Without Knowing Mr Walkley

by Edith Olivier

‘No. We can’t. They are too untidy.’

  I still feel the humiliation, but I am sure he was right. We probably looked complete ragamuffins, but my mother would never have seen it. Nor did she remember the episode afterwards. It was not the kind of thing she would think of again, though I do once remember her being most indignant when Gertrude Lady Pembroke said to her with affectionate mockery.

  ‘Dear Mrs. O., always so nice and shabby.’

  My father dressed well, and wanted his wife to do so too. He once looked at her rather critically, aware that something was wrong, and wondering what could be done about it.

  ‘That dress does not look right. It wants something. Perhaps a knot of cherry-coloured ribbon?’

  The cherry-coloured ribbon became a family saying, but something more than that was wanted to make my mother ‘look right’.

  Chapter Three

  PEOPLE I HAVE FORGOTTEN

  Nowadays, one meets fewer ‘Characters’ than of old, and life seems to be far more uniform. Everyone knew some oddities in their childhood, curious people who looked and behaved quite unlike, others, but such pronounced individuality is rare to-day. Forty or fifty years ago, the streets of Wilton teemed with odd personalities, but to-day they seem to have disappeared. Unfortunately, some of the most striking of these figures are so far away that they only swim faintly on the misty horizon of my memory. I wish I could remember them better.

  I half recall the form of Old Stroud, the cabinet maker, who must have been as delicate a craftsman as Chippendale himself, though without the masterly invention of that great man. Stroud had a large flat gentle face, surrounded by a thin Newgate fringe of pale brown hair. He stammered badly, and his eyes looked sorrowfully out as he vainly tried to enunciate his words. I know not whether he was the founder of the firm which bears his name in Wilton, but he was bent on his sons carrying it on, so much so that his dying words were: ‘Walter to make the coffin.’ No rival undertaker should intervene upon this family prerogative.

  Then there was Mr. Savage, the Prior of the little Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem at the end of the street. His voice was that of a very noisy raven; and he could also make a gigantic click with his tongue when he was encouraging the paces of the tandem donkeys which he always drove in an enormous and luxuriously padded Bath chair. This noise of his could be heard a quarter of a mile away, and it meant that the racing tandem would shortly rush round the corner, with Mr. Savage standing up in the Bath chair waving the reins and cheering on his donkeys. He taught his dog to run to the railway embankment to pick up the newspaper which the guard always threw out for him from the morning express train from London; and he always declared that when one morning the Chronicle was thrown out by mistake instead of the Standard, the dog spat it out, and refused to bring home this Liberal Rag. Mr. Savage was a bon viveur, and possessed, like other clerics of his day, a celebrated cellar. When he was at last dying from dropsy, and lay, looking very miserable, all the fun and humour gone from his face, the doctor proposed to relieve him by drawing off some of the fluid which was creeping up round his heart. He dolefully refused.

  ‘Nothing that’s been tapped lasts long in this house,’ he said.

  In those long-ago days, I sometimes heard my father say: ‘This bread is not very good.’ To which my mother would reply: ‘We shall have the new flour in a week or two.’ Or he said: ‘What good bread!’ and then she answered: ‘ It’s the new flour.’

  Those phrases marked an epoch, though my parents would have been surprised to hear it. People never do know which of their everyday habits or sayings will surprise their successors; and this one meant that the flour we used was grown and milled in the neighbourhood, and that the bread we ate was made in the house. Made, but not baked: and this brings me to another half-forgotten figure—George Street. I wish I had known him better. He was a tall yellow-haired man with a long slouching tread, and he came to the Rectory on Wednesdays and Saturdays to carry off the dough kneaded by the cook, in order to bake it in his brick oven. He plunged his arms into the great earthenware pot which, stood by the kitchen fire, and swung the ball of dough into a sack, which he then threw over his shoulder and strode away, looking like the picture in Reading without Tears of:

  P is like a man with a Pack on his back.

