PART II. ‘Girls and boys come out to play’

I

Until one looks back on one’s own past one fails to realise what an extraordinary view of the world a child has. The angle of vision is entirely different to that of the adult, everything is out of proportion.
Children can make a shrewd appraisal of what is going on around them, and have a quite good judgment of character and people. But the how and the why of things never seems to occur to them.

It must have been when I was about five years old that my father first became worried about financial affairs. He had been a rich man’s son and had taken it for granted that an assured income would always come in. My grandfather had set up a complicated series of trusts to come into effect when he died. There had been four trustees. One was very old and had, I think, retired from any active connection with the business, another shortly went into a mental asylum, and the other two, both men of his own age, died shortly afterwards. In one case the son took on. Whether it was sheer inefficiency or whether in the course of replacement somebody managed to convert things to his own use I do not know. At any rate the position seemed to get worse and worse.

My father was bewildered and depressed, but not being a businesslike man he did not know what to do about it. He wrote to dear old So-and-So and dear old Somebody Else, and they wrote back, either reassuring him or laying the blame on the state of the market, depreciation and other things. A legacy from an elderly aunt came in about this time and, I should imagine, tided him over a year or two, whilst the income that was due and should have been paid to him never seemed to arrive.

It was at about this time, too, that his health began to give way. On several occasions he suffered what were supposed to be heart attacks, a vague term that covered almost everything. The financial worry must, I think, have affected his health. The immediate remedy seemed to be that we must economise. The recognised way at that particular time was to go and live abroad for a short while. This was not, as nowadays, because of income tax–income tax was, I should imagine, about a shilling in the pound–but the cost of living was much less abroad. So the procedure was to let the house with the servants, etc., at a good rent, and go abroad to the South of France, staying at a fairly economical hotel.

Such a migration happened, as far as I remember, when I was six years old. Ashfield was duly let–I think to Americans, who paid a good price for it–and the family prepared to set off. We were going to Pau in the South of France. I was, of course, very much excited by this prospect. We were going, so my mother told me, where we should see mountains. I asked many questions about these. Were they very, very high? Higher than the steeple of St. Marychurch? I asked with great interest. It was the highest thing I knew. Yes, mountains were much, much higher than that. They went up for hundreds of feet, thousands of feet. I retired to the garden with Tony, and munching an enormous crust of dry bread obtained from Jane in the kitchen set to work to think this out, to try to visualise mountains. My head went back, my eyes stared up at the skies. That was how mountains would look–going up, up, up, up, up until lost in the clouds. It was an awe-inspiring thought. Mother loved mountains. She had never cared for the sea, she told us. Mountains, I felt sure, were to be one of the greatest things in my life.

One sad thing about going abroad was that it meant a parting between me and Tony. Tony was not, of course, being let with the house; he was being boarded out with a former parlourmaid called Froudie. Froudie, who was married to a carpenter and lived not far away, was quite prepared to have Tony. I kissed him all over and Tony responded by licking me frantically all over my face, neck, arms and hands.

Looking back now, the conditions of travel abroad then seem extraordinary. There were, of course, no passports or any forms to fill in. You bought tickets, made sleeping-car reservations, and that was all that had to be done. Simplicity itself. But the Packing! (Only capital letters would explain what packing meant.) I don’t know what the luggage of the rest of the family consisted of; I do have a fair memory of what my mother took with her. There were, to begin with, three round-top trunks. The largest stood about four feet high and had two trays inside. There were also hat boxes, large square leather cases, three trunks of the type called cabin trunks and trunks of American manufacture which were often to be seen at that time in the corridors of hotels. They were large, and I should imagine excessively heavy.

For a week at least before departure my mother was surrounded by her trunks in her bedroom. Since we were not well off by the standards of the day, we did not have a lady’s maid. My mother did the packing herself. The preliminary to it was what was called ‘sorting’. The large wardrobes and chests of drawers stood open while my mother sorted amongst such things as artificial flowers, and an array of odds and ends called ‘my ribbons’ and ‘my jewellery’. All these apparently required hours of sorting before they were packed in the trays in the various trunks.

Jewellery did not, as nowadays, consist of a few pieces of ‘real jewellery’ and large quantities of costume jewellery. Imitation jewellery was frowned on as ‘bad taste’, except for an occasional brooch of old paste. My mother’s valuable jewellery consisted of ‘my diamond buckle, my diamond crescent and my diamond engagement ring’. The rest of her ornaments were ‘real’ but comparatively inexpensive. Nevertheless they were all of intense interest to all of us. There was ‘my Indian necklace’, ‘my Florentine set’, ‘my Venetian necklace’, ‘my cameos’ and so on. And there were six brooches in which both my sister and myself took a personal and vivid interest. These were ‘the fishes’, five small fish in diamonds, ‘the mistletoe’, a tiny diamond and pearl brooch, ‘my parma violet’, an enamel brooch representing a parma violet, ‘my dogrose’, also a flower brooch, a pink enamelled rose with clusters of diamond leaves round it, and ‘my donkey’, prime favourite, which was a baroque pearl mounted in diamonds as a donkey’s head. They were all earmarked for the future on my mother’s demise. Madge was to have the parma violet (her favourite flower), the diamond crescent and the donkey. I was to have the rose, the diamond buckle and the mistletoe. This earmarking of possessions for the future was freely indulged in by my family. It conjured up no sad feelings about death, but merely a warm appreciation of the benefits to come.

At Ashfield the whole house was crowded with oil paintings bought by my father. To crowd oil paintings as closely as you could on your walls was the fashion of the day. One was marked down for me–a large painting of the sea, with a simpering young woman catching a boy in a net in it. It was my highest idea of beauty as a child, and it is sad to reflect how poorly I thought of it when the time came for me to sort out pictures to sell. Even for sentiment’s sake I have not kept any of them. I am forced to consider that my father’s taste in pictures was consistently bad. On the other hand every piece of furniture he ever bought is a gem. He had a passion for antique furniture, and the Sheraton desks and Chippendale chairs that he bought, often at a very low figure since at that time bamboo was all the rage, are a joy to live with and possess, and appreciated so much in value that my mother was able to keep the wolf from the door after my father died by selling a good many of the best pieces.

He, my mother and my grandmother all had a passion for collecting china. When Grannie came to live with us later she brought her collection of Dresden and Capo di Monte with her, and innumerable cupboards were filled with it at Ashfield. In fact, fresh cupboards had to be built to accommodate it. There is no doubt that we were a family of collectors and that I have inherited these attributes. The only sad thing is that if you inherit a good collection of china and furniture it leaves you no excuse for starting a collection of your own. The collector’s passion, however, has to be satisfied, and in my case I have accumulated quite a nice stock of papier-mache furniture and small objects which had not figured in my parents’ collections.

When the day came I was so excited that I felt quite sick and completely silent. When really thrilled by anything, it always seems to deprive me of the powers of speech. My first clear memory of going abroad was when we stepped on to the boat at Folkestone. My mother and Madge took the Channel crossing with the utmost seriousness. They were bad sailors and retired immediately to the ladies’ saloon to lay themselves down, close their eyes and hope to get across the intervening water to France without the worst happening. In spite of my experience in small dinghies I was convinced that I was a good sailor. My father encouraged me in this belief, so I remained on deck with him. It was, I imagine, a perfectly smooth crossing, but I gave the credit not to the sea but to my own power of withstanding its motion. We arrived at Boulogne and I was glad to hear father announce, ‘Agatha’s a perfectly good sailor’.

The next excitement was going to bed in the train. I shared a compartment with my mother and was hoisted up on to the top bunk. My mother always had a passion for fresh air, and the steam heat of the wagon lits carriages was agony to her. All that night it seemed to me I woke up to see mother with the window pushed down and her head out, breathing great gasps of night air.

Early the next morning we arrived at Pau. The Hotel Beausejour bus was waiting so we piled into it, our eighteen pieces of luggage coming separately, and in due course arrived at the hotel. It had a large terrace outside it facing the Pyrenees.

‘There!’ said father. ‘See? There are the Pyrenees. The snow mountains.’

I looked. It was one of the great disillusionments of my life, a disillusionment that I have never forgotten. Where was that soaring height going up, up, up into the sky, far above my head–something beyond contemplation or understanding? Instead, I saw, some distance away on the horizon, what looked like a row of teeth standing up, it seemed, about an inch or two from the plain below. Those? Were those mountains? I said nothing, but even now I can still feel that terrible disappointment.


II

We must have spent about six months at Pau. It was an entirely new life for me. My father and mother and Madge were soon caught up in a whirl of activity. Father had several American friends staying there, he made a lot of hotel acquaintances, and we also had brought letters of introduction to people in various hotels and pensions.

To look after me, mother engaged a kind of daily nursery governess–actually an English girl, but one who had lived in Pau all her life and who spoke French as easily as English, if not, in fact, rather better. The idea was that I should learn French from her. This plan did not turn out as expected. Miss Markham called for me every morning and took me for a walk. In its course she drew my attention to various objects and repeated their names in French. ‘Un chien.’ Une maison.’ ‘Un gendarme.’ ‘Le boulanger.’ I repeated these dutifully, but naturally when I had a question to ask I asked it in English and Miss Markham replied in English. As far as I can remember I was rather bored during my day; interminable walks in the company of Miss Markham, who was nice, kind, conscientious and dull.

My mother soon decided that I should never learn French with Miss Markham, and that I must have regular French lessons from a French-woman who would come every afternoon. The new acquisition was called Mademoiselle Mauhourat. She was large, buxom and dressed in a multiplicity of little capes, brown in colour.

All rooms of that period were overcrowded, of course. There was too much furniture in them, too many ornaments and so on. Mlle Mauhourat was a flouncer. She flounced about the room, jerking her shoulders, gesticulating with her hands and elbows, and sooner or later she invariably knocked an ornament off the table and broke it. It became quite a family joke. Father said, ‘She reminds me of that bird you had, Agatha. Daphne. Always big and awkward and knocking her seed pans over.’

Mlle Mauhourat was particularly full of gush, and gush made me feel shy. I found it increasingly difficult to respond to her little cooing squeals of: ‘Oh, la chère mignonne! Quelle est gentille, cette petite! Oh, la chère mignonne! Nous allons prendre des lefons tres amusantes, n’est ce pas?’ I looked at her politely but with a cold eye. Then, receiving a firm look from my mother, I muttered unconvincingly, ‘Oui, merci’, which was about the limit of my French at that time.

The French lessons went on amiably. I was docile as usual, but apparently bone-headed as well. Mother, who liked quick results, was dissatisfied with my progress.

‘She’s not getting on as she should, Fred,’ she complained to my father. My father, always amiable, said, ‘Oh, give her time, Clara, give her time. The woman’s only been here ten days.’

But my mother was not one to give anybody time. The climax came when I had a slight childish illness. It started, I suppose, with local flu and led to catarrhal trouble. I was feverish, out of sorts, and in this convalescent stage with still a slight temperature I could not stand the sight of Mlle Mauhourat.

‘Please,’ I would beg, ‘please don’t let me have a lesson this afternoon. I don’t want to.’

Mother was always kind enough when there was real cause. She agreed. In due course Mlle Mauhourat, capes and all, arrived. My mother explained that I had a temperature, was staying indoors, and perhaps it would be better not to have a lesson that day. Mlle Mauhourat was off at once, fluttering over me, jerking her elbows, waving her capes, breathing down my neck. ‘Oh, la pauvre mignonne, la pauvre petite mignonne.’ She would read to me, she said. She would tell me stories. She would amuse ‘la pauvre petite’.

I cast the most agonising glances at mother. I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear another moment of it! Mlle Mauhourat’s voice went on, high-pitched, squeaky–everything I most disliked in a voice. My eyes implored: ‘Take her away. Please take her away.’ Firmly, my mother drew Mlle Mauhourat towards the door.

‘I think Agatha had better be kept quite quiet this afternoon,’ she said. She ushered Mlle Mauhourat out, then she returned and shook her head at me. ‘It’s all very well,’ she said, ‘but you must not make such terrible faces.’

