PART III. Growing up

I

Life took on a completely different complexion after my father’s death. I stepped out of my child’s world, a world of security and thoughtlessness, to enter the fringes of the world of reality.
I think there is no doubt that from the man of the family comes the stability of the home. We all laugh when the phrase comes, ‘Your father knows best,’ but that phrase does represent what was so marked a feature of later Victorian life. Father–the rock upon which the home is set. Father likes meals punctually; Father mustn’t be worried after dinner; Father would like you to play duets with him. You accept it all unquestioningly. Father provides meals; Father sees that the house works to rule; Father provides music lessons.

Father took great pride and pleasure in Madge’s company as she grew up. He enjoyed her wit and her attractiveness; they were excellent companions to each other. He found in her, I think, some of the gaiety and humour my mother probably lacked–but he had a soft spot in his heart for his little girl, the afterthought, little Agatha. We had our favourite rhyme:

Agatha-Pagatha my black hen,

She lays eggs for gentlemen,

She laid six and she laid seven,

And one day she laid eleven!



Father and I were very fond of that particular joke.

But Monty, I think, was really his favourite. His love for his son was more than he would feel for any daughter. Monty was an affectionate boy, and he had great affection for his father. He was, alas, unsatisfactory from the point of view of making a success of life, and father was unceasingly worried about this. In a way, I think, his happiest time, where Monty was concerned, was after the South African War. Monty obtained a commission in a regular regiment, the East Surreys, and went straight from South Africa, with his regiment, to India. He appeared to be doing well and to have settled down in his army life. In spite of father’s financial worries, Monty at least was one problem removed for the time being.

Madge married James Watts about nine months after my father’s death, though a little reluctant to leave mother. Mother herself was urgent that the marriage should take place, and that they should not have to wait longer. She said, and truly I think, that it would be even more difficult for her to part with Madge as time went on and their companionship drew them closer. James’s father was anxious for him to marry young. He was just leaving Oxford, and would go straight into the business, and he said it would be happier for him if he could marry Madge and settle down in their own home. Mr Watts was going to build a house for his son on part of his land, and the young couple could settle down there. So things were arranged.

My father’s American executor, Auguste Montant, came from New York and stayed with us a week. He was a large stout man, genial, very charming, and nobody could have been kinder to my mother. He told her frankly that father’s affairs were in a bad mess, and that he had been extremely ill advised by lawyers and others who had pretended to act for him. A lot of good money had been thrown after bad by trying to improve the New York property by half-hearted measures. It was better, he said, that a good deal of the property should be abandoned altogether to save taxes. The income that was left would be very small. The big estate my grandfather had left had disappeared into thin air. H. B. Claflin & Co., the firm in which my grandfather had been partner, would still provide Grannie’s income, as the widow of a partner, and also a certain income for mother, though not a large one. We three children, under my grandfather’s will, would get, in English currency, £100 a year each. The rest of the vast amount of dollars had been also in property, which had gone down hill and fallen derelict, or had been sold off in the past for far too little.

The question arose now whether my mother could afford to live on at Ashfield. Here, I think, mother’s own judgment was better than anyone else’s. She thought definitely that it would be a bad thing to stay on. The house would need repairs in the future, and it would be difficult to manage on a small income–possible but difficult. It would be better to sell the house and to buy another smaller house somewhere in Devonshire, perhaps near Exeter, which would cost less to run and would leave a certain amount of money from the exchange to add to income. Although my mother had no business training or knowledge, she had really quite a lot of common sense.

Here, however, she came up against her children. Both Madge and I, and my brother, writing from India, protested violently against selling Ashfield, and begged her to keep it. We said it was our home and we couldn’t bear to part with it. My sister’s husband said he could always spare mother a small addition to her income. If Madge and he came down in the summers they could help with the running expenses. Finally, touched I think by my violent love for Ashfield, mother gave in. She said at any rate we would try how we got on.

I now suspect that mother herself had never really cared for Torquay as a place to live. She had a great passion for cathedral towns, and she had always been fond of Exeter. She and my father sometimes went for a holiday touring various cathedral towns–to please her, I think, not my father–and I believe she rather enjoyed the idea of living in a much smaller house near Exeter. However, she was an unselfish person, and fond of the house itself, so Ashfield continued to be our home, and I continued to adore it.

To have kept it on was not a wise thing, I know that now. We could have sold it and bought a much more manageable house. But though my mother recognised that at the time, and must indeed have recognised it very much better later, yet I think she was content to have had it so. Because Ashfield has meant something to me for so many years. It has been there, my background, my shelter, the place where I truly belong. I have never suffered from the absence of roots. Though to hold on to it may have been foolish, it gave me something that I value, a treasure of remembrance. It has also given me a lot of trouble, worry, expense, and difficulties–but surely for everything you love you have to pay some price?

My father died in November, my sister’s marriage took place the following September. It was quiet, with no reception afterwards, owing to the mourning still observed for my father’s death. It was a pretty wedding and took place in old Tor church. With the importance of being first bridesmaid I enjoyed it all immensely. The bridesmaids all wore white, with white wreaths of flowers on their heads.

The wedding took place at eleven in the morning, and we had the wedding breakfast at Ashfield. The happy couple were blest not only with lots of lovely wedding presents but with every variety of torture that could have been thought up by my boy cousin Gerald and myself. All through their honeymoon rice fell out of every garment they removed from suit-cases. Satin shoes were tied on to the carriage in which they drove away, and chalked on the back, after it had first been carefully examined to make sure that nothing of the kind had occurred, were the words ‘Mrs Jimmy Watts is a first-class name’. So off they drove to a honeymoon in Italy.

My mother retired to her bed exhausted and weeping, and Mr and Mrs Watts to their hotel–Mrs Watts no doubt also to weep. Such appears to be the effect of weddings on mothers. The young Wattses, my cousin Gerald and I were left to view each other with the suspicion of strange dogs, and try to decide whether or not we were going to like each other. There was a great deal of natural antagonism at first between Nan Watts and me. Unfortunately, but in the fashion of the day, we had each been given harangues about the other by our respective families. Nan, who was a gay boisterous tomboy, had been told now nicely Agatha always behaved, ‘so quiet and polite’. And while Nan had my decorum and general solemnity praised to her I had been admonished on the subject of Nan, who was said to be ‘never shy, always answered when she was spoken to–never flushed, or muttered, or sat silent’. We both therefore looked at each other with a great deal of ill-will.

A sticky half-hour ensued, and then things livened up. In the end we organised a kind of steeple-chase round the school-room, doing wild leaps from piled-up chairs and landing always on the large and somewhat elderly chesterfield. We were all laughing, shouting, screaming, and having a glorious time. Nan revised her opinion of me–here was somebody anything but quiet, shouting at the top of her voice. I revised my opinion of Nan as being stuck-up, talking too much, and in’ with the grown-ups. We had a splendid time, we all liked each other, and the springs of the sofa were permanently broken. Afterwards there was a snack meal and we went to the theatre, to The Pirates of Penzance. From that time the friendship never looked back and continued intermittently all through out lives. We dropped it, picked it up, and things seemed just the same when we came together again. Nan is one of the friends I miss most now. With her, as with few others, I could talk together of Abney and Ashfield and the old days, the dogs, and the pranks we played, and our young men, and the theatricals we got up and acted in.



After Madge’s departure the second stage of my life began. I was a child still, but the first phase of childhood had ended. The brilliance of joy, despair of sorrow, the momentous importance of every day of one’s life: those things are the hallmark of childhood. With them go security and the complete lack of thought for the morrow. We were no longer the Millers–a family. We were now just two people living together: a middle-aged woman and an untried, naive girl. Things seemed the same, but the atmosphere was different.

My mother had bad heart attacks since my father’s death. They came on her with no warning, and nothing that the doctors gave her helped. I knew for the first time what it was to feel anxiety for other people, whilst at the same time being a child still, so that my anxiety was naturally exaggerated. I used to wake up at night, my heart beating, sure that mother was dead. Twelve or thirteen may be a natural time of anxiety. I knew, I think, that I was being foolish and giving way to exaggerated feelings, but there it was. I would get up, creep along the corridor, kneel down by my mother’s door with my head to the hinge, trying to hear her breathing. Very often I was quickly reassured–a welcome snore rewarded me. Mother had a special style of snoring, beginning daintly and pianissimo and working up to a terrific explosion, after which she would usually turn over and there would be no repetition of the snoring for at least another three quarters of an hour.

If I heard a snore then, delighted, I went back to bed and to sleep; but if there happened to be none, I remained there, crouching in miserable apprehension. It would have been far more sensible if I had opened the door and walked in to reassure myself, but somehow that does not seem to have occurred to me, or possibly mother always locked her door at night.

I did not tell mother about these terrible fits of anxiety, and I don’t think she ever guessed at them. I used also to have fears, when she had gone out into the town, that she might have been run over. It all seems silly now, so unnecessary. It wore off gradually, I think, and probably lasted only for a year or two. Later I slept in father’s dressing-room, off her bedroom, with the door slightly ajar, so that if she did have an attack in the night I could go in, raise her head, and fetch her brandy and sal volatile. Once I felt that I was on the spot, I no longer suffered from the awful pangs of anxiety. I was, I suppose, always over-burdened with imagination. That has served me well in my profession–it must, indeed, be the basis of the novelist’s craft–but it can give you some bad sessions in other respects.

The conditions of our life changed after my father’s death. Social occasions practically ceased. My mother saw a few old friends but nobody else. We were very badly off and had to economise in every way. It was, of course, all we could do to keep up Ashfield. My mother no longer gave luncheon or dinner parties. She had two servants instead of three. She tried to tell Jane that we were now badly off and that she would have to manage with two young, inexpensive maids, but she stressed that Jane, with her magnificent cooking, could command a large salary, and that she ought to have it. Mother would look about and find Jane a place where she would get good wages and also have a kitchenmaid under her. ‘You deserve it,’ said mother.

Jane displayed no emotion; she was eating at the time, as usual. She nodded her head slowly, continued to chew, then said: ‘Very well, Ma’am. Just as you say. You know best.’

The next morning, however, she reappeared. ‘I’d just like a word with you, Ma’am. I’ve been thinking things over and I would prefer to stay here. I quite understand what you said, and I would be prepared to take less wages, but I have been here a very long time. In any case, my brother’s been urging me to come and keep house for him and I have promised I will do so when he retires; that will probably be in four or five year’s time. Until then I would like to stay here.’

‘That is very, very good of you,’ said my mother, emotionally. Jane, who had a horror of emotion, said, ‘It will be convenient,’ and moved majestically from the room.

There was only one drawback to this arrangement. Having cooked in one way for so many years, Jane could not stop cooking in the same strain. If we had a joint it was always an enormous roast. Colossal beefsteak pies, huge tarts, and gargantuan steam puddings would be put on the table. Mother would say, ‘Only enough for two, remember, Jane,’ or ‘Only enough for four,’ but Jane could never understand. Jane’s own scale of hospitality was terribly expensive for the household; every day of the week, seven or eight of her friends were wont to arrive for tea, and eat pastries, buns, scones, rock cakes and jam tarts. In the end, in desperation, seeing the household books mounting up, my mother said gently that perhaps, as things were different now, Jane would have one day a week when she could have her friends. This would save a certain amount of waste, in case a lot was cooked and then people did not turn up. Thenceforward Jane held court on Wednesdays only.

Our own meals was now very different from the normal three-or four-course feasts. Dinners were cut out altogether, and mother and I had a macaroni cheese or a rice pudding or something like that in the evening. I’m afraid this saddened Jane a great deal. Also, little by little, mother managed to take over the ordering, which formerly had been done by Jane. It had been one of my father’s friend’s great delights, when staying in the house, to hear Jane ordering on the telephone in her deep bass Devonshire voice: ‘And I want six lobsters, hen lobsters, and prawns–not less than…’ It became a favourite phrase in our family. ‘Not less than’ was not only used by Jane but also by a later cook of ours, Mrs Potter. What splendid days for the tradesmen those were!

‘But I’ve always ordered twelve fillets of sole, Ma’am,’ Jane would say, looking distressed. The fact that there were not enough mouths to devour twelve fillets of sole, not even counting a couple in the kitchen, never appeared to enter her head.

None of these changes were particularly noticeable to me. Luxury or economy mean little when you are young. If you buy boiled sweets instead of chocolates the difference is not noticeable. Mackerel I had always preferred to sole, and a whiting with its tail in its mouth I thought a most agreeable looking fish.

My personal life was not much altered. I read enormous quantities of books–worked through all the rest of Henty, and was introduced to Stanley Weyman (what glorious historical novels they were. I read The Castle Inn only the other day and thought how good it was.) The Prisoner of Zenda was my opening to romance, as it was for many others. I read it again and again. I fell deeply in love–not with Rudolf Rassendyll, as might have been expected, but with the real king imprisoned in his dungeon and sighing. I yearned to succour him, to rescue him, to assure him that I–Flavia, of course–loved him and not Rudolf Rassendyll. I also read the whole of Jules Verne in French–Le Voyage au Centre de la Terre was my favourite for many months. I loved the contrast between the prudent nephew and the cocksure uncle. Any book I really liked I read over again at monthly intervals; then, after about a year, I would be fickle and choose another favourite.