  He seldom spoke to us, but in spite of this, we were all fascinated by him, for he had a surly independent charm. Too charming, he must have been, for he got into one of those scrapes which then were not discussed before the children, and he left Wilton early, under a cloud.

  A very different type was old Thresher, who had no charm at all, but was a completely farcical figure. He was a narrow old man, with a long thin straggling grey beard, and he was generally seen bustling about with a black cotton sack in his hand. His appearance was simply absurd, but really he was a most sinister person. He was a miser. He kept a tiny shop almost opposite the Rectory, and indeed it had to be small, as all its stock-in-trade was carried into it, in relays, by old Thresher himself, in that black cotton sack. He was too stingy to part with enough money at any one time to buy his goods wholesale: he preferred to spend a few shillings at a time in the Salisbury shops. He would not afford a railway ticket for the journey to Salisbury, nor would he pay the carrier to bring his stock to Wilton. So he walked the three miles to Salisbury two or three times each week, with the empty sack under his arm; and a few hours later he walked home—his brisk one-sided tread a little less brisk and a little more one sided, while the sack, now very bulgy, hung from his hand.

  In Salisbury, Mr. Thresher had of course paid the usual retail prices for his goods, and in Wilton he sold them for twice those amounts, or more. It was odd that he found customers. Probably it was sometimes convenient for Wilton people to buy a reel of cotton or a piece of tape near home; and by the sale of trifles like these, Thresher slowly built up quite a little fortune. He invested his savings in derelict house property which he let to very poor people who could not complain of the condition of their cottages, as they could not afford to move out of them. He went from house to house collecting his rents on the days when he did not walk to Salisbury.

  Mrs. and Miss Thresher sold in the shop, and we were often their customers. Our favourite purchases were halfpenny balls of wool. In Salisbury Mr. Thresher bought skeins of very cheap wool in bright colours, and then he and his wife and daughter wound this off into balls containing each about a yard. These were just what we wanted for making our Christmas presents. We made woollen balls for babies by twisting our wool round two cardboard circles, and then clipping the edges; or else we made wool mats in French knitting. This horrible craft is, I hope, now forgotten, for nothing could be more ugly than it is. Its one charm was that it was extremely easy to do. Four tintacks were hammered into an empty cotton reel, and a succession of loops twisted over these. Then a long wormlike thing began to ooze out from the opposite end of the reel. We French knitted short lengths of wool of every colour, and finally twisted the variegated worm into a round wool mat to be presented to a mother or some other grown-up female relation.

  For children, the most attractive corner in Thresher’s shop was the penny window—a narrow slit of glass in which were displayed the delapidated toys which the old man bought up for next to nothing, so that even at a penny each they brought him in a handsome profit. Children’s noses were always pressed against this window; and never in my life have I wanted anything more than a most clumsily made Toby jug of some sort of stoneware which once lay there. On it was the face of a bearded nigger, quite hideous, and moulded very roughly. I was bent on possessing it, and though my mother was not in favour of it, she allowed me to buy it at last. For a week I was supremely happy. It really was as delightful as I expected. Then one day, I used it to hold painting water, and I washed it afterwards. When it came out of the wash-tub, the nigger was a nigger no more. His face was a dead white, upon which the lumps and excrescences which had been so fascinating in the negroid type had become only deformities. My one
wish was that Mamma should never see this metamorphosis. It would have too cruelly proved that she had been right. I felt this very much.

  The townspeople said of Mr. Thresher that he attended either Church or Chapel without prejudice in favour of either, as long as he was always present for the collection. This was not from generosity. He wanted to hand the bag. As he had customers of all denominations, he was determined to be seen by all in whatever place of worship he was present.

  He added to his income in all sorts of ways—by waiting at the Mayor’s banquet, or at my father’s annual choir supper. After one of these he won a nickname which stuck to him for life—Old Apple-Pie. It somehow became known that he had carried home as perquisites an uneaten apple tart and a rice pudding, and a few evenings later, an anonymous rhymed alphabet was pushed under the door of every house in the town. It began:

  A was an Apple-Pie made for the choir.

