The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit

by Eleanor Fitzsimons

  Edith also sold flowers, fruit, and vegetables to the military hospitals. When her customers inquired about the availability of freshly laid eggs, she advertised for a poultry expert. She hired Lillian Steele Evans, a separated mother of four in her mid-forties who had studied poultry rearing for six years. In the autumn of 1915 Evans sent her children, two boys and two girls, to boarding school and moved into the cottage that stood to the right of the entrance gate to Well Hall. In “The Voyage of the Hut,” Edith described the impact of her arrival:

  The few quiet casual hens who laid our breakfast eggs gave place to “intensively” kept birds, many of them, and incubators infested the cellars, once sacred to nut-brown ale, to the red wine and the white. And children came to the door a hundred times a day for a pennorth of apples, a ha’porth of parsley, or an egg, “and mother says can she have a very small one, cheap?”5

  The Leeds Mercury published an article titled “Popular Novelist becomes Poultry Expert” and illustrated it with a photograph of Edith holding a chick and staring directly into the camera with a characteristically forthright expression.6 She approached her new business with admirable professionalism; converting outbuildings and printing writing paper headed:

  E. Nesbit Bland

  Garden Produce,

  Poultry,

  New-laid Eggs

  In “Poetess and Poultry Culture” the Sevenoaks Chronicle and Kentish Advertiser reported: “Saturdays are market days for Mrs Bland, and on that day all Eltham flocks to her for eggs, roses and home-made jams.”7 She told Edward Andrade they sold more than one thousand eggs in one week alone. Demand was so strong that Lillian Evans offered classes in poultry keeping to local women. Her daughter Joan left a vivid description of spending her Christmas holidays at Well Hall:

  That first night we assembled for supper in the dining room, the old Hall, where a long oval table was placed lengthwise in front of a roaring fire. The table looked gay; there was the smell of food and the chatter of voices; everything radiated warmth. But we were bewildered. Grown-ups gathered; there were other P.G.s [paying guests] beside ourselves, and we children, seven to nine strong, as always, congregated at the far end of the table. And then E. Nesbit appeared on the stairway. She was fifty-seven at this time, rather stout, and dressed in a flowing sort of dress not unlike today’s Caftan, with a kind of longish oriental coat. She wore Turkish slippers and quantities of jangling bangles—she always wore those—reaching almost up to her elbows. Her face was small, her voice warm and soft. Her wispy hair was parted in the middle and knotted in a kind of bun at the back. She wore large spectacles and carried under her arm a box—she was seldom without it—in which was a tin of tobacco, cigarette paper, and a long quill cigarette holder.8

  It struck Joan that the children were invited to join in with adult games and conversations on equal terms. There were sing-alongs around the piano, and the carpet was rolled back for dancing. She remembered that Edith “excelled at rhyming games, patience, and chess, and she loved to play whist.”9 When deadlines obliged her to stay up all night, she could be “as cantankerous as her own cantankerous Psammead.” But she was generally good-tempered. She “liked to be embraced, and embraced us often and called us ‘dear.’”10 Like Edith, Joan was prone to bronchitis. When she felt ill, Edith would sit beside her and tell her a story or allow her to help with sewing and mending.

  Joan Evans described Alice as a “diminutive, vivacious, and competent little woman, with her big brown eyes and mop of grey hair.” She was “the pivot of all the functional and complicated household finances.”11 The older Bland children were not much in evidence by then, but John, a day pupil at St. Paul’s School, became like a brother to Joan and her siblings. He could be “a real loner and very sullen,” Joan remembered. When his humor was good, he would perch little Margery Evans on his shoulders, grab Pandora’s hand, and invite Joan to clutch onto his coattails before taking them all around London.12

  Mavis Carter recorded her memories of Well Hall in wartime:

  I remember well one happy Sunday at Well Hall when I arrived to find all and sundry making jam—a glorious mixture of improbable people from every walk of life, all stirring away, while E. Nesbit, who had invited me to lunch, said gaily, “We’ve settled not to have any lunch as it’s war-time!” and handed me instead a spoon for stirring. Oh how hungry I was! Later we all ate by candlelight and adjourned to the panelled drawing room where she sat at the grand piano and played little old-fashioned lilting waltzes while we young things danced or sang songs of her inventing, set to the traditional old tunes, and her son John, aged about seventeen (the lamb of The Five Children and It) gave his celebrated imitation of Sir Henry Wood conducting his orchestra at the Queen’s Hall “Proms.”13

