteenth-century trade advertisement which was printed in pale red ink on the paper which he used for packing his most homely parcels.
Sending the boys to school was a costly business, and so for a long time there was no governess for the ‘little girls’. Our ‘education’ would be despised to-day. My mother taught us herself. We learnt everything by heart—pieces of poetry, passages from the Bible, history, geography, or French and Latin grammar; and then she came to us for about half an hour to ‘hear us’. After that she wrote copies for us, in her lovely harmonious handwriting, leaving us by ourselves writing for an hour or so. I only had lessons from real governesses for four years of my life, and money was certainly saved on the education of my sisters and me, but though our training was very unconventional, I think we were not any the worse for that. We learnt how to
read for ourselves, in English and in French, and were given plenty of opportunity to do both. We learnt how to live in the family circle, which costs nothing, and is very useful in after life.
As children we were abominably dressed. This was of course partly from economy, though it must also be confessed that my mother was completely destitute of dress-sense. She was indeed in many ways blind to appearances. Her humorously affectionate vision saw chiefly what was beneath the surface. She did appreciate my father’s good looks, but as for her children, she loved them equally whatever their appearance. She did not care what we looked like. In fact she did not know. Mildred and I once stood on the platform at Wilton station, watching my parents starting for a flower show. My father turned and said something to Mamma. We read the words on his lips.
‘Let us take the little girls.’
She at once agreed, and came to the window to call us. Then we saw him say something else. It was this.
Without Knowing Mr Walkley Page 3