  B was the Baker who baked it with fire.

  C was the Cook who made it look nice.

  D was the Draper who liked it with rice.

  I believe the waggish poet was never identified.

  Deaf old Mrs. Staples lived a few doors away from Thresher. She was the wife of the chemist. Beside her cheeks were unchangingly set some bunches of very hard, neat, grey curls, and she wore a large frilled cap trimmed with bows of magenta ribbon. Cairngorms were her favourite stones, and the high tucker of starched lace at her throat was always fastened by a very large one. When a customer rang the bell, Mr. Staples would shuffle rather furtively into the shop from the sitting-room, taking care to shut the glass door behind him. In spite of this, it was always possible to hear the loud unmodulated deaf voice of Mrs. Staples, talking angrily about Predestination with her friends.

  ‘We know that the Childurn of Israel were chosen from all Eternity to be the Elect of Jehovah,’ she chanted triumphantly, though I know not why this gave her such immense personal delight; but how I should now have enjoyed these tremendous conversations!

  In those days, Wilton post office was simply one of the ordinary small houses in the Square, and it must have been very difficult for strangers to find it. You opened the door upon a lobby measuring about two feet square, on one side of which was a window of frosted glass. The customer tapped upon this, and then it flew up with a snap to reveal the cross face of Miss Young, the postmistress. She seemed to be overcome with rage if anyone dared to buy a stamp from her, and we were terrified of her. She did, however, once unbend sufficiently to teach my mother how to open an envelope so cunningly that no one could possibly guess that it had been touched. A useful art for a postmistress.

  Wandering about the roads and lanes of Wiltshire, it has always been possible to come across specimens of that charming if quarrelsome race—the race of born Antiquaries. The Wiltshire strain begins in the seventeenth century with Aubrey, the most winning of gossips. He soon escaped from his tutors, whom he thought ‘dull, ignorant, rest-in-the-house teachers’, and spent his life among ‘umbrages, Osney House ruines, etc., and antiquities’. He finished nothing, but he filled a number of pocket-books with ‘ philosophical and antiquarian remarks’ for his own amusement and the delight of his friends. Thus, ‘by God’s Providence’, as he said, he found happiness, though ‘his businesses and affaires ran kim-kam’, and he lost all his money. More than two hundred years later, Sir Richard Colt Hoare was still at it, but in a more systematic way, for he published the result of his researches in some huge tomes which no Wiltshire historians can yet do without. He dug and measured and wrote things down, though unfortunately his company was so agreeable that he was often detained too long over luncheon with the local squire during his excavations. He left his labourers to go on with the digging and only strolled out late in the afternoon to see what they had thought worth saving among their finds.

  Two Antiquaries of the old school were living in Wilton when I was a child, and they died within a few months of each other, some time in the early ’nineties. Like Aubrey, Mr. Nightingale and Mr. Swayne wrote very little down, and most of their learning perished with them. My father constantly quoted bits of old Wiltshire knowledge on no authority but the word of one of these two, and they must have made the most delightful companions. Each of them loved the county with a love resembling that of an old family servant, and the past of Wiltshire lay in their minds as if it were their own. They were chain-talkers too, a reference to one thing evoking from them a flow of associated memories.

  Mr. Swayne was also a chain-smoker, with a cigar always in his mouth and a book in his hand. He built an enormous library (since pulled down) on to his house, the Island, at Wilton, but its walls could never hold his books. They lay in heaps on the floor, jumbled up with cigar boxes empty and full, till his son succeeded him and spent several years in tidying up the litter.

  Mr. Swayne was a tall thin handsome man with a sardonic expression, and a gift for sarcastic epigram which was said (with what truth I know not) to have lost him half a fortune. In his youth he had been a barrister, and the story goes that once he shot one of the poisoned shafts of his wit across the Court at the sitting judge, who happened to be his own father, and who at once went home and altered his will.