  When Paul Bland joined up as a sapper* with the London Electrical Engineers in 1916, he was stationed at a garrison at Newhaven. By then he was engaged to Gertrude Nebel, a primary school teacher of German descent. Edith and she were terrified that he would be posted overseas. That July, Edith traveled to Newhaven to see him. She stayed in a “horrid inn” that she described in a letter to Edward Andrade:

  My bedstead is enormous, modern and made of brass and iron—but I think the bed dates from one of the early Ptolemys. It has a pyramid in the middle and slopes to the sides so that you can only remain in it by curling around the pyramid and holding on to the one pillow with your eyelashes. The sitting room is what William Morris might have seen in a nightmare. It is difficult to understand how so much plush and walnut and of such a quality could have been brought together in one real room.14

  She struggled with a chest ailment while she was there and drank Worcestershire sauce to ease it, since this was the only warming substance she could find.

  While Paul was away, Edith rented his room to paying guests. She had already converted the maid’s sitting room into a bedroom since she was working in the Woolwich Arsenal. In her novel The Lark, Jane and Lucinda, two enterprising young women, sell produce from their garden and take in “Pigs—P.G.’s, you know, Paying Guests.”15 They don’t enjoy having strangers in their home: “‘I’d no idea it would be like this,’ said Jane. ‘It’s perfectly ghastly. You’re never free of them. All day long and the evenings too.’”16 Edith too seemed unable to settle on whether her guests should be treated as customers or friends. She stuck up reminders and notices in rhyme with instructions she wished them to follow.

  When the novelist Peter Blundell and his wife were working in the Woolwich Arsenal they stayed at Well Hall.* The gardener objected to the way they treated the garden as their own, picking choice fruit that was intended for sale. Blundell told Doris Langley Moore that Edith “never tired of doing her utmost to entertain us [paying guests] and keep us happy.” He remembered dancing in the drawing room and recalled that Edith “could dance well although easily fatigued.” John Lane had told him that, when she was young, she was “the handsomest woman I had ever met.”17 Blundell thought her “still beautiful” even though she was in her late fifties by then. He left a description:

  I can see her now with her ample figure rather untidily dressed in black, her grey masses of hair done rather sketchily, a cigarette in a holder stuck in the corner of her wide, generous mouth, the round, ruddy low-browed face and the grey-blue [sic] eyes behind the big spectacles, eyes that shone with a wish to make everybody happy.

  For a time Well Hall prospered as a result of the war. In June 1917 The Pioneer reported:

  And now the green lawns of Well Hall are dotted with poultry coops; prize bred ducks swim in the old moat; prize-bred hens range by its banks, and the egg business grows and grows. New-laid eggs sold not just for immediate eating, but in quantities, to be laid down in water-glass, so that people may be sure of fresh eggs in the winter, when eggs are dear and scarce. Day-old chicks are to be bought, of approved breeds, that will be hens and laying hens by Christmas. Young fowls for table form another branch of the trade.18

  As war dragged on, rationing le
d to a shortage of chicken food and, consequently, poor laying rates. An outbreak of fowl disease, which was exacerbated by the thieving habits of foxes and water rats from the moat, finished the business off.

  Lillian Evans found a job filling shells at the munitions factory, but Edith and Alice continued to sell produce from the garden; Alice supervised sales of fruit and vegetables while Edith took charge of flowers. In the early years they used the dining hall, which Edith described as “a big room with a chequered marble floor . . . dark with old oak, and bright with old brass and china.” She noted the challenges they faced:

  Our hall, which is also our diningroom, opens straight into out-of-doors. The hall was piled with heaps of cabbages, carrots, onions, jars of chrysanthemums, baskets of potatoes, boxes of apples. We lived through that winter in one perpetual draught. Seventy-five pocket-handkerchiefs in one week and two cases of bronchitis impelled us to change.19