There were also L. T. Meade’s books for girls, which my mother disliked very much; she said the girls in them were vulgar and only thought of being rich and having smart clothes. Secretly, I rather liked them, but with a guilty feeling of being vulgar in my tastes! Some of the Hentys mother read aloud to me, though she was slightly exasperated by the length of the descriptions. She also read a book called The Last Days of Bruce, of which both she and I approved heartily. By way of lessons, I was put on to a book called Great Events of History, of which I had to read one chapter and answer the questions about it set in a note at the end. This was a very good book. It taught a lot of the main events that happened in Europe and elsewhere, which one could link on to the history of the Kings of England, from Little Arthur onwards. How satisfactory to be firmly told So-and-So was a bad king; it has a kind of Biblical finality. I knew the dates of the Kings of England and the names of all their wives–information that has never been much use to me.

Every day I had to learn how to spell pages of words. I suppose the exercise did me some good, but I was still an extraordinarily bad speller and have remained so until the present day.

My principal pleasures were the musical and other activities into which I entered with a family called Huxley. Dr Huxley had a vague but clever wife. There were five girls–Mildred, Sybil, Muriel, Phyllis and Enid. I came between Muriel and Phyllis, and Muriel became my special friend. She had a long face and dimples, which is unusual in a long face, pale golden hair, and she laughed a great deal. I joined them first in their weekly singing-class. About ten girls took part in singing part-songs and oratorios under the direction of a singing-master, Mr Crow. There was also ‘the orchestra’ Muriel and I both played mandolines, Sybil and a girl called Connie Stevens the violin, Mildred the ‘cello.

Looking back on the day of the orchestra, I think the Huxleys were an enterprising family. The stuffier of the old inhabitants of Torquay looked slightly askance at ‘those Huxley girls’, mainly because they were in the habit of walking up and down The Strand, which was the shopping centre of the town, between twelve and one, first three girls, arm in arm, then two girls and the governess; they swung their arms, and walked up and down, and laughed and joked, and, cardinal sin against them, they did not wear gloves. These things were social offences at that time. However, since Dr Huxley was by far the most fashionable doctor in Torquay, and Mrs Huxley was what is known as ‘well connected’, the girls were passed as socially acceptable.

It was a curious social pattern, looking back. It was snobbish, I suppose; on the other hand, a certain type of snobbishness was much looked down upon. People who introduced the aristocracy into their conversation too frequently were disapproved of and laughed at. Three phases have succeeded each other during the span of my life. In the first the questions would be: ‘But who is she, dear? Who are her people? Is she one of the Yorkshire Twiddledos? Of course, they are badly off, very badly off, but she was a Wilmot.’ This was to be succeeded in due course by: ‘Oh yes, of course they are pretty dreadful, but then they are terribly rich.’ ‘Have the people who have taken The Larches got money?’ ‘Oh well, then we’d better call.’ The third phase was different again: ‘Well, dear, but are they amusing?’ ‘Yes, well of course they are not well off, and nobody knows where they came from, but they are very very amusing.’ After which digression into social values I had better return to the orchestra.

Did we make an awful noise, I wonder? Probably. Anyway, it gave us a lot of fun and increased our musical knowledge. It led on to something more exciting, which was the getting up of a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan.

The Huxleys and their friends had already given Patience–that was before I joined their ranks. The next performance in view was The Yeomen of the Guard–a somewhat ambitious undertaking. In fact I am surprised that their parents did not discourage them. But Mrs Huxley was a wonderful pattern of aloofness, for which, I must say, I admire her, since parents were not particularly aloof then. She encouraged her children to get up anything they liked, helped them if they asked for help, and, if not, left them to it. The Yeomen of the Guard was duly cast. I had a fine strong soprano voice, about the only soprano they had, and I was naturally in the seventh heaven at being chosen to play Colonel Fairfax.

We had a little difficulty with my mother, who was old-fashioned in her views about what girls could or could not wear on their legs if they were to appear in public. Legs were legs, definitely indelicate. For me to display myself in trunk hose, or anything of that kind, would, my mother thought, be most indecorous. I suppose I was thirteen or fourteen by then, and already five foot seven. There was, alas, no sign of the full rich bosom that I had hoped for when I was at Cauterets. A Yeoman of the Guard’s uniform was adjudged all right, though it had to be made with unusually baggy plus-four trousers, but the Elizabethan gentleman presented more difficulties. It seems to me silly nowadays, but it was a serious problem then. Anyway, it was surmounted by my mother saying that it would be all right, but I must wear a disguising cloak thrown over one shoulder. So a cloak was managed out of a piece of turquoise blue-velvet among Grannie’s ‘pieces’. (Grannie’s pieces were kept in various trunks and drawers, and comprised all types of rich and beautiful fabrics, remnants which she had bought in various sales over the last twenty-five years and had now more or less forgotten about.) It is not terribly easy to act with a cloak draped over one shoulder and flung over the other, in such a way that the indelicacies of one’s legs were more or less hidden from the audience.

As far as I remember I felt no stage fright. Strangely enough for a terribly shy person, who very often can hardly bring herself to enter a shop and who has to grit her teeth before arriving at a large party, there was one activity in which I never felt nervous at all, and that was singing. Later, when I studied both piano and singing in Paris, I lost my nerve completely whenever I had to play the piano in the school concert but if I had to sing I felt no nervousness at all. Perhaps that was due to my early conditioning in ‘Is life a boon?’ and the rest of Colonel Fairfax’s repertoire. There is no doubt that The Yeomen of the Guard was one of the highlights of my existence. But I can’t help thinking that it’s as well that we didn’t do any more operas–an experience that you really enjoyed should never be repeated.

One of the odd things in looking back is that, while you remember how things arrived or happened, you never know how or why they disappeared or came to a stop. I cannot remember many scenes in which I participated with the Huxleys after that time, yet I am sure there was no break in friendship. At one time we seemed to be meeting every day, and then I would find myself writing to Lully in Scotland. Perhaps Dr Huxley left to practise elsewhere, or retired? I don’t remember any definite leave-taking. I remember that Lully’s terms of friendship were clearly defined. ‘You can’t be my best friend,’ she explained, ‘because there are the Scottish girls, the McCrackens. They have always been our best friends. Brenda is my best friend, and Janet is Phyllis’s best friend; but you can be my second-best friend.’ So I was content with being Lully’s second-best friend, and the arrangement worked well, since the ‘best friends’, the McCrackens, were only seen by the Huxleys at intervals of, I should say, roughly two years.


II

It must, I think, have been some time in March that my mother remarked that Madge was going to have a baby. I stared at her. ‘Madge, have a baby?’ I was dumbfounded. I cannot imagine why I shouldn’t have thought of Madge having a baby–after all, it was happening all round one–but things are always surprising when they happen in one’s own family. I accepted my brother-in-law, James, or Jimmy, as I usually called him, enthusiastically, and was devoted to him. Now here was something entirely different.

As usual with me, it was some time before I could take it in. I probably sat with my mouth open for quite two minutes or more. Then I said, ‘Oh–that will be exciting. When is it coming? Next week?’

‘Not quite as soon as that,’ said my mother. She suggested a date in October.

‘October?’ I was deeply chagrined. Fancy having to wait all that time. I can’t remember very clearly what my attitude to sex was then–I must have been between twelve and thirteen–but I don’t think I any longer accepted the theories of doctors with black bags or heavenly visitants with wings. By then I had realised it was a physical process, but without feeling much curiosity or, indeed, interest. I had, however, done a little mild deduction. The baby was first inside you, and then in due course it was outside you; I reflected on the mechanism, and settled on the navel as a focal point. I couldn’t see what that round hole in the middle of my stomach was for–it didn’t seem to be for anything else, so clearly it must be something to do with the production of a baby.

My sister told me years afterwards that she had had very definite ideas; that she had thought that her navel was a keyhole, that there was a key that fitted it, which was kept by your mother, who handed it over to your husband, who unlocked it on the wedding night. It all sounded so sensible that I don’t wonder she stuck firmly to her theory.

I took the idea out into the garden and thought about it a good deal. Madge was going to have a baby. It was a wonderful concept, and the more I thought about it the more I was in favour of it. I was going to be an aunt–it sounded very grown up and important. I would buy it toys, I would let it play with my dolls’ house, I would have to be careful that Christopher, my kitten, didn’t scratch it by mistake. After about a week I stopped thinking about it; it was absorbed into various daily happenings. It was a long time to wait until October.

Some time in August a telegram took my mother away from home. She said she had to go and stay with my sister in Cheshire. Auntie-Grannie was staying with us at the time. Mother’s sudden departure did not surprise me much, and I didn’t speculate about it, because whatever mother did she did suddenly, with no apparent forethought or preparation. I was, I remember, out in the garden on the tennis lawn, looking hopefully at the pear-trees to see if I could find a pear which was ripe. It was here that Alice came out to fetch me. ‘It’s nearly lunch-time and you are to come in, Miss Agatha. There is a piece of news waiting for you.’

‘Is there? What news?’

‘You’ve got a little nephew,’ said Alice.

A nephew?

‘But I wasn’t going to have a nephew till October!’ I objected.

‘Ah, but things don’t always go as you think they will,’ said Alice. ‘Come on in now.’

I came in to the house and found Grannie in the kitchen with a telegram in her hand. I bombarded her with questions. What did the baby look like? Why had it come now instead of October? Grannie returned answers to these questions with the parrying art well known to Victorians. She had, I think, been in the middle of an obstetric conversation with Jane when I came in, because they lowered their voices and murmured something like: ‘The other doctor said, let the labour come on, but the specialist was quite firm.’ It all sounded mysterious and interesting. My mind was fixed entirely on my new nephew. When Grannie was carving the leg of mutton, I said:

‘But what does he look like? What colour is his hair?’

‘He’s probably bald. They don’t get hair at once.’ ‘Bald,’ I said, disappointed. ‘Will his face be very red?’

‘Probably.’

‘How big is he?’

Grannie considered, stopped carving, and measured off a distance on the carving knife.

‘Like that,’ she said. She spoke with the absolute certainty of one who knew. It seemed to me rather small. All the same the announcement made such an impression on me that I am sure if I were being asked an associative question by a psychiatrist and he gave me the key-word ‘baby’ I would immediately respond with ‘carving-knife’. I wonder what kind of Freudian complex he would put that answer down to.

I was delighted with my nephew. Madge brought him to stay at Ashfield about a month later, and when he was two months old he was christened in old Tor church. Since his godmother, Norah Hewitt, could not be there, I was allowed to hold him and be proxy for her. I stood near the font, full of importance, while my sister hovered nervously at my elbow in case I should drop him. Mr Jacob, our Vicar, with whom I was well acquainted, since he was preparing me for confirmation, had a splendid hand with infants at the font, tipping the water neatly back and off their forehead, and adopting a slightly swaying motion that usually stopped the baby from howling. He was christened James Watts, like his father and grandfather. He would be known as Jack in the family. I could not help being in rather a hurry for him to get to an age when I could play with him, since his principal occupation at this time seemed to be sleeping.

It was lovely to have Madge home for a long visit. I relied on her for telling me stories and providing a lot of entertainment in my life. It was Madge who told me my first Sherlock Holmes story, The Blue Carbuncle, and after that I had always been pestering her for more. The Blue Carbuncle, The Red-Headed League and The Five Orange Pips were definitely my favourites, though I enjoyed all of them. Madge was a splendid story-teller.

She had, before her marriage, begun writing stories herself. Many of her short stories were accepted for Vanity Fair. To have a Vain Tale in Vanity Fair was considered quite a literary achievement in those days, and father was extremely proud of her. She wrote a series of stories all connected with sport–The Sixth Ball of the Over, A Rub of the Green, Cassie Plays Croquet, and others. They were amusing and witty. I re-read them about twenty years ago, and I thought then how well she wrote. I wonder if she would have gone on writing if she had not married. I don’t think she ever saw herself seriously as a writer, she would probably have preferred to be a painter. She was one of those people who can do almost anything they put their mind to. She did not, as far as I remember, write any more short stories after she married, but about ten or fifteen years later she began to write for the stage. The Claimant was produced by Basil Dean of the Royal Theatre with Leon Quartermayne and Fay Compton in it. She wrote one or two other plays, but they did not have London productions. She was also quite a good amateur actress herself, and acted with the Manchester Amateur Dramatic. There is no doubt that Madge was the talented member of our family.

I personally had no ambition. I knew that I was not very good at anything. Tennis and croquet I used to enjoy playing, but I never played them well. How much more interesting it would be if I could say that I always longed to be a writer, and was determined that someday I would succeed, but, honestly, such an idea never came into my head.

As it happened, I did appear in print at the age of eleven. It came about in this way. The trams came to Ealing–and local opinion immediately erupted into fury. A terrible thing to happen to Ealing; such a fine residential neighbourhood, such wide streets, such beautiful houses–to have trams clanging up and down! The word Progress was uttered but howled down. Everyone wrote to the Press, to their M.P., to anyone they could think of to write to. Trams were common–they were noisy–everyone’s health would suffer. There was an excellent service of brilliant red buses, with Ealing on them in large letters, which ran from Ealing Broadway to Shepherds Bush, and another extremely useful bus, though more humble in appearance, which ran from Hanwell to Acton. And there was the good old-fashioned Great Western Railway; to say nothing of the District Railway.

Trams were simply not needed. But they came. Inexorably, they came, and there was weeping and gnashing of teeth–and Agatha had her first literary effort published, which was a poem I wrote on the first day of the running of the trams. There were four verses of it, and one of Grannie’s old gentlemen, that gallant bodyguard of Generals, Lt.-Colonels, and Admirals, was persuaded by Grannie to visit the local newspaper office and suggest that it should be inserted. It was–and I can still remember the first verse:

When first the electric trams did run

In all their scarlet glory,

’Twas well, but ere the day was done,

It was another story.



After which I went on to deride a ‘shoe that pinched’. (There had been some electrical fault in a ‘shoe’, or whatever it was, which conveyed the electricity to the trams, so that after running for a few hours they broke down.) I was elated at seeing myself in print, but I cannot say that it led me to contemplate a literary career.

In fact I only contemplated one thing–a happy marriage. About that I had complete self-assurance–as all my friends did. We were conscious of all the happiness that awaited us; we looked forward to love, to being looked after, cherished and admired, and we intended to get our own way in the things which mattered to us while at the same time putting our husbands’ life, career and success before all, as was our proud duty. We didn’t need pep pills or sedatives; we had belief and joy in life. We had our own personal disappointments–moments of unhappiness–but on the whole life was fun. Perhaps it is fun for girls nowadays–but they certainly don’t look as if it is. However–a timely thought–they may enjoy melancholy; some people do. They may enjoy the emotional crises that seem always to be overwhelming them. They may even enjoy anxiety. That is certainly what we have nowadays–anxiety. My contemporaries were frequently badly off and couldn’t have a quarter of the things they wanted. Why then did we have so much enjoyment? Was it some kind of sap rising in us that has ceased to rise now? Have we strangled or cut it off with education, and, worse, anxiety over education; anxiety as to what life holds for you.?

We were like obstreperous flowers–often weeds maybe, but nevertheless all of us growing exuberantly–pressing violently up through cracks in pavements and flagstones, and in the most inauspicious places, determined to have our fill of life and enjoy ourselves, bursting out into the sunlight, until someone came and trod on us. Even bruised for a time, we would soon lift a head again. Nowadays, alas, life seems to apply weed killer (selective!)–we have no chance to raise a head again. There are said to be those who are ‘unfit for living’. No one would ever have told us we were unfit for living. If they had, we shouldn’t have believed it. Only a murderer was unfit for living. Nowadays a murderer is the one person you mustn’t say is unfit for living.

The real excitement of being a girl–of being, that is, a woman in embryo–was that life was such a wonderful gamble. You didn’t know what was going to happen to you. That was what made being a woman so exciting. No worry about what you should be or do–Biology would decide. You were waiting for The Man, and when the man came, he would change your entire life. You can say what you like, that is an exciting point of view to hold at the threshold of life. What will happen? ‘Perhaps I shall marry someone in the Diplomatic Service…I think I should like that; to go abroad and see all sorts of places…’ Or: ‘I don’t think I would like to marry a sailor; you would have to spend such a lot of time living in seaside lodgings.’ Or: ‘Perhaps I’ll marry someone who builds bridges, or an explorer.’ The whole world was open to you–not open to your choice, but open to what Fate brought you. You might marry anyone; you might, of course, marry a drunkard or be very unhappy, but that only heightened the general feeling of excitement. And one wasn’t marrying the profession, either; it was the man. In the words of old nurses, nannies, cooks and housemaids: ‘One day Mr Right will come along.’

I remember when I was very small seeing one of mother’s prettier friends being helped to dress for a dance by old Hannah, Grannie’s cook. She was being laced into a tight corset. ‘Now then, Miss Phyllis,’ said Hannah, ‘brace your foot against the bed and lean back–I’m going to pull. Hold your breath.’

‘Oh Hannah, I can’t bear it, I can’t really. I can’t breathe.’

‘Now don’t you fret, my pet, you can breathe all right. You won’t be able to eat much supper, and that’s a good thing, because young ladies shouldn’t be seen eating a lot; it’s not delicate. You’ve got to behave like a proper young lady. You’re all right. I’ll just get the tape measure. There you are–nineteen and a half. I could have got you to nineteen…’

‘Nineteen and a half will do quite well,’ gasped the sufferer.

‘You’ll be glad when you get there. Suppose this is the night that Mr Right’s coming along? You wouldn’t like to be there with a thick waist, would you, and let him see you like that?’

Mr Right. He was more elegantly referred to sometimes as ‘Your Fate’. ‘I don’t know that I really want to go to this dance.’

‘Oh yes, you do, dear. Think! You might meet Your Fate.’

And of course that is what actually happens in life. Girls go to something they wanted to go to, or they didn’t want to go to, it doesn’t matter which–and there is their Fate.

Of course, there were always girls who declared they were not going to marry, usually for some noble reason. Possibly they wished to become nuns or to nurse lepers, to do something grand and important, above all self-sacrificial. I think it was almost a necessary phase. An ardent wish to become a nun seems to be far more constant in Protestant than in Catholic girls. In Catholic girls it is, no doubt, more vocational–it is recognised as one of the ways of life–whereas for a Protestant it has some aroma of religious mystery that makes it very desirable. A hospital nurse was also considered a heroic way of life, with all the prestige of Miss Nightingale behind it. But marriage was the main theme; whom you were going to marry the big question in life.



By the time I was thirteen or fourteen I felt myself enormously advanced in age and experience. I no longer thought of myself as protected by another person. I had my own protective feelings. I felt responsible for my mother. I also began to try to know myself, the sort of person I was, what I could attempt successfully, and the things I was no good at and that I must not waste time over. I knew that I was not quick-witted; I must give myself time to look at a problem carefully before deciding how I would deal with it.

I began to appreciate time. There is nothing more wonderful to have in one’s life, than time. I don’t believe people get enough of it nowadays. I was excessively fortunate in my childhood and youth, just because I had so much time. You wake up in the morning, and even before you are properly awake you are saying to yourself: ‘Now, what shall I do with today?’ You have the choice, it is there, in front of you, and you can plan as you please. I don’t mean that there were not a lot of things (duties, we called them) I had to do–of course there were. There were jobs to be done in the house: days when you cleaned silver photograph frames, days when you darned your stockings, days when you learnt a chapter of Great Events in History, a day when you had to go down the town and pay all the tradesmen’s bills. Letters and notes to write, scales and exercises, embroidery–but they were all things that lay in my choice, to arrange as I pleased. I could plan my day, I could say, ‘I think I’ll leave my stockings until this afternoon; I will go down town in the morning and I will come back by the other road and see whether that tree had come into blossom yet.’

Always when I woke up, I had the feeling which I am sure must be natural to all of us, a joy in being alive. I don’t say you feel it consciously–you don’t–but there you are, you are alive, and you open your eyes, and here is another day; another step, as it were, on your journey to an unknown place. That very exciting journey which is your life. Not that it is necessarily going to be exciting as a life, but it will be exciting to you because it is your life. That is one of the great secrets of existence, enjoying the gift of life that has been given to you.

Not every day is necessarily enjoyable. After the first delightful feeling of ‘Another day! How wonderful!’ you remember you have to go to the dentist at 10.30, and that is not nearly so good. But the first waking feeling has been there, and that acts as a useful booster. Naturally, a lot depends on temperament. You are a happy person, or you are of a melancholic disposition. I don’t know that you can do anything about that. I think it is the way one is made–you are either happy until something arises to make you unhappy or else you are melancholy until something distracts you from it. Naturally happy people can be unhappy and melancholic people enjoy themselves. But if I were taking a gift to a child at a christening that is what I would choose: a naturally happy frame of mind.

There seems to me to be an odd assumption that there is something meritorious about working. Why? In early times man went out to hunt animals in order to feed himself and keep alive. Later, he toiled over crops, and sowed and ploughed for the same reason. Nowadays, he rises early, catches the 8.15, and sits in an office all day–still for the same reason. He does it to feed himself and have a roof over his head–and, if skilled and lucky, to go a bit further and have comfort and entertainment as well.

It’s economic and necessary. But why is it meritorious? The old nursery adage used to be ‘Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do’. Presumably little Georgie Stephenson was enjoying idleness when he observed his mother’s tea-kettle lid rising and falling. Having nothing at the moment to do, he began to have ideas about it…

I don’t think necessity is the mother of invention–invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble. That is the big secret that has brought us down the ages hundreds of thousands of years, from chipping flints to switching on the washing up machine.

The position of women, over the years, has definitely changed for the worse. We women have behaved like mugs. We have clamoured to be allowed to work as men work. Men, not being fools, have taken kindly to the idea. Why support a wife? What’s wrong with a wife supporting herself? She wants to do it. By Golly, she can go on doing it!

It seems sad that having established ourselves so cleverly as the ‘weaker sex’, we should now be broadly on a par with the women of primitive tribes who toil in the fields all day, walk miles to gather camel-thorn for fuel, and on trek carry all the pots, pans and household equipment on their heads, whilst the gorgeous, ornamental male sweeps on ahead, unburdened save for one lethal weapon with which to defend his women.

You’ve got to hand it to Victorian women; they got their menfolk where they wanted them. They established their fraility, delicacy, sensibility–their constant need of being protected and cherished. Did they lead miserable, servile lives, downtrodden and oppressed? Such is not my recollection of them. All my grandmothers’ friends seem to me in retrospect singularly resilient and almost invariably successful in getting their own way. They were tough, self-willed, and remarkably well-read and well-informed.

Mind you, they admired their men enormously. They genuinely thought men were splendid fellows–dashing, inclined to be wicked, easily led astray. In daily life a woman got her own way whilst paying due lip service to male superiority, so that her husband should not lose face.

‘Your father knows best, dear,’ was the public formula. The real approach came privately. ‘I’m sure you are quite right in what you said, John, but I wonder if you have considered…’

In one respect man was paramount. He was the Head of the House. A woman, when she married, accepted as her destiny his place in the world and his way of life. That seems to me sound sense and the foundation of happiness. If you can’t face your man’s way of life, don’t take that job–in other words, don’t marry that man. Here, say, is a wholesale draper; he is a Roman Catholic; he prefers to live in a suburb; he plays golf and he likes to go for holidays to the sea side. That is what you are marrying. Make up your mind to it and like it. It won’t be so difficult.

It is astonishing how much you can enjoy almost everything. There are few things more desirable than to be an acceptor and an enjoyer. You can like and enjoy almost any kind of food or way of life. You can enjoy country life, dogs, muddy walks; towns, noise, people, clatter. In the one there is repose, ease for nerves, time for reading, knitting, embroidery, and the pleasure of growing things. In the other theatres, art galleries, good concerts, and seeing friends you would otherwise seldom see. I am happy to say that I can enjoy almost everything.

Once when I was travelling by train to Syria, I was much entertained by a fellow traveller’s dissertation on the stomach.

‘My dear,’ she said, ‘never give in to your stomach. If a certain thing doesn’t agree with you, say to yourself “Who’s going to be master, me or my stomach?”’

‘But what do you actually do about it?’ I asked with curiosity.

‘Any stomach can be trained. Very small doses at first. It doesn’t matter what it is. Eggs, now, used to make me sick, and toasted cheese gave me the most terrible pains. But just a spoonful or two of boiled egg two or three times a week, and then a little more scrambled egg and so on. And now I can eat any amount of eggs. It’s been just the same with toasted cheese. Remember this, your stomach’s a good servant, but a bad master.’

I was much impressed and promised to follow her advice, and I have done so–though it has not presented much difficulty, my stomach being definitely a servile one.


III

When my mother had gone abroad with Madge to the South of France after my father’s death, I remained at Ashfield under the tranquil eye of Jane for three weeks by myself. It was then that I discovered a new sport and new friends.

Roller-skating on the pier was a pastime much in vogue. The surface of the pier was extremely rough, and you fell down a good deal, but it was great fun. There was a kind of concert-room at the end of the pier, not used in winter of course, and this was opened as a kind of indoor rink. It was also possible to skate at what was grandly called the Assembly Rooms, or the Bath Saloons, where the big dances took place. This was much more high-class, but most of us preferred the pier. You had your own skates and you paid twopence for admission, and once on the pier you skated! The Huxleys could not join me in this sport because they were engaged with their governess during the morning, and the same held for Audrey. The people I used to meet there were the Lucys. Although grown up, they had been very kind to me, knowing that I was alone at Ashfield because the doctor had ordered my mother abroad for change and rest.

Although I felt rather grand on my own, one could get weary of that feeling. I enjoyed ordering the meals–or thinking I was ordering the meals. Actually we always had for lunch exactly what Jane had made up her mind we were going to have beforehand, but she certainly put up a good show of considering my wildest suggestions. ‘Could we have roast duck and meringues?’ I would ask and Jane would say yes, but she was not sure about the ordering of the duck, and that perhaps meringues–there were no whites of egg at the moment, perhaps we had better wait until some day when we had used the yolks for something else; so that in the end we had what was already sitting in the larder. But dear Jane was very tactful. She always called me Miss Agatha and allowed me to feel that I was in an important position.

It was then that the Lucys suggested that I should come down and skate with them on the pier. They more or less taught me to stand up on my skates, and I loved it. They were, I think, one of the nicest families I have ever known. They came from Warwickshire, and the family’s beautiful house, Charlecote, had belonged to Berkeley Lucy’s uncle. He always thought that it ought to have come to him but instead of that it had gone to his uncle’s daughter, her husband taking the name of Fairfax-Lucy. I think the whole family felt very sad that Charlecote was not theirs, though they never said anything about it, except amongst themselves. The oldest daughter, Blanche, was an extraordinarily handsome girl–she was a little older than my sister and had been married before her. The eldest son, Reggie, was in the army but the second son was at home–about my brother’s age–and the next two daughters, Marguerite and Muriel, known to all as Margie and Noonie, were also grown-up. They had rather slurred lazy voices that I found very attractive. Time as such meant nothing to them.

After skating for some time, Noonie would look at her watch and say, ‘Well, did you ever, look at the time now. It’s half-past one already.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘It will take me twenty minutes at least to walk home.’

‘Oh you’d better not go home, Aggie. You come home with us and have lunch. We can ring up Ashfield.’

So I would go home with them, and we would arrive about half-past two to be greeted by Sam the dog–‘Body like a barrel, breath like a drainpipe,’ as Noonie used to describe him–and somewhere there would be some kind of meal being kept hot and we would have it. Then they would say it was a pity to go home yet, Aggie, and we would go into their school-room and play the piano and have a sing-song. Sometimes we went on expeditions to the Moor. We would agree to meet at Torre station and take a certain train. The Lucys were always late, and we always missed the train. They missed trains, they missed trams, they missed everything, but nothing rattled them. ‘Oh well,’ they would say, ‘what does it matter? There’ll be another one by and by. It’s never any good worrying, is it?’ It was a delightful atmosphere.

The high spots in my life were Madge’s visits. She came down every August. Jimmy came with her for a few days, then he had to get back to business, but Madge stayed on to about the end of September, and Jack with her.

Jack, of course, was a never-ending source of enjoyment to me. He was a rosy-cheeked golden-haired little boy, looking good enough to eat, and indeed we sometimes called him ‘le petit brioche’. He had a most uninhibited nature, and did not know what silence was. There was no question of bringing Jack out and making him talk–the difficulty was to hush him down. He had a fiery temper and used to do what we called ‘blow up’ he would first get very red in the face, then purple, then hold his breath, till you really thought he was going to burst, then the storm would happen!

He had a succession of Nannies, all with their own peculiarities. There was one particularly cross one, I remember. She was old, with a great deal of untidy grey hair. She had much experience, and was about the only person who could really daunt Jack when he was on the warpath. One day he had been very obstreperous, shouting out ‘You idiot, you idiot, you idiot’ for no reason whatever, rushing to each person in turn. Nannie finally reproved him, telling him that if he said it any more he would be punished. ‘I can tell you what I’m going to do,’ said Jack. ‘When I die I shall go to Heaven and I shall go straight up to God and I shall say “You idiot, you idiot, you idiot’.’ He paused, breathless, to see what this blasphemy would bring forth. Nannie put down her work, looked over her spectacles at him, and said without much interest: ‘And do you suppose that the Almighty is going to take any notice of what a naughty little boy like you says?’ Jack was completely deflated.

Nannie was succeeded by a young girl called Isabel. She for some reason was much addicted to throwing things out of the window. ‘Oh drat these scissors,’ she would suddenly murmur, and fling them out on to the grass. Jack, on occasions, attempted to help her. ‘Shall I throw it out of the window, Isabel?’ he would ask, with great interest. Like all children, he adored my mother. He would come into her bed early in the morning and I would hear them through the wall of my room. Sometimes they were discussing life, and sometimes my mother would be telling him a story–a kind of serial went on, all about mother’s thumbs. One of them was called Betsy Jane and the other Sary Anne. One of them was good, the other was naughty, and the things they did and said kept Jack in a gurgle of laughter the whole time. He always tried to join in conversation. One day when the Vicar came to lunch there was a momentary pause. Jack suddenly piped up. ‘I know a very funny story about a bishop,’ he said. He was hastily hushed by his relations, who never knew what Jack might come out with that he had overheard.

Christmas we used to spend in Cheshire, going up to the Watts’. Jimmy usually got his yearly holiday about then, and he and Madge used to go to St. Moritz for three weeks. He was a very good skater, and so it was the kind of holiday he liked most. Mother and I used to go up to Cheadle, and since their newly-built house, called Manor Lodge, was not ready yet, we spent Christmas at Abney Hall, with the old Wattses and their four children and Jack. It was a wonderful house to have Christmas in if you were a child. Not only was it enormous Victorian Gothic, with quantities of rooms, passages, unexpected steps, back staircases, front staircases, alcoves, niches–everything in the world that a child could want–but it also had three different pianos that you could play, as well as an organ. All it lacked was the light of day; it was remarkably dark, except for the big drawing-room with its green satin walls and its big windows.

Nan Watts and I were fast friends by now. We were not only friends but drinking companions–we both liked the same drink, cream, ordinary plain, neat cream. Although I had consumed an enormous amount of Devonshire cream since I lived in Devonshire, raw cream was really more of a treat. When Nan stayed with me at Torquay, we used to visit one of the dairies in the town, where we would have a glass of half milk and half cream. When I stayed with her at Abney we used to go down to the home farm and drink cream by the half-pint. We continued these drinking bouts all through our lives, and I still remember buying our cartons of cream in Sunningdale and coming up to the golf course and sitting outside the club house waiting for our respective husbands to finish their rounds of golf, each drinking our pinta cream.

Abney was a glutton’s paradise. Mrs Watts had what was called her store-room off the hall. It was not like Grannie’s store-room, a kind of securely-locked treasure house from which things were taken out. There was free access to it, and all round the walls were shelves covered with every kind of dainty. One side was entirely chocolates, boxes of them, all different, chocolate creams in labelled boxes…There were biscuits, gingerbread, preserved fruits, jams and so on.

Christmas was the supreme Festival, something never to be forgotten. Christmas stockings in bed. Breakfast, when everyone had a separate chair heaped with presents. Then a rush to church and back to continue present opening. At two o’clock Christmas Dinner, the blinds drawn down and glittering ornaments and lights. First, oyster soup (not relished by me), turbot, then boiled turkey, roast turkey, and a large roast sirloin of beef. This was followed by plum pudding, mince pies, and a trifle full of sixpences, pigs, rings, bachelors’ buttons and all the rest of it. After that, again, innumerable kinds of dessert. In a story I once wrote, The Affair of the Christmas Pudding, I have described just such a feast. It is one of those things that I am sure will never be seen again in this generation; indeed I doubt nowadays if anyone’s digestion would stand it. However, our digestions stood it quite well then.

I usually had to vie in eating prowess with Humphrey Watts, the Watts son next to James in age. I suppose he must have been twenty-one or twenty-two to my twelve or thirteen. He was a very handsome young man, as well as being a good actor and a wonderful entertainer and teller of stories. Good as I always was at falling in love with people, I don’t think I fell in love with him, though it is amazing to me that I should not have done so. I suppose I was still at the stage where my love affairs had to be romantically impossible–concerned with public characters, such as the Bishop of London and King Alfonso of Spain, and of course with various actors. I know I fell deeply in love with Henry Ainley when I saw him in The Bondman, and I must have been just getting ripe for the K.O.W.s (Keen on Wallers), who were all to a girl in love with Lewis Waller in Monsieur Beaucaire.

Humphrey and I ate solidly through the Christmas Dinner. He scored over me in oyster soup, but otherwise we were neck and neck. We both first had roast turkey, then boiled turkey, and finally four or five slashing slices of sirloin of beef. It is possible that our elders confined themselves to only one kind of turkey for this course, but as far as I remember old Mr Watts certainly had beef as well as turkey. We then ate plum pudding and mince pies and trifle–I rather sparingly of trifle, because I didn’t like the taste of wine. After that there were the crackers, the grapes, the oranges, the Elvas plums, the Carlsbad plums, and the preserved fruits. Finally, during the afternoon, various handfuls of chocolates were fetched from the store-room to suit our taste. Do I remember being sick the next day? Having bilious attacks? No, never. The only bilious attacks I ever remember were those that seized me after eating unripe apples in September. I ate unripe apples practically every day, but occasionally I must have overdone it.

What I do remember was when I was about six or seven years old and had eaten mushrooms. I woke up with a pain about eleven o’clock in the evening, and came rushing down to the drawing-room, where mother and father were entertaining a party of people, and announced dramatically: ‘I am going to die! I am poisoned by mushrooms!’ Mother rapidly soothed me and administered a dose of ipecacuanha wine–always kept in the medicine cupboard in those days–and assured me that I was not due to die this time.

At any rate I never remember being ill at Christmas. Nan Watts was just the same as I was; she had a splendid stomach. In fact, really, when I remember those days, everyone seemed to have a pretty good stomach. I suppose people had gastric and duodenal ulcers and had to be careful, but I cannot remember anybody living on a diet of fish and milk. A coarse and gluttonous age? Yes, but one of great zest and enjoyment. Considering the amount that I ate in my youth (for I was always hungry) I cannot imagine how I managed to remain so thin–a scrawny chicken indeed.

After the pleasurable inertia of Christmas afternoon–pleasurable, that is, for the elders: the younger ones read books, looked at their presents, ate more chocolates, and so on–there was a terrific tea, with a great iced Christmas cake as well as everything else, and finally a supper of cold turkey and hot mince pies. About nine o’clock there was the Christmas Tree, with more presents hanging on it. A splendid day, and one to be remembered till next year, when Christmas came again.



I stayed at Abney with my mother at other times of year, and always loved it. There was a tunnel in the garden, underneath the drive, which I found useful in whatever historical romance or drama I was enacting at the moment. I would strut about, muttering to myself and gesticulating. I daresay the gardeners thought that I was mental, but I was only getting into the spirit of the part. It never occurred to me to write anything down–and I was quite indifferent to what any gardeners thought. I occasionally walk about nowadays muttering to myself–trying to get some chapter that won’t ‘go’ to come right.

My creative abilities were also engaged by embroidery of sofa cushions. Cushions were most prevalent at that time, and embroidered cushion-covers always welcome. I went in for an enormous bout of embroidery in the autumn months. To begin with I used to buy transfers, iron them off on the squares of satin, and start embroidering them in silks. Disliking the transfers in the end as being all the same, I then began to take flower pictures off china. We had some big Berlin and Dresden vases with beautiful bunches of flowers on them, and I used to trace over these, draw them out, and then try to copy the colours as closely as possible. Granny B. was very pleased when she heard I was doing this; she had spent so much of her life in embroidery that she was glad to think a grand-daughter took after her in that way. I did not reach her heights of fine embroidery, however; I never actually embroidered landscapes and figures, as she did. I have two of her fire screens now, one of a shepherdess, the other of a shepherd and shepherdess together under a tree, writing or drawing a heart on the bark of it, which is exquisitely done. How satisfying it must have been for the great ladies in the days of the Bayeux Tapestry, in the long winter months.

Mr Watts, Jimmy’s father, was a person who always made me feel unaccountably shy. He used to call me ‘dream-child’, which made me wriggle in agonised embarrassment. ‘What is our dream-child thinking of?’ he used to say. I would go purple in the face. He used to make me play and sing sentimental songs to him, too. I could read music quite well, so he would often take me to the piano and I would sing his favourite songs. I didn’t like them much, but at least it was preferable to his conversation. He was an artistic man, and painted landscapes of moors and sunsets. He was also a great collector of furniture, particularly old oak. In addition he and his friend Fletcher Moss took good photographs, and published several books of photographs of famous houses. I wish I had not been so stupidly shy, but I was of course at the age when one is particularly self-conscious.

I much preferred Mrs Watts, who was brisk, cheerful, and completely factual. Nan, who was two years older than I was, went in for being an ‘enfant terrible’, and took a special pleasure in shouting, being rude, and using swear words. It upset Mrs Watts when her daughter fired off damns and blasts. She also disliked it when Nan used to turn on her and say: ‘Oh don’t be such a fool, Mother!’ It was not the sort of thing that she had ever envisaged a daughter of hers saying to her, but the world was just entering into an age of plain speaking. Nan revelled in the role she was playing, though really, I believe, she was quite fond of her mother. Ah well, most mothers have to go through a period in which their daughters put them through the mill in one way or another.

On Boxing Day we were always taken to the pantomime in Manchester–and very good pantomimes they were. We would come back in the train singing all the songs, the Watts rendering the comedian’s songs in broad Lancashire. I remember us all bawling out: ‘I was born on a Friday, I was born on a Friday, I was born on a Friday when (crescendo!) my mother wasn’t at ‘ome!’ Also: ‘Watching the trains coom in, watching the trains go out, when we’d watched all the trains coom in, we watched the trains go OUT.’ The supreme favourite was sung by Humphrey as a melancholy solo: ‘The window, The window, I’ve pushed it through the window. I have no pain, dear Mother now, I’ve pushed it through the window.’

The Manchester pantomime was not the earliest I was taken to. The first I ever saw was at Drury Lane, where I was taken by Grannie. Dan Leno was Mother Goose. I can still remember that pantomime. I dreamt of Dan Leno for weeks afterwards–I thought he was the most wonderful person I had ever seen. And there was an exciting incident that night. The two little Royal princes were up in the Royal Box. Prince Eddy, as one spoke of him colloquially, dropped his programme and opera glasses over the edge of the box. They fell in the stalls quite near where we were sitting, and, oh delight, not the Equerry but Prince Eddy himself came down to retrieve them, apologising very politely, saying that he did hope they hadn’t hurt anyone.

I went to sleep that night indulging in the fantasy that one day I would marry Prince Eddy. Possibly I could save his life from drowning first…A grateful Queen would give her Royal Consent. Or perhaps there would be an accident–he would be bleeding to death, I would give a blood transfusion. I would be created a Countess–like the Countess Torby–and there would be a Morganatic Marriage. Even for six years old, however, such a fantasy was a little too fantastic to last.

My nephew Jack once arranged a very good Royal alliance of his own at about the age of four. ‘Supposing, Mummy,’ he said, ‘you were to marry King Edward. I should become Royalty.’ My sister said there was the Queen to be thought of, and a little matter of Jack’s own father. Jack rearranged matters. ‘Supposing the Queen died, and supposing that Daddy’–he paused to put it tactfully–‘supposing that Daddy–er–wasn’t there, and then supposing that King Edward was to–just to see you…’ Here he stopped, leaving it to the imagination. Obviously King Edward was going to be struck all of a heap, and in next to no time Jack was going to be the King’s stepson.

‘I was looking in the prayer-book during the sermon,’ Jack said to me, about a year later. ‘I’ve been thinking of marrying you when I am grown up, Ange, but I’ve been looking in the prayer-book and there is a table of things in the middle, and I see that the Lord won’t let me.’ He sighed. I told him that I was flattered that he should have thought of such a thing.

It is astonishing how you never really change in your predilections. My nephew Jack, from the days when he went out with a nursemaid, was always obsessed by things ecclesiastical. If he disappeared from sight you could usually find him in a church, gazing admiringly at the altar. If he was given coloured plasticine the things he made were always triptychs, crucifixes, or some kind of ecclesiastical adornment. Roman Catholic churches in particular fascinated him. His tastes never changed, and he read more ecclesiastical history than anyone I have ever known. When he was about thirty, he finally entered the Roman Catholic Church–a great blow to my brother-in-law, who was what I can only describe as the perfect example of a ‘Black Protestant’. He would say, in his gentle voice: ‘I’m not prejudiced, I really am not prejudiced. It’s just that I can’t help noticing that all Roman Catholics are the most terrible liars. It’s not prejudice, it just is so.’

Grannie was a good example of a Black Protestant too, and got much enjoyment out of the wickedness of the Papists. She would lower her voice and say: ‘All those beautiful girls disappearing into convents–never seen again.’ I am sure she was convinced that all priests selected their mistresses from special convents of beautiful girls.

The Watts were non-conformist, Methodist I think, which perhaps may have led to this tendency to regard Roman Catholics as representatives of ‘the Scarlet Woman of Babylon’. Where Jack got his passion for the Roman Catholic Church I cannot think. He doesn’t seem to have inherited it from anyone in his family, but it was there, present always from his early years. Everybody took a great interest in religion in my young days. Disputes about it were full and colourful, and sometimes heated. One of my nephew’s friends said to him later in life: ‘I really can’t think, Jack, why you can’t be a cheerful heretic like everyone else, it would be so much more peaceful.’

The last thing on earth that Jack could ever imagine being was peaceful. As his nursemaid said, on one occasion, when she had spent some time finding him: ‘Why Master Jack wants to go into churches, I can’t imagine. It seems such a funny thing for a child to want to do.’ Personally, I think he must have been a reincarnation of a medieval churchman. He had, as he grew older, what I might call a churchman’s face–not a monk’s face, certainly not a visionary’s–the kind of churchman versed in ecclesiastical practices and able to acquit himself well at the Council of Trent–and to be quite sound on the exact number of angels able to dance on the point of a needle.


IV

Bathing was one of the joys of my life, and has remained so almost until my present age; in fact I would still enjoy it as much as ever but for the difficulties attendant on a rheumatic person getting herself into the water, and, even more difficult, out again.

A great social change came when I was about thirteen. Bathing as I first remember it was strictly segregated. There was a special Ladies’ Bathing-Cove, a small stony beach, to the left of the Bath Saloons. The beach was a steeply sloping one, and on it there were eight bathing machines in the charge of an ancient man, of somewhat irascible temper, whose non-stop job was to let the machine up and down in the water. You entered your bathing machine–a gaily-painted striped affair–saw that both doors were safely bolted, and began to undress with a certain amount of caution, because at any moment the elderly man might decide it was your turn to be let down into the water. At that moment there would be a frantic rocking, and the bathing machine would grind its way slowly over the loose stones, flinging you about from side to side. In fact the action was remarkably similar to that of a Jeep or Land Rover nowadays, when traversing the more rocky parts of the desert.

The bathing machine would stop as suddenly as it had started. You then proceeded with your undressing and got into your bathing-dress. This was an unaesthetic garment, usually made of dark blue or black alpaca, with numerous skirts, flounces and frills, reaching well down below the knees, and over the elbow. Once fully attired, you unbolted the door on the water side. If the old man had been kind to you, the top step was practically level with the water. You descended and there you were, decorously up to your waist. You then proceeded to swim. There was a raft not too far out, to which you could swim and pull yourself up and sit on it. At low tide it was quite near; at high tide it was quite a good swim, and you had it more or less to yourself. Having bathed as long as you liked, which for my part was a good deal longer than any grown-up accompanying me was inclined to sanction, you were signalled to come back to shore–but as they had difficulty in getting at me once I was safely on the raft, and I anyway proceeded to swim in the opposite direction, I usually managed to prolong it to my own pleasure.

There was of course no such thing as sunbathing on the beach. Once you left the water you got into your bathing machine, you were drawn up with the same suddenness with which you had been let down, and finally emerged, blue in the face, shivering all over, with hands and cheeks died away to a state of numbness. This, I may say, never did me any harm, and I was as warm as toast again in about three-quarters of an hour. I then sat on the beach and ate a bun while I listened to exhortations on my bad conduct in not having come out sooner. Grannie, who always had a fine series of cautionary tales, would explain to me how Mrs Fox’s little boy (‘such a lovely creature’) had gone to his death of pneumonia, entirely from disobeying his elders and staying in the sea too long. Partaking of my currant bun or whatever refreshment I was having, I would reply dutifully, ‘No, Grannie, I won’t stay in as long next time. But actually, Grannie, the water was really warm.’

‘Really warm, was it indeed? Then why are you shivering from head to foot? Why are your fingers so blue?’

The advantage of being accompanied by a grown-up person, especially Grannie, was that we would go home in a cab from the Strand, instead of having to walk a mile and a half. The Torbay Yacht Club was stationed on Beacon Terrace, just above the Ladies’ Bathing-Cove. Although the beach was properly invisible from the Club windows, the sea around the raft was not, and, according to my father, a good many of the gentlemen spent their time with opera glasses enjoying the sight of female figures displayed in what they hopefully thought of as almost a state of nudity! I don’t think we can have been sexually very appealing in those shapeless garments.

The Gentlemen’s Bathing-Cove was situated further along the coast. There the gentlemen, in their scanty triangles, could disport themselves as much as they pleased, with no female eye able to observe them from any point whatever. However, times were changing: mixed bathing was being introduced all over England.

The first thing mixed bathing entailed was wearing far more clothing than before. Even French ladies had always bathed in stockings, so that no sinful bare legs could be observed. I have no doubt that, with natural French chic, they managed to cover themselves from their necks to their wrists, and with lovely thin silk stockings outlining their beautiful legs, looked far more sinfully alluring than if they had worn a good old short-skirted British bathing dress of frilled alpaca. I really don’t know why legs were considered so improper: throughout Dickens there are screams when any lady thinks that her ankles have been observed. The very word was considered daring. One of the first nursery axioms was always uttered if you mentioned those pieces of your anatomy: ‘Remember, the Queen of Spain has no legs.’ What does she have instead, Nursie ?’ Limbs, dear, that is what we call them; arms and legs are limbs.’

All the same, I think it would sound odd to say: ‘I’ve got a spot coming on one of my limbs, just below the knee.’

Which reminds me of a friend of my nephew’s, who described an experience of her own as a little girl. She had been told that her godfather was coming to see her. Having not heard of such a personage before, she had been thrilled by the notion. That night, at about one a.m., after waking and considering the matter for some time, she spoke into the darkness:

‘Nanny, I’ve got a godfather.’

‘Urmrp.’ Some indescribable sound answered her.

‘Nanny,’ a little louder, ‘I’ve got a godfather.’

‘Yes, dear, yes, very nice.’

‘But, Nanny, I’ve got a’–fortissimo–‘GODFATHER.’

‘Yes, yes, turn over, dear, and go to sleep.’

‘But, Nanny’–molto fortissimo–‘I HAVE GOT A GODFATHER!’ ‘Well, rub it, dearie, rub it!’

Bathing-dresses continued to be very pure practically up to the time I was first married. Though mixed bathing was accepted by then, it was still regarded as dubious by the older ladies and more conservative families. But progress was too strong, even for my mother. We often took to the sea on such beaches as were given over to the mingling of the sexes. It was allowed first on Tor Abbey Sands and Corbin’s Head Beach, which were more or less main town beaches. We did not bathe there–anyway–the beaches were supposed to be too crowded. Then mixed bathing was allowed on the more aristocratic Meadfoot Beach. This was another good twenty minutes away, and therefore made your walk to bathe rather a long one, practically two miles. However, Meadfoot Beach was much more attractive than the Ladies’ Bathing-Cove: bigger, wider, with an accessible rock a good way out to which you could swim if you were a strong swimmer. The Ladies’ Bathing-Cove remained sacred to segregation, and the men were left in peace in their dashing triangles.

As far as I remember, the men were not particularly anxious to avail themselves of the joys of mixed bathing; they stuck rigidly to their own private preserve. Such of them as arrived at Meadfoot were usually embarrassed by the sight of their sisters’ friends in what they still considered a state of near nudity.

It was at first the rule that I should wear stockings when I bathed. I don’t know how French girls kept their stockings on: I was quite unable to do so. Three or four vigorous kicks when swimming, and my stockings were dangling a long way beyond my toes; they were either sucked off altogether or else wrapped round my ankles like fetters by the time I emerged. I think that the French girls one saw bathing in fashion-plates owed their smartness to the fact that they never actually swam, only walked gently into the sea and out again to parade the beach.

A pathetic tale was told of the Council Meeting at which the question of mixed bathing came up for final approval. A very old Councillor, a vehement opponent, finally defeated, quavered out his last plea:

‘And all I say is, Mr Mayor, if this ‘ere mixed bathing is carried through, that there will be decent partitions in the bathing machines, ’owever low.’

With Madge bringing down Jack every summer to Torquay, we bathed practically every day. Even if it rained or blew a gale, it seems to me that we still bathed. In fact, on a rough day I enjoyed the sea even more.

Very soon there came the great innovation of trams. One could catch a tram at the bottom of Burton Road and be taken down to the harbour, and from there it was only about twenty minutes’ walk to Meadfoot. When Jack was about five, he started to complain. ‘What about taking a cab from the tram to the beach?’ ‘Certainly not,’ said my sister, horrified. ‘We’ve come down all this way in a tram, haven’t we? Now we walk to the beach.’

My nephew would sigh and say under his breath, ‘Mum on the stingy side again!’

In retaliation, as we walked up the hill, which was, bordered on either side with Italianate villas, my nephew, who, at that age, never stopped talking for a moment, would proceed with a kind of Gregorian chant of his own, which consisted of repeating the names of all the houses we passed: ‘Lanka, Pentreave, The Elms, Villa Marguerita, Hartly St. George.’ As time went on, he added the names of such occupants as he knew, starting with ‘Lanka, Dr G. Wreford; Pentreave, Dr Quick;

Villa Marguerita, Madam Cavallen; The Laurels, don’t know,’ and so on. Finally, infuriated, Madge or I would tell him to shut up.

‘Why?’

‘Because we want to talk to each other, and we can’t talk to each other if you are talking the whole time and interrupting us.’

‘Oh, very well.’ Jack lapsed into silence. His lips were moving, however, and one could just hear in faint breath: ‘Lanka, Pentreave, The Priory, Torbay Hall…’ Madge and I would look at each other and try to think of something to say.

Jack and I nearly drowned ourselves one summer. It was a rough day; we had not gone as far as Meadfoot, but instead to the Ladies’ Bathing-Cove, where Jack was not yet old enough to cause a tremor in female breasts. He could not swim at that time, or only a few strokes, so I was in the habit of taking him out to the raft on my back. On this particular morning we started off as usual, but it was a curious kind of sea–a sort of mixed swell and chop–and, with the additional weight on my shoulders, I found it almost impossible to keep my mouth and nose above water. I was swimming, but I couldn’t get any breath into myself. The tide was not far out, so that the raft was quite close, but I was making little progress, and was only able to get a breath about every third stroke.

Suddenly I realised that I could not make it. At any moment now I was going to choke. ‘Jack,’ I gasped, ‘get off and swim to the raft. You’re nearer that than the shore.’ ‘Why?’ said Jack. ‘I don’t want to.’ ‘Please–do–’ I bubbled. My head went under. Fortunately, though Jack clung to me at first, he got shaken off and was able therefore to proceed under his own steam. We were quite near the raft by then, and he reached it with no difficulty. By that time I was past noticing what anyone was doing. The only feeling in my mind was a great sense of indignation. I had always been told that when you were drowning the whole of your past life came before you, and I had also been told that you heard beautiful music when you were dying. There was no beautiful music, and I couldn’t think about anything in my past life; in fact I could think of nothing at all but how I was going to get some breath into my lungs. Everything went black and–and–and the next thing I knew was violent bruises and pains as I was flung roughly into a boat. The old Sea-Horse, crotchety and useless as we had always thought him, had had enough sense to notice that somebody was drowning and had come out in the boat allowed him for the purpose. Having thrown me into the boat, he took a few more strokes to the raft and grabbed Jack, who resisted loudly saying, ‘I don’t want to go in yet. I’ve only just got here. I want to play on the raft. I won’t come in!’ The assorted boatload reached the shore, and my sister came down the beach laughing heartily and saying, ‘What were you doing? What’s all this fuss?’

‘Your sister nearly drowned herself,’ said the old man crossly: ‘Go on, take this child of yours. We’ll lay her out flat, and we’ll see if she needs a bit of punching.’

I suppose they gave me a bit of punching, though I don’t think I had quite lost consciousness.

‘I can’t see how you knew she was drowning. Why didn’t she shout for help?’

‘I keeps an eye. Once you goes down you can’t shout–water’s comin’ in.’

We both thought highly of the old Sea-Horse after that.



The outside world impinged much less than it had in my father’s time. I had my friends and my mother had one or two close friends whom she saw, but there was little social interchange. For one thing mother was very badly off; she had no money to spare for social entertainments, or indeed for paying cab fares to go to luncheons or dinners. She had never been a great walker, and now, with her heart attacks, she got out little, as it was impossible in Torquay to go anywhere without going up or down hill almost immediately. I had bathing in the summer, roller-skating in the winter and masses of books to read. There, of course, I was constantly making new discoveries. Mother read me Dickens aloud at this point and we both enjoyed it.

Reading aloud started with Sir Walter Scott. One of my favourites was The Talisman. I also read Marmion and The Lady of the Lake, but I think that both mother and I were highly pleased when we passed from Sir Walter Scott to Dickens. Mother, impatient as always, did not hesitate to skip when it suited her fancy. ‘All these descriptions,’ she would say at various points in Sir Walter Scott. ‘Of course they are very good, and literary, but one can have too many of them.’ I think she also cheated by missing out a certain amount of sob-stuff in Dickens, particularly the bits about Little Nell.

Our first Dickens was Nicholas Nickleby, and my favourite character was the old gentleman who courted Mrs Nickleby by throwing vegetable marrows over the wall. Can this be one of the reasons why I made Hercule Poirot retire to grow vegetable marrows? Who can say? My favourite Dickens of all was Bleak House, and still is.

Occasionally we would try Thackeray for a change. We got through Vanity Fair all right, but we stuck on The Newcombes–‘We ought to like it,’ said my mother, ‘everyone says it is his best.’ My sister’s favourite had been Esmond, but that too we found diffuse and difficult; indeed I have never been able to appreciate Thackeray as I should.

For my own reading, the works of Alexandre Dumas in French now entranced me. The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, and best of all, The Count of Monte Christo. My favourite was the first volume, Le Château d’If, but although the other five volumes occasionally had me slightly bewildered the whole colourful pageant of the story was entrancing. I also had a romatic attachment to Maurice Hewlett: The Forest Lovers, The Queen’s Quair, and Richard Yea-and-Nay. Very good historical novels they are, too.

Occasionally my mother would have a sudden idea. I remember one day when I was picking up suitable windfalls from the apple-tree, she arrived like a whirlwind from the house. ‘Quickly,’ she said, ‘we are going to Exeter.’

‘Going to Exeter,’ I said surprised. ‘Why?’

‘Because Sir Henry Irving is playing there, in Becket. He may not live much longer, and you must see him. A great actor. We’ve just time to catch the train. I have booked a room at the hotel.’

We duly went to Exeter, and it was indeed a wonderful performance of Becket which I have never forgotten.

The theatre had never stopped being a regular part of my life. When staying at Ealing, Grannie used to take me to the theatre at least once a week, sometimes twice. We went to all the musical comedies, and she used to buy me the score afterwards. Those scores–how I enjoyed playing them! At Ealing, the piano was in the drawing-room, and so fortunately I did not annoy anyone by playing several hours on end.

The drawing-room at Ealing was a wonderful period piece. There was practically no room in it to move about. It had a rather splendid thick Turkey carpet on the floor, and every type of brocaded chair; each one of them uncomfortable. It had two, if not three, marquetry china cabinets, a large central candelabra, standard oil lamps, quantities of small whatnots, occasional tables, and French Empire furniture. The light from the window was blocked by a conservatory, a prestige symbol that was a must, as in all self-respecting Victorian houses. It was a very cold room; the fire was only lit there if we had a party; and nobody as a rule went into it except myself. I would light the brackets on the piano, adjust the music-stool, breathe heavily on my fingers, and start off with The Country Girl or Our Miss Gibbs. Sometimes I allotted roles to ‘the girls’, sometimes I was myself singing them, a new and unknown star.

Taking my scores to Ashfield, I used to play them in the evenings in the school-room, (also an icy cold room in winter). I played and I sang. Mother often used to go to bed early, after a light supper, about eight o’clock. After she had had about two and a half hours of me thumping a piano overhead, and singing at the top of my voice, she could bear it no longer, and used to take a long pole, which served for pushing the windows up and down, and rap frantically on the ceiling with it. Regret-fully I would abandon my piano.

I also invented an operetta of my own called Marjorie. I did not compose it exactly, but I sang snatches of it experimentally in the garden. I had some vague idea that I might really be able to write and compose music one day. I got as far as the libretto, and there I stuck. I can’t remember the whole story now, but it was all slightly tragic, I think. A handsome young man with a glorious tenor voice loved desperately a girl called Marjorie, who equally naturally did not love him in return. In the end he married another girl, but on the day after his wedding a letter arrived from Marjorie in a far country saying that she was dying and had at last realised that she loved him. He left his bride and rushed to her forthwith. She was not quite dead when he arrived–alive enough at any rate to raise herself on one elbow and sing a splendid dying love song. The bride’s father arrived to wreak vengeance for his deserted daughter, but was so affected by the lovers’ grief that he joined his baritone to their voices, and one of the most famous trios ever written concluded the opera.

I also had a feeling that I might like to write a novel called Agnes. I remember even less of that. It had four sisters in it: Queenie, the eldest, golden-haired and beautiful, and then some twins, dark and handsome, finally Agnes, who was plain, shy and (of course) in poor health, lying patiently on a sofa. There must have been more story than this, but it has all gone now. All I can remember is that Agnes’s true worth was recognised at last by some splendid man with a black moustache whom she had loved secretly for many years.

The next of my mother’s sudden ideas was that perhaps, after all, I wasn’t being educated enough, and that I had better have a little schooling. There was a girls’ school in Torquay kept by someone called Miss Guyer, and my mother made an arrangement that I should go there two days a week and study certain subjects. I think one was arithmetic, and there was also grammar and composition. I enjoyed arithmetic, as always, and may even have begun algebra there. Grammar I could not understand in the least: I could not see why certain things were called prepositions or what verbs were supposed to do, and the whole thing was a foreign language to me. I used to plunge happily into composition, but not with real success. The criticism was always the same: my compositions were too fanciful. I was severely criticised for not keeping to the subject. I remember–‘Autumn’–in particular. I started off well, with golden and brown leaves, but suddenly, somehow or other, a pig got into it–I think it was possibly rooting up acorns in the forest. Anyway, I got interested in the pig, forgot all about autumn, and the composition ended with the riotous adventures of Curlytail the Pig and a terrific Beechnut Party he gave his friends.

I can picture one teacher there–I can’t recall her name. She was short and spare, and I remember her eager jutting chin. Quite unexpectedly one day (in the middle, I think, of an arithmetic lesson) she suddenly launched forth on a speech on life and religion. ‘All of you,’ she said, ‘every one of you–will pass through a time when you will face despair. If you never face despair, you will never have faced, or become, a Christian, or known a Christian life. To be a Christian you must face and accept the life that Christ faced and lived; you must enjoy things as he enjoyed things; be as happy as he was at the marriage at Cana, know the peace and happiness that it means to be in harmony with God and with God’s will. But you must also know, as he did, what it means to be alone in the Garden of Gethsemane, to feel that all your friends have forsaken you, that those you love and trust have turned away from you, and that God Himself has forsaken you. Hold on then to the belief that that is not the end. If you love, you will suffer, and if you do not love, you do not know the meaning of a Christian life.’

She then returned to the problems of compound interest with her usual vigour, but it is odd that those few words, more than any sermon I have ever heard, remained with me, and years later they were to come back to me and give me hope at a time when despair had me in its grip. She was a dynamic figure, and also, I think, a fine teacher; I wish I could have been taught by her longer.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had continued with my education. I should, I suppose, have progressed, and I think I should have been entirely caught up in mathematics–a subject which has always fascinated me. If so, my life, would certainly have been very different. I should have been a third or fourth-rate mathematician and gone through life quite happily. I should probably not have written any books. Mathematics and music would have been enough to satisfy me. They would have engaged my attention, and shut out the world of imagination.

On reflection, though, I think that you are what you are going to be. You indulge in the fantasies of, ‘If so-and-so had happened, I should have done so-and-so’, or, ‘If I had married So-and-so, I suppose I should have had a totally different life.’ Somehow or other, though, you would always find your way to your own pattern, because I am sure you are following a pattern: your pattern of your life. You can embellish your pattern, or you can scamp it, but it is your pattern and so long as you are following it you will know harmony, and a mind at ease with itself.

I don’t suppose I was at Miss Guyer’s more than a year and a half; after that my mother had another idea. With her usual suddenness she explained that I was now going to Paris. She would let Ashfield for the winter, we would go to Paris; I might perhaps start at the same pension at which my sister had been, and see how I liked it.

Everything went according to plan; mother’s arrangements always did. She carried them out with the utmost efficiency, and bent everyone to her will. An excellent let was obtained for the house; mother and I packed all our trunks (I don’t know that there were quite so many round-topped monsters as there had been when we went to the South of France, but there were still a goodly number), and in next to no time we were settled in the Hotel d’lena, in the Avenue d’Iéna in Paris.

Mother was laden with letters of introduction and the addresses of various pensionnats and schools, teachers and advisers of all kinds. She had things sorted out before long. She heard that Madge’s pensionnat had changed its character and gone downhill as the years passed–Mademoiselle T. herself had either given up or was about to give up–so my mother merely said we could try it for a bit, and see. This attitude towards schooling would hardly be approved of nowadays, but to my mother trying a school was exactly like trying a new restaurant. If you looked inside you couldn’t tell what it was like; you must try it, and if you didn’t like it the sooner you moved from it the better. Of course then you had not to bother with G. C. E. School Certificate, O levels, A levels and serious thoughts for the future.

I started at Mademoiselle T.’s, and stayed there for about two months, until the end of the term. I was fifteen. My sister had distinguished herself on arriving, when she was dared by some other girl to jump out of a window. She had immediately done so–and arrived slap in the middle of a tea-table round which Mademoiselle T. and distinguished parents were sitting. ‘What hoydens these English girls are!’ exclaimed Mademoiselle T. in high displeasure. The girls who had egged her on were maliciously pleased, but they admired her for her feat.

My entry was not at all sensational. I was merely a quiet mouse. By the third day I was in misery with homesickness. In the last four or five years I had been so closely attached to my mother, hardly ever leaving her, that it was not unnatural that the first time I really went away from home I should feel homesick. The curious thing was that I didn’t know what was the matter with me. I just didn’t want to eat. Every time I thought of my mother, tears came into my eyes and ran down my cheeks. I remember looking at a blouse which mother had made–extremely badly–with her own fingers, and the fact that it was made badly, that it did not fit, that the tucks were uneven, made me cry all the more. I managed to conceal these feelings from the outside world, and only wept at night into my pillow. When my mother came to fetch me the following Sunday I greeted her as usual, but when we got back to the hotel I burst into tears and flung my arms round her neck. I am glad to say that at least I did not ask her to take me away; I knew quite well that I had to stop there. Besides, having seen mother I felt that I wasn’t going to be homesick any more; I knew what was the matter with me.

I had no recurrence of homesickness. Indeed, I now enjoyed my days at Mademoiselle T.’s very much. There were French girls, American girls, and a good many Spanish and Italian girls–not many English. I liked the company of the American girls especially. They had a breezy interesting way of talking and reminded me of my Cauterets friend, Marguerite Prestley.

I can’t remember much about the work side of things–I don’t think it can have been very interesting. In history we seemed to be doing the period of the Fronde, which I knew pretty well from the reading of historical novels; and in geography I have been mystified for life by learning the provinces of France as they were in the time of the Fronde rather than as they are now. We also learnt the names of the months as they were during the French Revolution. My faults in French dictation horrified the mistress in charge so much she could hardly believe it. ‘Vraiment, c’est impossible’, she said. ‘Vous, qui parlez si bien le francais, vous avez fait vingt-cinq fautes en dictee, vingt-cinq!’

Nobody else had made more than five. I was quite an interesting phenomenon by reason of my failure. I suppose it was natural enough under the circumstances, since I had known French entirely by talking it. I spoke it colloquially but, of course, entirely by ear, and the words été and était sounded exactly the same to me: I spelt it one way or the other purely by chance, hoping I might have hit upon the right one. In some French subjects, literature, recitation, and so on, I was in the top class; as regards French grammar and spelling I was practically in the bottom class. It made it difficult for my poor teachers–and I suppose shaming for me–except that I can’t feel that I really cared.

I was taught the piano by an elderly lady called Madame Legrand. She had been there for a great many years. Her favourite method of teaching the piano was to play a quatre mains with her pupil. She was insistent on pupils being taught to read music. I was not bad at reading music, but playing it with Madame Legrand was something of an ordeal. We both sat on the bench-like music seat and, as Madame Legrand was extremely well-covered, she took up the greater part of it and elbowed me away from the middle of the piano. She played with great vigour, using her elbows, which stuck out slightly a-kimbo, the result being that the unfortunate person who was playing the other two hands had to play with one elbow stuck tightly to her side.

With a certain natural craftiness I managed nearly always to play the bass side of the duet. Madame Legrand was led into this the more easily because she so enjoyed her own performance, and naturally the treble gave her a far better chance of pouring her soul into the music. Sometimes for quite a long time, owing to the vigour of her playing and her absorbtion in it, she failed to realise that I had lost my place in the bass. Sooner or later I hesitated over a bar, got one behind, tried to catch up, not sure where I was, and then tried to play such notes as would accord with what Madame Legrand was playing. Since, however, we were reading music I could not always anticipate this intelligently. Suddenly, as the hideous cacophany we were making dawned upon her, she would stop, raise her hands in the air and exclaim: ‘Mais qu’est-ce que vous jouez là, petite? Que c’est horrible!’ I couldn’t have agreed with her more–horrible it was. We would then start again at the beginning. Of course, if I was playing the treble my lack of coordination was noticed at once. However, as a whole, we got on well. Madame Legrand puffed and snorted a great deal the whole time she played. Her bosom rose and fell, groans sometimes came from her; it was alarming but fascinating. She also smelt rather high, which was not so fascinating.

There was to be a concert at the end of the term, and I was scheduled to play two pieces, one the third movement from the Sonata Pathetique of Beethoven, and the other a piece called Serenade d’Aragona, or something like that. I took a scunner to the Serenade d’Aragona straight away. I found extraordinary difficulty in playing it–I don’t know why; it was certainly much easier than the Beethoven. Though my playing of the Beethoven came on well, the Serenade d’Aragona continued to be a very poor performance. I practised it ardently, but I seemed to make myself even more nervous. I woke up at night, thinking I was playing, and all sorts of things would happen. The notes of the piano would stick, or I would find I was playing an organ instead of the piano, or I was late in arriving, or the concert had taken place the night before…It all seems so silly when one remembers it.

Two days before the concert I had such high fever that they sent for my mother. The doctor could find no cause for it. However, he gave it as his view that it would be much better if I did not play at the concert, and if I were removed from the school for two or three days until the concert was over. I cannot tell you of my thankfulness, though at the same time I had the feeling of somebody who has failed at something they had been determined to accomplish.

I remember now that at an arithmetic exam at Miss Guyer’s school I had come out bottom, though I had been top of the class all the week previously. Somehow, when I read the questions at the exam my mind shut up and I was unable to think. There are people who can pass exams, often high up, after being almost bottom in class; there are people who can perform in public much better than they perform in private; and there are people who are just the opposite. I was one of the latter. It is obvious that I chose the right career. The most blessed thing about being an author is that you do it in private and in your own time. It can worry you, bother you, give you a headache; you can go nearly mad trying to arrange your plot in the way it should go and you know it could go; but–you do not have to stand up and make a fool of yourself in public.

I returned to the pensionnat with great relief and in good spirits. Immediately I tried to see if I could now play the Serenade d’Aragona. I certainly played it better than I had ever done before, but the performance was still poor. I went on learning the rest of the Beethoven sonata with Madame Legrand, who, though disappointed in me as a pupil who might have done her credit, was still kind and encouraging and said I had a proper sense of music.

The two winters and one summer that I spent in Paris were some of the happiest days I have ever known. All sorts of delightful things happened all the time. Some American friends of my grandfather whose daughter sang in Grand Opera lived there. I went to hear her as Marguerite in Faust. At the pensionnat, they did not take girls to hear Faust–the subject was not supposed to be ‘convenable’ for ‘les jeunes filles’. I think people tended to be rather optimistic over the easy corruption of les jeunes filles; you would have to have far more knowledge than jeunes filles did in those days to know anything improper was going on at Marguerite’s window. I never understood in Paris why Marguerite was suddenly in her prison. Had she, I wondered, stolen the jewellery? Certainly pregnancy and the death of the child never even occurred to me.

We were taken mostly to the Opera Comique. Thais, Werther, Carmen, La Vie Boheme, Manon. Werther was my favourite. At the Grand Opera House I heard Tannhauser as well as Faust.

Mother took me to dressmakers, and I began to appreciate clothes for the first time. I had a pale grey crepe de Chine semi-evening dress made, which filled me with joy–I had never had anything so grown-up-looking before. It was sad that my bosom was still unco-operative, so that I had to have a lot of ruffles of crêpe de Chine hurriedly tucked into the bodice, but I was still hopeful that one day a couple of truly womanly bosoms, firm, round and large, would be mine. How lucky that vision into the future is spared to us. Otherwise I should have seen myself at thirty-five, with a round womanly bosom well-developed, but, alas, everybody else going about with chests as flat as boards, and if they were so unfortunate as to have bosoms, tightening them out of existence.

Through the introductions mother had brought, we went into French society. American girls were welcomed always to the Faubourg St. Germain and it was acceptable for the sons of the French aristocracy to marry rich Americans. Though I was far from rich, my father was known to have been American, and all Americans were supposed to have some money. It was a curious, decorous, old-world society. The Frenchmen I met were polite, very comme il faut–and nothing could have been duller from a girl’s point of view. However, I learnt French phraseology of the politest kind. I also learnt dancing and deportment, with someone called, I think (though it seems improbable), Mr Washington Lob. Mr Washington Lob was the closest thing to Mr Turveydrop that I can imagine. I learnt the Washington Post, the Boston, and a few other things, and I also learnt the various usages of cosmopolitan society. ‘Suppose now, you were about to sit down by an elderly married lady. How would you sit?’ I looked at Mr Washington Lob with blank eyes. ‘I should–er–sit,’ I said puzzled.

‘Show me.’ He had some gilt chairs there, and I sat down in a gilt chair, trying to hide my legs as much as possible underneath the chair.

‘No, no, that is impossible. That will never do,’ said Mr Washington Lob. ‘You turn slightly sideways, that is enough, not more; and as you sit down you are leaning slightly to the right, so you bend your left knee slightly, so that it is almost like a little bow as you sit.’ I had to practise this a good deal.

The only things I really hated were my drawing and painting lessons. Mother was adamant on that subject; she would not let me off: ‘Girls should be able to do water-colours.’

So very rebelliously, twice a week, I was called for by a suitable young woman (since girls did not go about alone in Paris) and taken by metro or bus to an atelier somewhere near the flower-market. There I joined a class of young ladies, painting violets in a glass of water, lilies in a jar, daffodils in a black vase. There would be terrific sighs as the lady in charge came round. ‘Mais vous ne voyez rien,’ she said to me. ‘First you must start with the shadows: do you not see? Here, and here, and here there are shadows.’

But I never saw the shadows; all I saw were some violets in a glass of water. Violets were mauve–I could match the shade of mauve on my palette, and I would then paint the violets a flat mauve. I quite agree that the result did not look like a bunch of violets in a glass of water, but I did not see, and I don’t think have ever seen, what does make shadows look like a bunch of violets in water. On some days, to ease my depression, I would draw the table legs or an odd chair in perspective, which cheered me up, but which did not go down at all well with my instructress.

Though I met many charming Frenchmen, strangely enough I did not fall in love with any of them. Instead I conceived a passion for the reception clerk in the hotel, Monsieur Strie. He was tall and thin, rather like a tapeworm, with pale blond hair and a tendency to spots. I really cannot understand what I saw in him. I never had the courage to speak to him, though he occasionally said ‘Bonjour, Mademoiselle’ as I passed through the hall. It was difficult to have fantasies about Monsieur Strie. I imagined myself sometimes nursing him through the plague in French Indo-China, but it took much effort to keep that vision going. As he finally gasped out his last breath he would murmur: ‘Mademoiselle, I always adored you in the days at the hotel’–which was all right as far as it went, but when I noticed Monsieur Strie writing industriously behind the desk the following day it seemed to me extremely unlikely that he would ever say such a thing, even on his deathbed.

We passed the Easter holidays going on expeditions to Versailles, Fontainebleau, and various other places, and then, with her usual suddenness, mother announced that I should not be returning to Mademoiselle T.’s.

‘I don’t think much of that place,’ she said. ‘No interesting teaching. It’s not what it was in Madge’s time. I am going back to England, and I have arranged that you shall go to Miss Hogg’s school at Auteuil, Les Marroniers.’

I can’t remember feeling anything beyond mild surprise. I had enjoyed myself at Mademoiselle T.’s, but I didn’t particularly want to go back there. In fact it seemed more interesting to go to a new place. I don’t know whether it was stupidity on my part or amiability–I like to think, of course, that it was the latter–but I was always prepared to like the next thing that came along.

So I went to Les Marroniers, which was a good school but extremely English. I enjoyed it, but found it dull. I had quite a good music teacher, but not as much fun as Madame Legrand had been. As everyone talked English all the time, in spite of the fact that it was strictly forbidden, nobody learned much French.

Outside activities were not encouraged, or indeed perhaps even allowed, at Les Marroniers, so at last I was to shake myself free of my detested painting and drawing lessons. The only thing I missed was passing through the flower-market, which really had been heavenly. It was no surprise to me at the end of the summer holidays when my mother suddenly said to me at Ashfield that I was not going back to Les Marroniers. She had had a new idea for my education.


V

Grannie’s doctor, Dr Burwood, had a sister-in-law who kept a small establishment for ‘finishing’ girls in Paris. She only took twelve to fifteen girls, and they were all studying music or taking courses at the Conservatoire or the Sorbonne. How did I like that idea? my mother asked. As I have said, I welcomed new ideas; in fact my motto might have been established by then as ‘Try anything once’. So in the autumn I went to Miss Dryden’s establishment, just off the Arc de Triomphe in the Avenue du Bois.

Being at Miss Dryden’s suited me down to the ground. For the first time I felt that what we were doing was really interesting. There were twelve of us. Miss Dryden herself was tall, rather fierce, with beautifully arranged white hair, an excellent figure, and a red nose, which she was in the habit of rubbing violently when she was angry. She had a dry, ironic form of conversation that was alarming but stimulating. Assisting her was a French coadjutor, Madame Petit. Madame Petit was very French, temperamental, highly emotional, remarkably unfair, and we were all devoted to her, and not nearly so much in awe of her as we were of Miss Dryden.

It was, of course, much more like living in a family, but a serious attitude was taken towards our studies. There was an emphasis on music, but we had plenty of interesting classes of all kinds. We had people from the Comedie Francaise, who gave us talks on Moliere, Racine and Corneille, and singers from the Conservatoire, who sang the airs of Lully and Glück. We had a dramatic class where we all recited. Luckily we did not have so many ‘dictées’ here, so my spelling faults were not quite so noticeable, and since my spoken French was better than the others’ I enjoyed myself thoroughly reciting the lines of Andromaque, feeling myself indeed that tragic heroine as I stood and declaimed: ‘Seigneur, toutes ces grandeurs ne me touchent plus guère’.

I think we all rather enjoyed ourselves at the drama class. We were taken to the Comedie Francaise and saw the classic dramas and several modern plays as well. I saw Sarah Bernhardt in what must have been one of the last roles of her career, as the golden pheasant in Rostand’s Chantecler. She was old, lame, feeble, and her golden voice was cracked, but she was certainly a great actress–she held you with her impassioned emotion. Even more exciting than Sarah Bernhardt did I find Rejane. I saw her in a modern play, La Course aux Flambeaux. She had a wonderful power of making you feel, behind a hard repressed manner, the existence of a tide of feeling and emotion which she would never allow to come out into the open. I can still hear now, if I sit quiet a minute or two with my eyes closed, her voice, and see her face in the last words of the play: ‘Pour sauver ma fille, j’ai tué ma mère,’ and the deep thrill this sent through one as the curtain came down.

It seems to me that teaching can only be satisfactory if it awakens some response in you. Mere information is no good, it gives you nothing more than you had before. To be talked to about plays by actresses, repeating words and speeches from them; to have real singers singing you Bois Epais or an aria from Glück’s Orphée was to bring to life in you a passionate love of the art you were hearing. It opened a new world to me, a world in which I have been able to live ever since.

My own serious study was music, of course, both singing and piano. I studied the piano with an Austrian, Charles Fürster. He occasionally came to London and gave recitals. He was a good but frightening teacher. His method was to wander round the room as you played. He had the air of not listening, looked out of the window, smelt a flower, but all of a sudden, as you played a false note or phrased something badly, he would swing round with the alaerity of a pouncing tiger and cry out: ‘Hein, qu’est-ce que vous jouez Ià, petite, hein? C’est atroce.’ It was shattering to the nerves at first, but one got used to it. He was a passionate addict of Chopin, so that I learnt mostly Chopin Etudes and Waltzes, the Fantaisie Impromptue, and one of the Ballades. I knew I was getting on well under his teaching, and it made me happy. I also learned the Sonatas of Beethoven, as well as several light, what he called ‘drawing-room pieces’, a Romance of Fauré, the Barcarolle of Tchaikowski, and others. I practised with real assiduity, usually about seven hours a day. I think a wild hope was springing up within me–I don’t know that I ever let it quite come into my consciousness, but it was there in the background–that perhaps I could be a pianist, could play at concerts. It would be a long time and hard work, but I knew that I was improving rapidly.

My singing lessons had begun before this period. My teacher was a Monsieur Boue. He and Jean de Reszke were supposed at that time to be the two leading singing teachers of Paris. Jean de Reszke had been a famous tenor and Boué an operatic baritone. He lived in an apartment five flights up with no lift. I used to arrive at the fifth storey completely out of breath, as indeed was only natural. The apartments all looked so alike that you lost count of the storeys you had climbed, but you always knew when you were getting to Monsieur Boue’s because of the wall-paper on the stairs. On the last turn, was an enormous grease mark which had a rough resemblance to the head of a cairn terrier.

When I arrived I would be immediately greeted with reproaches. What did I mean by breathing fast like that? Why did I have to be out of breath? Someone my age should spring upstairs, without panting. Breathing was everything. ‘Breathing is the whole of singing, you should know that by now.’ He would then reach for his tape measure, which was always at hand. This he would put round my diaphragm and then urge me to breathe in, hold it, and then breathe out as completely as possible. He would calculate the difference between the two measurements, nodding his head occasionally and saying: ‘C’est bien, c’est bien, it advances. You have a good chest, an excellent chest. You have splendid expansion, and what is more, I will tell you something, you will never have the consumption. That is a sad thing for some singers; they get the consumption, but with you no. As long as you practise your breathing, all will be well with you. You like beefsteak?’ I said yes, I was extremely fond of beefsteak. ‘That is good too; that is the best food for a singer. You cannot eat large meals, or eat often, but I say to my opera singers you will have at three o’clock in the afternoon a large steak and a glass of stout; after that nothing till you sing at nine o’clock.’

We then proceeded to the singing lesson proper. The voix de tête, he said, was very good, it was perfect, properly produced and natural, and my chest notes were not too bad; but the médium, the médium was extremely weak. So to begin with I was to sing mezzo-soprano songs to develop le médium. At intervals he would get exasperated with what he called my English face. ‘English faces,’ he said, ‘have no expression! They are not mobile. The skin round the mouth, it does not move; and the voice, the words, everything, they come from the back of the throat. That is very bad. The French language has got to come from the palate, from the roof of the mouth. The roof of the mouth, the bridge of the nose, that is where the voice of the medium comes from. You speak French very well, very fluently, though it is unfortunate you have not the English accent but the accent of the Midi. Why do you have the accent of the Midi?’

I thought for a minute, and then I said perhaps because I had learnt French from a French maid who had come from Pau.

‘Ah, that explains it,’ he said. ‘Yes, that is it. It is the accent meridional that you have. As I say, you speak French fluently, but you speak it as though it were English because you speak it from the back of your throat. You must move your lips. Keep your teeth close together, but move your lips. Ah, I know what we shall do.’

He would then tell me to stick a pencil in the corner of my mouth and articulate as well as possible while I was singing, without letting the pencil drop out. It was extraordinarily difficult at first, but in the end I managed it. My teeth clamped the pencil and my lips then had to move a great deal to make the words come out at all.

Boué’s fury was great one day when I brought in the air from Samson et Delilah, ‘Mon coeur s’ouvre à to voix’, and asked him if I could possibly learn it, as I had enjoyed the opera so much.

‘But what is this you have here?’ he said, looking at the piece of music. What is this? What key is it in? It is in a transposed key.’

I said I had bought the version for a soprano voice.

He shouted with rage: ‘But Delilah is not a soprano part. It is a mezzo part. Do you not know that if you sing an air from an opera, it must always be sung in the key it was written in? You cannot transpose for a soprano voice what has been written for a mezzo voice–it puts the whole emphasis wrong. Take it away. If you bring it in the proper mezzo key, yes, you shall learn it.’

I never dared sing a transposed song again.

I learned large quantities of French songs, and a lovely Ave Maria of Cherubini’s. We debated for some time how I was to pronounce the Latin of that. ‘The English pronounce Latin in the Italian way, the French have their own way of pronouncing Latin. I think, since you are English, you had better sing it in the Italian pronunciation.’

I also sang a good many of Schubert’s songs in German. In spite of not knowing German this was not too difficult; and I sang songs in Italian, of course. On the whole I was not allowed to be too ambitious, but after about six months or so of study I was allowed to sing the famous aria from La Bohème ‘Te Gelida Manina’ and also the aria from Tosca, ‘Vissi d’arte’.

It was indeed a happy time. Sometimes, after a visit to the Louvre, we were taken to have tea at Rumpelmayer’s. There could be no delight in life for a greedy girl like tea at Rumpelmayer’s. My favourites were those glorious cakes with cream and marron piping of a sickliness which was incomparable.

We were taken of course, for walks in the Bois–a very fascinating place. One day, I remember, when we were going in a neat crocodile, two by two, along a deeply wooded path, a man came out from behind some trees–a classic case of indecent exposure. We must all have seen him, I think, but we all behaved in a decorous manner as if we had noticed nothing unusual–possibly we may have been not quite sure of what it was we had seen. Miss Dryden, herself, who was in charge of us that day, sailed along with the iron-clad belligerence of a battleship. We followed her. I suppose the man, whose upper half was very correct, with black hair and pointed beard and a very smart cravat and tie, must have spent his day wandering about the darker places of the Bois so as to surprise decorous young ladies from pensionnats, walking in a crocodile, wishing perhaps to add to their knowledge of life in Paris. I may add that, as far as I know, not one of us mentioned this incident to any of the other girls; there was not so much as a giggle. We were all splendidly modest in those days.

We had occasional parties at Miss Dryden’s, and on one occasion a former pupil of hers, an American woman now married to a French Vicomte, arrived with her son, Rudy. Rudy might have been a French baron, but in appearance he was a thoroughly American college boy. He must have blenched a little at the sight of twelve nubile girls looking at him with interest, approbation, and possible romance in their eyes.

‘I’ve got my work cut out shaking hands round here,’ he declared in a cheerful voice. We all met Rudy again the next day at the Palais de Glace, where some of us were skating and some learning to skate. Rudy was again determinedly gallant, anxious not to let his mother down. He skated several circuits of the rink with those of us who were able to stand up. I, as so often in these matters, was unlucky. I had only just begun to learn, and on my first afternoon had succeeded in throwing the skating instructor. This, I may say, had made him extremely angry. He had been held up to the ridicule of his colleagues. He prided himself on being able to hold up anyone, even the stoutest American lady, and to be floored by a tall thin girl must have infuriated him. He took me out for my turn as seldom as possible after this. Anyway I didn’t think I would risk being pioneered by Rudy round the rink–I should probably throw him too, and then he would have been annoyed.

Something happened to me at the sight of Rudy. We only saw him on those few occasions, but they marked a point of transition. From that moment forward I stepped out of the territory of hero-worship. All the romantic love I had felt for people real and unreal–people in books, people in the public eye, actual people who came to the house–finished at that moment. I no longer had the capacity for selfless love or the wish to sacrifice myself on their behalf. From that day I began to think of young men only as young men–exciting creatures whom I would enjoy meeting, and among whom, some day, I should find my husband (Mr Right in fact). I did not fall in love with Rudy–perhaps I might have, if I had met him often–but I did suddenly feel different. I had become one of the world of females on the prowl! From that moment, the image of the Bishop of London, who had been my last object of hero-worship, faded from my mind. I wanted to meet real young men, lots of real young men–in fact there couldn’t be too many of them.

I am hazy now as to how long I remained at Miss Dryden’s–a year, perhaps eighteen months, I do not think as long as two years. My volatile mother did not propose any further changes of educational plan; perhaps she did not hear of anything that excited her. But I think really that she had an intuitive knowledge that I had found what satisfied me. I was learning things that mattered, that built themselves into me as part of an interest in life.

One dream of mine faded before I left Paris. Miss Dryden was expecting an old pupil of hers, the Countess of Limerick, who herself was a very fine pianist, a pupil of Charles Fürster’s. Usually the two or three girls who were studying the piano would give an informal concert on these occasions. I was one of them. The result was catastrophic. I was nervous beforehand, but not unusually so, no more than would be natural, but as soon as I sat down at the piano inefficiency overwhelmed me like a tide. I played wrong notes, my tempo went, my phrasing was amateur and ham-handed–I was just a mess.

Nobody could have been kinder than Lady Limerick. She talked to me later and said she had realised how nervous I had been, and that one did get these fits of what really qualified as stage-fright. Perhaps I would get over them later when I became more experienced in playing before an audience. I was grateful for those kind words, but I knew myself that there was more to it than that.

I continued to study, but before I finally went home I asked Charles Fürster frankly whether he thought that by hard work and application I could one day be a professional pianist. He, too, was kind, but he told me no lies. He said that he thought I had not the temperament to play in public, and I knew he was right. I was grateful to him for telling me the truth. I was miserable about it for a while, but I tried hard not to dwell on it more than I could help.

If the thing you want beyond anything cannot be, it is much better to recognise it and go forward, instead of dwelling on one’s regrets and hopes. Such a rebuff coming early helped me for the future; it taught me that I had not the kind of temperament for exhibition of any kind. I can describe what it seemed like by saying that I could not control my physical reaction.

Posted in An Autobiography