The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit

by Eleanor Fitzsimons

  Edith, who had a lifelong passion for building, lamented the fact that “there was no building at Brighton except on the beach.” In a passage that illustrates perfectly what an imaginative child she was, she described the disappointing sand:

  Sand is as good as anything in the world to build with—but there is no sand on the beach at Brighton, only sandiness. There are stones—pebbles you call them, but they are too round to be piled up into buildings. The only thing you can play with them is dolls’ dinner parties. There are plenty of oyster shells and flat bits of slate and tile for dishes and plates—and it is quite easy to find stones the proper shape and colour for boiled fowls and hams and roast legs of mutton, German sausages, ribs of beef, mince pies, pork pies, roast hare or calf’s head. But building is impossible.4

  Perhaps it was while she was digging on the stony beaches of Brighton and wishing for better sand that she dreamed up her Psammead (a sand fairy), star of Five Children and It (1902), one of her best-loved books. It was “brown and furry and fat,” and it crawled out of the sand where her fictional children had been digging:

  Its eyes were on long horns like a snail’s eyes, and it could move them in and out like telescopes; it had ears like a bat’s ears, and its tubby body was shaped like a spider’s and covered with thick soft fur; its legs and arms were furry too, and it had hands and feet like a monkey’s.5

  In Brighton, Edith was enrolled as a weekday boarder at Mrs. Arthur’s school. During outings, she would walk right past her rented home:

  I remember the hot white streets, and the flies, and Brill’s baths, and the Western Road, and the bitter pang of passing, at the end of a long procession, our own house, where always some one might be at the window, and never any one was. I used to go home on Saturdays, and then all bitterness was so swallowed up in the bliss of the homereturning, that I actually forgot the miseries of my school-life; but I was very unhappy there.6

  The main source of her unhappiness was the relentless bullying she endured at the hands of a little girl dressed in “Stuart Plaid,” who destroyed her few remaining toys out of sheer malice: “She tortured me unremittingly,” Edith recalled. Her account of her childish attempt to replenish the paint set this callous girl destroyed makes it clear that she never told her mother:

  When I had been at school a week or two my paint-box suffered at her hands, but I bore it meekly and in silence, only seeking to replace my Vandyke brown by mud from the garden. Chinese white I sought to manufacture by a mixture of chalk picked up on the sea-shore, and milk from my mug at tea-time. It was never a successful industry.7

  Illness brought deliverance. “I suppose no prisoner ever hailed the falling of his fetters with the joy I felt when at last, after three or four days of headache and tears, I was wrapped in a blanket and taken home with the measles,” she recalled.8 She recovered in time for their midsummer holiday.

  Alfred and Harry had been released from school by then, and Sarah rented “a lovely cottage among the beech-woods of Buckinghamshire,” a glorious haven swathed in “royal red roses, and jasmine, and tall white lilies.” All around stood “lovely trees, acacias and elms, and a big copper beech . . . and in the hedge by the gate, sweet-briar and deep-cupped white convolvulus.”9 For breakfast they feasted on “honey in the comb,” “new-laid eggs,” and “cool raspberries . . . trimmed with fresh green leaves.” Edith watched her mother “in a cool cotton gown pouring out tea, and purring with pleasure at having all her kittens together again.”10 Alfred gave her “a white rabbit with pink eyes—in a hutch he had made himself.” Harry offered to share two dormice he kept in an old tea-caddy in “a nook among the roots of the copper beech.”

  “That was summer indeed,” she wrote in My School Days, but summer never lasts. Come September, she was sent to a “select boarding establishment for young ladies and gentlemen” in faraway Stamford in Lincolnshire. “I venture to think,” she recalled, “that I should have preferred a penal settlement.” Turned feral by the freedom of heady summer days, she struggled to conform to the strict regime. Her first difficulty, she explained, was her unruly hair:

  My hair was never tidy . . . this got me into continual disgrace. I am sure I tried hard enough to keep it tidy—I brushed it for fruitless hours till my little head was so sore that it hurt me to put my hat on. But it never would look smooth and shiny. . . . It was always a rough, impossible brown mop.

