PART I. Ashfield

O! ma chère maison; mon nid, mon gîte
Le passé Vhabite…O ma chère maison




I

One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is to have a happy childhood. I had a very happy childhood.
I had a home and a garden that I loved; a wise and patient Nanny; as father and mother two people who loved each other dearly and made a success of their marriage and of parenthood.

Looking back I feel that our house was truly a happy house. That was largely due to my father, for my father was a very agreeable man. The quality of agreeableness Is not much stressed nowadays. People tend to ask if a man is clever, industrious, if he contributes to the well-being of the community, if he ‘counts’ in the scheme of things. But Charles Dickens puts the matter delightfully in David Copperfield:

‘Is your brother an agreeable man, Peggotty?’ I enquired cautiously.

‘Oh what an agreeable man he is!’ exclaimed Peggotty.

Ask yourself that question about most of your friends and acquaintances, and you will perhaps be surprised at how seldom your answer will be the same as Peggotty’s.

By modern standards my father would probably not be approved of.

He was a lazy man. It was the days of independent incomes, and if you had an independent income you didn’t work. You weren’t expected to. I strongly suspect that my father would not have been particularly good at working anyway.

He left our house in Torquay every morning and went to his club.

He returned, in a cab, for lunch, and in the afternoon went back to the club, played whist all afternoon, and returned to the house in time to dress for dinner. During the season, he spent his days at the Cricket Club, of which he was President. He also occasionally got up amateur theatricals. He had an enormous number of friends and loved entertaining them. There was one big dinner party at our home every week, and he and my mother went out to dinner usually another two or three times a week.

It was only later that I realized what a much loved man he was. After his death, letters came from all over the world. And locally tradesmen, cabmen, old employees–again and again some old man would come up to me and say: ‘Ah! I remember Mr Miller well. I’ll never forget him.

Not many like him nowadays.’

Yet he had no outstanding characteristics. He was not particularly intelligent. I think that he had a simple and loving heart, and he really cared for his fellow men. He had a great sense of humour and he easily made people laugh. There was no meanness in him, no jealousy, and he was almost fantastically generous. And he had a natural happiness and serenity.

My mother was entirely different. She was an enigmatic and arresting personality–more forceful than my father–startlingly original in her ideas, shy and miserably diffident about herself, and at bottom, I think, with a natural melancholy.

Servants and children were devoted to her, and her lightest word was always promptly obeyed. She would have made a first class educator.

Anything she told you immediately became exciting and significant.

Sameness bored her and she would jump from one subject to another in a way that sometimes made her conversation bewildering. As my father used to tell her, she had no sense of humour. To that accusation she would protest in an injured voice: ‘Just because I don’t think certain stories of yours are funny, Fred…’ and my father would roar with laughter.

She was about ten years younger than my father and she had loved him devotedly ever since she was a child often. All the time that he was a gay young man, flitting about between New York and the South of France, my mother, a shy quiet girl, sat at home, thinking about him, writing an occasional poem in her ‘album,’ embroidering a pocket-book for him.

That pocket-book, incidentally, my father kept all his life.

A typically Victorian romance, but with a wealth of deep feeling behind it.

I am interested in my parents, not only because they were my parents, but because they achieved that very rare production, a happy marriage.

Up to date I have only seen four completely successful marriages. Is there a formula for success? I can hardly think so. Of my four examples, one was of a girl of seventeen to a man over fifteen years her senior. He had protested she could not know her mind. She replied that she knew it perfectly and had determined to marry him some three years back!

Their married life was further complicated by having first one and then the other mother-in-law living with them-enough to wreck most alliances. The wife is calm with a quality of deep intensity. She reminds me a little of my mother without having her brilliance and intellectual interests. They have three children, all now long out in the world. Their partnership has lasted well over thirty years and they are still devoted.

Another was that of a young man to a woman fifteen years older than himself–a widow. She refused him for many years, at last accepted him, and they lived happily until her death 35 years later.

My mother Clara Boehmer went through unhappiness as a child.

Her father, an officer in the Argyll Highlanders, was thrown from his horse and fatally injured, and my grandmother was left, a young and lovely widow with four children, at the age of 27 with nothing but her widow’s pension. It was then that her elder sister, who had recently married a rich American as his second wife, wrote to her offering to adopt one of the children and bring it up as her own.

To the anxious young widow, working desperately with her needle to support and educate four children, the offer was not to be refused. Of the three boys and one girl, she selected the girl; either because it seemed to her that boys could make their way in the world while a girl needed the advantages of easy living, or because, as my mother always believed, she cared for the boys more. My mother left Jersey and came to the North of England to a strange home. I think the resentment she felt, the deep hurt at being unwanted, coloured her attitude to life. It made her distrustful of herself and suspicious of people’s affection. Her aunt was a kindly woman, good-humoured and generous, but she was imperceptive of a child’s feelings. My mother had all the so-called advantages of a comfortable home and a good education–what she lost and what nothing could replace was the carefree life with her brothers in her own home.

Quite often I have seen in correspondence columns enquiries from anxious parents asking if they ought to let a child go to others because of ‘the advantages she will have which I cannot provide–such as a first-class education’. I always long to cry out: Don’t let the child go. Her own home, her own people, love, and the security of belonging–what does the best education in the world mean against that?

My mother was deeply miserable in her new life. She cried herself to sleep every night, grew thin and pale, and at last became so ill that her aunt called in a doctor. He was an elderly, experienced man, and after talking to the little girl he went to her aunt and said: ‘The child’s homesick.’

Her aunt was astonished and unbelieving. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘That couldn’t possibly be so. Clara’s a good quiet child, she never gives any trouble, and she’s quite happy.’ But the old doctor went back to the child and talked to her again. She had brothers, hadn’t she? How many?

What were their names? And presently the child broke down in a storm of weeping, and the whole story came out.

Bringing out the trouble eased the strain, but the feeling always remained of ‘not being wanted’. I think she held it against my grandmother until her dying day. She became very attached to her American ‘uncle’. He was a sick man by then, but he was fond of quiet little Clara and she used to come and read to him from her favourite book, The King of the Golden River. But the real solace in her life were the periodical visits of her aunt’s stepson–Fred Miller–her so-called ‘Cousin Fred’.

He was then about twenty and he was always extra kind to his little ‘cousin’. One day, when she was about eleven, he said to his stepmother:

‘What lovely eyes Clara has got!’

Clara, who had always thought of herself as terribly plain, went upstairs and peered at herself in her aunt’s large dressing-table mirror.

Perhaps her eyes were rather nice…She felt immeasurably cheered.

From then on, her heart was given irrevocably to Fred.

Over in America an old family friend said to the gay young man, ‘Freddie, one day you will marry that little English cousin of yours.’

Astonished, he replied, ‘Clara? She’s only a child.’

But he always had a special feeling for the adoring child. He kept her childish letters and the poems she wrote him, and after a long series of flirtations with social beauties and witty girls in New York (among them Jenny Jerome, afterwards Lady Randolph Churchill) he went home to England to ask the quiet little cousin to be his wife.

It is typical of my mother that she refused him firmly.

‘Why?’ I once asked her.

‘Because I was dumpy,’ she replied.

An extraordinary but, to her, quite valid reason.

My father was not to be gainsaid. He came a second time, and on this occasion my mother overcame her misgivings and rather dubiously agreed to marry him, though full of misgivings that he would be ‘disappointed in her’.

So they were married, and the portrait that I have of her in her wedding dress shows a lovely serious face with dark hair and big hazel eyes.

Before my sister was born they went to Torquay, then a fashionable winter resort enjoying the prestige later accorded to the Riviera, and took furnished rooms there. My father was enchanted with Torquay. He loved the sea. He had several friends living there, and others, Americans, who came for the winter. My sister Madge was born in Torquay, and shortly after that my father and mother left for America, which at that time they expected to be their permanent home. My father’s grandparents were still living, and after his own mother’s death in Florida he had been brought up by them in the quiet of the New England countryside.

He was very attached to them and they were keen to see his wife and baby daughter. My brother was born whilst they were in America. Some time after that my father decided to return to England. No sooner had he arrived than business troubles recalled him to New York. He suggested to my mother that she should take a furnished house in Torquay and settle there until he could return.

My mother accordingly went to look at furnished houses in Torquay.

She returned with the triumphant announcement: ‘Fred; I’ve bought a house!’

My father almost fell over backwards. He still expected to live in America.

‘But why did you do that?’ he asked.

‘Because I liked it,’ explained my mother.

She has seen, it appeared, about 35 houses, but only one did she fancy, and that house was for sale only–its owners did not want to let. Sc my mother, who had been left £2000 by my aunt’s husband, had appealed to my aunt, who was her trustee, and they had forthwith bought the house.

‘But we’ll only be there for a year,’ groaned my father, ‘at most.’

My mother, whom we always claimed was clairvoyant, replied that they could always sell it again. Perhaps she saw dimly her family living in that house for many years ahead.

‘I loved the house as soon as I got into it,’ she insisted. ‘It’s got a wonderfully peaceful atmosphere.’

The house was owned by some people called Brown who were Quakers, and when my mother, hesitatingly, condoled with Mrs Brown on having to leave the house they had lived in so many years, the old lady said gently:

‘I am happy to think of thee and thy children living here, my dear.’

It was, my mother said, like a blessing.

Truly I believe there was a blessing upon the house. It was an ordinary enough villa, not in the fashionable part of Torquay–the Warberrys or the Lincombes–but at the other end of the town the older part of Tor Mohun. At that time the road in which it was situated led almost at once into rich Devon country, with lanes and fields. The name of the house was Ashfield and it has been my home, off and on, nearly all my life.

For my father did not, after all, make his home in America. He liked Torquay so much that he decided not to leave it. He settled down to his club and his whist and his friends. My mother hated living near the sea, disliked all social gatherings and was unable to play any game of cards.

But she lived happily in Ashfield, and gave large dinner parties, attended social functions, and on quiet evenings at home would ask my father with hungry impatience for local drama and what had happened at the club today.

‘Nothing,’ my father would reply happily.

‘But surely, Fred, someone must have said something interesting?’

My father obligingly racks his brains, but nothing comes. He says that M—is still too mean to buy a morning paper and comes down to the club, reads the news there, and then insists on retailing it to the other members. ‘I say, you fellows, have you seen that on the North West Frontier…’ etc. Everyone is deeply annoyed, since M—is one of the richest members.

My mother, who has heard all this before, is not satisfied. My father relapses into quiet contentment. He leans back in his chair, stretches out his legs to the fire and gently scratches his head (a forbidden pastime).

‘What are you thinking about, Fred?’ demands my mother.

‘Nothing,’ my father replies with perfect truth.

‘You can’t be thinking about nothing?

Again and again that statement baffles my mother. To her it is unthinkable.

Through her own brain thoughts dart with the swiftness of swallows in flight. Far from thinking of nothing, she is usually thinking of three things at once.

As I was to realise many years later, my mother’s ideas were always slightly at variance with reality. She saw the universe as more brightly coloured than it was, people as better or worse than they were. Perhaps because in the years of her childhood she had been quiet, restrained, with her emotions kept well below the surface, she tended to see the world in terms of drama that came near, sometimes, to melodrama. Her creative imagination was so strong that it could never see things as drab or ordinary. She had, too, curious flashes of intuition–of knowing suddenly what other people were thinking. When my brother was a young man in the Army and had got into monetary difficulties which he did not mean to divulge to his parents, she startled him one evening by looking across at him as he sat frowning and worrying. ‘Why, Monty,’ she said, ‘you’ve been to moneylenders. Have you been raising money on your grandfather’s will? You shouldn’t do that. It’s better to go to your father and tell him about it.’

Her faculty for doing that sort of thing was always surprising her family. My sister said once: ‘Anything I don’t want mother to know, I don’t even think of, if she’s in the room.’


II

Difficult to know what one’s first memory is. I remember distinctly my third birthday. The sense of my own importance surges up in me. We are having tea in the garden–in the part of the garden where, later, a hammock swings between two trees.

There is a tea-table and it is covered with cakes, with my birthday cake, all sugar icing and with candles in the middle of it. Three candles. And then the exciting occurrence–a tiny red spider, so small that I can hardly see it, runs across the white cloth. And my mother says: ‘It’s a lucky spider, Agatha, a lucky spider for your birthday…’ And then the memory fades, except for a fragmentary reminiscence of an interminable argument sustained by my brother as to how many eclairs he shall be allowed to eat.

The lovely, safe, yet exciting world of childhood. Perhaps the most absorbing thing in mine is the garden. The garden was to mean more and more to me, year after year. I was to know every tree in it, and attach a special meaning to each tree. From a very early time, it was divided in my mind into three distinct parts.

There was the kitchen garden, bounded by a high wall which abutted on the road. This was uninteresting to me except as a provider of raspberries and green apples, both of which I ate in large quantities. It was the kitchen garden but nothing else. It offered no possibilities of enchantment.