  Mr. Swayne was ‘an old man who wouldn’t say his prayers’ except at three o’clock on Sunday afternoons, so, while he lived, a special Evensong was always said in Wilton church for his benefit at this hour. From our nursery window, we always saw him pass on his way to this service, with Mrs. Swayne, a small round woman, walking a few steps behind him.

  The Swaynes had several daughters, one of whom was of so dazzling a beauty that she was a legend in her lifetime, and the old ladies at the parties in the Bishop’s palace at Salisbury used to cluster round the door to see her come in. The whole county was in love with her, though she was only nineteen when she married a most brilliant barrister much older than herself. In less than a year, he had a complete and permanent breakdown, and this lovely creature returned to Wilton to live in a tiny house in the Square with her baby daughter. She was like her father, a curious aloof character, and now she became very much a recluse. Only three or four special friends were ever admitted to her house, their names being inscribed on a list hung in the hall, so that the parlour-maid might refresh her memory on her way to answer the bell. My eldest sister was one of the chosen.

  Mr. Nightingale’s personality was of another quality to that of Mr. Swayne, with its bitter tang and its touch of mockery. The Nightingales were well known in the county as wine-merchants, though I never heard of Mr. Nightingale selling a bottle of wine. However, as his affairs did not ‘run kim-kam’, and he lived in comfortable leisure to the end of his life, I presume that other members of his family carried on the business, while he lived peacefully with his sister at the Mount. The walls of two of the rooms in this house were glazed to secure the remains of what had been a unique collection of early English porcelain; and here Mr. Nightingale was often to be found, his quiet face very serene, and his calm brown eyes resting affectionately upon some specially loved ‘piece’ which he happened to be showing to one of his friends. He loved his china as an old man might love an exquisite young girl living in his house, in whom he sees—behind her own beauty—another beauty, long vanished from his sight. And something of this belonged to Mr. Nightingale’s China Room, for in it, this calm selfless man was in the presence of the sorrow of his life. The collection was only a part of what he once had possessed. The most beautiful of his specimens, the rarest, those which had meant for him those magic moments in a collector’s life when he knows that he has found his pearl of great price—most of these had been destroyed in a fire at the Alexandra Palace. He had lent the best of his possessions for an exhibition there. Mr. Nightingale did not look like a broken-hearted man, yet this was a loss from which he never recovered.

  Mr. Nightingale had other tastes than china. He loved by-ways in art, and generally quiet-coloured things. This quality appealed to him first of all in his porcelain, but it w
as seen again in his medieval needle-work, and his portfolios of reproductions of Italian Primitifs. Ancient seals, Gothic stained glass, Church Plate—in all of these he was deeply learned; and as a younger man he had travelled extensively and stored his retentive memory with the works of Byzantine, Renaissance, and Romanesque art. Those things remained in his mind, in his little house which bordered upon the fairground at Wilton; and living there in the presence of so much august beauty and splendour, he remained the most modest and unassuming of men. While he moved mentally in happy intimacy among the Stones of Venice and of Stonehenge, he outwardly stayed content in his garden, behind the gigantic wall of box and yew which concealed it from the highroad.

  Chapter Four

  FAMILY PRAYERS

  The first Lady Radnor whom I remember was a very remarkable woman, a fine musician and a convinced spiritualist. In those days there often stayed at Longford a Miss Wingfield who was clairvoyante, and she was one of the party at the marriage of the only daughter of the house to Lord Skelmersdale, Lord Lathom’s son. Miss Wingfield arrived a day before the other guests, and that evening, when she was sitting alone with her host and hostess, it was suggested that she should gaze in the crystal for something connected with the wedding. She took the crystal, and the others waited. After a few moments she began to describe what seemed to be a most absurd picture, in no way connected with what was in all their minds.

  ‘What are those people doing?’ she asked. ‘They seem to be smelling their chairs. What can that mean? Oh, I see now, this is family prayers, and those are the servants kneeling in a row. An old man with a long beard is reading. A lady is kneeling a little way off, and now she gets up from her knees, crosses to the old man, and whispers something to him. He waves her away, and she goes back to her place.’