  She also struggled to keep her hands clean:

  My hands were more compromising to me than anyone would have believed who had ever seen their size, for, in the winter especially, they were never clean. I can see now the little willow-patterned basin of hard cold water, and smell the unpleasant little square of mottled soap with which I was expected to wash them. I don’t know how the others managed, but for me the result was always the same—failure; and when I presented myself at breakfast, trying to hide my red and grubby little paws in my pinafore, Miss —— used to say: “Show your hands, Daisy—yes as I thought. Not fit to sit down with young ladies and gentlemen. Breakfast in the schoolroom for Miss Daisy.”

  Most distressing was her inability to grasp the intricacies of long division:

  [Day] after day the long division sums, hopelessly wrong, disfigured my slate, and were washed off with my tears. Day after day I was sent to bed, my dinner was knocked off, or my breakfast, or my tea.

  A second term brought no relief:

  Night after night I cried myself to sleep in my bed—whose coarse home-spun sheets were hotter than blankets—because I could not get the answers right. Even Miss Fairfield [the kind headmistress], I fancied, began to look coldly on me, and the other children naturally did not care to associate with one so deficient in arithmetic.11

  It was during these desperate days that Sarah arrived with dreadful news. Mary’s doctors, believing she would not survive another damp Brighton winter, had advised Sarah to take her to the south of France once she was well enough to travel. Sarah planned to take Saretta too, leaving Edith in England with her brothers. Since Edith was inconsolable, Sarah agreed to take her along. “When I was small and teachable,” she recalled, “my mother was compelled to much travel and change of scene by the illness of my elder sister; and as she liked to have me more or less within reach, I changed schools as a place-hunter changes his politics.”12

  From then on, her school attendance was sporadic and largely unsuccessful. Years later, she told a friend:

  Once at school where I had been quite contented I was one term wretched—for reasons—and wrote home saying so and imploring to be taken away . . . They did not come—they wrote saying I would feel all right and happy again soon and I didn’t. I was miserable the whole term and refused to return at the end.13

  It is no coincidence that her fictional children, who are of school-going age, rarely attend school. The Bastables are removed when their father’s business fails. Of her Railway Children, she wrote, they “got used to not going to school.”14

  Yet she was precociously intelligent and a voracious reader. A profile in The Strand Magazine confirmed:

  She read Scott and Longfellow at the age of five. She began to write verse as soon as she could write at all, and her first published poem appeared when she was only sixteen.15

  The night crossing from Newhaven to Dieppe proved a terrible ordeal for an overwrought little girl. Laid low by debilitating seasickness, Edith arrived in Rouen in a state of utter exhaustion. While traveling to their lodgings from the train station, she glimpsed the words Débit de Tabac,* and they became lodged in her febrile imagination. Drifting between wakefulness and sleep, she formed a weird association between this innocuous phrase and her own last name:

  I lay awake in the dark, the light from the oil lamp in the street came through the Persiennes [louvered shutters] and fell in bright bars on the wall. As I grew drowsier I seemed to read there in letters of fire “Débit de Tabac.” Then I fell asleep, and dreamed that my father’s ghost came to me, and implored me to have the horri
ble French inscription erased from his tomb—“for I was an Englishman,” he said.16

  Wide-awake and filled with terror, she crept across the corridor to Sarah’s room. This, she realized, was her first memory of having an abiding “terror of the dead, or of the supernatural.”