‘Faces?’ I said.

‘Yes. All that grimacing and looking at me. Mlle Mauhourat could see perfectly that you wanted her to go away.’

I was upset. I had not meant to be impolite.

‘But, Mummy,’ I said, ‘those weren’t French faces that I was making. They were English faces.’

My mother was much amused, and explained to me that making faces was a kind of international language which was understood by people of all countries. However, she told my father that Mlle Mauhourat was not being much of a success and she was going to look elsewhere. My father said it would be just as well if we did not lose too many more china ornaments. He added, ‘If I were in Agatha’s place, I should find that woman insupportable, just as she does.’

Freed from the ministrations of Miss Markham and Mlle Mauhourat, I began to enjoy myself. Staying in the hotel was Mrs Selwyn, the widow or perhaps the daughter-in-law of Bishop Selwyn, and her two daughters, Dorothy and Mary. Dorothy (Dar) was a year older than I was, Mary a year younger. Pretty soon we were inseparable.

Left to myself I was a good, well-behaved and obedient child, but in company with other children I was only too ready to engage in any mischief that was going. In particular we three plagued the life out of the unfortunate waiters in the table d’hôte. One evening we changed the salt to sugar in all of the salt cellars. Another day we cut pigs out of orange peel and placed them on everyone’s plate just before the table d’hôte bell was rung.

Those French waiters were the kindliest men I’m ever likely to know. In particular there was Victor, our own waiter. He was a short square man with a long jerking nose. He smelt to my mind, quite horribly (my first acquaintance with garlic). In spite of all the tricks that we played upon him, he seemed to bear no malice and, indeed, went out of his way to be kindly to us. In particular, he used to carve us the most glorious mice out of radishes. If we never got into serious trouble for what we did, it was because the loyal Victor never complained to the management or to our parents.

My friendship with Dar and Mary meant far more to me than any of my former friendships. Possibly I was now of an age when co-operative enterprise was more exciting than doing things alone. We got up to plenty of mischief together and enjoyed ourselves thoroughly all through those winter months. Of course we often got into trouble through our pranks, but on only one occasion did we really feel righteous indignation at the censure that fell upon us.

My mother and Mrs Selwyn were sitting together happily talking when a message was brought by the chambermaid. ‘With the compliments of the Belgian lady who lived in the other block of the hotel. Did Mrs Selwyn and Mrs Miller know that their children were walking round the fourth floor parapet?’

Imagine the senation of the two mothers as they stepped out into the courtyard, looked up and caught sight of three cheerful figures balancing themselves on a parapet about a foot in width and walking along it in single file. The idea that there was any danger attached to it never entered our heads. We had gone a little far in teasing one of the chamber-maids and she had managed to inveigle us into a broom cupboard and then shut the door on us from outside, triumphantly turning the key in the lock. Our indignation was great. What could we do? There was a tiny window, and sticking her head out of it Dar said she thought possibly that we could wriggle through and then walk along the parapet, round the corner and get in at one of the windows along there. No sooner said than done. Dar squeezed through first, I followed, and then Mary. To our delight we found it was quite easy to walk along the parapet. Whether we looked down the four storeys below I don’t know, but I don’t suppose, even if we had, that we would have felt giddy or been likely to fall. I’ve always been appalled by the way children can stand on the edge of a cliff, looking down with their toes over the edge, with no sense of vertigo or other grown-up complaints.

In this case we had not to go far. The first three windows, as I remember, were shut, but the next one, which led into one of the public bathrooms, was open, and we had gone in through this to be met to our surprise with the demand, ‘Come down at once to Mrs Selwyn’s sitting-room.’ Both mothers were excessively angry. We could not see why. We were all banished to bed for the rest of the day. Our defence was simply not accepted. And yet it was the truth.

‘But you never told us,’ we said, each in turn. ‘You never told us that we weren’t to walk round the parapet.’

We withdrew to bed with a strong feeling of injustice.

Meanwhile, my mother was still considering the problem of my education. She and my sister were having dresses made for them by one of the dressmakers of the town, and there, one day, my mother was attracted by the assistant fitter, a young woman whose main business was to put the fitted garment on and off and hand pins to the first fitter. This latter was a sharp-tempered, middle-aged woman, and my mother, noticing the patient good-humour of the young girl’s manner, decided to find out a little more about her. She watched her during the second and third fitting and finally retained her in conversation. Her name was Marie Sije, she was twenty-two years of age. Her father was a small cafe proprietor and she had an elder sister, also in the dressmaking establishment, two brothers and a little sister. Then my mother took the girl’s breath away by asking her in a casual voice if she would care to come to England. Marie gasped her surprise and delight.

‘I must of course talk to your mother about it,’ said my mother. ‘She might not like her daughter to go so far away.’

An appointment was arranged, my mother visited Madame Sije, and they went into the subject thoroughly. Only then did she approach my father on the subject.

‘But, Clara,’ protested my father, ‘this girl isn’t a governess or anything of that kind.’

My mother replied that she thought Marie was just the person they needed. ‘She knows no English at all, not a word of it. Agatha will have to learn French. She’s a really sweet-natured and good-humoured girl. It’s a respectable family. The girl would like to come to England and she can do a lot of sewing and dressmaking for us’

‘But are you sure about this, Clara?’ my father asked doubtfully. My mother was always sure.

‘It’s the perfect answer,’ she said.

As was so often the case with my mother’s apparently unaccountable whims, this proved to be true. If I close my eyes I can see dear Marie today as I saw her then. Round, rosy face, snub nose, dark hair piled up in a chignon. Terrified, as she later told me, she entered my bedroom on the first morning having primed herself by laboriously learning the English phrase with which to greet me: ‘Good morning, mees. I hope you are well.’ Unfortunately, owing to Marie’s accent I did not understand a word. I stared at her suspiciously. We were, for the first day, like a couple of dogs just introduced to each other. We said little and eyed each other in apprehension. Marie brushed my hair–very fair hair always arranged in sausage-curls–and was so frightened of hurting me that she hardly put the brush through the hair at all. I wanted to explain to her that she must brush much harder, but of course it was impossible as I did not know the right words.

How it came about that in less than a week Marie and I were able to converse I do not know. The language used was French. A word here and a word there, and I could make myself understood. Moreover, at the end of the week we were fast friends. Going out with Marie was fun. Doing anything with Marie was fun. It was the beginning of a happy partnership.

In the early summer it grew hot in Pau, and we left, spending a week at Argeles and another at Lourdes, then moving up to Cauterets in the Pyrenees. This was a delightful spot, right at the foot of the mountains. (I had got over my disappointment about mountains now, but although the position at Cauterets was more satisfactory you could not really look a long way up.) Every morning we had a walk along a mountain path which led to the spa, where we all drank glasses of nasty water. Having thus improved our health we purchased a stick of sucre d’orge. Mother’s favourite was aniseed, which I could not bear. On the zigzag paths by the hotel I soon discovered a delightful sport. This was to toboggan down through the pine trees on the seat of my pants. Marie took a poor view of this, but I am sorry to say that from the first Marie was never able to exert any authority over me. We were friends and playmates, but the idea of doing what she told me never occurred to me.

Authority is an extraordinary thing. My mother had it in full measure. She was seldom cross, hardly ever raised her voice, but she had only gently to pronounce an order and it was immediately fulfilled. It always was odd to her that other people had not got this gift. Later, when she was staying with me after I was first married and had a child of my own, I complained how tiresome some little boys were who lived in the next house and who were always coming in through the hedge. Though I ordered them away, they would not go.

‘But how extraordinary,’ said my mother. ‘Why don’t you just tell them to go away?’

I said to her, ‘Well, you try it.’ At that moment the two small boys arrived and were preparing as usual to say, ‘Yah. Boo. Shan’t go,’ and throw gravel on the grass. One started pelting a tree and shouting and puffing. My mother turned her head.

‘Ronald,’ she said. ‘Is that your name?’

Ronald admitted it was.

‘Please don’t play so near here. I don’t like being disturbed,’ said my mother. ‘Just go a little further away.’

Ronald looked at her, whistled to his brother, and departed immediately.

‘You see, dear,’ said my mother, ‘it’s quite simple.’

It certainly was for her. I really believe that my mother would have been able to manage a class of juvenile delinquents without the least difficulty.

There was an older girl at the hotel in Cauterets, Sybil Patterson, whose mother was a friend of the Selwyns. Sybil was the object of my adoration. I thought her beautiful, and the thing I admired about her most was her budding figure. Bosoms were much in fashion at that time. Everyone more or less had one. My grandmother and great-aunt had enormous jutting shelves, and it was difficult for them to greet each other with a sisterly kiss without their chests colliding first. Though I took the bosoms of grown-up people for granted, Sybil’s possession of one aroused all my most envious instincts. Sybil was fourteen. How long should I have to wait until I, too, could have that splendid development? Eight years? Eight years of skinniness? I longed for these signs of female maturity. Ah well, patience was the only thing. I must be patient. And in eight years’ time, or seven perhaps, if I was lucky, two large rounds would miraculously spurt forth on my skinny frame. I only had to wait.

The Selwyns were not at Cauterets as long as we were. They went away, and I then had the choice of two other friends: a little American girl, Marguerite Prestley, and another, Margaret Home, an English girl. My father and mother were great friends by now with Margaret’s parents, and naturally they hoped that Margaret and I would go about and do things together. As is usual in these cases, however, I had an enormous preference for the company of Marguerite Prestley, who used what were to me extraordinary phrases and odd words that I had never heard before. We told each other stories a good deal, and there was one story of Marguerite’s which entailed the dangers encountered on meeting a scarrapin which thrilled me.

‘But what is a scarrapin?’ I kept asking.

Marguerite, who had a nurse called Fanny whose southern American drawl was such that I could seldom understand what she said, gave me a brief description of this horrifying creature. I applied to Marie but Marie had never heard of scarrapins. Finally I tackled my father. He had a little difficulty, too, at first, but at last realisation dawned on him and he said, ‘I expect what you mean is a scorpion.’

Somehow the magic then departed. A scorpion did not seem nearly so horrifying as the imagined scarrapin.

Marguerite and I had quite a serious dispute on one subject, which was the way babies arrived. I assured Marguerite that babies were brought by the angels. This had been Nursie’s information. Marguerite, on the other hand, assured me that they were part of a doctor’s stock-in-trade, and were brought along by him in a black bag. When our dispute on this subject had got really heated, the tactful Fanny settled it once and for all.

‘Why, that’s just the way it is, honey,’ she said. ‘American babies come in a doctor’s black bag and English babies are brought by the angels. It’s as simple as that.’

Satisfied, we ceased hostilities.

Father and Madge made a good many excursions on horseback, and in answer to my entreaties one day I was told that on the morrow I should be allowed to accompany them. I was thrilled. My mother had a few misgivings, but my father soon overruled them.

‘We have a Guide with us,’ he said, ‘and he’s quite used to children and will see to it that they don’t fall off.’

The next morning the three horses arrived, and off we went. We zigzagged along up the precipitous paths, and I enjoyed myself enormously perched on top of what seemed to me an immense horse. The Guide led it up, and occasionally picking little bunches of flowers, handed them to me to stick in my hatband. So far all was well, but when we arrived at the top and prepared to have lunch, the Guide excelled himself. He came running back to us bringing with him a magnificent butterfly he had trapped. ‘Pour la petite mademoiselle,’ he cried. Taking a pin from his lapel he transfixed the butterfly and stuck it in my hat! Oh the horror of that moment! The feeling of the poor butterfly fluttering, struggling against the pin. The agony I felt as the butterfly fluttered there. And of course I couldn’t say anything. There were too many conflicting loyalties in my mind. This was a kindness on the part of the Guide. He had brought it to me. It was a special kind of present. How could I hurt his feelings by saying I didn’t like it? How I wanted him to take it off! And all the time, there was the butterfly, fluttering, dying. That horrible flapping against my hat. There is only one thing a child can do in these circumstances. I cried.