Then came the garden proper–a stretch of lawn running downhill, and studded with certain interesting entities. The ilex, the cedar, the Wellingtonia (excitingly tall). Two fir-trees, associated for some reason not now clear with my brother and sister. Monty’s tree you could climb (that is to say hoist yourself gingerly up three branches). Madge’s tree, when you had burrowed cautiously into it, had a seat, an invitingly curved bough, where you could sit and look out unseen on the outside world. Then there was what I called the turpentine tree which exuded a sticky strong-smelling gum which I collected carefully in leaves and which was ‘very precious balm’. Finally, the crowning glory, the beech tree–the biggest tree in the garden, with a pleasant shedding of beechnuts which I ate with relish. There was a copper beech, too, but this, for some reason, never counted in my tree world.

Thirdly, there was the wood. In my imagination it looked and indeed still looms as large as the New Forest. Mainly composed of ash trees, it had a path winding through it. The wood had everything that is connected with woods. Mystery, terror, secret delight, inaccessibility and distance…

The path through the wood led out on to the tennis or croquet lawn at the top of a high bank in front of the dining-room window. When you emerged there, enchantment ended. You were in the everyday world once more, and ladies, their skirts looped up and held in one hand, were playing croquet, or, with straw boater-hats on their heads, were playing tennis.

When I had exhausted the delights of ‘playing in the garden’ I returned to the Nursery wherein was Nursie, a fixed point, never changing. Perhaps because she was an old woman and rheumatic, my games were played around and beside, but not wholly with, Nursie. They were all make-believe.

From as early as I can remember, I had various companions of my own choosing. The first lot, whom I cannot remember except as a name, were ‘The Kittens’. I don’t know now who ‘The Kittens’ were, and whether I was myself a Kitten, but I do remember their names:

Clover, Blackie and three others. Their mother’s name was Mrs Benson.

Nursie was too wise ever to talk to me about them, or to try to join in the murmurings of conversation going on round her feet. Probably she was thankful that I could amuse myself so easily.

Yet it was a horrible shock to me one day when I came up the stairs from the garden for tea to hear Susan the housemaid saying:

‘Don’t seem to care for toys much, does she? What does she play with?’

And Nursie’s voice replying:

‘Oh she plays that she’s a kitten with some other kittens.’

Why is there such an innate demand for secrecy in a child’s mind?

The knowledge that anyone–even Nursie–knew about The Kittens upset me to the core. From that day on I set myself never to murmur aloud in my games. The Kittens were My Kittens and only mine. No one must know.

I must, of course, have had toys. Indeed, since I was an indulged and much loved child, I must have had a good variety of them, but I do not remember any, except, vaguely, a box of variegated beads, and stringing them into necklaces. I also remember a tiresome cousin, an adult, insisting teasingly that my blue beads were green and my green ones were blue.

My feelings were as those of Euclid: ‘which is absurd’, but politely I did not contradict her. The joke fell flat.

I remember some dolls: Phoebe, whom I did not much care for, and a doll called Rosalind or Rosy. She had long golden hair and I admired her enormously, but I did not play much with her. I preferred The Kittens.

Mrs Benson was terribly poor, and it was all very sad. Captain Benson, their father, had been a Sea Captain and had gone down at sea, which was why they had been left in such penury. That more or less ended the Saga of the Kittens except that there existed vaguely in my mind a glorious finale to come of Captain Benson not being dead and returning one day with vast wealth just when things had become quite desperate in the Kittens’ home.

From the Kittens I passed on to Mrs Green. Mrs Green had a hundred children, of whom the important ones were Poodle, Squirrel and Tree.

Those three accompanied me on all my exploits in the garden. They were not quite children and not quite dogs, but indeterminate creatures between the two.

Once a day, like all well brought-up children, I ‘went for a walk’. This I much disliked, especially buttoning up my boots-a necessary preliminary.

I lagged behind and shuffled my feet, and the only thing that got me through was Nursie’s stories. She had a repertoire of six, all centred on the various children of the families with which she had lived.

I remember none of them now, but I do know that one concerned a tiger in India, one was about monkeys, and one about a snake. They were very exciting, and I was allowed to choose which I would hear. Nursie repeated them endlessly without the least sign of weariness.

Sometimes, as a great treat, I was allowed to remove Nursie’s snowy ruffled cap. Without it, she somehow retreated into private life and lost her official status. Then, with elaborate care, I would tie a large blue satin ribbon round her head–with enormous difficulty and holding my breath, because tying a bow is no easy matter for a four-year-old. After which I would step back and exclaim in ecstasy: ‘Oh Nursie, you are beautiful!’

At which she would smile and say in her gentle voice:

‘Am I, love?’

After tea, I would be put into starched muslin and go down to the drawing-room to my mother to be played with.

If the charm of Nursie’s stories were that they were always the same, so that Nursie represented the rock of stability in my life, the charm of my mother was that her stories were always different and that we practically never played the same game twice. One story, I remember, was about a mouse called Bright Eyes. Bright Eyes had several different adventures, but suddenly, one day, to my dismay, my mother declared that there were no more stories about Bright Eyes to tell. I was on the point of weeping when my mother said: ‘But I’ll tell you a story about a Curious Candle.’ We had two instalments of the Curious Candle, which was, I think, a kind of detective story, when unluckily some visitors came to stay and our private games and stories were in abeyance. When the visitors left and I demanded the end of the Curious Candle, which had paused at a most thrilling moment when the villain was slowly rubbing poison into the candle, my mother looked blank and apparently could remember nothing about the matter. That unfinished serial still haunts my mind. Another delightful game was ‘Houses’, in which we collected bath towels from all over the house and draped them over chairs and tables so as to make ourselves residences, out of which we emerged on all fours.

I remember little of my brother and sister, and I presume this is because they were away at school. My brother was at Harrow and my sister at Brighton at the Miss Lawrences’ School which was afterwards to become Roedean. My mother was considered go-ahead to send her daughter to a boarding school, and my father broad-minded to allow it.

But my mother delighted in new experiments.

Her own experiments were mostly in religion. She was, I think, of a naturally mystic turn of mind. She had the gift of prayer and contemplation, but her ardent faith and devotion found it difficult to select a suitable form of worship. My long-suffering father allowed himself to be taken to first one, now another place of worship.

Most of these religious flirtations took place before I was born. My mother had nearly been received into the Roman Catholic church, had then bounced off into being a Unitarian (which accounted for my brother never having been christened), and had from there become a budding Theosophist, but took a dislike to Mrs Besant when hearing her lecture.

After a brief but vivid interest in Zoroastrianism, she returned, much to my father’s relief, to the safe haven of the Church of England, but with a preference for ‘high’ churches. There was a picture of St. Francis by her bed, and she read The Imitation of Christ night and morning. That same book lies always by my bed.

My father was a simple-hearted, orthodox Christian. He said his prayers every night and went to Church every Sunday. His religion was matter-of-fact and without heart-searchings–but if my mother liked hers with trimmings, it was quite all right with him. He was, as I have said, an agreeable man.

I think he was relieved when my mother returned to the Church of England in time for me to be christened in the Parish Church. I was called Mary after my grandmother, Clarissa after my mother, and Agatha as an afterthought, suggested on the way to the church by a friend of my mother’s who said it was a nice name.

My own religious views were derived mainly from Nursie, who was a Bible Christian. She did not go to Church but read her Bible at home.

Keeping the Sabbath was very important, and being worldly was a sore offence in the eyes of the Almighty. I was myself insufferably smug in my conviction of being one of the ‘saved’. I refused to play games on Sunday or sing or strum the piano, and I had terrible fears for the ultimate salvation of my father, who played croquet blithely on Sunday afternoons and made gay jokes about curates and even, once, about a bishop.

My mother, who had been passionately enthusiastic for education for girls, had now, characteristically, swung round to the opposite view. No child ought to be allowed to read until it was eight years old: better for the eyes and also for the brain.

Here, however, things did not go according to plan. When a story had been read to me and I liked it, I would ask for the book and study the pages which, at first meaningless, gradually began to make sense. When out with Nursie, I would ask her what the words written up over shops or on hoardings were. As a result, one day I found I was reading a book called The Angel of Love quite successfully to myself. I proceeded to do so out loud to Nursie.

‘I’m afraid, Ma’am,’ said Nursie apologetically to mother the next day, ‘Miss Agatha can read.’

My mother was much distressed–but there it was. Not yet five, but the world of story books was open to me. From then on, for Christmas and birthdays I demanded books.

My father said that, as I could read, I had better learn to write. This was not nearly so pleasant. Shaky copybooks full of pothooks and hangers still turn up in old drawers, or lines of shaky B’s and R’s, which I seem to have had great difficulty in distinguishing since I had learned to read by the look of words and not by their letters.

Then my father said I might as well start arithmetic, and every morning after breakfast I would set to at the dining-room window seat, enjoying myself far more with figures than with the recalcitrant letters of the alphabet.

Father was proud and pleased with my progress. I was promoted to a little brown book of ‘Problems’. I loved ‘Problems’. Though merely sums in disguise, they had an intriguing flavour. ‘John has five apples, George has six; if John takes away two of George’s apples, how many will George have at the end of the day?’ and so on. Nowadays, thinking of that problem, I feel an urge to reply: ‘Depends how fond of apples George is.’ But then I wrote down 4, with the feeling of one who has solved a knotty point, and added of my own accord, ‘and John will have 7.’ That I liked arithmetic seemed strange to my mother, who had never, as she admitted freely, had any use for figures, and had so much trouble with household accounts that my father took them over.

The next excitement in my life was the gift of a canary. He was named Goldie and became very tame, hopping about the nursery, sometimes sitting on Nursie’s cap, and perching on my finger when I called him. He was not only my bird, he was the start of a new secret Saga. The chief personages were Dickie and Dicksmistress. They rode on chargers all over the country (the garden) and had great adventures and narrow escapes from bands of robbers.

One day the supreme catastrophe occurred. Goldie disappeared. The window was open, the gate of his cage unlatched. It seemed likely he had flown away. I can still remember the horrible, dragging length of that day.

It went on and on and on. I cried and cried and cried. The cage was put outside the window with a piece of sugar in the bars. My mother and I went round the garden calling, ‘Dickie, Dickie, Dickie’. The housemaid was threatened with instant dismissal by my mother for cheerfully remarking, ‘Some cat’s got him, likely as not,’ which started my tears flowing again.

It was when I had been put to bed and lay there, still sniffing spasmodically and holding my mother’s hand, that a cheerful little cheep was heard. Down from the top of the curtain pole came Master Dickie. He flew round the nursery once and then entered his cage. Oh that incredulous wonder of delight! All that day-that unending miserable day–Dickie had been up the curtain pole.

My mother improved the occasion after the fashion of the time.

‘You see,’ she said, ‘how silly you have been? What a waste all that crying was? Never cry about things until you are sure.’

I assured her that I never would.

Something else came to me then, besides the joy of Dickie’s return, the strength of my mother’s love and understanding when there was trouble.

In the black abyss of misery, holding tight to her hand had been the one comfort. There was something magnetic and healing in her touch. In illness there was no one like her. She could give you her own strength and vitality.


III

The outstanding figure in my early life was Nursie. And round myself and Nursie was our own special world, The Nursery.

I can see the wallpaper now–mauve irises climbing up the walls in an endless pattern. I used to lie in bed at night looking at it in the firelight or the subdued light of Nursie’s oil lamp on the table. I thought it was beautiful. Indeed, I have had a passion for mauve all my life.

Nursie sat by the table sewing or mending. There was a screen round my bed and I was supposed to be asleep, but I was usually awake, admiring the irises, trying to see just how they intertwined, and thinking up new adventures for the Kittens. At nine-thirty, Nursie’s supper tray was brought up by Susan the housemaid. Susan was a great big girl, jerky and awkward in her movements and apt to knock things over. She and Nursie would hold a whispered conversation, then, when she had gone, Nursie would come over and look behind the screen.

‘I thought you wouldn’t be asleep. I suppose you want a taste?’

‘Oh, yes please, Nursie.’

A delicious morsel of juicy steak was placed in my mouth. I cannot really believe that Nursie had steak every night for supper, but in my memories steak it always is.

One other person of importance in the house was Jane our cook, who ruled the kitchen with the calm superiority of a queen. She came to my mother when she was a slim girl of nineteen, promoted from being a kitchenmaid. She remained with us for forty years and left weighing at least fifteen stone. Never once during that time had she displayed any emotion, but when she finally yielded to her brother’s urgings and went to keep house for him in Cornwall, the tears rolled silently down her cheeks as she left. She took with her one trunk–probably the trunk with which she had arrived. In all those years she had accumulated no possessions. She was, by today’s standards, a wonderful cook, but my mother occasionally complained that she had no imagination.

‘Oh dear, what pudding shall we have tonight? You suggest something, Jane.’

‘What about a nice stone pudding, Ma’am?’

A stone pudding was the only suggestion Jane ever vouchsafed, but for some reason my mother was allergic to the idea and said no, we wouldn’t have that, we’d have something else. To this day I have never known what a stone pudding was–my mother did not know either–she just said that it sounded dull.

When I first knew Jane she was enormous–one of the fattest women I have ever seen. She had a calm face, hair parted in the middle–beautiful, naturally wavy dark hair scraped back into a bun in the nape of her neck. Her jaws moved rhythmically all the time because she was invariably eating something–a fragment of pastry, a freshly-made scone, or a rock cake–it was like a large gentle cow everlastingly chewing the cud.

Splendid eating went on in the kitchen. After a large breakfast, eleven o’clock brought the delights of cocoa, and a plate of freshly-made rock cakes and buns, or perhaps hot jam pastry. The midday meal took place when ours was finished, and by etiquette the kitchen was taboo until 3 o’clock had struck. I was instructed by my mother that I was never to intrude during the kitchen lunchtime: ‘That is their own time, and it must not be interrupted by us.’

If by some unforeseen chance–a cancellation of dinner guests for instance-a message had to be conveyed, my mother would apologise for disturbing them, and, by unwritten law, none of the servants would rise at her entrance if they were seated at table.

Servants did an incredible amount of work. Jane cooked five-course dinners for seven or eight people as a matter of daily routine. For grand dinner parties of twelve or more, each course contained alternatives–two soups, two fish courses, etc. The housemaid cleaned about forty silver photograph frames and toilet silver ad lib, took in and emptied a ‘hip bath’ (we had a bathroom but my mother considered it a revolting idea to use a bath others had used), brought hot water to bedrooms four times a day, lit bedroom fires in winter, and mended linen etc. every afternoon.

The parlourmaid cleaned incredible amounts of silver and washed glasses with loving care in a papier mache bowl, besides providing perfect waiting at table.

In spite of these arduous duties, servants were, I think, actively happy, mainly because they knew they were appreciated–as experts, doing expert work. As such, they had that mysterious thing, prestige; they looked down with scorn on shop assistants and their like.

One of the things I think I should miss most, if I were a child nowadays, would be the absence of servants. To a child they were the most colourful part of daily life. Nurses supplied platitudes; servants supplied drama, entertainment, and all kinds of unspecified but interesting knowledge.

Far from being slaves they were frequently tyrants. They ‘knew their place’, as was said, but knowing their place meant not subservience but pride, the pride of the professional. Servants in the early 1900s were highly skilled. Parlourmaids had to be tall, to look smart, to have been perfectly trained, to have the right voice in which to murmur: ‘Hock or sherry?’ They performed intricate miracles of valeting for the gentlemen.

I doubt if there is any such thing as a real servant nowadays. Possibly a few are hobbling about between the ages of seventy and eighty, but otherwise there are merely the dailies, the waitresses, those who ‘oblige’, domestic helpers, working housekeepers, and charming young women who want to combine earning a little extra money with hours that will suit them and their children’s needs. They are amiable amateurs; they often become friends but they seldom command the awe with which we regarded our domestic staff.

Servants, of course, were not a particular luxury–it was not a case of only the rich having them; the only difference was that the rich had more.

They had butlers and footmen and housemaids and parlourmaids and between-maids and kitchen-maids and so on. As you descended the stages of affluence you would arrive eventually at what is so well described in those delightful books of Barry Pain, Eliza and Eliza’s Husband, as The girl’.

Our various servants are far more real to me than my mother’s friends and my distant relations. I have only to close my eyes to see Jane moving majestically in her kitchen, with vast bust, colossal hips, and a starched band that confined her waist. Her fat never seemed to trouble her, she never suffered from her feet, her knees or her ankles, and if she had blood pressure she was quite unaware of it. As far as I remember she was never ill. She was Olympian. If she had emotions, she never showed them; she was prodigal neither of endearments nor of anger; only on the days when she was engaged in the preparation of a large dinner-party a slight flush would show. The intense calm of her personality would be what I should describe as ‘faintly ruffled’-her face slightly redder, her lips pressed tight together, a faint frown on her forehead. Those were the days when I used to be banished from the kitchen with decision. ‘Now, Miss Agatha, I have no time today–I’ve got a lot on hand. I’ll give you a handful of raisins and then you must go out in the garden and not come and worry me any more.’ I left immediately, impressed, as always, by Jane’s utterances.

Jane’s principal characteristics were reticence and aloofness. We knew she had a brother, otherwise we knew little of her family. She never talked about them. She came from Cornwall. She was called ‘Mrs Rowe’, but that was a courtesy title. Like all good servants, she knew her place.

It was a place of command, and she made it clear to those working in the house that she was in charge.

Jane must have taken pride in the splendid dishes she cooked, but never showed it or spoke of it. She accepted compliments on her dinner on the following morning with no sign of gratification, though I think she was definitely pleased when my father came out into the kitchen and congratulated her.

Then there was Barker, one of our housemaids, who opened up to me yet another vista of life. Barkers’ father was a particularly strict Plymouth Brother, and Barker was very conscious of sin and the way she had broken away in certain matters. ‘Damned to all Eternity I shall be, no doubt of it,’ she would say, with a kind of cheerful relish. ‘What my father would say, I don’t know, if he knew I went to Church of England services.

What’s more, I enjoyed them. I enjoyed the Vicar’s sermon last Sunday, and I enjoyed the singing too.’

A child who came to stay was heard by my mother saying scornfully one day to the parlourmaid: ‘Oh! you’re only a servant!’ and was promptly taken to task.

‘Never let me hear you speak like that to a servant. Servants must be treated with the utmost courtesy. They are doing skilled work which you could not possibly do yourself without long training. And remember they cannot answer back. You must always be polite to people whose position forbids them to be rude to you. If you are impolite, they will despise you, and rightly, because you have not acted like a lady.’

‘To be a little lady’ was well rammed home in those times. It included some curious items.

Starting with courtesy to dependents, it went on to such things as:

‘Always leave something on your plate for Lady Manners.’ ‘Never drink with your mouth full.’ ‘Remember never to put two halfpenny stamps on a letter unless it is a bill to a tradesman.’ And, of course ‘Put on clean underclothes when you are going on a railway journey in case there should be an accident.’

Tea-time in the kitchen was often a social reunion. Jane had innumerable friends, and one or two of them dropped in nearly every day. Trays of hot rock cakes came out of the oven. Never since have I tasted rock cakes like Jane’s. They were crisp and flat and full of currants, and eaten hot they were Heaven. Jane in her mild bovine way was quite a martinet; if one of the others rose from the table, a voice would say: ‘I haven’t finished yet, Florence,’ and Florence, abashed, would sit down again murmuring, ‘I beg your pardon, Mrs Rowe.’

Cooks of any seniority were always ‘Mrs’. Housemaids and parlourmaids were supposed to have ‘suitable’ names–e.g. Jane, Mary, Edith, etc. Such names as Violet, Muriel, Rosamund and so on were not considered suitable, and the girl was told firmly, ‘Whilst you are in my service you will be called “Mary’.’ Parlourmaids, if of sufficient seniority, were often called by their surnames.

Friction between ‘the nursery’ and ‘the kitchen’ was not uncommon, but Nursie, though no doubt standing on her rights, was a peaceable person and respected and consulted by the young maids.

Dear Nursie–I have a portrait of her hanging in my house in Devon.

It was painted by the same artist who painted the rest of my family, a painter well known at that time–N. H. J. Baird. My mother was somewhat critical of Mr Baird’s pictures: ‘He makes everybody look so dirty,’ she complained. ‘All of you look as if you hadn’t washed for weeks!’

There is something in what she said. The heavy blue and green shadows in the flesh tints of my brother’s face do suggest a reluctance to use soap and water, and the portrait of myself at sixteen has a suggestion of an incipient moustache, a blemish from which I have never suffered.

My father’s portrait, however, is so pink and white and shining that it might be an advertisement for soap. I suspect that it gave the artist no particular pleasure to paint, but that my mother had vanquished poor Mr Baird by sheer force of personality. My brother’s and sister’s portraits were not particularly like, my father’s was the living image of him, but was far less distinctive as a portrait.

Nursie’s portrait was, I am sure, a labour of love on Mr Baird’s part.

The transparent cambric of her frilled cap and apron is lovely, and a perfect frame for the wise wrinkled face with its deep set eyes-the whole reminiscent of some Flemish Old Master.

I don’t know how old Nursie was when she came to us, or why my mother should have chosen such an old woman, but she always said:

‘From the moment Nursie came, I never had to worry about you–I knew you were in good hands.’ A great many babies had passed through those hands–I was the last of them.

When the census came round, my father had to register the names and ages of everyone in the house.

‘Very awkward job,’ he said ruefully. ‘The servants don’t like you asking them their ages. And what about Nursie?’

So Nursie was summoned and stood before him, her hands folded in front of her snowy apron and her mild old eyes fixed on him inquiringly.

‘So you see,’ explained my father, after a brief resume of what a census was, ‘I have to put down everyone’s age. Er–what shall I put down for you?’

‘Whatever you like, Sir,’ replied Nursie politely.

‘Yes, but–er–I have to know.’

‘Whatever you think best, Sir.’ Nursie was not to be stampeded.

His own estimate being that she was at least seventy-five, he hazarded nervously: “Er–er–fifty-nine? Something like that?’

An expression of pain passed across the wrinkled face.

‘Do I really look as old as that, Sir?’ asked Nursie wistfully.

‘No, no–Well, what shall I say?’

Nursie returned to her gambit.

‘Whatever you think right, Sir,’ she said with dignity.

My father thereupon wrote down sixty-four.

Nursie’s attitude has its echoes in present times. When my husband, Max, was dealing with Polish and Yugoslav pilots during the last war, he encountered the same reaction.

‘Age?’

The pilot waves his hands amiably: ‘Anything you please–twenty, thirty, forty–it does not matter.’

‘And where were you born?’

‘Anywhere you like. Cracow, Warsaw, Belgrade, Zagreb-as you please.’

The ridiculous unimportance of these factual details could not be more clearly stressed.

Arabs are much the same.

‘Your father is well?’

‘Oh yes, but he is very old.’

‘How old?’

‘Oh a very old man–ninety, ninety—five.’

The father turns out to be just short of fifty.

But that is how life is viewed. When you are young, you are young; when you are in vigour you are a ‘very strong man’ when your vigour begins to fail, you are old. If old, you might as well be as old as possible.



On my fifth birthday, I was given a dog. It was the most shattering thing that ever happened to me; such unbelievable joy, that I was unable to say a word. When I read that well-known cliche ‘so and so was struck dumb’ I realize that it can be a simple statement of fact. I was struck dumb–I couldn’t even say thank-you. I could hardly look at my beautiful dog. Instead I turned away from him. I needed, urgently, to be alone and come to terms with this incredible happiness. (I have done the same thing frequently during my later life. Why is one so idiotic?) I think it was the lavatory to which I retired–a perfect place for quiet meditation, where no one could possibly pursue you. Lavatories were comfortable, almost residential apartments in those days. I closed the heavy mahogany shelf-like seat, sat on it, gazed unseeingly at the map of Torquay that hung on the wall, and gave myself up to realization.

‘I have a dog…a dog…. It’s a dog of my own…my very own dog…. It’s a Yorkshire terrier…my dog…my very own dog….’

My mother told me later that my father had been much disappointed by the reception of his gift.

‘I thought the child would love it.’ he said. ‘She doesn’t seem to care about it at all.’

But my mother, always understanding, said that I needed a little time.

‘She can’t quite take it in yet.’

The four-month-old Yorkshire terrier puppy, meantime, had wandered out disconsolately into the garden, where he attached himself to our gardener, a grumpy man called Davey. The dog had been bred by a jobbing gardener, and at the sight of a spade being pressed into the earth he felt that here was a place where he could feel at home. He sat down on the garden path and watched the digging with an attentive air.

Here in due course I found him and we made acquaintance. We were both shy, and made only tentative advances to each other. But by the end of the week Tony and I were inseparable. His official name, given him by my father, was George Washington–Tony, for short, was my contribution.

Tony was an admirable dog for a child–he was good-natured, affectionate, and lent himself to all my fancies. Nursie was spared certain ordeals. Bows of ribbon and general adornments were now applied to Tony, who welcomed them as a mark of appreciation and occasionally ate bits of them in addition to his quota of slippers. He had the privilege of being introduced into my new secret saga. Dickie (Goldie the canary) and Dicksmistress (me) were now joined by Lord Tony.



I remember less of my sister in those early years than of my brother. My sister was nice to me, while my brother called me Kid and was lofty–so naturally I attached myself to him whenever he permitted it. The chief fact I remember about him was that he kept white mice. I was introduced to Mr and Mrs Whiskers and their family. Nursie disapproved. She said they smelt. They did, of course.

We already had one dog in the house, an old Dandy Dinmont called Scotty, which belonged to my brother. My brother, named Louis Montant after my father’s greatest friend in America, was always known as Monty, and he and Scotty were inseparable. Almost automatically, my mother would murmur: ‘Don’t put your face down on the dog and let him lick you, Monty.’ Monty, flat on the floor by Scotty’s basket, with his arm wreathed lovingly round the dog’s neck, would pay no attention. My father would say: ‘That dog smells terrible!’ Scotty was then fifteen, and only a fervent dog-lover could deny the accusation. ‘Roses!’ Monty would murmur lovingly. ‘Roses! That’s what he smells of–roses.’

Alas, tragedy came to Scotty. Slow and blind, he was out walking with Nursie and myself when, crossing the road, a tradesman’s cart dashed round a corner, and he was run over. We brought him home in a cab and the vet was summoned, but Scotty died a few hours later. Monty was out sailing with some friends. My mother was disturbed at the thought of breaking the news to him. She had the body put in the wash-house and waited anxiously for my brother’s return. Unfortunately, instead of coming straight into the house as usual, he went round to the yard and into the wash-house, looking for some tools he needed. There he found Scotty’s body. He went straight off again and must have walked round for many hours. He got home at last just before midnight. My parents were understanding enough not to mention Scotty’s death to him. He dug Scotty’s grave himself in the Dogs’ Cemetery in a corner of the garden where each family dog had his name in due course on a small headstone.

My brother, given, as I have said, to remorseless teasing, used to call me the ‘scrawny chicken’. I obliged him by bursting into tears every time. Why the epithet infuriated me so I do not know. Being somewhat of a cry baby I used to trail off to Mother, sobbing out, ‘I aren’t a scrawny chicken, arm I, Marmee?’ My mother, unperturbed, would merely say: ‘If you don’t want to be teased, why do you go trailing after Monty all the time?’

The question was unanswerable, but such was my brother’s fascination for me that I could not keep away. He was at an age when he was highly scornful of kid sisters, and found me a thorough nuisance. Sometimes he would be gracious and admit me to his ‘workshop’, where he had a lathe, and would allow me to hold pieces of wood and tools and hand them to him. But sooner or later the scrawny chicken was told to take herself off.

Once he so highly favoured me as to volunteer to take me out with him in his boat. He had a small dinghy which he sailed on Torbay. Rather to everyone’s surprise I was allowed to go. Nursie, who was still with us then, was dead against the expedition, being of the opinion that I would get wet, dirty, tear my frock, pinch my fingers and almost certainly be drowned. ‘Young gentlemen don’t know how to look after a little girl.’

My mother said that she thought I had sense enough not to fall over-board, and that it would be an experience. I think also she wished to express appreciation of Monty’s unusual act of unselfishness. So we walked down the town and on to the pier. Monty brought the boat to the steps and Nursie passed me down to him. At the last moment, mother had qualms.

‘You are to be careful, Monty. Very careful. And don’t be out long. You will look after her, won’t you?’

My brother, who was, I imagine, already repenting of his kindly offer, said briefly, ‘She’ll be all right’. To me he said, ‘Sit where you are and keep still, and for goodness sake don’t touch anything.’

He then did various things with ropes. The boat assumed an angle that made it practically impossible for me to sit where I was and keep still as ordered, and also frightened me a good deal, but as we scudded through the water my spirits revived and I was transported with happiness.

Mother and Nursie stood on the end of the pier, gazing after us like figures in a Greek play, Nursie almost weeping as she prophesied doom, my mother seeking to allay her fears, adding finally, probably remembering what a bad sailor she herself was, ‘I don’t expect she’ll ever want to go again. The sea is quite choppy.’

Her pronouncement was true enough. I was returned shortly afterwards, green in the face, having ‘fed the fishes’ as my brother put it, three times. He landed me in high disgust, remarking that women were all the same.


IV

It was just before I was five years old that I first met fear. Nursie and I were primrosing one spring day. We had crossed the railway line and gone up Shiphay lane, picking primroses from the hedges, where they grew thickly.

We turned in through an open gate and went on picking. Our basket was growing full when a voice shouted at us, angry and rough:

‘Wot d’you think you’re doing ‘ere?’

He seemed to me a giant of a man, angry and red-faced.

Nursie said we were doing no harm, only primrosing.

‘Trespassing, that’s what you’re at. Get out of it. If you’re not out of that gate in one minute, I’ll boil you alive, see?’

I tugged desperately at Nursie’s hand as we went. Nursie could not go fast, and indeed did not try to do so. My fear mounted. When we were at last safely in the lane I almost collapsed with relief. I was white and sick, as Nursie suddenly noticed.

‘Dearie,’ she said gently, ‘you didn’t think he meant it, did you? Not to boil you or whatever it was?’

I nodded dumbly. I had visualised it. A great steaming cauldron on a fire, myself being thrust into it. My agonised screams. It was all deadly real to me.

Nursie talked soothingly. It was a way people had of speaking. A kind of joke, as it were. Not a nice man, a very rude, unpleasant man, but he hadn’t meant what he said. It was a joke.

It had been no joke to me, and even now when I go into a field a slight tremor goes down my spine. From that day to this I have never known so real a terror.

Yet in nightmares I never relived this particular experience. All children have nightmares, and I doubt if they are a result of nursemaids or others ‘frightening’ them, or of any happening in real life. My own particular nightmare centred round someone I called ‘The Gunman’. I never read a story about anyone of the kind. I called him The Gunman because he carried a gun, not because I was frightened of his shooting me, or for any reason connected with the gun. The gun was part of his appearance, which seems to me now to have been that of a Frenchman in grey-blue uniform, powdered hair in a queue and a kind of three-cornered hat, and the gun was some old-fashioned kind of musket. It was his mere presence that was frightening. The dream would be quite ordinary–a tea-party, or a walk with various people, usually a mild festivity of some kind. Then suddenly a feeling of uneasiness would come. There was someone–someone who ought not to be there–a horrid feeling of fear: and then I would see him–sitting at the tea-table, walking along the beach, joining in the game. His pale blue eyes would meet mine, and I would wake up shrieking: ‘The Gunman, the Gunman!’

‘Miss Agatha had one of her gunman dreams last night,’ Nursie would report in her placid voice.

‘Why is he so frightening, darling?’ my mother would ask. ‘What do you think he will do to you?’

I didn’t know why he was frightening. Later the dream varied. The Gunman was not always in costume. Sometimes, as we sat round a tea-table, I would look across at a friend, or a member of the family, and I would suddenly realise that it was not Dorothy or Phyllis or Monty, or my mother or whoever it might be. The pale blue eyes in the familiar face met mine–under the familiar appearance. It was really the Gunman.

At the age of four I fell in love. It was a shattering and wonderful experience. The object of my passion was one of the Dartmouth cadets, a friend of my brother’s. Golden-haired and blue-eyed, he appealed to all my romantic instincts. He himself could have had no idea of the emotions he aroused. Gloriously uninterested in the ‘kid sister’ of his friend Monty, he would probably have said, if asked, that I disliked him. An excess of emotion caused me to go in the opposite direction if I saw him coming, and when seated at the dining-table, to keep my head resolutely turned away. My mother took me gently to task.

‘I know you’re shy, dear, but you must be polite. It’s so rude to turn your head away from Philip all the time, and if he speaks to you, you only mutter. Even if you dislike him, you must be polite.’

Dislike him! How little anyone knew. When I think of it now, how supremely satisfying early love can be. It demands nothing–not a look nor a word. It is pure adoration. Sustained by it, one walks on air, creating in one’s own mind heroic occasions on which one will be of service to the beloved one. Going into a plague camp to nurse him. Saving him from fire. Shielding him from a fatal bullet. Anything, indeed, that has caught the imagination in a story. In these imaginings there is never a happy ending. You yourself are burnt to death, shot, or succumb to the plague. The hero does not even know of the supreme sacrifice you have made. I sat on the nursery floor, and played with Tony, looking solemn and priggish, whilst inside my head a glorious exultation swirled in extravagant fancies. The months passed. Philip became a midshipman and left the Britannia. For a short while his image persisted and then dwindled. Love vanished, to return three years later, when I adored hopelessly a tall dark young Army captain who was courting my sister.



Ashfield was home and accepted as such; Ealing, however, was an excitement. It had all the romance of a foreign country. One of its principal joys was its lavatory. It had a splendidly large mahogany lavatory seat. Sitting on it one felt exactly like a Queen on her throne, and I rapidly translated Dicksmistress into Queen Marguerite, and Dickie became her son, Prince Goldie, the heir to the throne. He sat at her right hand on the small circle which enclosed the handsome Wedgwood plug handle. Here in the morning I woud retreat, sit bowing, giving audience, and extending my hand to be kissed until summoned angrily to come out by others wishing to enter. On the wall there hung a coloured map of New York City, also an object of interest to me. There were several American prints in the house. In the spare bedroom was a set of coloured prints for which I had a deep affection. One, entitled ‘Winter Sports’, depicted a very cold-looking man on a sheet of ice, dragging up a fish through a small hole. It seemed rather a melancholy sport to me. On the other hand, Grey Eddy, the trotter, was fascinatingly dashing.

Since my father had married the niece of his stepmother (his American father’s English second wife), and since he called her Mother whilst his wife continued to call her Auntie, she was usually known officially as Auntie-Grannie. My grandfather had spent the last years of his life going to and fro between his business in New York and its English branch in Manchester. His had been one of the ‘success stories’ of America. A poor boy from a family in Massachusetts, he had come to New York, been engaged more or less as an office boy, and had risen to be a partner in the firm. ‘Shirtsleeves to Swivel-chair in Three Generations’ had certainly come true in our family. My grandfather made a big fortune. My father, mainly owing to trust in his fellow men, let it dwindle away, and my brother ran through what was left of it like a flash of lightning.

Not long before he died my grandfather had bought a large house in Cheshire. He was a sick man by then, and his second wife was left a widow comparatively young. She lived on in Cheshire for a while, but finally bought a house in Ealing, which was then still practically in the country. As she often said, there were fields all around. However, by the time I came to visit her this seemed hard to believe. Rows of neat houses spread in every direction.

Grannie’s house and garden had a tremendous fascination for me. I divided the nursery into several ‘territories’. The front part had been built out with a bay window and had a gay striped drugget on the floor. This part I christened the Muriel Room (possibly because I had been fascinated by the term Oriel window). The back part of the nursery, covered with a Brussels carpet, was the Dining Hall. Various mats and pieces of linoleum were allocated by me to different rooms. I moved, busy and important, from one room of my house to another, murmuring under my breath. Nursie, peaceful as ever, sat stitching.

Another fascination was Auntie-Grannie’s bed, an immense mahogany four-poster closely hemmed in with red damask curtains. It was a feather bed, and early in the morning I would arrive before being dressed and climb in. Grannie was awake from six o’clock onwards, and always welcomed me. Downstairs there was the drawing-room, crowded to repletion with marquetry furniture and Dresden china, and perpetually shrouded in gloom because of the conservatory erected outside. The drawing-room was only used for parties. Next to the drawing-room was the morning-room, where almost invariably a ‘sewing-woman’ was ensconced. Now that I come to think of it, sewing-women were an inevitable accompaniment of a household. They all had a certain resemblance to each other in that they were usually very refined, in unfortunate circumstances, treated with careful courtesy by the mistress of the house, and the family, and with no courtesy at all by the servants, were sent in meals on trays, and–as far as I can remember–were unable to produce any article of clothing that fitted. Everything was either too tight everywhere or else hung on one in loose folds. The answer to any complaint was usually: ‘Ah yes, but Miss James has had such an unfortunate life.’

So, in the morning-room, Miss James sat and sewed with patterns all around her, and a sewing-machine in front of her.

In the dining-room, Grannie passed her life in Victorian contentment. The furniture was of heavy mahogany with a central table and chairs all round it. The windows were thickly draped with Nottingham lace. Grannie sat either at the table, in a huge leather-backed carver’s chair, writing letters, or else in a big velvet armchair by the fireplace. The tables, sofa, and some of the chairs were taken up with books, books that were meant to be there and books escaping out of loosely tied-up parcels. Grannie was always buying books, for herself and for presents, and in the end the books became too much for her and she forgot to whom she had meant to send them–or else discovered that ‘Mr Bennett’s dear little boy had, unnoticed by her, now reached the age of eighteen and was no longer eligible for The Boys of St. Guldred’s or The Adventures of Timothy Tiger.

An indulgent playmate, Grannie would lay aside the long scratchy-looking letter she was writing (heavily crossed ‘to save notepaper’) and enter into the delightful pastime of ‘a chicken from Mr Whiteley’s’. Needless to say, I was the chicken. Selected by Grannie with appeals to the shopman as to whether I was really young and tender, brought home, trussed up, skewered (yells of delight from my skewered self), put in the oven, done to a turn, brought on the table dished up, great show of sharpening the carving-knife, when suddenly the chicken comes alive and ‘It’s Me!’–grand climax–to be repeated ad lib.

One of the morning events was Grannie’s visit to the store-cupboard which was situated by the side door into the garden. I would immediately appear and Grannie would exclaim, ‘Now what can a little girl want here?’ The little girl would wait hopefully, peering into the interesting recesses. Rows of jars of jam and preserves. Boxes of dates, preserved fruits, figs, French plums, cherries, angelica, packets of raisins and currants, pounds of butter and sacks of sugar, tea and flour. All the household eatables lived there, and were solemnly handed out every day in anticipation of the day’s needs. Also a searching inquiry was held as to exactly what had been done with the previous day’s allocation. Grannie kept a liberal table for all, but was highly suspicious of waste. Household needs satisfied, and yesterday’s provender satisfactorily accounted for, Grannie would unscrew a jar of French plums and I would go gladly out into the garden with my hands full.

How odd it is, when remembering early days, that the weather seems constant in certain places. In my nursery at Torquay it is always an autumn or winter afternoon. There is a fire in the grate, and clothes drying on the high fireguard, and outside there are leaves swirling down, or sometimes, excitingly, snow. In the Ealing garden it is always summer–and particularly hot summer. I can relive easily the gasp of dry hot air and the smell of roses as I go out through the side door. That small square of green grass, surrounded with standard rose-trees, does not seem small to me. Again it was a world. First the roses, very important; any dead heads snipped off every day, the other roses cut and brought in and arranged in a number of small vases. Grannie was inordinately proud of her roses, attributing all their size and beauty to ‘the bedroom slops, my dear. Liquid manure–nothing like it! No one has roses like mine.’

On Sundays my other grandmother and usually two of my uncles used to come to midday dinner. It was a splendid Victorian day. Granny Boehmer, known as Granny B., who was my mother’s mother, would arrive about eleven o’clock, panting a little because she was very stout, even stouter than Auntie-Grannie. After taking a succession of trains and omnibuses from London, her first action would be to rid herself of her buttoned boots. Her servant Harriet used to come with her on these occasions. Harriet would kneel before her to remove the boots and substitute a comfortable pair of woolly slippers. Then with a deep sigh Granny B. would settle herself down at the dining-room table, and the two sisters would start their Sunday morning business. This consisted of lengthy and complicated accounts. Granny B. did a great deal of Auntie-Grannie’s shopping for her at the Army and Navy Stores in Victoria Street. The Army and Navy Stores was the hub of the universe to the two sisters. Lists, figures, accounts were gone into and thoroughly enjoyed by both. Discussions on quality of the goods purchased took place: ‘You wouldn’t have cared for it, Margaret. Not good quality material, very rawny–not at all like that last plum colour velvet.’ Then Auntie-Grannie would bring out her large fat purse, which I always looked upon with awe and considered as an outward and visible sign of immense wealth. It had a lot of gold sovereigns in the middle compartment, and the rest of it was bulging with half-crowns and sixpences and an occasional five shilling piece. The accounts for repairs and small purchases were settled. The Army and Navy Stores, of course, was on a deposit account–and I think that Auntie-Grannie always added a cash present for Granny B’s time and trouble. The sisters were fond of each other, but there was also a good deal of petty jealousy and bickering between them. Each enjoyed teasing the other, and getting the better of her in some way. Granny B. had, by her own account, been the beauty of the family. Auntie-Grannie used to deny this. ‘Mary (or Polly, as she called her) had a pretty face, yes,’ she would say. ‘But of course she hadn’t got the figure I had. Gentlemen like a figure.’

In spite of Polly’s lack of figure (for which, I may say, she amply made up later–I have never seen such a bust) at the age of sixteen a captain in the Black Watch had fallen in love with her. Though the family had said that she was too young to marry, he pointed out that he was going abroad with his regiment and might not be back in England for some time, and that he would like the marriage to take place straight away. So married Polly was at sixteen. That, I think, was possibly the first point of jealousy. It was a love match. Polly was young and beautiful and her Captain was said to be the handsomest man in the regiment.

Polly soon had five children, one of whom died. Her husband left her a young widow of twenty-seven–after a fall from his horse. Auntie-Grannie was not married until much later in life. She had had a romance with a young naval officer, but they were too poor to marry and he turned to a rich widow. She in turn married a rich American with one son.

She was in some ways frustrated, though her good sense and love of life never deserted her. She had no children. However, she was left a very rich widow. With Polly, on the other hand, it was all she could do to feed and clothe her family after her husband’s death. His tiny pension was all she had. I remember her sitting all day in the window of her house, sewing, making fancy pin-cushions, embroidered pictures and screens. She was wonderful with her needle, and she worked without ceasing, far more, I think, than an eight-hour day. So each of them envied the other for something they did not have. I think they quite enjoyed their spirited squabbles. Erupting sounds would fill the ear.

‘Nonsense, Margaret, I never heard such nonsense in my life!’ Indeed, Mary, let me tell you–’ and so on. Polly had been courted by some of her dead husband’s fellow officers and had had several offers of marriage, but she had steadfastly refused to marry again. She would put no one in her husband’s place, she said, and she would be buried with him in his grave in Jersey when her time came.

The Sunday accounts finished, and commissions written down for the coming week, the uncles would arrive. Uncle Ernest was in the Home Office and Uncle Harry secretary of the Army and Navy Stores. The eldest uncle, Uncle Fred, was in India with his regiment. The table was laid and Sunday midday dinner was served.

An enormous joint, usually cherry tart and cream, a vast piece of cheese, and finally dessert on the best Sunday dessert plates–very beautiful they were and are: I have them still; I think eighteen out of the original twenty-four, which is not bad for about sixty odd years. I don’t know if they were Coalport or French china–the edges were bright green, scalloped with gold, and in the centre of each plate was a different fruit–my favourite was then and always has been the Fig, a juicy-looking purple fig. My daughter Rosalind’s has always been the Gooseberry, an unusually large and luscious gooseberry. There was also a beautiful Peach, White Currants, Red Currants, Raspberries, Strawberries, and many others. The climax of the meal was when these were placed on the table, with their little lace mats on them, and finger bowls, and then everyone in turn guessed what fruit their plate was. Why this afforded so much satisfaction I cannot say, but it was always a thrilling moment, and when you had guessed right you felt you had done something worthy of esteem.

After a gargantuan meal there was sleep. Aunti-Grannie retired to her secondary chair by the fireplace–large and rather low-seated. Granny B. would settle on the sofa, a claret-coloured leather couch, buttoned all over its surface, and over her mountainous form was spread an Afghan rug. I don’t know what happened to the uncles. They may have gone for a walk, or retired to the drawing-room, but the drawing-room was seldom used. It was impossible to use the morning-room because that room was sacred to Miss Grant, the present holder of the post of sewing-woman. ‘My dear, such a sad case,’ Grannie would murmur to her friends. ‘Such a poor little creature, deformed, only one passage, like a fowl.’ That phrase always fascinated me, because I didn’t know what it meant. Where did what I took to be a corridor come in?

After everyone except me had slept soundly for at least an hour–I used to rock myself cautiously in the rocking-chair–we would have a game of Schoolmaster. Both Uncle Harry and Uncle Ernest were splendid exponents of Schoolmaster. We sat in a row, and whoever was schoolmaster, armed with a newspaper truncheon, would pace up and down the line shouting out questions in a hectoring voice: ‘What is the date of the invention of needles?’ Who was Henry VIII’s third wife?’ How did William Rufus meet his death?’ What are the diseases of wheat?’ Anyone who could give a correct answer moved up; those correspondingly disgraced moved down. I suppose it was the Victorian forerunner of the quizzes we enjoy so much nowadays. The uncles, I think, disappeared after that, having done their duty by their mother and their aunt. Granny B. remained, and partook of tea with Madeira cake; then came the terrible moment when the buttoned boots were brought forth, and Harriet started on the task of encasing her in them once more. It was agonising to watch, and must have been anguish to endure. Poor Granny B.’s ankles had swollen up like puddings by the end of the day. To force the buttons into their holes with the aid of a button-hook involved an enormous amount of painful pinching, which forced sharp cries from her. Oh! those buttoned boots. Why did anyone wear them? Were they recommended by doctors? Were they the price of a slavish devotion to fashion? I know boots were said to be good for children’s ankles, to strengthen them, but that could hardly apply in the case of an old lady of seventy. Anyway, finally encased and pale still from the pain, Granny B. started her return by train and bus to her own residence in Bayswater.



Ealing at that time had the same characteristics as Cheltenham or Leamington Spa. The retired military and navy came there in large quantities for the ‘healthy air’ and the advantage of being so near London. Grannie led a thoroughly social life–she was a sociable woman at all times. Her house was always full of old Colonels and Generals for whom she would embroider waistcoats and knit bedsocks: ‘I hope your wife won’t object,’ she would say as she presented them. ‘I shouldn’t like to cause trouble!’ The old gentlemen would make gallant rejoinders, and go away feeling thoroughly doggish and pleased with their manly attractions. Their gallantry always made me rather shy. The jokes they cracked for my amusement did not seem funny, and their arch, rallying manner made me nervous.

‘And what’s the little lady going to have for her dessert? Sweets to the sweet, little lady. A peach now? Or one of these golden plums to match those golden curls?’

Pink with embarrassment, I murmured that I would like a peach please. ‘And which peach? Now then, choose.’

‘Please,’ I murmured, ‘I would like the biggest and the bestest.’ Roars of laughter. All unaware, I seemed to have made a joke.

‘You shouldn’t ask for the biggest, ever,’ said Nursie later. ‘It’s greedy.’ I could admit that it was greedy, but why was it funny?

As a guide to social life, Nursie was in her element.

‘You must eat up your dinner quicker than that. Suppose now, that you were to be dining at a ducal house when you grow up?’

Nothing seemed more unlikely, but I accepted the possibility.

‘There will be a grand butler and several footmen, and when the moment comes, they’ll clear away your plate, whether you’ve finsihed or not.’

I paled at the prospect and applied myself to boiled mutton with a will. Incidents of the aristocracy were frequently on Nursie’s lips. They fired me with ambition. I wanted, above everything in the world, to be the Lady Agatha one day. But Nursie’s social knowledge was inexorable. ‘That you can never be,’ she said.

‘Never?’ I was aghast.

‘Never,’ said Nursie, a firm realist. ‘To be the Lady Agatha, you have to be born it. You have to be the daughter of a Duke, a Marquis, or an Earl. If you marry a Duke, you’ll be a Duchess, but that’s because of your husband’s title. It’s not something you’re born with.’

It was my first brush with the inevitable. There are things that cannot be achieved. It is important to realise this early in life, and very good for you. There are some things that you just cannot have–a natural curl in your hair, black eyes (if yours happen to be blue) or the title of Lady Agatha.

On the whole I think the snobbery of my childhood, the snobbery of birth that is, is more palatable than the other snobberies: the snobbery of wealth and intellectual snobbery. Intellectual snobbery seems today to breed a particular form of envy and venom. Parents are determined that their offspring shall shine. ‘We’ve made great sacrifices for you to have a good education,’ they say. The child is burdened with guilt if he does not fulfil their hopes. Everyone is so sure that it is all a matter of opportunity–not of natural aptitude.

I think late Victorian parents were more realistic and had more consideration for their children and for what would make a happy and successful life for them. There was much less keeping up with the Joneses. Nowadays I often feel that it is for one’s own prestige that one wants one’s children to succeed. The Victorians looked dispassionately at their offspring and made up their minds about their capacities. A. was obviously going to be ‘the pretty one’. B. was ‘the clever one’. C. was going to be plain and was definitely not intellectual. Good works would be C.’s best chance. And so on. Sometimes, of course, they were wrong, but on the whole it worked. There is an enormous relief in not being expected to produce something that you haven’t got.

In contrast to most of our friends, we were not really well off My father, as an American, was considered automatically to be ‘rich’. All Americans were supposed to be rich. Actually he was merely comfortably off We did not have a butler or a footman. We did not have a carriage and horses and a coachman. We had three servants, which was a minimum then. On a wet day, if you were going out to tea with a friend, you walked a mile and a half in the rain in your machintosh and your goloshes. A ‘cab’ was never ordered for a child unless it was going to a real party in a perishable dress.

On the other hand, the food that was served to guests in our house was quite incredibly luxurious compared to present-day standards–indeed you would have to employ a chef and his assistant to provide it! I came across the menu of one of our early dinner parties (for ten) the other day. It began with a choice of thick or clear soup, then boiled turbot, or fillets of sole. After that came a sorbet. Saddle of mutton followed. Then, rather unexpectedly, Lobster Mayonnaise. Pouding Diplomatique and Charlotte Russe were the sweets and then dessert. All this was produced by Jane, single-handed.

Nowadays, of course, on an equivalent income, a family would have a car, perhaps a couple of dailies, and any heavy entertaining would probably be in a restaurant or done at home by the wife.

In our family it was my sister who was early recognised as ‘the clever one’. Her headmistress at Brighton urged that she should go to Girton. My father was upset and said ‘We can’t have Madge turned into a blue-stocking. We’d better send her to Paris to be “finished’.’ So my sister went to Paris, to her own complete satisfaction since she had no wish whatever to go to Girton. She certainly had the brains of the family. She was witty, very entertaining, quick of repartee and successful in everything she attempted. My brother, a year younger than her, had enormous personal charm, a liking for literature, but was otherwise intellectually backward. I think both my father and my mother realised that he was going to be the ‘difficult’ one. He had a great love of practical engineering. My father had hoped that he would go into banking but realised that he did not have the capacity to succeed. So he took up engineering–but there again he could not succeed, as mathematics let him down.

I myself was always recognised, though quite kindly, as ‘the slow one’ of the family. The reactions of my mother and my sister were unusually quick–I could never keep up. I was, too, very inarticulate. It was always difficult for me to assemble into words what I wanted to say. ‘Agatha’s so terribly slow’ was always the cry. It was quite true, and I knew it and accepted it. It did not worry or distress me. I was resigned to being always ‘the slow one’. It was not until I was over twenty that I realised that my home standard had been unusually high and that actually I was quite as quick or quicker than the average. Inarticulate I shall always be. It is probably one of the causes that have made me a writer.



The first real sorrow of my life was parting with Nursie. For some time one of her former nurselings who had an estate in Somerset had been urging her to retire. He offered her a comfortable little cottage on his property where she and her sister could live out their days. Finally she made her decision. The time had come for her to quit work.

I missed her terribly. Every day I wrote to her–a short badly-written ill-spelt note: writing and spelling were always terribly difficult for me. My letters were without originality. They were practically always the same: ‘Darling Nursie. I miss you very much. I hope you are quite well. Tony has a flea. Lots and lots of love and kisses. From Agatha.’

My mother provided a stamp for these letters, but after a while she was moved to gentle protest.

‘I don’t think you need write every day. Twice a week, perhaps?’ I was appalled.

‘But I think of her every day. I must write.’

She signed, but did not object. Nevertheless she continued gentle suggestion. It was some months before I cut down correspondence to the two letters a week suggested. Nursie herself was a poor hand with a pen, and in any case was too wise, I imagine, to encourage me in my obstinate fidelity. She wrote to me twice a month, gentle nondescript epistles. I think my mother was disturbed that I found her so hard to forget. She told me afterwards that she had discussed the matter with my father, who had replied with an unexpected twinkle: ‘Well, you remembered me very faithfully as a child when I went to America.’ My mother said that that was quite different.

‘Did you think that I would come back and marry you one day when you were grown up?’ he asked.

My mother said, ‘No, indeed,’ then hesitated and admitted that she had had her day-dream. It was a typically sentimental Victorian one. My father was to make a brilliant but unhappy marriage. Disillusioned, after his wife’s death he returned to seek out his quiet cousin Clara. Alas, Clara, a helpless invalid, lay permanently on a sofa, and finally blessed him with her dying breath. She laughed as she told him–‘You see,’ she said, ‘I thought I shouldn’t look so dumpy lying on a sofa–with a pretty soft wool cover thrown over me.’

Early death and invalidism were as much the tradition of romance then as toughness seems to be nowadays. No young woman then, as far as I can judge, would ever own up to having rude health. Grannie always told me with great complacence how delicate she had been as a child, ‘never expected to live to maturity’ a slight knock on the hand when playing and she fainted away. Granny B., on the other hand, said of her sister: ‘Margaret was always perfectly strong. I was the delicate one.’

Auntie-Grannie lived to ninety-two and Granny B. to eight-six, and personally I doubt if they were ever delicate at all. But extreme sensibility, constant fainting fits, and early consumption (a decline) were fashionable. Indeed, so imbued with this point of view was Grannie that she frequently went out of her way to impart mysteriously to my various young men how terribly delicate and frail I was and how unlikely to reach old age. Often, when I was eighteen, one of my swains would say anxiously to me, ‘Are you sure you won’t catch a chill? Your grandmother told me how delicate you are!’ Indignantly I would protest the rude health I had always enjoyed, and the anxious face would clear. ‘But why does your grandmother say you’re delicate?’ I had to explain that Grannie was doing her loyal best to make me sound interesting. When she herself was young, Grannie told me, young ladies were never able to manage more than a morsel of food at the dinner-table if gentlemen were present. Substantial trays were taken up to bedrooms later.

Illness and early death pervaded even children’s books. A book called Our White Violet was a great favourite of mine. Little Violet, a saintly invalid on page one, died an edifying death surrounded by her weeping family on the last page. Tragedy was relieved by her two naughty brothers, Punny and Firkin, who never ceased getting themselves into mischief. Little Women, a cheerful tale on the whole, had to sacrifice rosy-faced Beth. The death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop leaves me cold and slightly nauseated, but in Dickens’s time, of course, whole families wept over its pathos.

That article of household furniture, the sofa or couch, is associated nowadays mainly with the psychiatrist–but in Victorian times it was the symbol of early death, decline, and romance with a capital R. I am inclined to the belief that the Victorian wife and mother cashed in on it pretty well. It excused her from much household drudgery. She often took to it in the early forties and spent a pleasant life, waited on hand and foot, given affectionate consideration by her devoted husband and ungrudging service by her daughters. Friends flocked to visit her, and her patience and sweetness under affliction were admired by all. Was there really anything the matter with her? Probably not. No doubt her back ached and she suffered from her feet as most of us do as life goes on. The sofa was the answer.

Another of my favourite books was about a little German girl (naturally an invalid, crippled) who lay all day looking out of the window. Her attendant, a selfish and pleasure-loving young woman, rushed out one day to view a procession. The invalid leaned out too far, fell and was killed. Haunting remorse of the pleasure-loving attendant, white-faced and grief-stricken for life. All these gloomy books I read with great satisfaction.

And there were, of course, the Old Testament stories, in which I had revelled from an early age. Going to church was one of the highlights of the week. The parish church of Tor Mohun was the oldest church in Torquay. Torquay itself was a modern watering place, but Tor Mohun was the original hamlet. The old church was a small one, and it was decided that a second, bigger church was needed for the parish. This was built just about the time that I was born, and my father advanced a sum of money in my infant name so that I should be a founder. He explained this to me in due course and I felt very important. ‘When can I go to church?’ had been my constant demand–and at last the great day came. I sat next to my father in a pew near the front and followed the service in his big prayer-book. He had told me beforehand that I could go out before the sermon if I liked, and when the time came he whispered to me, ‘Would you like to go?’ I shook my head vigorously and so remained. He took my hand in his and I sat contentedly, trying hard not to fidget.

I enjoyed church services on Sunday very much. At home previously there had been special story-books only allowed to be read on Sundays (which made a treat of them) and books of Bible stories with which I was familiar. There is no doubt that the stories of the Old Testament are, from a child’s point of view, rattling good yarns. They have that dramatic cause and effect which a child’s mind demands: Joseph and his brethren, his coat of many colours, his rise to power in Egypt, and the dramatic finale of his forgiveness of the wicked brothers. Moses and the burning bush was another favourite. David and Goliath, too, has a sure-fire appeal.

Only a year or two ago, standing on the mound at Nimrud, I watched the local bird-scarer, an old Arab with his handful of stones and his sling, defending the crops from the hordes of predatory birds. Seeing his accuracy of aim and the deadliness of his weapon, I suddenly realised for the first time that it was Goliath against whom the dice were loaded. David was in a superior position from the start–the man with a long-distance weapon against the man who had none. Not so much the little fellow against the big one, as brains versus brawn.

A good many interesting people came to our house during my young days, and it seems a pity that I do not remember any of them. All I recall about Henry James is my mother complaining that he always wanted a lump of sugar broken in two for his tea–and that it really was affectation, as a small knob would do quite as well Rudyard Kipling came, and again my only memory is a discussion between my mother and a friend as to why he had ever married Mrs Kipling. My mother’s friend ended by saying, ‘I know the reason. They are the perfect complement to each other.’ Taking the word to be ‘compliment’ I though it a very obscure remark, but as Nursie explained one day that to ask you to marry him was the highest compliment a gentleman could pay a lady, I began to see the point.

Though I came down to tea-parties, I remember, in white muslin and a yellow satin sash, hardly anyone at the parties remains in my mind. The people I imagined were always more real to me than the flesh and blood ones I met. I do remember a close friend of my mother’s, a Miss Tower, mainly because I took endless pains to avoid her. She had black eyebrows and enormous white teeth, and I thought privately that she looked exactly like a wolf. She had a habit of pouncing on me, kissing me vehemently and exclaiming, ‘I could eat you!’ I was always afraid she would. All through my life I have carefully abstained from rushing at children and kissing them unasked. Poor little things, what defence have they? Dear Miss Tower, so good and kind and so fond of children–but with so little idea of their feelings.

Lady MacGregor was a social leader in Torquay, and she and I were on happy, joking terms. When I was still in the perambulator she had accosted me one day and asked if I knew who she was? I said truthfully that I didn’t. ‘Tell your Mama,’ she said, ‘that you met Mrs Snooks out today.’ As soon as she had gone, Nursie took me to task. ‘That’s Lady MacGregor, and you know her quite well.’ But thereafter I always greeted her as Mrs Snooks and it was our own private joke.

A cheerful soul was my godfather, Lord Lifford, then Captain Hewitt. He came to the house one day, and hearing Mr and Mrs Miller were out said cheerfully, ‘Oh, that’s all right. I’ll come in and wait for them,’ and attempted to push past the parlourmaid. The conscientious parlourmaid slammed the door in his face and rushed upstairs to call to him from the conveniently situated lavatory window. He finally convinced her that he was a friend of the family–principally because he said, ‘And I know the window you’re speaking from, it’s the W.C.’ This proof of topography convinced her, and she let him in, but retired convulsed with shame at his knowledge that it was the lavatory from which she had been speaking.

We were very delicate about lavatories in those days. It was unthinkable to be seen entering or leaving one except by an intimate member of the family; difficult in our house, since the lavatory was halfway up the stairs and in full view from the hall. The worst, of course, was to be inside and then hear voices below. Impossible to come out. One had to stay immured there until the coast was clear.

Of my own childish friends I do not remember much.

There were Dorothy and Dulcie, younger than I was; stolid children with adenoids, whom I found dull. We had tea in the garden and ran races round a big ilex tree, eating Devonshire cream on ‘tough cakes’ (the local bun). I cannot imagine why this pleased us. Their father, Mr B., was my father’s great crony. Soon after we came to live in Torquay, Mr B. told my father that he was going to be married. A wonderful woman, so he described her, ‘And it frightens me, Joe’–my father was always called Joe by his friends–‘it positively frightens me how that woman loves me!’

Shortly afterwards a friend of my mother’s arrived to stay, seriously perturbed. Acting as companion to someone at a hotel in North Devon, she had come across a large, rather handsome young woman, who in a loud voice was conversing with a friend in the hotel lounge.

‘I’ve landed my bird, Dora,’ she boomed triumphantly. ‘Got him to the point at last, and he’s eating out of my hand.’

Dora congratulated her, and marriage settlements were freely discussed. Then the name of Mr B. was mentioned as the duly landed bridegroom.

A great consultation was held between my mother and father. What, if anything, was to be done about this? Could they let poor B. be married for his money in this shameful way? Was it too late? Would he believe them if they told him what had been overheard.

My father, at last, made his decision. B. was not to be told anything. Tale-telling was a mean business. And B. was not an ignorant boy. He had chosen with his eyes open.

Whether Mrs B. had married her husband for money or not, she made him an excellent wife, and they appeared to be as happy together as turtle-doves. They had three children, were practically inseparable, and a better home life could not be found. Poor B. eventually died of cancer of the tongue, and all through his long painful ordeal his wife nursed him devotedly. It was a lesson, my mother once said, in not thinking you know what’s best for other people.

When one went to lunch or tea with the B.’s the talk was entirely of food. ‘Percival, my love,’ Mrs B. would boom, ‘some more of this excellent mutton. Deliciously tender.’

‘As you say, Edith, my dear. Just one more slice. Let me pass you the caper sauce. Excellently made. Dorothy, my love, some more mutton?’ ‘No, thank you, papa.’

‘Dulcie? Just a small slice from the knuckle–so tender.’

‘No, thank you, mamma.’

I had one other friend called Margaret. She was what might be termed a semi-official friend. We did not visit each other’s homes (Margaret’s mother had bright orange hair and very pink cheeks; I suspect now that she was considered ‘fast’ and that my father would not allow my mother to call), but we took walks together. Our nurses, I gathered, were friends. Margaret was a great talker and she used to cause me horrible embarrassment. She had just lost her front teeth and it made her conversation so indistinct that I could not take in what she said. I felt it would be unkind to say so, so I answered at random, growing more and more desperate. Finally Margaret offered to ‘tell me a story’. It was all about ‘thome poithoned thweets’, but what happened to them I shall never know. It went on incomprehensibly for a long time and Margaret ended up triumphantly with, ‘Don’t you think thatth a loverly thtory?’ I agreed fervently. ‘Do you think thee really ought to–’ I felt questioning on the story would be too much for me to bear. I broke in with decision. ‘I’ll tell you a story now, Margaret.’ Margaret looked undecided. Evidently there was some knotty point in the poisoned sweets story that she wanted to discuss, but I was desperate.

‘It’s about a–a–peach-stone,’ I improvised wildly. ‘About a fairy who lived in a peach-stone.’

‘Go on,’ said Margaret.

I went on. I spun things out till Margaret’s gate was in sight.

‘That’s a very nice story,’ said Margaret appreciatively. ‘What fairy book does it come out of?’

It did not come out of any fairy book. It came out of my head. It was not, I think, a particularly good story. But it had saved me from the awful unkindness of reproaching Margaret for her missing teeth. I said that I could not quite remember which fairy book it was in.



When I was five years old, my sister came back ‘finished’ from Paris. I remember the excitement of seeing her alight at Ealing from a four-wheeler cab. She wore a gay little straw hat and a white veil with black spots on it, and appeared to me an entirely new person. She was very nice to her little sister and used to tell me stories. She also endeavoured to cope with my education by teaching me French from a manual called Le Petit Precepteur. She was not, I think, a good teacher and I took a fervant dislike to the book. Twice I adroitly concealed it behind other books in the bookshelf; it was a very short time, however, before it came to light again.

I saw that I had to do better. In a corner of the room was an enormous glass case containing a stuffed bald-headed eagle which was my father’s pride and glory. I insinuated Le Petit Précepteur behind the eagle into the unseen corner of the room. This was highly successful. Several days passed and a thorough hunt failed to find the missing book.

My mother, however, defeated my efforts with ease. She proclaimed a prize of a particularly delectable chocolate for whoever should find the book. My greed was my undoing. I fell into the trap, conducted an elaborate search round the room, finally climbed up on a chair, peered behind the eagle, and exclaimed in a surprised voice: ‘Why, there it is!’ Retribution followed. I was reproved and sent to bed for the rest of the day. I accepted this as fair, since I had been found out, but I considered it unjust that I was not given the chocolate. That had been promised to whoever found the book, and I had found it.

My sister had a game which both fascinated and terrified me. This was ‘The Elder Sister’. The thesis was that in our family was an elder sister, senior to my sister and myself. She was mad and lived in a cave at Corbin’s Head, but sometimes she came to the house. She was indistinguishable in appearance from my sister, except for her voice, which was quite different. It was a frightening voice, a soft oily voice.

‘You know who I am, don’t you, dear? I’m your sister Madge. You don’t think I’m anyone else, do you? You wouldn’t think that?’

I used to feel indescribable terror. Of course I knew really it was only Madge pretending–but was it? Wasn’t it perhaps true? That voice–those crafty sideways glancing eyes. It was the elder sister!

My mother used to get angry. ‘I won’t have you frightening the child with this silly game, Madge.’

Madge would reply reasonably enough: ‘But she asks me to do it.’ I did. I would say to her: ‘Will the elder sister be coming soon?’ ‘I don’t know. Do you want her to come?’

‘Yes–yes, I do.

Did I really? I suppose so.

My demand was never satisfied at once. Perhaps two days later there would be a knock at the nursery door, and the voice:

‘Can I come in, dear? It’s your elder sister.

Many years later, Madge had still only to use the Elder Sister voice and I would feel chills down my spine.

Why did I like being frightened? What instinctive need is satisfied by terror? Why, indeed, do children like stories about bears, wolves and witches? Is it because something rebels in one against the life that is too safe? Is a certain amount of danger in life a need of human beings? Is much of the juvenile delinquency nowadays attributable to the fact of too much security? Do you instinctively need something to combat, to overcome–to, as it were, prove yourself to yourself? Take away the wolf from Red Riding Hood and would any child enjoy it? However, like most things in life, you want to be frightened a little–but not too much.

My sister must have had a great gift for story-telling. At an early age her brother would urge her on. ‘Tell it me again.’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘Do, do!’

‘No, I don’t want to.’

‘Please. I’ll do anything.’

‘Will you let me bite your finger?’

‘Yes.’

‘I shall bite it hard. Perhaps I shall bite it right off!’

‘I don’t mind.’

Madge obligingly launches into the story once more. Then she picks up his finger and bites it. Now Monty yells. Mother arrives. Madge is punished.

‘But it was a bargain,’ she says, unrepentant.

I remember well my first written story. It was in the nature of a melodrama, very short, since both writing and spelling were a pain to me. It concerned the noble Lady Madge (good) and the bloody Lady Agatha (bad) and a plot that involved the inheritance of a castle.

I showed it to my sister and suggested we could act it. My sister said immediately that she would rather be the bloody Lady Madge and I could be the noble Lady Agatha.

‘But don’t you want to be the good one?’ I demanded, shocked. My sister said no, she thought it would be much more fun to be wicked. I was pleased, as it had been solely politeness which had led me to ascribe nobility to Lady Madge.

My father, I remember, laughed a good deal at my effort, but in a kindly way, and my mother said that perhaps I had better not use the word bloody as it was not a very nice word. ‘But she was bloody,’ I explained. ‘She killed a lot of people. She was like bloody Mary, who burnt people at the stake.’

Fairy books played a great part in life. Grannie gave them to me for birthdays and Christmas. The Yellow Fairy Book, The Blue Fairy Book, and so on. I loved them all and read them again and again. Then there was a collection of animal stories, also by Andrew Lang, including one about Androcles and the Lion. I loved that too.

It must have been about then that I first embarked on a course of Mrs Molesworth, the leading writer of stories for children. They lasted me for many years, and I think, on re-reading them now, that they are very good. Of course children would find them old-fashioned nowadays, but they tell a good story and there is a lot of characterization in them. There was Carrots, just a little Boy, and Herr Baby for very young children, and various fairy story tales. I can still re-read The Cuckoo Clock and The Tapestry Room. My favourite of all, Four Winds Farm, I find uninteresting now and wonder why I loved it so much.

Reading story-books was considered slightly too pleasurable to be really virtuous. No story-books until after lunch. In the mornings you were supposed to find something ‘useful’ to do. Even to this day, if I sit down and read a novel after breakfast I have a feeling of guilt. The same applies to cards on a Sunday. I outgrew Nursie’s condemnation of cards as ‘the Devil’s picture books’, but ‘no cards on Sundays’ was a rule of the house, and in after years when playing bridge on a Sunday I never quite threw off a feeling of wickedness.

At some period before Nursie left, my mother and father went to America and were away some time. Nursie and I went to Ealing. I must have been several months there, fitting in very happily. The pillar of Grannie’s establishment was an old, wrinkled cook, Hannah. She was as thin as Jane was fat, a bag of bones with deeply lined face and stooped shoulders. She cooked magnificently. She also made homebaked bread three times a week, and I was allowed in the kitchen to assist and make my own little cottage loaves and twists. I only fell foul of her once, when I asked her what giblets were. Apparently giblets were things nicely brought up young ladies did not ask about. I tried to tease her by running to and fro in the kitchen saying, ‘Hannah, what are giblets? Hannah, for the third time, what are giblets?’ etc. I was removed by Nursie in the end and reproved, and Hannah would not speak to me for two days. After that I was much more careful how I transgressed her rules.

Some time during my stay at Ealing I must have been taken to the Diamond Jubilee for I came across a letter not long ago written from America by my father. It is couched in the style of the day, which was singularly unlike my father’s spoken words–letter-writing fell into a definite and sanctimonious pattern, whereas my father’s speech was usually jolly and slightly ribald.

You must be very very good to dear Auntie-Grannie, Agatha, because remember how very very good she has been to you, and the treats she gives you. I hear you are going to see this wonderful show which you will never forget, it is a thing to be seen only once in a lifetime. You must tell her how very grateful you are; how wonderful it is for you, I wish I could be there, and so does your mother. I know you will never forget it.

My father lacked the gift of prophecy, because I have forgotten it. How maddening children are! When I look back to the past, what do I remember? Silly little things about local sewing-women, the bread twists I made in the kitchen, the smell of Colonel F.’s breath–and what do I forget? A spectacle that somebody paid a great deal of money for me to see and remember. I feel very angry with myself. What a horrible, ungrateful child!

That reminds me of what I think was a coincidence so amazing that one is so inclined to say it could never have happened. The occasion must have been Queen Victoria’s funeral. Both Auntie-Grannie and Granny B. were going to see it. They had procured a window in a house somewhere near Paddington, and they were to meet each other there on the great day. At five in the morning, so as not to be late, Grannie rose in her house at Ealing, and in due course got to Paddington Station. That would give her, she calculated, a good three hours to get to her vantage point, and she had with her some fancy-work, some food and other necessities to pass the hours of waiting once she arrived there. Alas, the time she had allowed herself was not enough. The streets were crammed. Some time after leaving Paddington Station she was quite unable to make further headway. Two ambulance men rescued her from the crowd, and assured her that she couldn’t go on. ‘I must, but I must!’ cried Grannie, tears streaming down her face. ‘I’ve got my room, I’ve got my seat; the two first seats in the second window on the second floor, so that I can look down and see everything. I must!’ ‘It’s impossible, Ma’am, the streets are jammed, nobody has been able to get through for half an hour.’ Grannie wept more. The ambulance man kindly said, ‘You can’t see anything, I am afraid, Ma’am, but I’ll take you down this street to where our ambulance is and you can sit there, and they will make you a nice cup of tea.’ Grannie went with them, still weeping. By the ambulance was sitting a figure not unlike herself, also weeping, a monumental figure in black velvet and bugles. The other figure looked up–two wild cries rent the air: ‘Mary!’ ‘Margaret!’ Two gigantic bugle-shaking bosoms met.


V

Thinking over what gave me most pleasure in my childhood I should be inclined to place first and foremost, my hoop. A simple affair, in all conscience, costing–how much? Sixpence? A shilling? Certainly not more.

And what an inestimable boon to parents, nurses, and servants. On fine days, Agatha goes out into the garden with her hoop and is no more trouble to anyone until the hour for a meal arrives–or, more accurately, until hunger makes itself felt.

My hoop was to me in turn a horse, a sea monster, and a railway train. Beating my hoop round the garden paths, I was a knight in armour on a quest, a lady of the court exercising my white palfrey, Clover (of The Kittens) escaping from imprisonment–or, less romantically, I was engine driver, guard, or passenger, on three railways of my own devising.

There were three distinct systems: the Tubular Railway, with eight stations and circling three quarters of the garden; the Tub Railway, a short line, serving the kitchen garden only and starting from a large tub of water with a tap under a pine tree; and the Terrace Railway, which encircled the house. Only a short while ago I came across in an old cupboard a sheet of cardboard on which sixty odd years before I had drawn a rough plan of all these railways.

I cannot conceive now why I so enjoyed beating my hoop along, stopping, calling out ‘Lily of the Valley Bed. Change for the Tubular Railway here. Tub. Terminus. All change.’ I did it for hours. It must have been very good exercise. I also practised diligently the art of throwing my hoop so that it returned to me, a trick in which I had been instructed by one of our visiting naval officer friends. I could not do it at all at first, but by long and arduous practice I got the hang of it, and was thereafter immensely pleased with myself.

On wet days there was Mathilde. Mathilde was a large American Rocking Horse which had been given to my sister and brother when they were children in America. It had been brought back to England and now, a battered wreck of its former self, sans mane, sans paint, sans tail, etc., was ensconced in a small greenhouse which adjoined the house on one side–quite distinct from The Conservatory, a grandiloquent erection, containing pots of begonias, geraniums, tiered stands of every kind of fern, and several large palm trees. This small greenhouse, called, I don’t know why, K.K. (or possibly Kai Kai?) was bereft of plants and housed instead croquet mallets, hoops, balls, broken garden chairs, old painted iron tables, a decayed tennis net and Mathilde.

Mathilde had a splendid action–much better than that of any English rocking horse I have ever known. She sprang forwards and back, upwards and down, and ridden at full pressure was liable to unseat you. Her springs, which needed oiling, made a terrific groaning, and added to the pleasure and danger. Splendid exercise again. No wonder I was a skinny child.

As companion to Mathilde in Kai Kai was Truelove–also of trans-atlantic origin. Truelove was a small painted horse and cart with pedals. Presumably from long years of disuse, the pedals were no longer workable. Large applications of oil might have done the trick–but there was an easier way of making Truelove serviceable. Like all gardens in Devon, our garden was on a slope. My method was to pull Truelove to the top of a long grassy slope, settle myself carefully, utter an encouraging sound, and off we went; slowly at first, gathering momentum whilst I braked with my feet, so that we came to rest under the monkey puzzle at the bottom of the garden. Then I would pull Truelove back up to the top and start down once more.

I discovered in later years that it had been a great source of amusement to my future brother-in-law to see this process enacted, for sometimes an hour at a time, always in perfect solemnity.

When Nursie left I was, naturally, at a loss for a playmate. I wandered disconsolately about until the hoop solved my problem. Like all children I went round trying to induce people to play with me–first my mother, then the servants. But in those days, if there was no one whose business it was to play with children then the child had to play by itself. The servants were good-natured, but they had their work to do–plenty of it–and so it would be: ‘Now run away, Miss Agatha. I’ve got to get on with what I’m doing.’ Jane was usually good for a handful of sultanas, or a slice of cheese, but suggested firmly that these should be consumed in the garden.

So it was that I made my own world and my own playmates. I really do think that it was a good thing. I have never, all through my life, suffered from the tedium of ‘nothing to do’. An enormous number of women do. They suffer from loneliness and boredom. To have time on their hands is a nightmare and not a delight. If things are constantly being done to amuse you, naturally you expect it. And when nothing is done for you, you are at a loss.

I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays, and have things arranged for them, that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas in holiday time. I am always astonished when children come to me and say: ‘Please. I’ve nothing to do.’ With an air of desperation I point out:

‘But you’ve got a lot of toys, haven’t you?’

‘Not really.’

‘But you’ve got two trains. And lorries, and a painting set. And blocks. Can’t you play with some of them?’

‘But I can’t play by myself with them.’

‘Why not? I know. Paint a picture of a bird, then cut it out and make a cage with the blocks, and put the bird in the cage.’

The gloom brightens and there is peace for nearly ten minutes.



Looking back over the past, I become increasingly sure of one thing. My tastes have remained fundamentally the same. What I liked playing with as a child, I have liked playing with later in life.

Houses, for instance.

I had, I suppose, a reasonable amount of toys: a dolls’ bed with real sheets and blankets and the family building bricks, handed down by my elder sister and brother. Many of my playthings were extemporised. I cut pictures out of old illustrated magazines and pasted them into scrap-books made of brown paper. Odd rolls of wallpaper were cut and pasted over boxes. It was all a long, leisurely process.

But my principal source of indoor amusement was undoubtedly my dolls’ house. It was the usual type of painted affair, with a front that swung open, revealing kitchen, sitting-room and hall downstairs, two bedrooms and bathroom upstairs. That is, it began that way. The furniture was acquired, piece by piece. There was an enormous range of dolls’ furniture in the shops then, quite cheap in price. My pocket money was, for those days, rather large. It consisted of what copper coins father happened to have in his possession every morning. I would visit him in his dressing-room, say good morning, and then turn to the dressing-table to see what Fate had decreed for me on that particular day. Twopence? Fivepence? Once a whole elevenpence! Some days, no coppers at all. The uncertainty made it rather exciting.

My purchases were always much the same. Some sweets–boiled sweets, the only kind my mother considered healthy–purchased from Mr Wylie who had a shop in Tor. The sweets were made on the premises, and as you came in through the shop door you knew at once what was being made that day. The rich smell of boiling toffee, the sharp odour of peppermint rock, the elusive smell of pineapple, barleysugar (dull), which practically didn’t smell at all, and the almost overpowering odour when pear drops were in process of manufacture.

Everything cost eightpence a pound. I spent about fourpence a week–one pennyworth of four different kinds. Then there was a penny to be donated for the Waifs and Strays (money-box on the hall table); from September onwards a few pence were salted away to save up for such Christmas presents as would be bought, not made. The rest went towards the furnishing and equipping of my dolls’ house.

I can still remember the enchantment of the things there were to buy. Food, for instance. Little cardboard platters of roast chicken, eggs and bacon, a wedding cake, a leg of lamb, apples and oranges, fish, trifle, plum pudding. There were plate baskets with knives, forks and spoons. There were tiny sets of glasses. Then there was the furniture proper. My drawing-room had a suite of blue satin chairs, to which I added by degrees a sofa and a rather grand gilded armchair. There were dressing-tables with mirrors, round polished dinner-tables, and a hideous orange brocade dining-room suite. There were lamps and epergnes and bowls of flowers. Then there were all the household implements, brushes and dustpans, brooms and pails and kitchen saucepans.

Soon my dolls’ house looked more like a furniture storehouse. Could I–could I, possibly–have another dolls’ house?

Mother did not think that any little girl ought to have two dolls’ houses. But why not, she suggested, inspired, use a cupboard. So I acquired a cupboard, and it was a wild success. A big room at the top of the house, originally built on by my father to provide two extra bedrooms, was so much enjoyed in its bare state by my sister and brother as a playroom that that is what it remained. The walls were more or less lined with books and cupboards, the centre conveniently free and empty. I was allotted a cupboard with four shelves, part of a built-in fitment against the wall. My mother found various nice pieces of wall-paper which could be pasted on the shelves as carpets. The original dolls’ house stood on top of the cupboard, so that I now had a six-storied house.

My house, of course, needed a family to live in it. I acquired a father and mother, two children and a maid, the kind of doll that has a china head and bust and malleable sawdust limbs. Mother sewed some clothes on them, from odd bits of stuff she had. She even fixed with glue a small black beard and moustache to the face of the father. Father, mother, two children and a maid. It was perfect. I don’t remember their having any particular personalities–they never became people to me, they existed only to occupy the house. But it really looked right when you sat the family round the dinner table. Plates, glasses, roast chicken, and a rather peculiar pink pudding were served at the first meal.

An additional enjoyment was housemoving. A stout cardboard box was the furniture van. The furniture was loaded into it, it was drawn round the room by a string several times, and then ‘arrived at the new house’. (This happened at least once a week.)

I can see quite plainly now that I have continued to play houses ever since. I have gone over innumerable houses, bought houses, exchanged them for other houses, furnished houses, decorated houses, made structural alterations to houses. Houses! God bless houses!



But to go back to memories. What odd things really, when one collects them all together, one does remember out of one’s life. One remembers happy occasions, one remembers–very vividly, I think–fear. Oddly enough pain and unhappiness are hard to recapture. I do not mean exactly that I do not remember them–I can, but without feeling them. Where they are concerned I am in the first stage. I say, ‘There was Agatha being terribly unhappy. There was Agatha having toothache.’ But I don’t feel the unhappiness or the toothache. On the other hand, one day the sudden smell of lime trees brings the past back, and suddenly I remember a day spent near the lime trees, the pleasure with which I threw myself down on the ground, the smell of hot grass, and the suddenly lovely feeling of summer; a cedar tree nearby and the river beyond…The feeling of being at one with life. It comes back in that moment. Not only a remembered thing of the mind but the feeling itself as well.

I remember vividly a field of buttercups. I must have been under five, since I walked there with Nursie. It was when we were at Ealing, staying with Auntie-Grannie. We went up a hill, past St. Stephen’s Church. It was then nothing but fields, and we came to one special field, crammed with golden buttercups. We went to it–that I do know–quite often. I don’t know if my memory of it is of the first time we went there or a later occasion, but the loveliness of it I do remember and feel. It seems to me that for many years now I have never seen a field of buttercups. I have seen a few buttercups in a field, but that is all. A great field full of golden buttercups in early summer is something indeed. I had it then, I have it with me now.



What has one enjoyed most in life? I daresay it varies with different people. For my own part, remembering and reflecting, it seems that it is almost always the quiet moments of everyday life. Those are the times, certainly, when I have been happiest. Adorning Nursie’s old grey head with blue bows, playing with Tony, making a parting with a comb down his broad back, galloping on what I feel to be real horses across the river my fancy has set in the garden. Following my hoop through the stations of the Tubular Railway. Happy games with my mother. My mother, later, reading Dickens to me, gradually getting sleepy, her spectacles half falling off her nose and her head dropping forward, and myself saying in an agonised voice. ‘Mother, you’re going to sleep’, to which my mother with great dignity replies, ‘Nothing of the kind, darling. I am not in the least sleepy!’ A few minutes later she would be asleep. I remember feeling how ridiculous she looked with her spectacles slipping off her nose and how much I loved her at that moment.

It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous, that you realise just how much you love them! Anyone can admire somebody for being handsome or amusing or charming, but that bubble is soon pricked when a trace of ridicule comes in. I should give as my advice to any girl about to get married: ‘Well now, just imagine he had a terrible cold in his head, speaking through his nose all full of b’s and d’s, sneezing, eyes watering. What would you feel about him?’ It’s a good test, really. What one needs to feel for a husband, I think, is the love that is tenderness, that comprises affection, that will take colds in the head and little mannerisms all in its stride. Passion one can take for granted.

But marriage means more than a lover–I take an old-fashioned view that respect is necessary. Respect–which is not to be confused with admiration. To feel admiration for a man all through one’s married life would, I think, be excessively tedious. You would get, as it were, a mental crick in the neck. But respect is a thing that you don’t have to think about, that you know thankfully is there. As the old Irish woman said of her husband, ‘Himself is a good head to me’. That, I think, is what a woman needs. She wants to feel that in her mate there is integrity, that she can depend on him and respect his judgment, and that when there is a difficult decision to be made it can safely lie in his hands.

It is curious to look back over life, over all the varying incidents and scenes–such a multitude of odds and ends. Out of them all what has mattered? What lies behind the selection that memory has made? What makes us choose the things that we have remembered? It is as though one went to a great trunk full of junk in an attic and plunged one’s hands into it and said, ‘I will have this–and this–and this.’

Ask three or four different people what they remember, say of a journey abroad and you will be surprised at the different answers you get. I remember a boy of fifteen, a son of friends of ours, who was taken to Paris as part of his spring holidays. When he returned, some fatuous friend of the family said, with the usual jovial accent inflicted on the young, ‘Well, my boy, and what impressed you most in Paris? What do you remember about it?’ He replied immediately: ‘The chimneys. The chimneys there are quite different from chimneys on houses in England.’

From his point of view it was a perfectly sensible remark. Some years later he started studying as an artist. It was, therefore, a visual detail that really impressed him, that made Paris different from London.

So, too, another memory. This was when my brother was invalided home from East Africa. He brought with him a native servant, Shebani. Anxious to show this simple African the glories of London, my brother hired a car and, sitting in it with Shebani, drove all round London. He displayed to him Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, the Guildhall, Hyde Park and so on. Finally, when they had arrived home, he said to Shebani, ‘What did you think of London?’ Shebani rolled his eyes up. ‘It is wonderful, Bwana, a wonderful place. Never did I think I would see anything like it.’ My brother nodded a satisfied head. ‘And what impressed you most?’ he said. The answer came without a moment’s thought. ‘Oh, Bwana, shops full of meat. Such wonderful shops. Meat hanging in great joints all over and nobody steals them, nobody rushes and pushes their way there and snatches. No, they pass by them in an orderly fashion. How rich, how great a country must be to have all this meat hanging in shops open to the streets. Yes, indeed, England is a wonderful place. London a wonderful city.’

Point of view. The point of view of a child. We all knew it once but we’ve travelled so far away from it that it’s difficult to get back there again. I remember seeing my own grandson Mathew when he must have been, I suppose, about two and a half. He did not know I was there. I was watching him from the top of the stairs. He walked very carefully down the stairs. It was a new achievement and he was proud of it, but still somewhat scared. He was muttering to himself, saying: ‘This is Mathew going down stairs. This is Mathew. Mathew is going down stairs. This is Mathew going down stairs.’

I wonder if we all start life thinking of ourselves, as soon as we can think of ourselves at all, as a separate person, as it were, from the one observing. Did I say to myself once, ‘This is Agatha in her party sash going down to the dining-room?’ It is as though the body in which we have found our spirit lodged is at first strange to us. An entity, we know its name, we are on terms with it, but are not as yet identified fully with it. We are Agatha going for a walk, Mathew going down stairs. We see ourselves rather than feel ourselves.

And then one day the next stage of life happens. Suddenly it is no longer ‘This is Mathew going down stairs.’ Suddenly it has become I am going down stairs. The achievement of ‘I’ is the first step in the progress of a personal life.

Posted in An Autobiography