  Traveling on to Paris, they spent three days at the International Exposition of 1867; Edith found it “large, empty and very tiring.” She was pleased to leave the city once the weather turned cold. In Poitiers, in an old Byzantine church, she picked up a bone she believed to be human. In My School Days, she recalled how she swaddled it in cotton wool and kept it hidden in a drawer. She “wove many romances round the little brown relic,” until her brother Alfred, roaring with laughter, told her it was “half a fowl’s back.”17 She was content in Bordeaux until her encounter with the mummies. “After that,” she wrote: “Farewell the tranquil mind, farewell content.”18

  After ten days in Bordeaux they continued south, staying in a series of affordable lodging houses but never settling anywhere for long. In Wings and the Child, Edith wrote:

  It is a mistake to suppose that children are naturally fond of change. They love what they know. In strange places they suffer violently from home-sickness, even when their loved nurse or mother is with them. They want to get back to the house they know, the toys they know, the books they know.19

  In November they found a comfortable pension in the city of Pau, fifty miles short of the Spanish border and popular on account of its mild winter climate. In a letter to her Uncle Edward in Australia, Mary admitted “the air agreed with none of us”; they decided to move on.20

  Concerned about the break in Edith’s education and her inability to speak French, Sarah arranged for the little girl to spend three months with the Lourdes family in Pau. As she listened to the wheels of her mother’s carriage rolling away from the door, the enormity of Edith’s situation dawned on her: “Then I was left, a little English child without a word of French in the bosom of a French family, and as this came upon me I burst into a flood of tears,” she recalled.21 Yet she enjoyed the routine of ordinary family life, and she formed a close friendship with Marguerite Lourdes, a sweet-natured little girl of similar age. As Marguerite spoke no English, Edith made rapid progress in French. She spent Christmas there and wept bitter tears when a maidservant arrived to reunite her with her mother and sisters.

  In Edith’s absence Mary’s health had worsened, so Sarah took her to Biarritz. On Boxing Day they played croquet in the sunshine, then gathered late roses from the churchyard hedge and maidenhair fern from a sea cave on the shoreline. “The fresh sea breezes quite set us up again,” Mary told Uncle Edward.22 In “glorious weather” they crossed the Spanish border to visit Irun and San Sebastian. Mary and Saretta enjoyed the trip, but Sarah was unhappy with the standard of Spanish inns. After Christmas they swapped Biarritz for the spa town of Bagnères-de-Bigorre in the high foothills of the Pyrenees, where they planned to stay for several months. In her letter to Uncle Edward, Mary described “innumerable streams of clear, sparkling water, running in and round and even under the houses.” Once Edith joined them, she found the town delightful:

  Streams cross the roads, streams run between the houses, under the houses, not quiet, placid little streams, such as meander through our English meadows, but violent, angry, rushing, boiling little mountain torrents that thunder along their rocky beds. Sometimes one of these streams is spanned by a dark arch, and a house built over it. What good fortune that one of these houses should have been the one selected by my mother—on quite other grounds, of course—and, oh! the double good fortune I, even I, was to sleep in the little bedroom actually built on the arch itself that spanned the mountain stream! It was delightful, it was romantic, it was fascinating. I could fancy myself a princess in a tower by the rushing Rhine as I heard the four-foot torrent go thundering along with a noise that would not have disgraced a full-grown river. It had every charm the imagination could desire, but it kept me awake till the small hours of the morning. It was humiliating to have to confess that even romance and a rushing torrent did not compensate for the loss of humdrum, commonplace sleep, but I accepted that humiliation and slept no more in the little room overhanging the torrent.23

  She missed Marguerite desperately and took little interest in the letter writing that kept her mother and sisters occupied. “It is not so easy to amuse yourself in-doors on a wet day as older people seem to think,” Oswald Bastable complains in The Wouldbegoods, “especially when you are far removed from your own home, and haven’t got all your own books and things.”24 In childhood she read Hans Christian Andersen, and at one time had an edition of The Arabian Nights with woodcut pictures, but they may not have survived the move to France.25 Kind-hearted Saretta, who was “a refuge on wet days when a fairy-story seemed to be the best thing to be had,” took her to visit a shepherdess, but she was desperately disappointed when the magical maiden she hoped for turned out to be a wizened old crone.26