The more anyone asked me questions the more I was unable to reply. ‘What’s the matter?’ demanded my father. ‘Have you got a pain?’ My sister said, ‘Perhaps she’s frightened at riding on the horse.’ I said No and No. I wasn’t frightened and I hadn’t got a pain. ‘Tired,’ said my father.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Well, then, what is the matter?’

But I couldn’t say. Of course I couldn’t say. The Guide was standing there, watching me with an attentive and puzzled face. My father said rather crossly:

‘She’s too young a child. We shouldn’t have brought her on this expedition.’

I redoubled my weeping. I must have ruined the day for both him and my sister, and I knew I was doing so, but I couldn’t stop. All I hoped and prayed was that presently he, or even my sister, would guess what was the matter. Surely they would look at that butterfly, they would see it, they would say, ‘Perhaps she doesn’t like the butterfly on her hat.’ If they said it, it would be all right. But I couldn’t tell them. It was a terrible day. I refused to eat any lunch. I sat there and cried, and the butterfly flapped. It stopped flapping in the end. That ought to have made me feel better. But by that time I had got into such a state of misery that nothing could have made me feel better.

We rode down again, my father definitely out of temper, my sister annoyed, the Guide still sweet, kindly and puzzled, Fortunately, he did not think of getting me a second butterfly to cheer me up. We arrived back, a most woeful party, and went into our sitting-room where mother was.

‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘what’s the matter? Has Agatha hurt herself?’

‘I don’t know,’ said my father crossly. ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with the child. I suppose she’s got a pain or something. She’s been crying ever since lunch-time, and she wouldn’t eat a thing.’

‘What is the matter, Agatha?’ asked my mother.

I couldn’t tell her. I only looked at her dumbly while tears still rolled down my cheeks. She looked at me thoughtfully for some minutes, then said, ‘Who put that butterfly in her hat?’

My sister explained that it had been the Guide.

‘I see,’ said mother. Then she said to me, ‘You didn’t like it, did you? It was alive and you thought it was being hurt?’

Oh, the glorious relief, the wonderful relief when somebody knows what’s in your mind and tells it to you so that you are at last released from that long bondage of silence. I flung myself at her in a kind of frenzy, thrust my arms round her neck and said, ‘Yes, yes, yes. It’s been flapping. It’s been flapping. But he was so kind and he meant to be kind. I couldn’t say.’

She understood it all and patted me gently. Suddenly the whole thing seemed to recede in the distance.

‘I quite see what you felt,’ she said. ‘I know. But it’s over now, and so we won’t talk about it any more.’



It was about this time that I became aware that my sister had an extraordinary fascination for the young men in her vicinity. She was a most attractive young woman, pretty without being strictly beautiful, and she had inherited from my father a quick wit and was extremely amusing to talk to. She had, moreover, a great deal of sexual magnetism. Young men went down before her like ninepins. It was not long before Marie and I had made what might in racing parlance be called a book on the various admirers. We discussed their chances.

‘I think Mr Palmer. What do you think, Marie?’

‘C’est possible. Mais il est trop jeune.’

I replied that he was about the same age as Madge, but Marie assured me that that was ‘beaucoup trop jeune’.

‘Me,’ said Marie, ‘I think the Sir Ambrose.’

I protested, ‘He’s years and years older than she is, Marie.’ She said, perhaps, but it made for stability if a husband was older than his wife. She also added that Sir Ambrose would be a very good ‘parti’, one of which any family would approve.

‘Yesterday,’ I said, ‘she put a flower as a buttonhole in Bernard’s coat.’ But Marie did not think much of the young Bernard. She said he was not a ‘garçon sérieux’.

I learnt a lot about Marie’s family. I knew the habits of their cat and how it was able to walk about among the glasses in the cafe and curl down asleep in the middle of them without ever breaking one. I knew that her sister, Berthe, was older than her and a very serious girl, that her little sister Angele was the darling of the whole family. I knew all the tricks the two boys played and how they got into trouble. Marie also confided to me the proud secret of the family, that once their name had been Shije instead of Sije. Though unable to see whence this pride came in–and indeed I do not even now–I fully concurred with Marie and congratulated her on having this satisfactory ancestry.

Marie occasionally read me French books, as did my mother. But the happy day arrived when I picked up Mémoires d’un ne myself and found, on turning the pages, that I was able to read it alone just as well as anyone could have read it to me. Great congratulations followed, not least from my mother. At last, after many tribulations, I knew French. I could read it. Occasionally I needed explanations of the more difficult passages, but on the whole I had arrived.

At the end of August we left Cauterets for Paris. I remember it always as one of the happiest summers I have ever known. For a child of my age it had everything. The excitement of novelty. Trees–a recurring factor of enjoyment all through my life. (Is it possibly symbolic that one of my first imaginary companions was called Tree?) A new and delightful companion, my dear snub-nosed Marie. Expeditions on mules. Exploring steep paths. Fun with the family. My American friend Marguerite. The exotic excitement of a foreign place. ‘Something rare and strange…’ How well Shakespeare knows. But it is not the items, grouped together and added up, that linger in my memory. It is Cauterets–the place, the long valley, with its little railway and its wooded slopes, and the high hills.

I have never been back there. I am glad of that. A year or two ago, we contemplated taking a summer holiday there. I said, unthinkingly: I should like to go back.’ It was true. But then it came to me that I could not go back. One cannot, ever, go back to the place which exists in memory. You would not see it with the same eyes–even supposing that it should improbably have remained much the same. What you have had you have had. ‘The happy highways where I went, And shall not come again…’

Never go back to a place where you have been happy. Until you do it remains alive for you. If you go back it will be destroyed.

There are other places I have resisted going back to. One is the shrine of Sheikh Adi in Northern Iraq. We went there on my first visit to Mosul. There was a certain difficulty of access then; you had to get a permit, and to stop at the police post at Ain Sifni under the rocks of the Jebl Maclub.

From there, accompanied by a policeman, we walked up a winding path. It was spring, fresh and green, with wild flowers all the way. There was a mountain stream. We passed occasional goats and children. Then we reached the Yezidi shrine. The peacefulness of it comes back–the flagged courtyard, the black snake carved on the wall of the shrine. Then the step carefully over, not on the threshold, into the small dark sanctuary. There we sat in the courtyard under a gently rustling tree. One of the Yezidees brought us coffee, first carefully spreading a dirty table-cloth. (This, proudly, as showing that European needs were understood.) We sat there a long time. Nobody forced information on us. I knew, vaguely, that the Yezidees were devil worshippers, and the Peacock Angel, Lucifer, is the object of their worship. It always seems strange that the worshippers of Satan should be the most peaceful of all the varying religious sects in that part of the world. When the sun began to get low, we left. It had been utter peace.

Now I believe, they run tours to it. The ‘Spring Festival’ is quite a tourist attraction. But I knew it in its day of innocence. I shall not forget it.


III

From the Pyrenees we went to Paris and then to Dinard. It is irritating to find that all I remember of Paris is my bedroom in the hotel, which had richly painted chocolate-coloured walls on which it was quite impossible to see mosquitoes.

There were myriads of mosquitoes. They pinged and whined all night, and our faces and arms were covered with bites. (Extremely humiliating to my sister Madge, who minded a good deal about her complexion at this period of her life.) We were only in Paris a week, and we seemed to spend all our time attempting to kill mosquitoes, anointing ourselves with various kinds of peculiar smelling oils, lighting incense cones by the bed, scratching bites, dropping hot candle grease on them. Finally, after vehement representations to the hotel management (who persisted in saying there were not really any mosquitoes), the novelty of sleeping under a mosquito net remains an event of the first importance. It was August and boiling hot weather, and under a net it must have been hotter still.

I suppose I must have been shown some of the sights of Paris, but they have left no mark on my mind. I do remember that I was taken to the Tour Eiffel as a treat, but I imagine that, like my first view of mountains, it did not come up to expectation. In fact the only souvenir of our stay there seemed to be a new nickname for me. ‘Moustique.’ No doubt justified.

No, I am wrong. It was on that visit to Paris that I first became acquainted with the forerunners of the great mechanical age. The streets of Paris were full of those new vehicles called ‘Automobiles.’ They rushed madly along (by present-day standards probably quite slowly, but then they only had to compete with the horse), smelling, hooting, driven by men with caps and goggles and full of motoring equipment. They were bewildering. My father said they would be everywhere soon. We did not believe him. I surveyed them without interest, my own allegiance firmly given to all kinds of trains.

My mother exclaimed sadly, ‘What a pity Monty is not here. He would love them.’



It seems odd to me looking back now at this stage of my life. My brother seems to disappear from it completely. He was there, presumably, coming home for the holidays from Harrow, but he does not exist as a figure any longer. The answer is, probably, that he took very little notice of me at this point. I learnt only later that my father was worried about him. He was superannuated from Harrow, being quite unable to pass his exams. I think he went first to a ship-building yard on the Dart, and afterwards up north, to Lincolnshire. Reports of his progress were disappointing. My father received blunt advice. ‘He’ll never get anywhere. You see, he can’t do mathematics. You show him anything practical and it’s all right; he’s a good practical workman. But that’s all he’ll ever be in the engineering line.’

In every family there is usually one member who is a source of trouble and worry. My brother Monty was ours. Until the day of his death he was always causing someone a headache. I have often wondered, looking back, whether there is any niche in life where Monty would have fitted in. He would certainly have been all right if he had been born Ludwig II of Bavaria. I can see him sitting in his empty theatre, enjoying opera sung only for him. He was intensely musical, with a good bass voice, and played various instruments by ear, from penny whistles to piccolo and flute. He would never have had the application, though, to become a professional of any kind, nor, I think, did the idea ever enter his head. He had good manners, great charm, and throughout his life was surrounded by people anxious to save him worry or bother. There was always someone ready to lend him money and to do any chores for him. As a child of six, when he and my sister received their pocket money, the same thing invariably happened. Monty spent his on the first day. Later in the week he would suddenly push my sister into a shop, quickly order three pennyworth of a favourite sweet and then look at my sister, daring her not to pay. Madge, who had a great respect for public opinion, always did. Naturally she was furious about it and quarrelled with him violently afterwards. Monty would merely smile at her serenely and offer her one of the sweets.

This attitude was one he adopted throughout his life. There seemed to be a natural conspiracy to slave for him. Again and again various women have said to me, ‘You know you don’t really understand your brother Monty. What he needs is sympathy.’ The truth was that we understood him only too well. It was impossible, mind you, not to feel affection for him. He recognised his own faults with the utmost frankness, and was always sure that everything was going to be different in future. He was, I believe, the only boy at Harrow who was allowed to keep white mice. His housemaster, in explaining this, said to my father, ‘You know he really seems to have such a deep love of natural history that I thought he should be allowed this privilege.’ The family opinion was that Monty had no love of natural history at all. He just wished to keep white mice!

I think, on looking back, that Monty was a very interesting person. A slightly different arrangement of genes and he might have been a great man. He just lacked something. Proportion? Balance? Integration? I don’t know.

The choice of a career for him settled itself. The Boer War broke out. Almost all the young men we knew volunteered–Monty, naturally, among them. (He had occasionally condescended to play with some toy soldiers I had, drawing them up in line of battle and christening their commanding officer Captain Dashwood. Later, to vary the routine, he cut off Captain Dashwood’s head for treason while I wept.) In some ways my father must have felt relief–the Army might provide a career for him–especially just at this moment when his engineering prospects were so doubtful.

The Boer War, I suppose, was the last of what one might describe as the ‘old wars’, the wars that did not really affect one’s own country or life. They were heroic story-book affairs, fought by brave soldiers and gallant young men. They were killed, if killed, gloriously in battle. More often they came home suitably decorated with medals for gallant feats performed on the field. They were tied up with the outposts of Empire, the poems of Kipling, and with the bits of England that were pink on the map. It seems strange today to think that people–girls in particular–went around handing our white feathers to young men whom they considered were backward in doing their duty by dying for their country.

I remember little of the outbreak of the South African War. It was not regarded as an important war–it consisted of ‘teaching Kruger a lesson’. With the usual English optimism it would be ‘all over in a few weeks’. In 1914 we heard the same phrase. ‘All over by Christmas.’ In 1940, ‘Not much point in storing the carpets with mothballs.’–this when the Admiralty took over my house–‘It won’t last over the winter.’

So what I remember is a gay atmosphere, a song with a good tune–‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’–and cheerful young men coming up from Plymouth for a few days’ leave. I can remember a scene at home a few days before the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Welsh Regiment was to sail for South Africa. Monty had brought a friend up from Plymouth, where they were stationed at the moment. This friend, Ernest Mackintosh, always called by us for some reason Billy, was to remain a friend and far more of a brother than my real brother to me all my life. He was a young man of great gaiety and charm. Like most of the young men around, he was more or less in love with my sister. The two boys had just got their uniforms, and were intensely intrigued by puttees which they had never seen before. They wound the puttees round their necks, bandaged their heads with them and played all sorts of tricks. I have a photograph of them sitting in our conservatory with puttees round their necks. I transferred my girlish hero-worship to Billy Mackintosh. A photograph of him stood by my bed in a frame with forget-me-nots on it.



From Paris we went to Dinard in Brittany.

The principal thing that I remember about Dinard is that I learnt to swim there. I can rememer my incredulous pride and pleasure when I found myself striking out for six spluttering strokes on my own without submerging.

The other thing I remember is the blackberries–never were there such blackberries, great big fat juicy ones. Marie and I used to go out and pick baskets of them, and eat masses of them at the same time. The reason for this profusion was that the natives of the countryside believed them to be deadly poison. ‘Ils ne mangent pas des mûres.’ said Marie wonderingly. ‘They say to me “vous allez vous empoisonner’.’ Marie and I had no such inhibitions, and we poisoned ourselves happily every afternoon.

It was in Dinard that I first took to theatrical life. Father and mother had a large double bedroom with an enormous bow window, practically an alcove, across which curtains were drawn. It was a natural for stage performances. Fired by a pantomime I had seen the previous Christmas, I pressed Marie into service and we gave nightly representations of various fairy stories. I chose the character I wished to be and Marie had to be everybody else.

Looking back, I am filled with gratitude at the extraordinary kindness of my father and mother. I can imagine nothing more boring than to come up every evening after dinner and sit for half an hour watching and applauding whilst Marie and I strutted and postured in our home-improvised costumes. We went through the Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast and so forth. I was fondest of the part of principal boy, and borrowing my sister’s stockings in an attempt to produce tights I marched around and declaimed. The performance was, of course, always in French, as Marie could not speak English. What a good-natured girl she was. Only once did she strike, and that for a reason I simply could not fathom. She was to be Cinderella, and I insisted on her taking her hair down. One really cannot imagine Cinderella with a chignon on top of her head! But Marie, who had enacted the part of the Beast without murmuring, who had been Red Riding Hood’s grandmother–Marie, who had been good fairies, bad fairies, who had been wicked old women, who had enacted a street scene where she spat into the gutter in a most realistic fashion saying in argot ‘Et bien crache!’ which incidentally convulsed my father with mirth–Marie suddenly refused with tears to enact the part of Cinderella.

‘Mais, pourquoi, pas, Marie?’ I demanded. ‘It is a very good part. It is the heroine. It is Cinderella the whole play is about.’

Impossible, said Marie, impossible that she should enact such a role. To take her hair down, to appear with her hair loose on her shoulders before Monsieur! That was the crux. To appear with her hair down before Monsieur was to Marie unthinkable, shocking. I yielded, puzzled. We concocted a kind of hood that went over Cinderella’s chignon, and all was well.

But how extraordinary taboos are. I remember one of my friends’ children–a pleasant, amiable little girl of about four. A French nursery governess arrived to look after her. There was the usual hesitation as to whether the child would ‘get on’ with her or not, but everything appeared to be perfect happiness. She went out with her for a walk, chatted, showed Madeleine her toys. Everything seemed to be going perfectly. Only at bedtime did tears arise when Joan refused firmly to let Madeleine give her her bath. Her mother, puzzled, gave in on the first day, since she could understand that the child was perhaps not quite at home with the strangers yet. But this refusal continued for two or three days. All was peace, all was happiness, all was friendship, until bed and bath time. It was not till the fourth day that Joan, weeping bitterly and burying her head in her mother’s neck, said, ‘You don’t understand, Mummy. You don’t seem to understand. How can I show my body to a foreigner?’

So it was with Marie. She could strut about in trousers, show quite a lot of leg in many roles, but she could not take her hair down in front of Monsieur.

I imagine, to begin with, our theatrical performances must have been extremely funny, and my father at least got a great deal of enjoyment out of them. But how boring they must have become! Yet my parents were far too kind to tell me frankly that they couldn’t be bothered to come up every night. Occasionally they let themselves off by explaining that friends were dining and so they would not be able to come upstairs, but on the whole they stuck it nobly–and how I, at least, enjoyed performing before them.

During the month of September that we stayed in Dinard my father was happy to find some old friends there–Martin Pirie and his wife and two sons, who were finishing off their holidays. Martin Pirie and my father had been at school together at Vevey, and close friends ever since. Martin’s wife, Lilian Pirie, I still think of as one of the most outstanding personalities I have ever known. The character that Sackville West drew so beautifully in All Passion Spent has always struck me as a little like Mrs Pirie. There was something faintly awe-inspiring in her, slightly aloof. She had a beautiful, clear voice, delicate features and very blue eyes. The movements of her hands were always beautiful. I think Dinard was the first time I ever saw her, but from then on I saw her at frequent intervals, and I knew her up to the age of eighty odd when she died. All that time my admiration and respect for her increased.

She was one of the few people I have met whom I consider had a really interesting mind. Each of her houses was decorated in a startling and original manner. She did the most beautiful embroidered pictures, there was never a book or a play she had not read or seen, and she always had something telling to say about them. Nowadays I suppose she would have embarked upon some career, but I wonder, if she had done so, whether the impact of her personality would have been as great as it actually was.

Young people always flocked to her house and were happy to talk to her. To spend an afternoon with her, even when she was well over seventy, was a wonderful refreshment. I think she had, more perfectly than anyone I have ever known, the art of leisure. You found her sitting in a high-backed chair in her beautiful room, usually engaged with some needle-work of her own design, some interesting book or other by her side. She had the air of having time to talk with you all day, all night, for months on end. Her criticisms were caustic and clear. Although she would talk about any abstract subject under the sun she seldom indulged in personalities. But it was her beautiful speaking voice that attracted me most. It is such a rare thing to find. I have always been sensitive to voices. An ugly voice repels me where an ugly face would not.

My father was delighted to see his friend Martin again. My mother and Mrs Pirie had much in common, and immediately engaged, if I remember rightly, in a frenzied discussion about Japanese art. Their two boys were there–Harold, who was at Eton, and Wilfred, who I suppose must have been at Dartmouth, as he was going into the Navy. Wilfred was later to be one of my dearest friends, but all I remember about him from Dinard was that he was said to be the boy who always laughed out loud whenever he saw a banana. This made me look at him with close attention. Naturally, neither of the boys took the least notice of me. An Eton schoolboy and a naval cadet would hardly demean themselves by paying attention to a little girl of seven.

From Dinard we moved on to Guernsey, where we spent most of the winter. As a birthday present I was given a surprise of three birds of exotic plumage and colouring. These were named Kiki, Tou-tou and Bebe. Shortly after arrival in Guernsey, Kiki, who was always a delicate bird, died. He had not been long enough in my possession for his decease to occasion violent grief–in any case, Bebe, who was an enchanting small bird, was my favourite–but I certainly enjoyed myself in a lavish way over the obsequies of Kiki. He was splendidly buried in a cardboard box with a lining of satin ribbon supplied by my mother. An expedition was then made out of the town of St. Peter Port to an upland region where a spot was chosen for the funeral ceremonies, and the box was duly buried with a large knot of flowers placed upon it.

All that of course was highly satisfactory, but it did not end there. ‘Visiter la tombe de Kiki’ became one of my favourite walks.

The great excitement in St. Peter Port was the flower market. There were lovely flowers of every kind and very cheap. According to Marie it was always the coldest and windiest day when, after inquiring, ‘And where shall we go for a walk today, Mees?’ Mees would reply with gusto, ‘Nous allons visiter la tombe de Kiki.’ Terrible sighs from Marie. A two-mile walk and a great deal of cold wind! Nevertheless, I was adamant. I dragged her to the market, where we purchased exciting camellias or other flowers, and then we took the two-mile walk lashed by wind and frequently rain as well, and placed the floral bouquet with due ceremony upon Kiki’s grave. It must run in one’s blood to enjoy funerals and funeral observances. Where indeed would archaeology be if it had not been for this trait in human nature? If I was ever taken for a walk in my youth by anyone other than nurses–one of the servants, for instance–we invariably went to the cemetery.

How happy are those scenes in Paris at Pere Lachaise, with whole families attending family tombs and making them beautiful for All Souls Day. Honouring the dead is indeed a hallowed cult. Is there behind it some instinctive means of avoiding grief, of becoming so interested in the rites and ceremonies that one almost forgets the departed loved one? I do know this, that however poor a family may be the first thing they save for is their funeral. A sweet old dear who worked for me at one time said, ‘Ah, hard times, dearie. Hard times indeed they’ve been. But one thing, however short I’ve gone and all the rest of us, I’ve got my money saved to bury me decent and I’ll never touch that. No, not even if I go hungry for days!’


IV

I sometimes think that in my last incarnation, if the theory of reincarnation is right, I must have been a dog. I have a great many of the dog’s habits. If anybody is undertaking anything or going anywhere I always want to be taken with them and do it too. In the same way, when returning home after this long absence I acted exactly like a dog. A dog always runs all round the house examining everything, sniffing here, sniffing there, finding out by its nose what has been going on, and visiting all its ‘best spots’. I did exactly the same. I went all round the house, then went out in the garden and visited my pet spots there: the tub, the see-saw tree, my little secret post overlooking the road outside in a hiding place up by the wall. I found my hoop and tested its condition, and took about an hour to satisfy myself that all was exactly as it had been before.

The greatest change had taken place in my dog, Tony. Tony had been a small, neat Yorkshire terrier when we went away. He was now, owing to Froudie’s loving care and endless meals, as fat as a balloon. She was completely Tony’s slave, and when my mother and I went to fetch him home Froudie gave us a long dissertation on how he liked to sleep, what exactly he had to be covered with in his basket, his tastes in food, and what time he liked his walk. At intervals she broke off her conversation with us to speak to Tony. ‘Mother’s lovely,’ she said. ‘Mother’s handsome.’ Tony looked very appreciative at these remarks, but nevertheless seemed to take them as no more than his due. ‘And he won’t eat a morsel,’ said Froudie proudly, ‘unless you give it him by hand. Oh no, I have to feed him every single little piece myself.’

I noticed a look in my mother’s face, and I could see that Tony was not going to receive quite that treatment at home. We took him home with us in the hired cab which we had got for the occasion, plus his bedding and the rest of his possessions. Tony, of course, was delighted to see us, and licked me all over. When his dinner was prepared and brought, Froudie’s warning was proved true. Tony looked at it, looked up at my mother and at me, moved a few steps away and sat down, waiting like a grand seigneur to have each morsel fed to him. I gave him a piece and he accepted it graciously, but my mother stopped that.

‘It’s no good,’ she said. ‘He will have to learn to eat his dinner properly, as he used to do. Leave his dinner down there. He’ll go and eat it presently.’

But Tony did not go and eat it. He sat there. And never have I seen a dog more overcome with righteous indignation. His large, sorrowful, brown eyes went round the assembled family and back to his plate. He was clearly saying, ‘I want it. Don’t you see? I want my dinner. Give it to me.’ However, my mother was firm.

‘Even if he doesn’t eat it today,’ she said, ‘he will tomorrow.’ ‘You don’t think he’ll starve?’ I demanded.

My mother looked thoughtfully at Tony’s immensely broad back. ‘A little starvation,’ she said, ‘would do him a world of good.’