  Such hardship prompted her to transfer their activities into “a little wooden shop, set up on the front lawn at Well Hall.”20 Measuring thirty feet by thirteen feet and twelve feet high, it was little more than a hut. A white fence enclosed it, and a little white gate fronted the garden boundary of Well Hall, facing out toward the tramlines and the Co-operative store. Edith planted roses against the sides and installed a gas heater. To attract customers, she erected a coop with three hens and a cock. “My own darling boy,” she told Paul, “we opened the hut-shop and did splendidly, taking nearly £5 (approximately £430, or USD$570, today) for eggs and vegetables and flowers.” She was filled with enthusiasm: “I was on my feet today from 8.30 to 8.15 so I am pretty tired,” she confessed, “but I am very well.” Her article, “The Voyage of the Hut,” was subtitled:

  A tale of the difficulties attending to the removal of a wooden hut, designed to house a flower, fruit and vegetable business of War-time growth, and of how they were surmounted through the instrumentality of a handyman of the sea.

  In it, she described the arrival of this hut in June 1916.21 The “handyman of the sea” she mentioned was Thomas Terry Tucker, a local marine engineer known affectionately as “Skipper.” They had been friends for several years, and Edith was very grateful for his help: “Mr Tucker keeps up my spirits and prevents my worrying over trifles,” she told Paul.22 She wrote in a letter to Harry: “I have a sailor friend who can find anything, and can do everything. Also, he knows everything.”

  They made a good team, as The Pioneer reported:

  Last February [1917], Mr T. Tucker, of the Woolwich Ferry, entered the partnership with E. Nesbit; and the crowds of friends who have known Mr Tucker in the social and political worlds will not be surprised to hear that he is entering into the business of poultry farming, gardening and floriculture with the indomitable energy and “go” which always characterises his varied activities. With four such partners success should be assured, especially in a business which set out to supply fresh fruit, fresh flowers, fresh eggs, and fresh vegetables—the best of everything and nothing but the best.23

  Tucker was two years older than Edith. He had left school early after his father died and went to work as a rivet boy in Sir Alfred Yarrow’s yard, where torpedo boats were built. Afterward he joined the merchant navy. In February 1898 he was appointed first class engineer with the Woolwich Ferry. He and his wife, Sophia, a former machinist, lived for a time in a house on the newly constructed Corbett Estate on the other side of Well Hall Road.* They had no children. Tommy and Sophia were committed socialists and Labour activists. He attended Fabian lectures and Sunday meetings at Poplar Town Hall while she was a driving force in the Woolwich Labour Movement and an original member of the Well Hall Women’s Guild. She joined strike committees and worked tirelessly with strike leaders, and she also provided assistance to South London’s poorest families. When the London County Council replaced the London Schools Board in 1904, Tommy, who was a member of the Woolwich Labour Party, was appointed one of eighteen school managers allocated across three local schools. He was also selected as a Labour Party candidate for the River Ward in the Woolwich Borough Council elections in 1909 and again in 1912.

  After Hubert lost his sight, Tommy took to visiting him almost daily to talk politics and share gossip from socialist circles. He nursed Sophia through her final, difficult illness until her death on January 14, 1916. They had been married for thirty years. When Sophia was laid to rest in the churchyard of St. John’s at Eltham, close to Fabian Bland, Edith and Alice sent wreaths made with flowers from their garden. Now that they were both alone, Edith’s friendship with Tommy intensified. He had been an invaluable source of support ever since she lost Hubert. In 1915 he had helped her with a fundraising event in aid of The Pioneer newspaper that was held in the grounds of Well Hall.

  The Pioneer newspaper operated at a loss, and the women members of the Labour Party who were responsible for distributing it banded together to ensure its survival. They formed the Women’s Pioneer Campaign Committee and established a “Pioneer fund.” One young member, Mabel Crout, who would become Dame Mabel Crout later in life, asked Edith’s permission to hold a garden fête at Well Hall. She described their meeting as “an eye opener.” Edith, dressed in a black gown with an extended train and smoking a cigarette in a very long holder, granted permission on condition that her granddaughter Pandora could perform a dance on the day. An article in The Pioneer on May 28, 1915, confirmed that “Mrs. Hubert Bland has very kindly consented to allow a Garden Party to be held in her grounds at Well Hall on June 26.”24