  Their stay in Bagnères-de-Bigorre was cut short by news from Harry’s boarding school in England that he had contracted whooping cough and was desperately ill. Sarah considered sending for him but decided to travel to England instead. Day and night, they traversed central France by carriage. Traveling from Aurillac to Murat, they grew nervous when their surly driver, “a blue-bloused ruffian of plausible manners,” picked up an equally disreputable looking companion. He assured them that this man was his stepson. Further along the road he picked up his “father and brother-in-law,” then a “cousin” and his “uncle,” all with “villainous-looking faces.” Edith recalled:

  The uncle, who looked like a porpoise and smelt horribly of brandy, was put inside the carriage with us, because there was now no room left in any other part of the conveyance. The family party laughed and jolted in a patois wholly unintelligible to us. I was convinced that they were arranging for the disposal of our property and our bodies after the murder. My mother and sisters were talking in low voices in English.27

  It was almost midnight by the time they reached their halfway house in one of the loneliest spots in the mountains of Auvergne. Sarah complained to their landlady, but she turned out to be the driver’s mother. When she demanded double the agreed fare, quick-thinking Sarah hid their valuables and convinced her they had only the fare agreed and a ten-franc piece to pay for their supper. Without further incident, they were deposited in Murat, where they spent the night at a filthy inn. They sat up until dawn rather than lie on the soiled sheets provided and caught the first train out the next morning.

  Once Harry was well again, Sarah returned to France to find a house for the summer. Edith was dispatched to a small English boarding school presided over by Mrs. MacBean, “one of the best and kindest women that ever lived.” She kept in touch with her for years. Letters to Sarah were addressed care of St. Martin’s le Grand, the headquarters of the Royal Mail in London, but Edith, who had no idea where her mother was, became convinced this must be in Paris. She was not yet ten years old when Sarah sent for her, and she traveled alone by train and boat to Saint-Malo in Brittany.

  Together for the first time in months, the family spent that summer in La Haye, close to Dinan in Brittany, in a rustic farmhouse with whitewashed walls and a steep slate roof. Edith’s description makes it sound heavenly:

  There never was such another garden, there never will be! Peaches, apricots, nectarines, and grapes of all kinds, lined the inside walls; the avenue that ran down the middle of it was of fig trees and standard peach-trees. There were raspberries, cherries and strawberries, and flowers mingling with fruits and vegetables in a confusion the most charming in the world. Along the end of the garden was a great arcade of black, clipped yews, so thick and strong that a child could crawl on the outside of it without falling through. Above the dairy and coach-house was an immense hay-loft, a straw-loft over the stable and cow-house. What play-rooms for wet days! Beyond the chicken-house was the orchard, full of twisted grey apple trees, beneat
h whose boughs in due season the barley grew. Beyond, a network of lanes, fringed with maiden-hair, led away into fairyland.28

  Here, in “the dearest home of my childhood,” Edith and her brothers were given the freedom they craved: “My mother,” she wrote, “with a wisdom for which I shall thank her all my days, allowed us to run wild.” All Sarah asked was that they present themselves for meals with “some approach to punctuality, and with hands and faces moderately clean.”29 They climbed trees, explored lanes and meadows, built forts of hay and straw, and recruited the resident goats, cow, and black English pig for their boisterous games. They had ponies to ride, Judy and frisky little Punch, who threw Edith three times in one morning. Decades later, she could describe their play in minute detail:

  In the courtyard of our house in France there was an outhouse with a sloping roof and a flat parapet about four feet high. We used to build little clay huts along this, and roof them with slates, leaving a hole for a chimney. The huts had holes for windows and doors, and we used to collect bits of candle and put them in our huts after dark and enjoy the lovely spectacle of our illuminated buildings till someone remembered us and caught us, and sent us to bed. That was the curse of our hut-building—the very splendour of the result attracted the attention one most wished to avoid.30

  Her lifelong belief in ghosts dated to the day they came upon a dilapidated and boarded-up château. Peering through gaps in the planks, they could see a bare room with a heap of straw in its center. Without warning, this straw swirled up and formed a rope that reached the ceiling. The terrified children ran down the driveway. An old woman who emerged from a cottage near the gate called out, “Je vois, mes enfants, que vous avez vu la dame qui file.”*31 They later tried to return to the château but never found it again.