It was not till the following evening that Tony capitulated, and then he saved his pride by eating his dinner when nobody was in the room. After that there was no further trouble. Days of being treated like a Grand Duke were over, and Tony obviously accepted the fact. Still, he did not forget that for a whole year he had been the beloved darling of another house. Any word of reproof, any trouble he got into, and immediately he would sneak off and trot down to Froudie’s house, where he obviously told her that he was not properly appreciated. The habit persisted for quite a long time.

Marie was now Tony’s nurse-attendant, in addition to her other duties. It was amusing to see Marie arrive when we were playing downstairs in the evening, an apron tied round her waist, saying politely, ‘Monsieur Toni pour le bain.’ Monsieur Tony would immediately try to get down on all fours and slide under the sofa, since he had a poor opinion of the weekly bath. Extracted, he was carried off, his tail drooping and his ears down. Marie would report proudly later on the amount of fleas that were floating on top of the Jeyes fluid.

I must say that now dogs do not seem to have nearly as many fleas as they did in my young days. In spite of baths, brushing and combing, and large amounts of Jeyes fluid, all our dogs always seemed to be full of fleas. Perhaps they frequented stables and played with other flea-ridden dogs more than they do now. On the other hand they were less pampered, and they did not seem to live at the vets as much as dogs do today. I don’t remember Tony ever being seriously ill, his coat seemed always in good condition, he ate his meals, which were the scraps from our own dinner, and little fuss was made about his health.

But much more fuss is made about children now than was then the case. Temperatures, unless they were high, were not taken much notice of. A temperature of 102, sustained for twenty-four hours, would probably involve a visit from the doctor, but anything under that was given little attention. Occasionally, after a surfeit of green apples one might have what was termed a bilious attack. Twenty-four hours in bed with starvation usually cured that quite easily. Food was good and varied. I suppose there was a tendency to keep young children on milk and starch far too long, but certainly I, from a young age, had tastes of the steak that was sent up for Nursie’s supper, and under-done roast beef was one of my favourite meals. Devonshire cream, too, was eaten in quantities; so much nicer than cod liver oil, my mother used to say. Sometimes one ate it on bread and sometimes with a spoon. Alas! You never see real Devonshire cream in Devon nowadays–not as it used to be–scalded and taken off the milk in layers with its yellow top standing in a china bowl. There is no doubt about it, my favourite thing has been, is, and probably always will be, cream.

Mother, who craved for variety in food as well as in everything else, used from time to time to have a new craze. One time it was ‘there’s more nourishment in an egg’. On this slogan we had eggs at practically every meal till father rebelled. There was also a fishy period, when we lived on sole and whiting and improved our brains. However, having made the round of the food diets, mother usually returned to the normal; just as, having dragged father through Theosophy, the Unitarian church, a near miss of becoming a Roman Catholic, and a flirtation with Buddhism, she returned at last to the Church of England.

It was satisfactory to come home and find everything just as usual. There was only one change, and that was for the better. I now had my devoted Marie.

I suppose that until I dipped a hand into my bag of remembrances I had never actually thought about Marie–she was just Marie, part of my life. To a child the world is simply what is happening to him or her: and that includes the people in it–whom they like, whom they hate, what makes them happy, what makes them unhappy. Marie, fresh, cheerful, smiling, always agreeable, was a much appreciated member of the household.

What I wonder now is what it meant to her? She had been, I think, very happy during the autumn and winter that we spent travelling in France and the Channel Islands. She was seeing places, the life in the hotels was pleasant, and, strangely enough, she liked her young charge. I would, of course, like to think that she liked me because I was me–but Marie was genuinely fond of children, and would have liked any child that she was looking after, short of one or two of those infantile monsters that one does encounter. I was certainly not particularly obedient to her; I don’t think the French have the capacity for enforcing obedience. In many ways I behaved disgracefully. In particular I hated going to bed, and invented a splendid game of leaping round all the furniture, climbing up on wardrobes, down from the tops of chests of drawers, completing the circuit of the room without ever once touching the floor. Marie, standing in the doorway, would moan: ‘Oh, Mees; Mees! Madame votre mère ne serait pas contente!’ Madame ma mère certainly did not know what was going on. If she had made an unexpected appearance, she would have raised her eyebrows, said, ‘Agatha! Why are you not in bed?’ and within three minutes I would have been in bed, scurrying there, without any further word of admonition. However, Marie never denounced me to authority; she pleaded, she sighed, but she never reported me. On the other hand, if I did not give her obedience, I did give her love. I loved her very much.

On only one occasion do I really remember having upset her, and that was entirely inadvertent. It happened after we had come back to England, in the course of an argument on some subject or other which was proceeding quite amicably. Finally, in exasperation, and wishing to prove my point of view, I was saying: ‘Mais, ma pauvre fille, vous ne savez done pas les chemins defer sont: At this point, to my utter amazement, Marie suddenly burst into tears. I stared at her. I had no idea what was the matter. Then words came amongst the sobs. Yes–she was indeed a ‘pauvre fille‘. Her parents were poor, not rich like those of Mees. They kept a cafe, where all the sons and daughters worked. But it was not gentille, it was not bien élevée of her dear Mees to reproach her with her poverty.

‘But, Marie,’ I expostulated, ‘Marie, I didn’t mean that at all’.’ It seemed impossible to explain that no idea of poverty had been in my mind, that ‘ma pauvre fille’ was a mere expression of impatience. Poor Marie had been hurt in her feelings, and it took at least half an hour of protestations, caresses, and reiterated assurances of affection before she was soothed. After that, all was healed between us. I was terribly careful in future never to use that particular expression.

I think that Marie, established at our house in Torquay, felt lonely and homesick for the first time. No doubt in the hotels where we had stayed there had been other maids, nurses, governesses, and so on–cosmopolitan ones–and she had not felt the separation from her family. But here in England she came in contact with girls of her own age, or at any rate of not much more than her own age. We had at that time, I think, a youngish housemaid and a parlourmaid of perhaps thirty. But their point of view was so different from Marie’s that it must have made her feel a complete alien. They criticised the plainness of her clothes, the fact that she never spent any money on finery, ribbons, gloves, all the rest of it.

Marie was receiving what were to her fantastically good wages. She asked Monsieur every month if he would be so kind as to remit practically the whole of her pay to her mother in Pau. She herself kept a tiny sum. This was to her natural and proper; she was saving up for her dot, that precious sum of money that all French girls at that time (and perhaps now, I do not know) industriously put by as a dowry–a necessity for the future, for lacking it they may easily not get married at all. It is the equivalent, I suppose, of what we call in England ‘my bottom drawer’, but far more serious. It was a good and sensible idea, and I think in vogue nowadays in England, because young people want to buy a house and therefore both the man and the girl save money towards it. But in the time I am speaking of, girls did not save up for marriage–that was the man’s business. He must provide a home and the wherewithal to feed, clothe and look after his wife. Therefore the ‘girls in good service’ and the lower class of shop-girls, considered the money they earned was their own to use for the frivolous things of life. They bought new hats, and coloured blouses, an occasional necklace or brooch. One might say, I suppose, that they used their wages as courting money–to attract a suitable male of the species. But here was Marie, in her neat little black coat and skirt, and her little toque and her plain blouses, never adding to her wardrobe, never buying anything unnecessary. I don’t think they meant to be unkind, but they laughed at her; they despised her. It made her very unhappy.

It was really my mother’s insight and kindness that helped her through the first four or five months. She was homesick, she wanted to go home. My mother, however, talked to Marie, consoled her, told her that she was a wise girl and doing the right thing, that English girls were not as far-seeing and prudent as French girls. She also, I think, had a word with the servants themselves and with Jane, saying that they were making this French girl unhappy. She was far away from home, and they must think what it would be like if they were in a foreign country. So after a month or two Marie cheered up.



I feel that, at this point, anyone who has had the patience to read so far will exclaim: ‘But didn’t you have any lessons to do?’

The answer is, ‘No, I did not.’

I was, I suppose, nine years old by now, and most children of my age had governesses–though these were engaged, I fancy, largely from the point of view of child care, to exercise and supervise. What they taught you in the way of ‘lessons’ depended entirely on the tastes of the individual governesses.

I remember dimly a governess or two in friends’ houses. One held complete faith in Dr Brewer’s Child’s Guide to Knowledge–a counterpart of our modern ‘Quiz’. I retain scraps of knowledge thus acquired–‘What are the three diseases of wheat?’ Rust, mildew, and soot.’ Those have gone with me all through life–though unfortunately they have never been of practical use to me. ‘What is the principal manufacture in the town of Redditch?’ ‘Needles.’ ‘What is the date of the Battle of Hastings?’ ‘1066.’

Another governess, I remember, instructed her pupils in natural history, but little else. A great deal of picking of leaves and berries and wild flowers went on–and a suitable dissection of the same. It was incredibly boring. ‘I do hate all this pulling things to pieces,’ confided my small friend to me. I entirely agreed, and indeed the word Botany all through my life has made me shy like a nervous horse.

My mother had gone to school in her own youth, to an establishment in Cheshire. She sent my sister Madge to boarding school but was now entirely converted to the view that the best way to bring up girls was to let them run wild as much as possible; to give them good food, fresh air, and not to force their minds in any way. (None of this, of course, applied to boys: boys had to have a strictly conventional education.)

As I have already mentioned, she had a theory that no child should be allowed to read until it was eight. This having been frustrated, I was allowed to read as much as I pleased, and I took every opportunity to do so. The schoolroom, as it was called, was a big room at the top of the house, almost completely lined with books. There were shelves of children’s books–Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, the earlier, sentimental Victorian tales which I have already mentioned, such as Our White Violet, Charlotte Yonge’s books, including The Daisy Chain, a complete set, I should think, of Henty, and, besides that, any amount of school-books, novels, and others. I read indiscriminately, picking up anything that interested me, reading quite a lot of things which I did not understand but which nevertheless held my attention.

In the course of my reading I found a French play which father discovered me reading. ‘How did you get hold of that?’ he asked, picking it up, horrified. It was one of a series of French novels and plays which he usually kept carefully locked up in the smoking-room for the perusal of adults only.

‘It was in the school-room,’ I said.

‘It shouldn’t have been there,’ said father. ‘It should have been in my cupboard.’

I relinquished it cheerfully. Truth to tell, I had found it somewhat difficult to understand. I returned happily to reading Mémoires d’un ne, Sans Famille, and other innocuous French literature.

I suppose I must have had lessons of some kind, but I did not have a governess. I continued to do arithmetic with my father, passing proudly through fractions to decimals. I eventually arrived at the point where so many cows ate so much grass, and tanks filled with water in so many hours–I found it quite enthralling.

My sister was now officially ‘out’, which entailed parties, dresses, visits to London, and so on. This kept my mother busy, and she had less time for me. Sometimes I became jealous, feeling that Madge had all the attention. My mother had had a dull girlhood herself. Though her aunt was a rich woman, and though Clara had travelled to and fro across the Atlantic with her, she had seen no reason to give her a social debut of any kind. I don’t think my mother was socially minded, but she did yearn, as any young girl might, to have a great many prettier clothes and dresses than she had. Auntie-Grannie ordered herself very expensive and fashionable clothes at the best dressmakers in Paris, but she always considered Clara as a child, and more or less dressed her as such. The awful sewing women again! My mother was determined that her daughters should have all the pretty-pretties and frivolities of life that she herself had missed. Hence her interest and delight in Madge’s clothes, and later in mine.

Mind you, clothes were clothes in those days! There was a great deal of them, lavish both in material and in workmanship. Frills, ruffles, flounces, lace, complicated seams and gores: not only did they sweep the ground and have to be held up in one hand elegantly as you walked along, but they had little capes or coats or feather boas.

There was also hairdressing: hairdressing, too, really was hairdressing in those times–no running a comb through it and that was that. It was curled, frizzed, waved, put in curlers overnight, waved with hot tongs; if a girl was going to a dance she started doing her hair at least two hours earlier and the hairdressing would take her about an hour and a half, leaving her about half an hour to put on her dress, stockings, slippers and so on.

This was not, of course, my world. It was the grown-ups’ world, from which I remained aloof. Nevertheless, I was influenced by it. Marie and I discussed the toilettes of the Mademoiselles and our special favourites.

It so happened that in our particular road there were no next-door neighbours with children of my age. So, as I had done at a younger age, I once more arranged a set of friends and intimates of my own–in succession to Poodle, Squirrel and Tree, and the famous Kittens. This time I invented a school. This was not because I had any desire myself to go to school. No, I think that The School constituted the only background into which I could conveniently fit seven girls of varying ages and appearances, giving them different backgrounds instead of making them a family, which I did not want to do. The School had no name–it was just The School.

The first girls to arrive were Ethel Smith and Annie Gray. Ethel Smith was eleven and Annie was nine. Ethel was dark, with a great mane of hair. She was clever, good at games, had a deep voice, and must have been rather masculine in appearance. Annie Gray, her great friend, was a complete contrast. She had pale flaxen hair, blue eyes, and was shy and nervous and easily reduced to tears. She clung to Ethel, who protected her on every occasion. I liked them both, but my preference was for the bold and vigorous Ethel.

After Ethel and Annie, I added two more: Isabella Sullivan, who was rich, golden-haired, brown-eyed, and beautiful. She was eleven years of age. Isabella I did not like–in fact I disliked her a good deal. She was ‘worldly’. (Worldly’ was a great word in the story-books of the time: pages of The Daisy Chain are devoted to the worries in the May family because of Flora’s worldliness.) Isabel was certainly the quintessence of worldliness. She gave herself airs, boasted about being rich, and had clothes that were far too expensive for her and too grand for a girl of her age. Elsie Green was her cousin. Elsie was rather Irish; she had dark hair, blue eyes, curls, and was gay and laughed a good deal. She got on quite well with Isabel, but sometimes ticked her off. Elsie was poor; she wore Isabel’s cast-off clothes, which sometimes rankled, but not much, because Elsie was easy-going.

With these four I got on well for some time. They travelled on the tubular railway, they rode horses, they did gardening, they also played a great deal of croquet. I used to arrange tournaments and special matches. My great hope was that Isabel would not win. I did everything short of cheating to see that she did not win–that is, I held her mallet for her carelessly, played quickly, hardly aimed at all–yet somehow the more carelessly I played, the more fortunate Isabel seemed to be. She got through impossible hoops, hit balls from right across the lawn, and nearly always finished as winner or runner-up. It was most annoying.

After a while I thought it would be nice to have some younger girls at the school. I added two six-year-olds, Ella White and Sue de Verte. Ella was conscientious, industrious and dull. She had bushy hair, and was good at lessons. She did well in Dr Brewer’s Guide to Knowledge, and played quite a fair game of croquet. Sue de Verte was curiously colourless, not only in appearance–she was fair, with pale blue eyes–but also in character. Somehow I couldn’t see or feel Sue. She and Ella were great friends, but though I knew Ella like the back of my hand Sue remained fluid. I think this is probably because Sue was really myself When I conversed with the others, I was always Sue conversing with them, not Agatha; and therefore Sue and Agatha became two facets of the same person, and Sue was an observer, not really one of the dramatis personae. The seventh girl to be added to the collection was Sue’s step-sister, Vera de Verte. Vera was an immense age–she was thirteen. She was not at the moment beautiful, but she was going to be a raving beauty in the future. There was also a mystery about her parentage. I had half-planned various futures for Vera of a highly romantic nature. She had straw-coloured hair and forget-me-not blue eyes.

An additional help to ‘the girls’ were bound copies of Royal Academy pictures which my grandmother had in the house in Ealing. She promised that they should belong to me one day, and I used to spend hours looking at them in wet weather, not so much for artistic satisfaction as for finding suitable pictures of ‘the girls’. A book that had been given me as a Christmas present, illustrated by Walter Crane–The Feast of Flora–represented flower pictures in human form. There was a particularly lovely one in it of forget-me-nots wreathed round a figure who was definitely Vera de Verte. Chaucer’s Daisy was Ella, and the handsome Crown Imperial striding along was Ethel.

‘The girls’, I may say, stayed with me for many years, naturally changing their characters as I myself matured. They participated in music, acted in opera, were given parts in plays and musical comedies. Even when I was grown up I spared them a thought now and then, and allocated them the various dresses in my wardrobe. I also designed model gowns for them in my mind. Ethel, I remember, looked very handsome in a dress of dark blue tulle with white arum lilies on one shoulder. Poor Annie was never given much to wear. I was fair to Isabel, though, and gave her some extremely handsome gowns–embroidered brocades, and satins usually. Even now, sometimes, as I put away a dress in a cupboard, I say to myself: ‘Yes, that would do well for Elsie, green was always her colour.’ Ella would look very nice indeed in that three-piece jersey suit.’ It makes me laugh when I do it, but there ‘the girls’ are still, though, unlike me, they have not grown old. Twenty-three is the oldest I have ever imagined them.

In the course of time I added four more characters: Adelaide, who was the oldest of all, tall, fair and rather superior; Beatrice, who was a merry, dancing, little fairy, the youngest of them all; and two sisters, Rose and Iris Reed. I became rather romantic about those two. Iris had a young man who wrote poetry to her and called her ‘Iris of the Marshes’, and Rose was very mischievous, played tricks on everybody, and flirted madly with all the young men. They were, of course, in due time married off, or remained unmarried. Ethel never married but lived in a small cottage with the gentle Annie–very appropriate, I think now: it’s exactly what they would have done in real life.



Soon after our return from abroad the delights of the world of music were opened to me by Fraulein Uder. Fraulein Uder was a short, wiry, formidable, little German woman. I don’t know why she was teaching music in Torquay, I never heard anything of her private life. My mother appeared one day in the Schoolroom with Fraulein Uder in tow, explaining she wanted Agatha to start learning the piano.

‘Ach!’ said Fraulein Uder with a rich German sound, though she spoke English perfectly. ‘Then we will at once to the piano go.’ To the piano we went–the schoolroom piano, of course, not the grand piano in the drawing-room.

‘Stand there,’ commanded Fraulein Uder. I stood as placed to the left of the piano. ‘That,’ she said, thumping the note so hard that I really thought something might happen to it, ‘is C Major. You understand? That is the note C. This is the scale of C Major.’ She played it. ‘Now we go back and play the chord of C, like that Now again–the scale. The notes are C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C. You understand?’

I said yes. As a matter of fact I knew that much already.

‘Now,’ said Fraulein Uder, ‘you will stand there where you cannot see the notes and I play first C, then another note, and you shall tell me what the second is.’

She hit C, and then hit another note with equal force.

‘What is that? Answer me.’

‘E,’ I said.

‘Quite right. Good. Now we will try again.’

Once more she thumped C, and then another note. ‘And that?’ ‘A,’ I hazarded.

‘Ach, that it first class. Good. This child is musical. You have the ear, yes. Ach, we shall get on famously.’

I certainly got off to a good start. I don’t think, to be honest, I had the least idea what the other notes were she was playing. I think it must have been an inspired guess. But anyway, having started on those lines we went ahead with plenty of good will on either side. Before long the houses resounded with scales, arpeggios, and in due course the strains of The Merry Peasant. I enjoyed my music lessons enormously. Both father and mother played the piano. Mother played Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words and various other ‘pieces’ that she had learned in her youth. She played well, but was not, I think, a passionate music lover. My father was naturally musical. He could play anything by ear, and he played delightful American songs and negro spirituals and other things. To The Merry Peasant Fraulein Uder and I added Trdumerei, and other of Schumann’s delicate little tunes. I practised with zeal for an hour or two a day. From Schumann I proceeded to Greig, which I loved passionately–Erotique and the First Rustle of Spring were my favourites. When I finally progressed to being able to play the Peer Gynt Morgen I was transported with delight. Fraulein Uder, like most Germans, was an excellent teacher. It was not all playing of pleasant tunes; there were masses of Czerny’s Exercises, about which I was not quite so zealous, but Fraulein Uder was having no nonsense. ‘You must the good grounding have,’ she said. ‘These exercises, they are the reality, the necessity. The tunes, yes, they are pretty little embroideries, they are like flowers, they bloom and drop off, but you must have the roots, the strong roots and the leaves.’ So I had a good deal of the strong roots and the leaves and an occasional flower or two, and I was probably much more pleased with the result than the others in the house, who found so much practising somewhat oppressive.

Then there was also dancing-class, which took place once a week, at something grandiosely called the Athenaeum Rooms, situated over a confectioner’s shop. I must have started going to dancing-class quite early–five or six, I think–because I remember that Nursie was still there and took me once a week. The young ones were started off with the polka. Their approach to it was to stamp three times: right, left, right–left, right, left–thump, thump, thump–thump, thump, thump. Very unpleasant it must have been for those having tea at the confectioner’s underneath. When I got home I was slightly upset by Madge, who said that that was not how the polka was danced. ‘You slide one foot, bring the next up to it, and then the first,’ she said, ‘like this.’ I was rather puzzled, but apparently it was Miss Hickey’s, the dancing-mistress’s idea of getting the rhythm of the polka before you did the steps.

Miss Hickey, I remember, was a wonderful if alarming personality. She was tall, stately, had a pompadour of grey hair beautifully arranged, long flowing skirts, and to waltz with her–which happened, of course, much later–was a terrifying experience. She had one pupil teacher of about eighteen or nineteen, and one of about thirteen called Aileen. Aileen was a sweet girl, who worked hard, and whom we all liked very much. The older one, Helen, was slightly terrifying, and only took notice of the really good dancers.

The procedure of dancing-class was as follows. It started with what were called ‘expanders’, which exercised your chest and arms. They were a sort of blue ribbon elastic with handles. You stretched these vigorously for about half an hour. There was then the polka, which was danced by all once they had graduated from thump, thump, thump–the older girls in the class dancing with the younger ones. ‘Have you seen me dance the polka? Have you seen my coat-tails fly?’ The polka was merry and unattractive. Then you had the grand march, in which, in pairs, you went up the middle of the room, round the sides, and into various figures of eight, the seniors leading, the juniors following up. You had partners for the march whom you engaged yourself, and a good deal of heart-burning took place over this. Naturally, everybody wished to have as partner either Helen or Aileen, but Miss Hickey saw to it that there were no particular monopolies. After the march the smaller ones were removed to the junior room, where they learned the steps of either the polka or, later, the waltz, or steps in their fancy dances at which they were particularly maladroit. The seniors did their fancy dance under the eye of Miss Hickey in the big room. This consisted of either a tambourine dance, a Spanish castanet dance, or a fan dance.

Talking of the fan dance, I once mentioned to my daughter, Rosalind, and her friend Susan, when they were girls of eighteen or nineteen, that I used to do a fan dance in my youth. Their ribald laughter puzzled me.

‘You didn’t really, mother, did you? A fan dance! Susan, she did a fan dance!’

‘Oh,’ said Susan, ‘I always thought that Victorians were so particular.’ It dawned on us soon, however, that by a fan dance we did not mean exactly the same thing.

After that the seniors sat out and the juniors did their dance, which was the Sailor’s Hornpipe or some gay little folk dance, not too difficult.

Finally we entered into the complications of The Lancers. We were also taught the Swedish Country Dance, and Sir Roger de Coverley. These last were especially useful because when you went to parties you were not shamed by ignorance of such social activities.

At Torquay we were almost entirely girls. When I went to dancing-class in Ealing there was quite a number of boys. This I think was when I was about nine, very shy, and not as yet adept in dancing. A boy of considerable charm, probably a year or two older than I was, came up and asked me to be his partner in The Lancers. Upset and downcast, I said that I couldn’t dance The Lancers. It seemed to me hard; I had never seen so attractive a boy. He had dark hair, merry eyes., and I felt at once that we were going to be soul-mates. I sat down sadly when The Lancers began, and almost immediately Mrs Wordsworth’s representative came up to me. ‘Now, Agatha, we can’t have anyone sitting out.’

‘I don’t know how to dance The Lancers, Mrs Wordsworth.’

‘No, dear, but you can soon learn. We must find you a partner.’

She seized a freckled boy with a snub nose and sandy hair; he also had adenoids. ‘Here you are. Here is William.’ During The Lancers, when we were engaged in visiting, I came up against my first love and his partner. He whispered to me, in dudgeon: ‘You wouldn’t dance with me, and here you are. It is very unkind of you.’ I tried to tell him that I couldn’t help it, that I had thought I couldn’t dance The Lancers but I was told I had to–but there is not time when you are visiting in The Lancers to enter into explanations. He continued to look reproachfully at me until the end of the dancing-class. I hoped I might meet him the following week, but alas I never saw him again: one of life’s sad love stories.

The waltz was the only dance I learned that was going to be useful to me through life, and I have never really liked waltzing. I do not like the rhythm, and I always used to get exceedingly giddy, especially when honoured by Miss Hickey. She had a wonderful sweep round in the waltz, which practically took you off your feet, and which left you at the end of the performance with your head reeling, hardly able to stand up. But I must admit that it was a beautiful sight to watch her.

Fraulein Uder disappeared from my life; I don’t know where or when. Perhaps she went back to Germany. She was replaced a little later by a young man called, as far as I remember, Mr Trotter. He was the organist of one of the churches; was rather a depressing teacher, and I had to adopt an entirely different style. I had to sit practically on the floor, with my hands reaching upward to get to the keys of the piano, and everything had to be played from the wrist. Fraulein Uder’s method, I think, must have been to sit high and play from the elbows. One was more or less poised above the piano so as to be able to come down on the keys with maximum power. Very satisfactory!


V

It must have been shortly after our return from the Channel Isles that the shadow of my father’s illness began to be felt. He had not been well abroad, and had twice consulted a doctor. The second doctor had pro-pounded a somewhat alarmist view, namely that my father suffered from a kidney disease. After our return to England he consulted our own doctor, who did not agree with that diagnosis and who sent him to a specialist. After that, the shadow was there, faint, felt only by a child as one of those atmospheric disturbances which are to the psychic world as an approaching thunderstorm is to the physical one.

Medical science seemed to be of little use. Father went to two or three specialists. The first one said it was definitely a heart condition. I don’t remember the details of it now; I only remember listening to my mother and sister talking, and the words ‘an inflammation of the nerves surrounding the heart,’ which sounded to me very frightening. Another doctor who was consulted put it down entirely to gastric trouble.

At increasingly short intervals my father had attacks of pain and breathlessness during the night, and my mother sat up with him, altering his position and giving him such medicaments as had been ordered by the last doctor.

As always there was a pathetic belief in the last doctor whom we had consulted, and the latest regime or treatment that we adopted. Faith does a lot–faith, novelty, a dynamic personality in a doctor–but it cannot in the end deal with the real organic complaint that is at the bottom of it.

Most of the time my father was his usual cheerful self, but the atmosphere of our home altered. He still went to the club, spent his summer days at the cricket ground, came back with amusing stories–was the same kindly personality. He was never cross or irritable, but the shadow of apprehension was there–also felt, of course, by my mother, who made valiant attempts to reassure my father and to tell him that he looked better, felt better, was better.

At the same time the shadow of financial worry darkened. The money from my grandfather’s will had been invested in house property in New York, but the buildings were leasehold, not freehold. By now, apparently, they were in a part of the city where the land would have been valuable, but the buildings were worth practically nothing. The owner of the land was, I gather, unco-operative–an elderly woman of seventy odd, who appeared to have a stranglehold, preventing any development or improvement. The income that should have come over seemed always to be swallowed up in repairs or taxation.

Catching scraps of conversation which seemed to me of dramatic import, I hurried upstairs and announced to Marie in the best manner of Victorian stories that we were ruined. Marie did not seem to me as distressed as I thought she ought to have been, however, she must have attempted some condolence with my mother, who came to me with some annoyance.

‘Really, Agatha, you must not repeat things in an exaggerated way. We are not ruined. We are just badly off for the time being and will have to economise.’

‘Not ruined?’ I said, deeply chagrined.

‘Not ruined,’ said my mother firmly.

I must admit that I was disappointed. In the many books I had read ruin happened frequently, and was treated as it should be treated–seriously. There would be threats of blowing out one’s brains, a heroine leaving a rich mansion in rags, and so on.

‘I forgot you were even in the room,’ said my mother. ‘But you understand, no repeating of things that you overhear.’

I said I would not, but I felt injured because only a short time before I had been criticised for not telling what I had overheard of another incident.

Tony and I had been seated under the dining-room table one night just before dinner. It was a favourite place of ours, suitable for the playing of adventures in crypts, dungeons, and the like.

We were hardly daring to breathe, so that the robbers who had imprisoned us should not hear us–this was not true of Tony who was fat and panted–when Barter, the housemaid who assisted the parlourmaid at dinner, came in with the tureen of soup which she placed on the sideboard hot plate. She lifted the lid and inserted the big soup ladle.

Ladling out a spoonful, she took some swigs from it. Lewis, the parlour-maid, came in and said: ‘I am just going to ring the gong–’ then broke off and exclaimed, ‘Why, Louie, whatever are you doing?’

‘Just refreshing myself,’ said Barter, with a hearty laugh. ‘Mm, not bad soup,’ and she took another swig.

‘Now, you put that back and the lid on,’ said Lewis, shocked. ‘Really!’

Barter laughed her fat good-natured chuckle, put back the ladle, replaced the lid, and departed to the kitchen for the soup plates as Tony and I emerged.

‘Is it good soup?’ I inquired with interest, as I prepared to take myself off.

‘Oh, I never! Miss Agatha, you give me such a fright, you did.’

I was mildly surprised, but never mentioned it until one day a couple of years later. My mother, talking to Madge, mentioned our former housemaid, Barter. I suddenly broke into the conversation, saying, ‘I remember Barter. She used to drink soup out of the tureen in the dining-room before you all came into dinner.’

This caused lively interest on the part of both my mother and Madge. ‘But why didn’t you ever tell me?’ asked mother. I stared at her. I couldn’t see the point.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘it seemed–’ I hesitated, mustering all my dignity, and proclaimed: ‘I don’t care for parting with information.’

After that it was always a joke brought up against me. ‘Agatha doesn’t like parting with information.’ It was true enough. I didn’t. Unless they struck me as apposite or interesting, I tucked away any scraps of information that came to me, locked them up, as it were, in a file inside my head. This was incomprehensible to the rest of my family, who were all extrovert talkers. If asked to keep a secret they never by any chance remembered to do so! It made them all much more entertaining than I was.

If Madge went to a dance or to a garden party, when she came back she had quantities of amusing things to tell. Indeed my sister was an entertaining person in every way–wherever she went things happened to her. Even later in life, going down the village to do a little marketing, she would come back with something extraordinary that had occurred or something somebody had said. These things were not untruths, either–there was always a good foundation of fact, but worked up by Madge to make a better story.

I, on the contrary, presumably taking after my father in this respect, when asked if anything amusing had happened, would immediately say, ‘Nothing’. ‘What was Mrs So-and-so wearing at the party?’ ‘I don’t remember.’ ‘Mrs S. has done up her drawing-room again I hear; what colour is it now?’ ‘I didn’t look.’ ‘Oh, Agatha, you really are hopeless, you never notice anything.’

I continued on the whole to keep my own counsel. I don’t think I meant to be secretive. It just seemed to me that most things didn’t matter–so why keep talking about them? Or else I was so busy conducting the conversations and quarrels of ‘the girls’ and inventing adventures for Tony and myself that I could not pay attention to the small affairs going on round me. It took something like a rumour of ruin to get me really aroused. Undoubtedly I was a dull child, with every prospect of growing up to be the kind of person who is most difficult to integrate properly in a party.

I have never been good at parties–and never much enjoyed them. I suppose there were children’s parties, but I don’t think there were nearly as many then as there are nowadays. I do remember going to tea with friends and friends coming to tea with me. That I did enjoy–and do nowadays. Set Parties, I think, in my youth only happened round Christmas time. I seem to remember one fancy-dress party and another at which there was a conjuror.

I fancy my mother was anti-party, being of the opinion that children got too hot, over-excited and over-eaten, and frequently came home and were sick from all three causes. She was probably right. At any children’s parties of any size that I have gone to, I have come to the conclusion that at least a third of the children are not really enjoying themselves.

A party is controllable up to twenty in number–beyond that, I should say, it is dominated by a lavatory complex! Children who want to go to the lavatory, who don’t like to say they want to go to the lavatory, leave going to the lavatory till the last minute, and so on. If the lavatories are inadequate to deal with large quantities of children who all want to use them at once, chaos and some regrettable incidents ensue. I remember one little girl of only two whose mother had been persuaded, against the advice of her experienced Nanny, to bring her child to one party. ‘Annette is so sweet, she must come. I’m sure she will enjoy it, and we’ll all take great care of her.’ As soon as they got to the party her mother, to be on the safe side, marched her to a potty. Annette, worked up to a fever of excitement, was quite unable to do her little performance. ‘Oh, well, perhaps she doesn’t really want to go,’ said the mother hopefully. They came downstairs and when a conjuror was producing things of every kind from his ears and his nose, and making the children laugh, and they were all standing round shouting and clapping their hands, the worst happened.

‘My dear,’ said an elderly aunt, recounting this to my mother. ‘You really have never seen anything like it–poor child. Right in the middle of the floor. Just like a horse, it was!’



Marie must have left some time before my father’s death–possibly a year or two. She had contracted to come for two years to England, but she stayed on at least a year after. She was homesick for her family and, also, I think, being sensible and practical, realised it was time for her to think in a serious French way about marriage. She had saved up a very nice little dot from her wages, and so, with tears, fond embraces to her ‘dear Mees’, Marie went, and left me very lonely.

We had, however, before she departed, come to an agreement on the subject of my sister’s future husband. That, as I have said, had been one of our continual sources of speculation. Marie’s selection had been firmly ‘le Monsieur blond’.

My mother, as a girl living with her aunt in Cheshire, had had a schoolfriend to whom she was much devoted. When Annie Browne married James Watts and my mother married her step-cousin Frederick Miller the two girls agreed that they would never forget each other and that they would always exchange letters and news. Although my grandmother left Cheshire for London, the two girls still kept in touch with each other. Annie Watts had five children–four boys and a girl–mother, of course, had three. They exchanged photographs of their children at various ages, and sent presents to them at Christmas.

So when my sister was going on a visit to Ireland, to make up her mind whether she was going to get engaged to a certain young man who was anxious to marry her, my mother mentioned Madge’s journey to Annie Watts, and Annie begged Madge to come and stay at Abney Hall in Cheshire, on her way back from Holyhead. She would so much like to see one of mother’s children.

Madge, therefore, having had a good time in Ireland and having decided that she did not want to marry Charlie P. after all, broke her journey back and stayed with the Watts family. The eldest son, James, who was then twenty-one or twenty-two, and was still at Oxford, was a quiet fair-haired young man. He had a soft low voice and did not speak much, and he paid much less attention to my sister than most young men did. She found this so extraordinary that it excited her interest. She took a good deal of trouble over James, but was not sure what effect she had made. Anyway, after she came home, desultory correspondence took place between them.

Actually James had been bowled over by her from the first moment she appeared, but it was not in his nature to display such emotion. He was shy and reserved. He came to stay with us the following summer. I took a great fancy to him at once. He was kind to me, always treating me seriously, and not making silly jokes or talking to me as though I was a little girl. He treated me as an individual, and I became devoted to him. Marie also thought well of him. So ‘le Monsieur blond’ was constantly discussed between us in the sewing room.

‘I don’t think they really seem to care for each other very much, Marie.’

‘Ah, mais oui, he thinks of her a great deal, and he watches her when she is not looking. Oh yes, il est bien épris. And it would be a good marriage, very sensible. He has the good prospects, I hear, and is tout à fait un garçon serieux. He will make a very good husband. And Mademoiselle, she is gay, witty, full of fun and laughter. It will suit her well to have a quiet and steady husband, and he will appreciate her because she is so different.’

The person who didn’t like him, I think, was my father, but I believe that is almost inevitable with the fathers of charming and gay daughters–they want somebody much better than could ever have been born at all. Mothers are supposed to feel the same about their sons’ wives. As my brother never married, my mother was not affected that way.

I must say, she never considered that her daughters’ husbands were good enough for them, but she admitted herself that that was a failing on her part rather than a failing on theirs. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘I can’t think any man would be good enough for either of my two daughters.’



One of the great joys in life was the local theatre. We were all lovers of the theatre in my family. Madge and Monty went practically every week and usually I was allowed to accompany them. As I grew older it became more and more frequent. We went to the pit stalls always–the pit itself was supposed to be ‘rough’. The pit cost a shilling and the pit stalls, which were two rows of seats in front, behind about ten rows of stalls, were where the Miller family sat, enjoying every kind of theatrical entertainment.

I don’t know whether it was the first play I saw, but certainly among the first was Hearts are Trumps, a roaring melodrama of the worst type. There was a villain in it, the wicked woman was called Lady Winifred, and there was a beautiful girl who had been done out of a fortune. Revolvers were fired, and I clearly remember the last scene, when a young man hanging by a rope from the Alps cut the rope and died heroically to save either the girl he loved or the man whom the girl he loved loved. I remember going through this story point by point. ‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘that the really bad ones were Spades’–father being a great whist player, I was always hearing talk of cards–‘and the ones who weren’t quite so bad were Clubs. I think perhaps Lady Winifred was a Club–because she repented–and so did the man who cut the rope on the mountain. And the diamonds–’ I reflected. ‘Just worldly,’ I said, in my Victorian tone of disapproval.

One of the great yearly events was the Torquay Regatta, which took place on the last Monday and Tuesday in August. I started saving up for it at the beginning of May. When I say I remember the Regatta I do not so much mean the yacht racing as the Fair which accompanied it. Madge, of course, used to go with father to Haldon Pier to watch the sailing, and we usually had a house party staying for the Regatta Ball in the evening. Father, mother and Madge used to go to the Regatta Yacht Club tea in the afternoon, and all the various functions connected with sailing. Madge never did more sailing than she could help, because she was, throughout her life, an incurably bad sailor. However, a passionate interest was taken in our friends’ yacht. There were picnics and parties, but this was the social side of the Regatta in which I was too young to participate.

My looked-forward-to joy in life was the Fair. The merry-go-rounds, where you rode on horses with manes, round and round and round, and a kind of switchback where you tore up and down slopes. Two machines blared music, and as you came round on the horses and the switchback cars, the tunes combined to make a horrible cacophony. Then there were all the shows–the Fat Woman; Madame Arensky, who told the Future; the Human Spider, horrible to look at; the Shooting Gallery, where Madge and Monty spent always a great deal of time and money. And there were coconut shies, from which Monty used to obtain large quantities of coconuts and bring them home to me. I was passionately fond of coconut. I was given a few shies at the coconuts myself, gallantly allowed so far forward by the man in charge that I sometimes actually managed to knock a coconut off. Coconut shies were proper coconut shies then. Nowadays there are still shies, but the coconuts are so arranged in a kind of saucer that nothing but the most stupendous mixture of luck and strength would topple one. Then one had a sporting chance. Out of six shots you usually got one, and Monty once got five.

The hoop-las, the Kewpie dolls, the pointers and all those things had not arrived yet. There were various stalls that sold things. My particular passion was what were known as penny monkeys. They cost a penny, and they were fluffy little representations of monkeys on a long pin which you stuck into your coat. Every year I purchased six to eight of these, and added them to my collection–pink, green, brown, red, yellow. As the years went by it became more difficult to find a different colour or a different pattern.

There was also the famous nougat, which only appeared at the Fair. A man stood behind a table chopping nougat from an enormous pink and white block in front of him. He yelled, shouted, and offered bits for auction. ‘Now, friends, sixpence for a stupendous piece! All right, love, cut it in half. Now then, what about that for fourpence?’ and so on and so on. There were some ready-made packets which you could buy for twopence, but the fun was entering the auction. ‘There, to the little lady there. Yes, twopence halfpenny to you.’

Goldfish did not arrive as a novelty in the Regatta until I was about twelve. It was a great excitement when they did. The whole stall was covered with goldfish bowls, one fish in each, and you threw ping-pong balls for them. If a ball lodged in the mouth of one of the bowls, the goldfish was yours. That, like the coconuts, was fairly easy to begin with. The first Regatta they appeared we got eleven between us, and bore them home in triumph to live in the Tub. But the price had soon advanced from a penny a ball to sixpence a ball.

In the evening there were fireworks. Since we could not see them from our house–or only the very high rockets–we usually spent the evening with some friends who lived just over the harbour. It was a nine o’clock party, with lemonade, ices and biscuits handed round. That was another delight of those days that I miss very much, not being of an alcoholic persuasion–the garden parties.

The garden parties of pre-1914 were something to be remembered. Everyone was dressed up to the nines, high-heeled shoes, muslin frocks with blue sashes, large leghorn hats with drooping roses. There were lovely ices–strawberry, vanilla, pistachio, orange-water and raspberry-water was the usual selection–with every kind of cream cake, of sandwich, of eclair, and peaches, muscat grapes, and nectarines. From this I deduce that garden parties were practically always held in August. I don’t remember any strawberries and cream.

There was a certain pain in getting there, of course. Those who hadn’t got carriages took a hired cab if they were aged or infirm, but all the young people walked a mile and a half to two miles from different parts of Torquay; some might be lucky and live near, but others were always bound to be a good way away, because Torquay is built on seven hills. There is no doubt that walking up hills in high-heeled shoes, holding up one’s long skirt in one’s left hand and one’s parasol in the right, was something of an ordeal. It was worth it, however, to get to the garden party.



My father died when I was eleven. His health had got slowly worse, but his illness seems never to have been precisely diagnosed. There is no doubt that constant financial worry weakened his resistance to illness of any kind.

He had been at Ealing, staying with his stepmother for about a week, and seeing various friends in London who might be able to help him find some kind of job. Finding jobs was not an easy thing to do at that particular date. Either you were a lawyer or a doctor or managed an estate, were in one of the services, or were a barrister, but the great world of business did not provide the livelihood that we expect of it nowadays. There were big financial banking houses, such as Pierpont Morgan’s, and others in which my father had some acquaintances, but everyone was of course a professional–either you belonged to one of the banking houses and had been in it ever since you were a boy, or you did not. My father, like most of his contemporaries, was not trained for anything. He did a great deal of charitable work, and other things that would nowadays provide a paid position, but it was very different then.

His financial position was perplexing to him, and indeed perplexed his executors after his death. It was a question of where the money left by my grandfather had disappeared to. My father had lived well within his supposed income. It was there on paper, but it was never there in fact, and there always seemed to be plausible excuses to explain this and to show that this default would only be temporary–just a matter of special repairs. The estate was no doubt mismanaged by the Trustees and by their successors, but it was too late to remedy that.

He worried, the weather was cold, he caught a bad chill, and double pneumonia developed. My mother was sent for to Ealing, and presently Madge and I followed her there. He was by then very ill. My mother never left him, night or day. We had two hospital nurses in the house. I wandered about, unhappy and frightened, praying earnestly that father might get well again.

One picture remains etched in my mind. It was afternoon. I was standing on the half landing. Suddenly the door of father and mother’s bedroom opened. My mother came out in a kind of rush, her hands held to her head over her eyes. She rushed from there into the adjoining room and shut the door behind her. A hospital nurse came out and spoke to Grannie, who was coming up the stairs. ‘It’s all over,’ she said. I knew then that my father was dead.

They did not take a child to the funeral of course. I wandered about the house in a queer state of turmoil. Something awful had happened, something that I had never envisaged could happen. The blinds of the house were pulled down, the lamps were lit. In the dining-room, in her big chair, Grannie sat writing endless letters, in her own peculiar style. From time to time she shook her head sadly.

Except when she got up to go to the funeral, my mother lay in her room. She did not eat anything for two days, because I heard Hannah commenting on the fact. I remember Hannah with gratitude. Dear old Hannah, with her worn, lined face. She beckoned me to the kitchen and told me she needed someone to help her mix pastry. ‘They were very devoted,’ said Hannah, again and again. ‘It was a good marriage.’

Yes, it was indeed a good marriage. I found among various old things, a letter written by my father to my mother, possibly only three or four days before his death. He wrote of how he longed to return to her at Torquay; nothing satisfactory had been arranged in London, but he felt, he said, he would forget it all when he was back with his dearest Clara again. He went on to say that he had told her often before but he wanted to tell her again how much she meant to him. ‘You have made all the difference in my life,’ he said. ‘No man ever had a wife like you. Every year I have been married to you I love you more. I thank you for your affection and love and sympathy. God bless you, my dearest, we shall soon be together again.’

I found this letter in an embroidered pocket-book. It was the pocket-book my mother had worked for him as a young girl and sent to him in America. He had always kept it, and in it he kept two poems she had written him. My mother added this letter to it.

The house at Ealing had a somewhat ghoulish character these days. It was full of whispering relatives–Granny B, uncles, the wives of uncles, courtesy aunts, Grannie’s old lady cronies–they all half-whispered, sighed, shook their heads. And everyone wore heavy black–I too had black clothes. I must say my mourning clothes were about the only consolation to me at that time. I felt important, worth-while and part of things when I put on my black clothes.

Then there were more whispers of ‘Really, Clara must be made to rouse herself.’ At intervals Grannie would say, ‘Wouldn’t you like to read this letter I’ve had from Mr B. or Mrs C.? Such a beautiful letter of condolence, really I think you would feel most touched by it.’ My mother would say fiercely, ‘I don’t want to see it’.

She opened her own letters but threw them aside almost immediately. Only one she treated differently. ‘Is that from Cassie?’ Grannie asked. ‘Yes, Auntie, it’s from Cassie.’ She folded it up and put it in her bag. ‘She understands,’ she said, and she went out of the room.

Cassie was my American godmother, Mrs Sullivan. I had probably seen her as a small child, but I only remember her when she came to London about a year later. She was a wonderful person: a little woman with white hair and the gayest, sweetest face imaginable, bursting with vitality, with a strange joyousness about her–yet she had had one of the saddest lives possible. Her husband, to whom she was devoted, had died quite young. She had had two lovely boys, and they too had died, paralysed. ‘Some nursemaid,’ said my grandmother, ‘must have let them sit on the damp grass.’ Really, I suppose, it must have been a case of polio–not recognised at that time–which was always called rheumatic fever, the result of damp, and which resulted in crippling paralysis. Anyway, her two children had died. One of her grown-up nephews, who was staying in the same house, also had suffered from paralysis and remained crippled for life. Yet, in spite of her losses, in spite of everything, Aunt Cassie was gay, bright, and full of more human sympathy than anyone I have ever known. She was the one person mother longed to see at that time. ‘She understands, it is no good making consoling phrases at people.’

I remember that I was used as an emissary by the family, that somebody–perhaps Grannie, or perhaps one of my aunts–took me aside and murmured that I must be my mamma’s little comforter, that I must go into the room where my mother was lying and point out to her that father was happy now, that he was in Heaven, that he was at peace. I was willing–it was what I believed myself, what surely everyone believed. I went in, a little timid, with the vague feeling which children have when they are doing what they have been told is right, and what they know is right, but which they feel may, somehow or other, for a reason that they don’t know, be wrong. I went timidly up to mother and touched her. ‘Mummy, father is at peace now. He is happy. You wouldn’t want him back, would you?’

Suddenly my mother reared up in bed, with a violent gesture that startled me into jumping back. ‘Yes, I would,’ she cried in a low voice. ‘Yes, I would. I would do anything in the world to have him back–anything, anything at all. I’d force him to come back, if I could. I want him, I want him back here, now, in this world with me.’

I shrank away, rather frightened. My mother said quickly, ‘It’s all right, darling. It’s all right. It’s just that I am not–not very well at present. Thank you for coming.’ And she kissed me and I went away consoled.

Posted in An Autobiography