  Edith agreed to open her grounds at four o’clock. The entrance fee was set at 6d (approximately £2.50, or USD$3.30, today) and tickets were sold from the office of The Pioneer or could be bought at the gate on the day. Tommy Tucker undertook to sell one hundred tickets and also offered to lend “the necessary crockery and a piano.” Additional revenue would be raised by selling refreshments: “home-made dainties” and “ices and cooling drinks.” Attractions included an exhibition of dancing by Miss Mary Hope and her pupils; dancing on the lawn accompanied by the Misses Bevan on cello, piano and violin; palm reading; and “games and competitions of an original character.”25

  The afternoon was a great success. The Pioneer carried an account of “a delightfully enjoyable gathering” in lovely surroundings. It reported: “In addition to rendering assistance in many other ways, Mrs Bland delighted those present with some skilfully and tastefully executed pianoforte solos.” She also presented competition winners with autographed books and awarded prizes for races on the lawn; a boys’ and a girls’ three-legged race, an egg-and-spoon race, and a men’s blindfold race, during which participants were “guided by ladies.” John oversaw boating trips on the moat and Pandora, accompanied by Rosemary Courlander, “enacted a beautiful fairy scene.” As proceedings came to a close, Councillor E. J. Mayers offered eloquent thanks:

  For the loan of the grounds and for the manifold assistance which she [Edith] had rendered, also for her labours in many ways in the past and in the present, in the direction of promoting the desires of the people for a nobler life.

  Edith responded with “a graceful little speech,” and three cheers were raised before those gathered sang a hearty rendition of Auld Lang Syne.26

  A second garden party was held the following year. The Pioneer reported:

  The event of first importance will be the launching of the lifeboat on the moat, in which they [children in attendance] will all be required to assist, then exploratory expeditions will be made in the lifeboat all round the moat.

  Attractions included a baby show, a recital by the cinema orchestra, fortune-telling from the “Queen of Sheba,” and races on the lawn. Pandora won the race for girls aged eight to ten and also danced “graceful classical Greek dances” on the lawn. So central was Tommy Tucker to the proceedings that he was rechristened “Admiral Tucker, the Lord High Everybody of the Day.” As the event reached its conclusion, Will Crooks, M.P., proposed “a hearty vote of thanks to Mrs Bland for distributing th
e prizes and lending her grounds.” Edith insisted that she deserved no thanks since “it had been the greatest pleasure to her to see them all there, and their thanks were due to the ladies and Mr Tucker for all the work they had done.” Afterward, “dancing on the lawn in the gathering twilight, to the fine music of the cinema orchestra, brought the programme of events to an end.” The Pioneer declared the event “probably their greatest public success so far recorded.”27

  But life was difficult for Edith. She told Harry that she had endured a “horrible three years” since Hubert’s death, and she likened these years to “shivering in a sort of Arctic night.” Still, even though she called him “the best man I have ever known,” when Tommy had proposed marriage to her six months earlier she had turned him down. Undaunted, he declared his intention of “devoting the rest of his life” to her. When she discovered that he had turned down a job worth an extra £100 (approximately £8,600, or USD$11,400, today) a year in order to stay near her, she decided “perhaps life would be less wretched if one joined hands with a good friend and chum who believed that one could make him happy.”28 She talked it over with family and close friends before she accepted his proposal, and she prayed to his late wife, Sophia, asking that she bless their marriage.

  Tommy and Edith were married in St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church in Woolwich on February 20, 1917. This surprised Iris, since Edith had expressed anger that the pope had remained neutral during the war, particularly after Germany invaded Belgium.29 By the time they arrived back at Tommy’s little house, they were so tired that she placed her head on his shoulder and they both fell happily asleep. They made Well Hall their home but kept Tommy’s house, which they nicknamed “the Hutch,” as a “little refuge from P.G.s.”

  Edith told Edward Andrade that everyone was “very much surprised” at her second marriage, “but no one more surprised than I am,” she added. She attributed its success to the fact the Tommy was not a literary man, although she recognized that her second husband shared several characteristics with her first: “his sane Socialist view of life, his sense of humour, and his love for me.” She likened her second marriage to “a consolation prize for all sorts of failures” and admitted that “the knowledge that I have a friend and comrade to sit on the other side of the hearth where life’s dying embers fade is incredibly comforting.”30 She signed a letter to Harry “E.N. Bland-Tucker” and described her newfound contentment: