PART IV. Flirting, courting, banns up, marriage

(Popular Victorian Game)

I

Soon after I came home from Paris, my mother had a serious illness. In the usual manner of doctors, it was diagnosed as appendicitis, paratyphoid, gallstones and a few more things.
Several times she had been on the brink of being carted off to the operating-table. Treatment did not improve her condition–she was constantly having relapses, and various different operations were mooted. My mother was an amateur doctor herself. When her brother Ernest had been working as a medical student, she had helped him with mounting enthusiasm. She would have made a far better doctor than he would. In the end he had to give up the idea owing to the fact that he could not stand the sight of blood. By that time mother was practically as fully trained as he was–and would not have minded blood, wounds, or any other physical offences to the eye. I noticed that, whenever we went to the dentist together, my mother ignored the Queen or The Tatler and immediately seized The Lancet or the British Medical journal if it was anywhere about on the table.

Finally losing patience with her medical attendants, she said, ‘I don’t think they know–I don’t know myself. I think the great thing is to get out of the doctors’ hands.’

She succeeded in finding yet another doctor who was what you might call the biddable kind, and was soon able to announce that he had advised sunshine and a warm dry climate. ‘We will go to Egypt for the winter,’ she informed me.

Once more we set about letting the house. It was fortunate that the expenses of travelling must have been fairly low in those days, and that the cost of living abroad seemed easily covered by the high rent asked for Ashfield. Torquay was of course at that period still a winter resort. Nobody went there during the summer, and people who lived there always went away then to avoid ‘the terrible heat’. (I can’t imagine what this terrible heat could be: nowadays I always find South Devon extremely cold in the summer.) Usually they went up to the moor and took houses there. Father and mother did that once, but they found it so hot on the moor that father hired a dog-cart and drove back into Torquay to sit in his own garden practically every afternoon. Anyway, Torquay was then the Riviera of England, and people paid large rents for furnished villas there, during quite a gay winter season with concerts in the afternoons, lectures, occasional dances, and a great deal of other social activity.

I was now ready to ‘come out’. My hair was ‘up’, which at that period meant done in the Grecian style, with large knots of curls high up on the back of the head and a kind of fillet round it. It was really a becoming style, particularly suited to evening dress. My hair was very long–I could sit on it easily. This for some reason was considered something to be proud of in a woman, though what it actually meant was that your hair was completely unmanageable and was always coming down. To counter-act this, hairdressers created what was called a postiche–a large false knot of curls, with your own hair pinned away as tight to your head as possible, and the postiche pinned to that.

‘Coming-out’ was a thing of great importance in a girl’s life. If you were well off, your mother gave a dance for you. You were supposed to go for a season in London. Of course the season was by no means the commercial and highly organised racket it has become in the last twenty or thirty years. The people you asked to your dance then, and the people to whose dances you went, were your personal friends. There was always a slight difficulty in scraping up enough men; but the dances were on the whole informal affairs, or else there were charity balls, to which you took a large party.

Of course, there could be nothing like that in my life. Madge had had her coming-out in New York and been to parties and dances there, but father had not been able to afford a London season for her, and there was certainly no question of my having one now. But my mother was anxious that I should have what was considered a young girl’s birthright, that is to say that she should emerge like a butterfly from a chrysalis, from a schoolgirl to a young lady of the world, meeting other girls and plenty of young men, and, to put it plainly, be given her chance of finding a suitable mate.

Everyone made a point of being kind to young girls. They asked them to house-parties, and they arranged pleasant theatre evenings for them. You could rely on all your friends to rally round. There was nothing approaching the French system of shielding daughters and permitting them to meet only a selected few partis, who would all make suitable husbands, who had committed their follies and sown their young men’s wild oats, and who had sufficient money or property to keep a wife. This system was, I think, a good one; it resulted, certainly, in a high percentage of happy marriages. The English belief that young French girls were forced to marry rich old men was quite untrue. A French girl could make her choice, but it was definitely a limited choice. The rackety, wild-living young man, the charming mauvais sujet whom she would doubtless have preferred, was never allowed to enter her orbit.

In England that was not so. Girls went out to dances and met all kinds of young men. Their mothers were there, too, sitting wearily as chaperones, but mothers were fairly helpless. Of course, people were reasonably careful about the young men with whom they allowed their daughters to associate, but there was still a wide field of choice, and girls were notorious for preferring undesirable young men, and even going so far as to get engaged to them or having what was termed an ‘understanding’. ‘Having an understanding’ was a really useful term; by it parents avoided the friction of bad feeling over refusing to accept their daughter’s choice. ‘You are very young still, dear, and I am sure Hugh is quite charming, but he also is young and has not established himself yet. I see no reason why you should not have an understanding and should meet occasionally, but no letters and no formal engagement.’ They then worked behind the scenes to try to produce a suitable young man so that he might distract the girl’s mind from the first one. This often happened. Direct opposition would, of course, have made the girl cling frantically to her first choice, but having it authorised took away some of the glamour, and as most girls are capable of being sensible they quite often changed their minds.

Owing to the fact that we were badly off, my mother saw that it was going to be difficult for me to enter society on the usual terms. Her choice of Cairo as a convalescent centre for herself was, I think, made mainly on my behalf, and was a good one. I was a shy girl, not brilliant socially; if I could be familiarized with dancing, talking to young men, and all the rest of it, as an everyday thing, it would be the best way of giving me some worth-while experience.

Cairo, from the point of view of a girl, was a dream of delight. We spent three months there, and I went to five dances every week. They were given in each of the big hotels in turn. There were three or four regiments stationed in Cairo; there was polo every day; and at the cost of living in a moderately expensive hotel all this was at your disposal. A good many people went out there for the winter, and many of them were mothers and daughters. I was shy at first, and remained shy in many ways, but I was passionately fond of dancing and I danced well. Also I liked young men, and I soon found they liked me, so everything went well. I was just seventeen–Cairo as Cairo meant nothing to me–girls between eighteen and twenty-one seldom thought of anything but young men, and very right and proper, too!

The art of flirtation is lost nowadays, but then it was in full swing, and was an approximation, I think, to what the old troubadours called ‘le pays du tendre’. It is a good introduction to life: the half-sentimental-half-romantic attachment that grows up between what I think of now in my advanced age as ‘girls and boys’. It teaches them something of life and of each other without having to pay too violent or disillusioning a price. I certainly don’t remember any illegitimate babies among my friends or their families. No, I am wrong. It was not a pretty story: a girl whom we knew went to spend her holidays with a schoolfriend, and was seduced by the schoolfriend’s father, an elderly man with a nasty reputation.

Sexual attachments would have been difficult to enter into because young men had a high opinion of young girls, and adverse public opinion would have affected them as well as the girls. Men had their sexual fun with married women, usually a good deal older than themselves, or else with ‘little friends’ in London, about whom no one was supposed to know. I do remember one incident when I was staying in a house-party in Ireland later. There were two or three other girls and young men, soldiers mostly, in the house, and one of the soldiers left abruptly one morning, saying he had had a telegram from England. This was patently untrue. Nobody knew the cause, but he had confided in a much older girl, whom he knew well and whom he considered able to appreciate his dilemma. Apparently he had been asked to accompany one of the girls to a dance some little distance away to which the others had not been invited. He duly drove her there, but on the way the girl suggested that they should stop at a hotel and engage a room. ‘We shall arrive at the dance a bit late,’ she said, ‘but nobody notices, I find–I’ve often done it.’ The young man was so horrified that, having refused the suggestion he felt it quite impossible to meet her again the next day. Hence his abrupt departure.

‘I could hardly believe my ears–she seemed such a nicely brought up girl, quite young, nice parents, and everything. Just the sort of girl one would feel one would want to marry.’

Those were still great days for the purity of young girls. I do not think we felt in the least repressed because of it. Romantic friendships, tinged certainly with sex or the possibility of sex, satisfied us completely. Courtship is, after all, a recognised stage in all animals. The male struts and courts, the female pretends not to notice anything, but is secretly gratified. You know it is not yet the real thing, but it is a kind of apprenticeship. The troubadours were quite right when they made their songs about the pays du tendre. I can re-read Aucassin and Nicolette always, for its charm, its naturalness and its sincerity. Never again, after your youth, do you have that particular feeling: the excitement of friendship with a man; that sense of being in affinity, of liking the same things, of the other one saying what you have just been thinking. A great deal of it is illusion, of course, but it is a wonderful illusion, and I think it ought to have its part in every woman’s life. You can smile at yourself later, saying, ‘I was really rather a young fool.’

However, in Cairo I didn’t even get as far as falling slightly in love. I had too much to do. There was so much going on, and so many attractive, personable young men. The ones that did stir my heart were men of about forty, who kindly danced with the child now and again, and teased me as a pretty young thing, but that was all. Society decreed that you should not dance more than two dances on your programme with the same man in an evening. It was possible, occasionally, to stretch this to three, but the sharp eyes of the chaperones were then upon you.

One’s first evening dresses, of course, were a great joy. I had one of pale green chiffon with little lace frills, and a white silk one, rather plainly made, and a rather gorgeous one of deep turquoise blue taffeta, the material for which Grannie had unearthed from one of her secret remnant chests. It was a magnificent piece of stuff, but alas, having been in storage for so many years, it was unable to stand the Egyptian climate, and one evening in the course of a dance it split up the skirt, down the sleeves and round the neck, and I had to retire hurriedly to the Ladies’ Cloakroom.

Next day we went to one of the Levantine dressmakers of Cairo. They were very expensive: my own dresses, bought in England, had been cheap. Still, I did get a lovely dress; it was a shot pale pink satin, and had a bunch of pink rose-buds on one shoulder. What I wanted, of course, was a black evening dress; all girls wanted a black evening dress to make them look mature. All their mothers refused to let them have them.

A young Cornishman, called Trelawny, and a friend of his, both in the 60th Rifles, were my chief partners. One of the older men, a Captain Craik, who was engaged to a nice American girl, brought me back to my mother after a dance one night and said, ‘Here’s your daughter. She has learnt to dance. In fact she dances beautifully. You had better try to teach her to talk now.’ It was a justified reproach. I had still, alas, no conversation.

I was good-looking. My family, of course, laugh uproariously whenever I say that I was a lovely girl. My daughter and her friends, particularly, say: ‘But, Mother, you couldn’t have been. Look at those awful old photographs!’ It is true that some of the photographs of those days are pretty terrible, but that, I think, is due to the clothes, which are not yet quite old enough to have become period. Certainly at that time we were wearing monstrous hats, practically a yard across, of straw, ribbon, flowers, and large veils. Studio portraits were often taken in hats like this, sometimes tied with a ribbon under the chin; or sometimes you were shown with a much-frizzled head of hair, holding an enormous bunch of roses like a telephone receiver up to your ear. Looking at my early photographs, one, taken before I came out, with two long pigtails, sitting, for God knows what reason, at a spinning-wheel, is quite attractive. As one young man said to me once, ‘I like the Gretchen one, very much.’ I suppose I did look rather like Marguerite in Faust. There was one nice one of me in Cairo in one of my plainer hats, an enormous dark blue straw with one pink rose. It makes an attractive angle round the face, and is not so overladen with ribbons as most. Dresses were, on the whole, fussy and frilly.

I soon became mad about polo, and used to watch it every afternoon. Mother tried to broaden my mind by taking me occasionally to the Museum, and also suggested we should go up the Nile and see the glories of Luxor. I protested passionately, with tears in my eyes, ‘Oh no, mother, oh no, don’t let’s go away now. There’s the fancy dress dance on Monday, and I promised to go on a picnic to Sakkara on Tuesday…’ and so on and so forth. The wonders of antiquity were the last thing I cared to see, and I am very glad she did not take me. Luxor, Karnak, the beauties of Egypt, were to come upon me with wonderful impact about twenty years later. How it would have spoilt them for me if I had seen them then with unappreciative eyes.

There is no greater mistake in life than seeing things or hearing them at the wrong time. Shakespeare is ruined for most people by having been made to learn it at school; you should see Shakespeare as it was written to be seen, played on the stage. There you can appreciate it quite young, long before you take in the beauty of the words and of the poetry. I took my grandson, Mathew, to Macbeth and The Merry Wives of Windsor at Stratford when he was, I think, eleven or twelve. He was very appreciative of both, though his comment was unexpected. He turned to me as we came out, and said in an awe-struck voice, ‘You know, if I hadn’t know beforehand that that was Shakespeare, I should never have believed it.’ This was clearly meant to be a testimonial to Shakespeare, and I took it as such. Macbeth having been a success with Mathew, we proceeded to The Merry Wives of Windsor. In those days it was done, as I am sure it was meant to be, as good old English slap-stick–no subtlety about it. The last representation of the Merry Wives I saw–in 1965–had so much arty production about it that you felt you had travelled very far from a bit of winter sun in Windsor Old Park. Even the laundry basket was no longer a laundry basket, full of dirty washing: it was a mere symbol made of raffia! One cannot really enjoy slapstick farce when it is symbolised. The good old pantomime custard trick will never fail to rouse a roar of laughter, so long as custard appears to be actually applied to a face! To take a small carton with Birds Custard Powder written on it and delicately tap a cheek–well, the symbolism may be there, but the farce is lacking. The Merry Wives of Windsor went down well indeed with Mathew, I am glad to say–particular delight being taken over the Welsh schoolmaster.

I think there is nothing more delightful than introducing the young to things that we ourselves have long taken for granted, and have taken for granted in a particular way. Max and I went on a motor tour of the castles of the Loire once with my daughter, Rosalind, and one of her friends. The friend measured all the castles we saw by one criterion only: she would look round with experienced eyes and say, ‘They could really have made whoopee here, couldn’t they?’ I had never thought of the castles of the Loire in terms of making whoopee before, but again it was a shrewd observation. The old kings and noblemen of France did indeed use their castles for whoopee. The moral (since I was brought up always to find morals) is that you are never too old to learn. There is always some new point of view being shown you unexpectedly.

This seems to have led me a long way from Egypt. One thing does so lead to another; but why shouldn’t it? That winter in Egypt, I now see, solved a great many problems in our life. My mother, faced with the difficulty of having to provide social life for a young daughter, with next to no money to do it on, discovered a solution, I overcame my awkwardness. In the language of my time, ‘I knew how to behave’. Our way of life now is so different that it seems almost impossible to explain.

The trouble is that girls today know nothing of the art of flirtation. Flirtation, as I have said, was an art carefully cultivated by girls of my generation. We knew the rules back to front. It was true that in France no young girl was ever left alone with a young man, but in England that was certainly not so. You went for a walk with a man, you went out riding with a man–but you did not go to a dance alone with a young man: either your mother sat there, or some other bored dowager, or appearances were satisfied by a young married woman being in your party. But having kept the rules, and having danced with a young man, you then strolled out in the moonlight or wandered into the conservatory, and charming têtes à têtes could take place without decorum being abandoned in the eyes of the world.

Managing your programme was a difficult art, and one that I was not particularly good at. Say you start off at a party: A, B, C are three girls, D, E, F are three young men. You must at least dance with each of those young men twice–probably, you will go to supper with one of them, unless he or you particularly wish to avoid that. The rest of the programme is open for you to arrange to your satisfaction. There are plenty of young men lined up there, and at once some of them–the ones you don’t particularly want to see–approach you. Then the tricky bit begins. You try to prevent them seeing that your programme is as yet not filled up at all, and say doubtfully that you could manage number fourteen. The difficulty is to strike the right balance. The young men you do want to dance with are here somewhere, but if they are late coming up your programme may be already filled. On the other hand, if you tell enough lies to the first young men you will be left with gaps in your programme, and they may not be filled by the right young men. Then you will have to sit out some dances and be a wallflower. Oh, the agony when the young man you have secretly been waiting for suddenly appears, having been looking wildly for you in all the wrong places! You have to tell him sadly, ‘I have only got the second extra and number ten.’

‘Oh, surely you can do better than that?’ he pleads.

You look at your programme, and consider. Cutting dances is not a nice act. It is disapproved of, not only by hostesses and mothers, but also by young men themselves. They sometimes take revenge by cutting dances themselves in return. Perhaps in looking down your programme you see the name of some young man who has behaved badly to you, who has come up late, who has talked more to another girl at supper than to you. If so, you sacrifice him properly. Just occasionally, in desperation, you sacrifice a young man because he dances so abominably that it is really agony for your feet. But that I hardly ever liked to do, because I was tender-hearted, and it seemed unkind to treat so badly a poor young man who was almost certain to be treated badly by everyone else. The whole thing was really as intricate as the steps of a dance. In some ways it was great fun, but in others rather nerve-racking. At any rate one’s manners did improve with practice.

Going to Egypt was a great help to me. I don’t think anything else would have removed my natural gaucherie so soon. It was certainly a wonderful three months for a girl. I got to know at least twenty or thirty young men reasonably well. I went to, I suppose, between fifty and sixty dances; but I was too young and enjoying myself far too much to fall in love with anybody, which was lucky. I did cast languishing eyes on a handful of bronzed middle-aged colonels, but most of these were already attached to attractive married women–the wives of other men–and had no interest in young and insipid girls. I was somewhat plagued by a young Austrian count of excessive solemnity, who paid me serious attention. Avoid him as much as I could, he always sought me out and engaged me for a waltz. The waltz, as I have said, is the one dance I dislike, and the count’s waltzing was of the most superior kind–that is, it consisted very largely of reversing at top speed, which rendered me so giddy that I was always afraid I would fall down. Reversing had been considered by Miss Hickey’s dancing-class as not quite nice, so I had not had sufficient practice in it.

The count would then say that he would like the pleasure of a little conversation with my mother. This was, I suppose, his way of showing that his attentions were honourable. Of course, I had to take him to my mother, who was sitting against the wall, enduring the penance of the evening–for to her it certainly was a penance. The count sat down beside her and entertained her very solemnly for, I should think, at least twenty minutes. Afterwards, when we got home, my mother said to me crossly. ‘What on earth induced you to bring over that little Austrian to talk to me? I couldn’t get rid of him.’ I assured her that I couldn’t help it, that he had insisted. ‘Oh well, you must try and do better, Agatha,’ said my mother. ‘I can’t have young men being brought up to talk to me. They only do it to be polite, and to make a good impression.’ I said he was a dreadful man. ‘He is nice-looking, well-bred, and a good dancer,’ said my mother, ‘but I must say that I found him a complete bore.’

Most of my friends were young subalterns, and our friendships were absorbing but non-serious. I watched them playing polo, goaded them if they had not done well or applauded if they had, and they showed off before me to the best of their ability. I found it rather more difficult to talk to the slightly older men. A great many names are forgotten by this time, but there was a Captain Hibberd who used to dance with me fairly often. It was quite a surprise to me when my mother said nonchalantly on the boat when we were sailing back from Cairo to Venice: ‘You know Captain Hibberd wanted to marry you, I suppose?’

‘What?’ I said, startled. ‘He never proposed to me or said anything.’ ‘No, he said it to me,’ answered mother.

‘To you?’ I said in astonishment.

‘Yes. He said he was very much in love with you, and did I think you were too young? Perhaps he ought not to speak of it to you, he said.’ ‘And what did you say?’ I demanded.

‘I told him I was quite sure you were not in love with him, and that it was no good his going on with the idea,’ she said.

‘Oh mother!’ I exclaimed indignantly. ‘You didn’t!’

Mother looked at me in great surprise. ‘Do you mean to say you did like him?’ she demanded. ‘Would you have considered marrying him?’

‘No, of course not,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to marry him at all, and I’m not in love with him, but I really do think, mother, that you might let me have my own proposals.’

Mother looked rather startled; then she admitted handsomely that she had been wrong. ‘It’s quite a long time, you see, since I was a girl myself,’ she said. ‘But I do see your point of view. Yes, one does like to have one’s own proposals.’

I was annoyed about it for some time. I wanted to know what it felt like to be proposed to. Captain Hibberd was good-looking, not boring, danced well, was well off–it was a pity that I could not consider marrying him. I suppose, as is so often the case, that if you are not attracted to a young man, but he is attracted to you, he is at once put out of court by the fact that men, when they are in love, invariably manage to look like a somewhat sick sheep. If a girl is attracted to such a man she feels flattered by this appearance, and does not hold it against him; if she has no interest she dismisses him from her mind. This is one of the great injustices of life. Women, when they fall in love, look ten times as good-looking as normally: their eyes sparkle, their cheeks are bright, their hair takes a special glow; their conversation becomes much wittier and more brilliant. Other men, who have never noticed them before, then start to take a second look.

That was my first, highly unsatisfactory proposal of marriage. My second came from a young man six foot five high. I had liked him very much, and we had been good friends. He did not think of approaching me through my mother, I am glad to say. He had more sense than that. He managed to get home on the same boat as I did, sailing from Alexandria to Venice. I felt sorry that I was not fonder of him. We continued to write letters to one another for a short time; but then he was posted to India, I think. If I had met him when I was a little older I might perhaps have cared for him.

While I am on the subject of proposals, I wonder if men were specially given to proposing in my young days. I cannot help feeling that some of the proposals I and my friends had were entirely unrealistic. I have a suspicion that if I had accepted the offers they would have been dismayed. I once tackled a young naval lieutenant on this point. We had been walking home from a party in Torquay when he suddenly blurted out his proposal of marriage. I thanked him and said no, and added, ‘And I don’t believe you really want to, either.’

‘Oh I do, I do.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ I said. ‘We have only known each other about ten days, and I don’t see why you want to get married so young in any case. You know it would be very bad for your career.’

‘Yes, well, of course, that’s true in a way.’

‘So it’s really an awfully silly thing to go and propose to a girl like that. You must admit that yourself. What made you do it?’

‘It just came over me,’ said the young man. ‘I looked at you and it just came over me.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t think you had better do it again to anyone. You must be more careful.’

We parted on kindly prosaic terms.


II

In describing my life I am struck by the way it sounds as though I and everybody else were extremely rich. Nowadays you certainly would have to be rich to do the same things, but in point of fact nearly all my friends came from homes of moderate income. Most of their parents did not have a carriage or horses, they certainly had not yet acquired the new automobile or motorcar. For that you did have to be rich.

Girls had usually not more than three evening dresses, and they had to last you for some years. Your hats you painted with a shilling bottle of hat paint every season. We walked to parties, tennis parties and garden parties, though for evening dances in the country we would of course hire a cab. In Torquay there were not many private dances except at Christmas or Easter. People tended to invite guests to stay and make up a party to go to the Regatta Ball in August, and usually some other local dance in one of the bigger houses. I went to a few dances in London during June and July–not many because we did not know many people in London. But one would go occasionally to subscription dances, as they were called, making up a party of six. None of this called for much expenditure.

Then there were the country house parties. I went, nervously the first time, to some friends in Warwickshire. They were great hunting people. Constance Ralston Patrick, the wife, did not hunt herself: she drove a pony carriage to all the meets and I drove with her. My mother had forbidden me strictly to accept a mount or ride. ‘You really don’t know very much about riding,’ she pointed out. ‘It would be fatal if you went and injured somebody’s valuable horse.’ However, nobody offered me a mount–perhaps it was as well.

My riding and hunting had been confined to Devonshire, which meant scrabbling over high banks rather like Irish hunting, in my case mounted on a horse from a livery stable which was used to fairly unskilful riders on its back. The horse certainly knew more than I did, and I was quite content to leave it to Crowdy, my usual mount, a rather dispirited strawberry roan, who managed to get himself successfully over the banks of Devon. Naturally, I rode sidesaddle–hardly any woman rode astride at that time. You feel wonderfully safe on a side-saddle, your legs clasped round pommels. The first time I ever tried to ride astride I felt more unsafe than I could have believed possible.

The Ralston Patricks were very kind to me. They called me ‘The Pinkling’ for some reason–I suppose because I so often had pink evening dresses. Robin used to tease The Pinkling a lot, and Constance used to give me matronly advice with a slight twinkle in her eye. They had a delightful small daughter, about three or four years old when I first went there, and I used to spend a good deal of time playing with her. Constance was a born match-maker, and I realise now that she produced during the course of my visits several nice and eligible men. I sometimes got a little unofficial riding too. I remember one day I had had a gallop round the fields with a couple of Robin’s friends. Since this had happened at a moment’s notice, and I had not even got into a riding-habit but was in an ordinary print frock, my hair was not up to the strain. I still wore, as all girls did, the postiche attachment. Riding back down the village street, my hair collapsed completely, and curls dropped off at intervals all the way. I had to go back on foot to pick them up. Unexpectedly this produced a rather pleasing reaction in my favour. Robin told me afterwards that one of the leading lights of the Warwickshire Hunt had said to him approvingly, ‘Nice girl you’ve got staying with you. I like the way she behaved when all that false hair fell off; didn’t mind a bit. Went back and picked it all up and roared with laughter. Good sport, she was!’ The things that made a good impression on people are really very odd.

Another of the delights of staying with the Ralston Patricks was that they had a motor car. I cannot tell you the excitement that this produced in 1909. It was Robin’s pet delight and treasure, and the fact that it was temperamental and broke down constantly made his passion for it all the greater. I remember one day we made an excursion to Banbury. Starting out was rather like equipping an expedition to the North Pole. We took large furry rugs, extra scarves to wrap round the head, baskets of provisions, and so on. Constance’s brother Bill, Robin and I made the expedition. We said a tender farewell to Constance; she kissed us all, urged us to be careful, and said she would have plenty of hot soup and home comforts waiting for us if we returned. Banbury, I may say, was about twenty-five miles from where they lived, but it was treated as though it was Land’s End.

We proceeded seven miles quite happily, cautiously at about twenty-five miles an hour, but free from trouble. However, that was only the beginning. We did eventually get to Banbury, after changing a wheel and trying to find a garage somewhere, but garages were few and far between in those days. At last we got home, about seven o’clock in the evening, exhausted, frozen to the marrow, and frantically hungry, having finished all the provisions long before. I still think of it as one of the most adventurous days of my life! I had spent a great deal of it sitting on a bank by the roadside, in an icy wind, urging on Robin and Bill as, with the manual of instruction open beside them, they struggled with tyres, spare wheel, jacks, and various other pieces of mechanism of which they had had, up till then, no personal knowledge.

One day my mother and I went down to Sussex and lunched with the Barttelots. Lady Barttelot’s brother, Mr Ankatell, was also lunching, and he had an enormous and powerful automobile of the kind which in my memory seems to be about 100 feet long and hung with enormous tubes all over the outside. He was a keen motorist, and offered to drive us back to London. ‘No need to go by train–beastly things, trains. I’ll drive you back.’ I was in the seventh heaven. Lady Barttelot lent me one of the new motoring caps–a sort of flat thing halfway between a yachting cap and that worn by a German Officer of the Imperial staff,–which was tied down with motoring veils. We got into the monster, extra rugs were piled round us, and off we went like the wind. All cars were open at that time. To enjoy them one had to be pretty hardy. But then, of course, one was hardy in those days–practising the piano in rooms with no fires in the middle of winter inured you against icy winds.

Mr Ankatell did not contain himself to the twenty miles an hour that was the usual ‘safe’ speed–I believe we went forty or fifty m.p.h. through the roads of Sussex. At one moment he started up in the driving seat exclaiming: ‘Look back! Look back! Look back behind that hedge! Do you see that fellow hiding there? Ah, the wretch! The villain! It’s a police trap. Yes, the villains, that’s what they do: hide behind a hedge and then come out and measure the time.’ From fifty we dropped to a crawl of ten miles an hour. Enormous chuckles from Mr Ankatell. ‘That dished him!’

I found Mr Ankatell a somewhat alarming man, but I loved his automobile. It was bright red–a frightening, exciting monster.

Later I went to stay with the Barttelots for Goodwood Races. I think that was the only country house visit that I did not enjoy. It was entirely a racing crowd staying there, and racing language and terms were incomprehensible to me. To me racing meant standing about for hours wearing an unmanageable flowery hat, pulling on six hat-pins with every gust of wind, wearing tight patent-leather shoes with high heels, in which my feet and ankles swelled horribly in the heat of the day. At intervals I had to pretend enormous enthusiasm as everyone shouted ‘They’re off!’ and stood on tiptoe to look at quadrupeds already out of sight.

One of the men asked me kindly if he should put something on for me. I looked terrified. Mr Ankatell’s sister, who was acting as hostess, at once ticked him off. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said, ‘the girl is not to bet.’ Then she said kindly to me, ‘I tell you what. You shall have five shillings on whatever I back. Pay no attention to these others.’ When I discovered that they were betting £20 or £25 each time my hair practically stood on end! But hostesses were always kind to girls in money matters. They knew that few girls had any money to throw about. Even the rich ones, or the ones who came from rich homes, had only moderate dress allowances–£50 or £100 a year. So hostesses looked after the girls carefully. They were sometimes encouraged to play bridge, but if so someone always ‘carried them’, and was responsible for their debts if they lost. This kept them from feeling out of it, and at the same time ensured that they didn’t lose sums of money which they could not afford to lose.

My first acquaintance with racing did not enthral me. When I got home to mother I said that I hoped I would never hear the words ‘They’re off!’ again. When a year had passed, however, I had become quite a keen racing fan, and knew something about the runners. I stayed later with Constance Ralston Patrick’s family in Scotland, where her father kept a small racing stable, and there I was initiated more fully into the sport and was taken to several small race meetings, which I soon found to be fun.

Goodwood, of course, had been more like a garden party–a garden party going on for far too long. Moreover there was a lot of ragging going on; a kind of ragging I had not been used to. People broke up each other’s rooms, threw things out of the windows, and shouted with laughter. There were no other girls there; they were mostly young married women in the racing set. One old Colonel of about sixty came barging into my room and crying, ‘Now then, let’s have a bit of fun with Baby!’ took out one of my evening dresses from the cupboard–it was rather a babyish one, pink with ribbons–and threw it out of the window saying, ‘Catch, catch, here is a trophy from the youngest member of the party!’ I was terribly upset. Evening dresses were great items in my life; carefully tended and preserved, cleaned, mended–and here it was being thrown about like a football. Mr Ankatell’s sister, and one of the other women, came to the rescue, and told him that he was not to tease the poor child. I was really thankful to leave this party. Still, it no doubt did me good.

Amongst other House Parties I remember an enormous one at a country house rented by Mr and Mrs Park-Lyle–Mr Park-Lyle used to be referred to as ‘The Sugar King’. We had met Mrs Park-Lyle out in Cairo. She was, I suppose, fifty or sixty at the time, but from a short distance she looked like a handsome young woman of twenty-five. I had never seen much make-up in private life before. Mrs Park-Lyle certainly put up a good show with her dark, beautifully-arranged hair, exquisitely enamelled face (almost comparable with that of Queen Alexandra), and the pink and pale blue pastel shades which she wore–her whole appearance a triumph of art over nature. She was a woman of great kindliness, who enjoyed having lots of young people in her house.

I was rather attracted to one of the young men there–later killed in the 1914-18 war. Though he took only moderate notice of me, I had hopes of becoming better acquainted. In this I was foiled, however, by another soldier, a gunner, who seemed continually to be at my elbow, insisting on being my partner at tennis and croquet, and all the rest of it. Day by day my mounting exasperation grew. I was sometimes extremely rude to him; he didn’t seem to notice. He kept asking me if I had read this book or that, offering to send them to me. Would I be in London? Would I care to go and see some polo? My negative replies had no effect upon him. When the day came for my departure I had to catch a fairly early train because I had to go to London first and then take another train on to Devon. Mrs Park-Lyle said to me after breakfast ‘Mr S.’–I can’t remember his name now–‘is going to drive you to the station.’

Fortunately that was not very far. I would have much preferred to have gone in one of the Park-Lyle cars–naturally the Park-Lyles had a fleet of cars–but I presume Mr S. had suggested driving me to our hostess, who had probably thought I would like it. How little she knew! However, we arrived at the station, the train came in, an express to London, and Mr. S. ensconced me in the corner seat of an empty second-class carriage.

I said goodbye to him, in friendly tones, relieved to be seeing the last of him. Then just as the train started he suddenly caught at the handle, opened the door, and leapt in, closing it behind him. ‘I’m coming to London, too,’ he said. I stared at him with my mouth open.

‘You haven’t got any luggage with you.’

‘I know, I know–it doesn’t matter.’ He sat down opposite me, leant forward, his hands on his knees, and gazed at me with a kind of ferocious glare. ‘I meant to put it off till I met you again in London. I can’t wait. I have to tell you now. I am madly in love with you. You must marry me. From the first moment I saw you, coming down to dinner, I knew that you were the one woman in the world for me.’

It was some time before I could interrupt the flow of words, and say with icy coldness: ‘It is very kind of you, Mr S., I am sure, and I deeply appreciate it, but I am afraid the answer is no.’

He protested for about five minutes, finally urging that we should at least leave it, so that we could be friends and meet again. I said that I thought it was much better that we shouldn’t meet again, and that I would not change my mind. I said it with such finality that he was forced to accept it. He leant back in his seat and gave himself up to gloom. Can you imagine a worse time to propose to a girl? There we were, shut up in an empty carriage–no corridors then–going to London, two hours at least, and having arrived at such an impasse in the conversation that there was nothing for us to say. Neither of us had anything to read. I still dislike Mr S. when I remember him, and have no proper feeling of gratitude such as one was always taught should be felt for a good man’s love (Grannie’s maxim). I am sure he was a good man–perhaps that was what made him so dull.

Another country house visit I paid was also a racing one, to stay with some old friends of my godmother’s in Yorkshire, the Matthews. Mrs Matthews was a non-stop talker, and rather alarming. The invitation was to a party for the St. Leger. By the time I went there I had got more used to racing, and in fact was beginning to enjoy it. Moreover–a silly thing to remember, but the sort of thing one does–I had a new coat-and-skirt bought for this particular occasion. I was vastly pleased with myself in it. It was of a greenish brown tweed of good quality. It came from a good tailoring house. It was the sort of thing my mother said was worth spending money on, because a good coat and skirt would do you for years. This one certainly did: I wore it for six years at least. The coat was long and had a velvet collar. With it I wore a smart little toque in greenish brown shades of velvet and a bird’s wing. I have no photographs of myself in this get-up; if I had I should no doubt think I looked highly ridiculous now, but my memories of myself are as looking smart, sporting, and well-dressed!

The height of my joy was reached when at the station where I had to change (I must, I think, have been coming from Cheshire, where I had been with my sister). There was a cold wind blowing, and the station-master approached me and asked if I would like to wait in his office. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘your maid would like to bring along your jewel-case or anything valuable.’ I had of course never travelled with a maid in my life, and never should–nor was I the owner of a jewel case–but I was gratified by this treatment, putting it down to the smartness of my velvet toque. I said my maid was not with me this time–I could not avoid saying ‘this time’ in case I should go down in his eyes–but I gratefully accepted his offer, and sat in front of a good fire exchanging pleasant platitudes about the weather. Presently the next train came in and I was seen into it with much ceremony. I am convinced I owed this preferential treatment to my coat-and-skirt and hat. Since I was travelling second class and not first, I could hardly be suspected of great wealth or influence.

The Matthews lived at a house called Thorpe Arch Hall. Mr Matthews was much older than his wife–he must have been about seventy–and he was a dear, with a thatch of white hair, a great love of racing, and, in his time, hunting. Though extremely fond of his wife he was inclined to be greatly flustered by her. Indeed, my principal memory of him was saying irritably, ‘Damme, dear, don’t hustle me. Damme, don’t hustle me, don’t hustle me, Addie!’

Mrs Matthews was a born hustler and fusser. She talked and fussed from morning to night. She was kind, but at times I found her almost unbearable. She hustled poor old Tommy so much that he finally invited a friend of his to live permanently with them–a Colonel Wallenstein–always said by the surrounding County to ‘be Mrs Matthews’ second husband’. I am quite convinced that this was no case of ‘the other man’ or the wife’s lover. Colonel Wallenstein was devoted to Addie Matthews–I think it had been a lifetime passion of his–but she had always kept him where she wanted him, as a convenient, platonic friend with a romantic devotion. Anyway, Addie Matthews lived a very happy life with her two devoted men. They indulged her, flattered her, and always arranged that she should have everything she wanted.

It was while staying there that I met Evelyn Cochran, Charles Cochran’s wife. She was a lovely little creature, just like a Dresden shepherdess, with big blue eyes, and fair hair. She had with her dainty but highly unsuitable shoes for the country, which Addie never let her forget, reproaching her for them every hour of the day: ‘Really, Evelyn dear, why you don’t bring proper shoes with you! Look at those things–pasteboard soles, only fit for London.’ Evelyn looked sadly at her with large blue eyes, Her life was mostly spent in London, and was entirely wrapped up in the theatrical profession. She had, so I learnt from her, climbed out of a window to run away with Charles Cochran, who was heavily disapproved of by her family. She adored him with the kind of adoration that one seldom meets. She wrote to him every single day if she was away from home. I think, too, that, in spite of many other adventures, he always loved her. She suffered a good deal during her life with him, for with such a love as hers jealousy must have been hard to bear. But I think she found it worth it. To have such a passion for one person that lasts all your life is a privilege, no matter what it costs you in endurance.

Colonel Wallenstein was her uncle. She disliked him very much. She also disliked Addie Matthews, but was rather fond of old Tom Matthews. ‘I have never liked my uncle,’ she said, ‘he is a most tiresome man. And as for Addie, she is the most aggravating and silly female I have ever met. She can’t leave anyone alone; she is always scolding them or managing them, or doing something–she can’t keep quiet.’


III

After our stay at Thorpe Arch, Evelyn Cochran asked me to come to see them in London. I did, feeling shy, and was thrilled by hearing so much theatrical gossip. Also, for the first time, I began to appreciate that there might be something in pictures. Charles Cochran had a great love of painting. When I first saw his Degas picture of ballet girls it stirred something in me that I had not known existed. The habit of marching girls to picture galleries willy-nilly, at too young an age, is much to be deprecated. It does not produce the wanted result, unless they are naturally artistic. Moreover, to the untutored eye or the unartistic one, the resemblance of great masters to one another is most depressing. They have a sort of shiny mustard gloom. Art was forced on me, first by being made to learn to draw and paint when I didn’t enjoy it, and then by having a kind of moral obligation to appreciate art laid on me.

An American friend of ours, herself a great devotee of pictures, music, and all kinds of culture, used to come over to London on periodical visits–she was a niece of my godmother, Mrs Sullivan, and also of Pierpont Morgan. May was a dear person with a terrible affliction–she had a most unsightly goitre. In the days when she had been a young girl–she must have been a woman of about forty when I first knew her–there was no remedy for goitre: surgery was supposed to be too dangerous. One day when May arrived in London, she told my mother that she was going to a clinic in Switzerland to be operated on.

She had already made arrangements. A famous surgeon, who made this his speciality, had said to her, ‘Mademoiselle, I would not advise this operation to any man: it must be done with a local anaesthetic only, because during the course of it the subject has to talk the whole time. Men’s nerves are not strong eough to endure this, but women can achieve the fortitude necessary. It is an operation that will take some time–perhaps an hour or more–and during that time you will have to talk. Have you the fortitude?’

May says she looked at him, thought a minute or two, and then said firmly, yes, she had the fortitude.

‘I think you are right to try, May,’ my mother said. ‘It will be a great ordeal for you, but if it succeeds it will make such a difference to your life that it will be worth anything you suffer.’

In due course word came from May in Switzerland: the operation had been successful. She had now left the clinic and was in Italy, in a pension at Fiesole, near Florence. She was to remain there for about a month, and after go back to Switzerland to have a further examination. She asked whether my mother would allow me to go out and stay with her there, and see Florence and its art and architecture. Mother agreed, and arrangements were made for me to go. I was very excited, of course; I must have been about sixteen.

A mother and daughter were found who were travelling out by the train that I was taking. I was delivered over to them, introduced by Cook’s agent at Victoria, and started off. I was lucky in one thing: both mother and daughter felt ill in trains if they were not facing the engine. As I did not care, I had the whole of the other side of the carriage on which to lie down flat. None of us had appreciated the fact of the hour’s difference in time, so when the moment came in the early hours of the morning for me to change at the frontier I was still asleep. I was bundled out by the conductor on to the platform, and mother and daughter shouted farewell. Assembling my belongings, I went to the other train, and immediately journeyed on through the mountains into Italy.

Stengel, May’s maid, met me in Florence, and we went up together in the tram to Fiesole. It was inexpressibly beautiful on that day. All the early almond and peach blossom was out, delicate white and pink on the bare branches of the trees. May was in a villa there, and came out to meet me with a beaming face. I have never seen such a happy looking woman. It was strange to see her without that terrible bag of flesh jutting out under her chin. She had had to have a great deal of courage, as the doctor had warned her. For an hour and twenty minutes, she told me, she had lain there in a chair, her feet held up in a wrench above her head, while the surgeons carved at her throat and she talked to them, answering questions, speaking, grimacing if told. Afterwards the doctor had congratulated her: he told her she was one of the bravest women he had ever known.

‘But I must tell you, Monsieur le docteur,’ she said, ‘just before the end I was feeling I had to scream, have hysterics, cry out and say I could not bear any more.’

‘Ah,’ said Doctor Roux, ‘but you did not do so. You are a brave woman. I tell you.’

So May was unbelievably happy, and she did everything she could to make my stay in Italy agreeable. I went sightseeing into Florence every day. Sometimes Stengel went with me, but more often a young Italian woman engaged by May came up to Fiesole and escorted me into the town. Young girls had to be even more carefully chaperoned in Italy than in France, and indeed I suffered all the discomforts of being pinched in trams by ardent young men–most painful. It was then that I had been subjected to so large a dose of picture galleries and museums. Greedy as ever, what I looked forward to was the delicious meal in a patisserie before catching the tram back to Fiesole.

On several occasions in the later days May came in also, to accompany me on my artistic pilgrimage, and I remember well on the last day, when I was to return to England, she was adamant that I should see a wonderful St. Catherine of Siena, which had just been cleaned. I don’t know if it was in the Uffizi or what gallery now, but May and I galloped through every room looking in vain for it. I couldn’t have cared less about St. Catherine. I was fed up with St. Catherines, revolted by those innumerable St. Sebastians struck all over with arrows–heartily tired of saints one and all, and their emblems and their unpleasant methods of death. I was fed up, too, with self-satisfied Madonnas, particularly with those of Raphael. I really am ashamed, writing now, to think what a savage I was in this respect, but there it is: Old Masters are an acquired taste. As we raced about looking for St. Catherine, my anxiety was mounting. Would we have time to go to the patisserie and have a final delicious meal of chocolate and whipped cream, and sumptuous gateaux? I kept saying: ‘I don’t mind, May, really I don’t mind. Don’t bother any more. I’ve seen so many pictures of St. Catherine.’

‘Ah, but this one, Agatha dear, it’s so wonderful–you’ll realise when you see it how sad it would be if you’d missed it.’

I knew I shouldn’t realise, but I was ashamed to tell May so! However, fate was on my side–it transpired that this particular picture of St. Catherine would be absent from the gallery for some weeks longer. There was just time to stuff me with chocolate and cakes before catching our train–May expatiating at length upon all the glorious pictures, and I agreeing with her fervently as I pushed in mouthfuls of cream and coffee icing. I ought to have looked like a pig by now, with bulging flesh and tiny eyes; instead of which I had a most ethereal appearance, fragile and thin, with large dreamy eyes. Seeing me, you would have prophesied an early death in a state of spiritual ecstasy, like children in Victorian story-books. At any rate I did have the grace to feel ashamed at not appreciating May’s artistic education. I had enjoyed Fiesole–but mostly the almond blossom–and I had got a lot of fun out of Doodoo, a tiny Pomeranian dog which accompanied May and Stengel everywhere. Doodoo was small and very clever. May often brought him to visit England. On those occasions he got inside a large muff of hers and always remained unsuspected by Customs officers.

May came to London on her way back to New York, and displayed her elegant new neck. Mother and Grannie both wept and kissed her repeatedly, and May wept too, because it was like an impossible dream come true. Only after she had left for New York did mother say to Grannie, ‘How sad, though, how terribly sad, to think that she could have had this operation fifteen years ago. She must have been very badly advised by consultants in New York.’

‘And now, I suppose, it’s too late,’ said my grandmother thoughtfully. ‘She will never marry now.’

But there, I am glad to say, Grannie was wrong.

I think May had been terribly sad that marriage was not to be for her, and I don’t think for one moment she expected it so late in life. But some years later she came over to England bringing with her a clergyman who was the rector at one of the most important Episcopalian churches in New York, a man of great sincerity and personality. He had been told that he had only a year to live, but May, who had always been one of his most zealous parishioners, had insisted on getting together a subscription from the congregation and bringing him to London to consult doctors there. She said to Grannie: ‘You know, I am convinced that he will recover. He’s needed, badly needed. He does wonderful work in New York. He’s converted gamblers and gangsters, he’s gone into the most terrible brothels and places, he’s had no fear of public opinion or of being beaten up, and a lot of extraordinary characters have been converted by him.’ May brought him out to luncheon at Ealing. Afterwards, at her next visit, when she came to say goodbye, Grannie said to her, ‘May, that man’s in love with you.’

‘Why, Aunty,’ exclaimed May, ‘how can you say such a terrible thing? He never thinks of marriage. He is a convinced celibate.’

‘He may have been once,’ said Grannie, ‘but I don’t think he is now. And what’s all this about celibacy? He’s not a Roman. He’s got his eye on you, May.’

May looked highly shocked.

However, a year later, she wrote and told us that Andrew was restored to health and that they were getting married. It was a very happy marriage. No one could have been kinder, gentler and more understanding than Andrew was to May. ‘She does so need to be happy,’ he said once to Grannie. ‘She has been shut off from happiness for most of her life, and she has become so afraid of it that it has turned her almost into a Puritan.’ Andrew was always to be something of an invalid, but it did not stop his work. Dear May, I am so glad that happiness came to her as it did.


IV

In the year 1911 something that I considered fantastic happened. I went up in an aeroplane. Aeroplanes, of course, were one of the chief subjects of surmise, disbelief, argument, and all the rest of it. When I had been at school in Paris, we were taken one day to see Santos Dumont endeavour to get up off the ground in the Bois de Boulogne. As far as I remember, the aeroplane got up, flew a few yards, then crashed. All the same, we were impressed. Then there were the Wright brothers. We read about them eagerly.

When taxis came into use in London, a system was introduced of whistling for cabs. You stood on your front doorstep: one whistle would produce a ‘growler’ (four-wheeled cab); two whistles a hansom, that gondola of the streets; three whistles (if you were very lucky) produced that new vehicle a taxi. A picture in Punch one week showed a small urchin saying to a butler standing on a stately doorstep, whistle in hand: ‘Try whistling four times, Guv’nor, you might get an aeroplane!’

Now suddenly it seemed that that picture was not so funny or impossible as it had been. It might soon be true.

On the occasion I am talking about, mother and I had been staying somewhere in the country, and we went one day to see a flying exhibition–a commercial venture. We saw planes zoom up into the air, circle round, and vol-plane down to earth again. Then a notice was put up: ‘£5 a flight.’ I looked at mother. My eyes grew large and pleading. ‘Could I? Oh, mother, couldn’t I? It would be so wonderful!’ I think it was my mother who was wonderful. To stand and watch her beloved child going up in the air in a plane! At that time they were crashing every day. She said, ‘If you really want to go, Agatha, you shall.’

£5 was a lot of money in our life, but it was well spent. We went to the barricade. The pilot looked at me, and said, ‘Is that hat on tight? All right, get in.’ The flight only lasted five minutes. Up we went in the air, circled round several times–oh, it was wonderful! Then that switch-back down, and the vol-plane to earth again. Five minutes of ecstasy–and half a crown extra for a photograph: a faded old photograph that I still have showing a dot in the sky that is me in an aeroplane on May 10, 1911.



The friends of one’s life are divided into two categories. First there are those that spring out of one’s environment; with whom you have in common the things you do. They are like the old-fashioned ribbon-dance. They wind and pass in and out of your life, and you pass in and out of theirs. Some you remember, some you forget. Then there are those whom I would describe as one’s elected friends–not many in number–whom a real interest on either side brings together, and who usually remain, if circumstances permit, all through your life. I should say I have had about seven or eight such friends, mostly men. My women friends have usually been environmental only.

I don’t know exactly what brings about a friendship between man and woman–men do not by nature ever want a woman as a friend. It comes about by accident–often because the man is already sensually attracted by some other woman and quite wants to talk about her. Women do often crave after friendship with men–and are willing to come to it by taking an interest in someone else’s love affair. Then there comes about a very stable and enduring relationship–you become interested in each other as people. There is a flavour of sex, of course, the touch of salt as a condiment.

According to an elderly doctor friend of mine, a man looks at every woman he meets and wonders what she would be like to sleep with–possibly proceeding to whether she’d be likely to sleep with him if he wanted it. ‘Direct and coarse–that’s a man,’ he put it. They don’t consider a woman as a possible wife.

Women, I think, quite simply try on, as it were, every man they meet as a possible husband. I don’t believe any woman has ever looked across a room and fallen in love at first sight with a man; lots of men have with a woman.

We used to have a family game, invented by my sister and a friend of hers–it was called ‘Agatha’s Husbands’. The idea was that they picked out two or at most three of the most repellent-looking strangers in a room, and it was then put to me that I had to choose one of them as a husband, on pain of death or slow torture by the Chinese.

‘Now then, Agatha, which will you have–the fat young one with pimples, and the scurfy head, or that black one like a gorilla with the bulging eyes?’

‘Oh, I can’t–they’re so awful.’

‘You must–it’s got to be one of them. Or else red hot needles and water torture.’

‘Oh dear, then the gorilla.’

In the end we got into a habit of labelling any physically hideous individual as ‘an Agatha’s husband’: ‘Oh! Look! That’s a really ugly man–a real Agatha’s husband.’

My one important woman friend was Eileen Morris. She was a friend of our family. I had in a way known her all my life, but did not get to know her properly until I was about nineteen and had ‘caught up’ with her, since she was some years older than I was. She lived with five maiden aunts in a large house overlooking the sea, and her brother was a schoolmaster. She and he were very alike, and she had a mind with the clarity of a man’s rather than a woman’s. Her father was a nice, quiet, dull man–his wife had been, my mother told me, one of the gayest and most beautiful women she had ever seen. Eileen was rather plain, but she had a remarkable mind. It ranged over so many subjects. She was the first person I had come across with whom I could discuss ideas. She was one of the most impersonal people I have ever known; one never heard anything about her own feelings. I knew her for many years, yet I often wonder in what her private life consisted. We never confided anything personal in each other, but whenever we met we had something to discuss, and plenty to talk about. She was quite a good poet, and knowledgeable about music. I remember that I had a song which I liked, because I enjoyed the music of it so much, but unfortunately it had remarkably silly words. When I commented on this to Eileen, she said she would like to try to write some different words for it. This she did, improving the song enormously from my point of view.

I, too, wrote poetry–perhaps everyone did at my age. Some of my earlier examples are unbelievably awful. I remember one poem I wrote when I was eleven:

I knew a little cowslip and a pretty flower too,

Who wished she was a bluebell and had a robe of blue.

You can guess how it went on. She got a robe of blue, became a bluebell, and didn’t like it. Could anything be more suggestive of a complete lack of literary talent? By the age of seventeen or eighteen, however, I was doing better. I wrote a series of poems on the Harlequin legend: Harlequin’s song, Columbine’s, Pierrot, Pierrette, etc. I sent one or two poems to The Poetry Review. I was very pleased when I got a guinea prize. After that, I won several prizes and also had poems printed there. I felt very proud of myself when I was successful. I wrote quite a lot of poems from time to time. A sudden excitement would come over me and I would rush off to write down what I felt gurgling round in my mind. I had no lofty ambitions. An occasional prize in The Poetry Review was all I asked. One poem of mine that I re-read lately I think is not bad; at least it has in it something of what I wanted to express. I reproduce it here for that reason:

DOWN IN THE WOOD

Bare brown branches against a blue sky

(And Silence within the wood),

Leaves that, listless, lie under your feet,

Bold brown boles that are biding their time

(And Silence within the wood).

Spring has been fair in the fashion of youth,

Summer with languorous largesse of love,

Autumn with passion that passes to pain,

Leaf, flower, and flame–they have fallen and failed



And Beauty–bare Beauty is left in the wood!



Bare brown branches against a mad moon

(And Something that stirs in the wood),

Leaves that rustle and rise from the dead,

Branches that beckon and leer in the light

(And Something that walks in the wood).

Skirling and whirling, the leaves are alive!

Driven by Death in a devilish dance!

Shrieking and swaying of terrified trees!

A wind that goes sobbing and shivering by…



And Fear–naked Fear passes out of the wood!



I occasionally tried to set one of my poems to music. My composition was not of a high order–a fairly simple ballad I could do not too badly. I also wrote a waltz with a trite tune, and a rather extraordinary title–I don’t know where I got it from–‘One Hour With Thee.’



It was not until several of my partners had remarked that an hour was a pretty hefty time for a waltz to last that I realised the title was somewhat ambiguous. I was proud because one of the principal bands, Joyce’s Band, which played at most of the dances, included it occasionally in its repertoire. However, that waltz, I can see now, is exceedingly bad music. Considering my own feelings about waltzes, I cannot imagine why I tried to write one.

The Tango was another matter. A deputy of Mrs Wordsworth started a dancing evening for adults at Newton Abbot, and I and others used to go over for instruction. There I made what I called ‘my Tango friend’–a young man whose Christian name was Ronald and whose last name I cannot remember. We rarely spoke to each other or took the least interest in each other–our whole mind was engrossed with our feet. We had been partnered together fairly early, had found the same enthusiasm, and danced well together. We became the principal exponents of the art of the Tango. At all dances where we met we reserved the Tango for each other without question.

Another excitement was Lily Elsie’s famous dance in The Merry Widow or The Count of Luxembourg, I can’t remember which, when she and her partner waltzed up a staircase and down again. This I practised with the boy next door. Max Mellor was at Eton at the time, about three years younger than I was. His father was a very ill man with tuberculosis, who had to lie out in the garden in an open-air hut where he slept at night. Max was their only son. He fell deeply in love with me as an older girl, and grown up, and used to parade himself for my benefit, or so his mother told me, wearing a shooting jacket and shooting boots, shooting sparrows with an airgun. He also began to wash (quite a novelty on his part, since his mother had had to worry him for several years about the state of his hands, neck, etc.), bought several pale mauve and lavender ties, and in fact showed every sign of growing up. We got together on the subject of dancing, and I would repair to the Mellors’ house to practise with him on their stairs, which were more suitable than ours, being shallower and wider. I don’t know that we were a great success. We had a lot of extremely painful falls, but persevered. He had a nice tutor, a young man called, I think, Mr Shaw, about whom Marguerite Lucy commented, ‘A nice little nature–it’s a pity his legs are so common.’

I must say that ever since I have been unable to stop myself applying this criterion to any male stranger. Good-looking, perhaps–but are his legs common?


V

One unpleasant winter’s day, I was lying in bed recovering from influenza. I was bored. I had read lots of books, had attempted to do The Demon thirteen times, brought out Miss Milligan successfully, and was now reduced to dealing myself bridge hands. My mother looked in.

‘Why don’t you write a story?’ she suggested.

‘Write a story?’ I said, rather startled.

‘Yes,’ said mother. ‘Like Madge.’

‘Oh, I don’t think I could.’

‘Why not?’ she asked.

There didn’t seem any reason why not, except that….

‘You don’t know that you can’t,’ mother pointed out, ‘because you’ve never tried.’

That was fair enough. She disappeared with her usual suddenness and reappeared five minutes later with an exercise book in her hand. ‘There are only some laundry entries at one end,’ she said. ‘The rest of it is quite all right. You can begin your story now.’

When my mother suggested doing anything one practically always did it. I sat up in bed and began thinking about writing a story. At any rate it was better than doing Miss Milligan again.

I can’t remember now how long it took me–not long, I think, in fact, I believe it was finished by the evening of the following day. I began hesitantly on various different themes, then abandoned them, and finally found myself thoroughly interested and going along at a great rate. It was exhausting, and did not assist my convalescence, but it was exciting too.

‘I’ll rout out Madge’s old typewriter,’ said mother, ‘then you can type it.

This first story of mine was called The House of Beauty. It is no masterpiece but I think on the whole that it is good; the first thing I ever wrote that showed any sign of promise. Amateurishly written, of course, and showing the influence of all that I had read the week before. This is something you can hardly avoid when you first begin to write. Just then I had obviously been reading D. H. Lawrence. I remember that The Plumed Serpent, Sons and Lovers, The White Peacock etc. were great favourites of mine about then. I had also read some books by someone called Mrs Everard Cotes, whose style I much admired. This first story was rather precious, and written so that it was difficult to know exactly what the author meant, but though the style was derivative the story itself shows at least imagination.

After that I wrote other stories–The Call of Wings (not bad), The Lonely God (result of reading The City of Beautiful Nonsense: regrettably sentimental), a short dialogue between a deaf lady and a nervous man at a party, and a grisly story about a seance (which I re-wrote many years later). I typed all these stories on Madge’s machine–an Empire typewriter, I remember–and hopefully sent them off to various magazines, choosing different pseudonyms from time to time as the fancy took me.

Madge had called herself Mostyn Miller; I called myself Mack Miller, then changed to Nathaniel Miller (my grandfather’s name). I had not much hope of success, and I did not get it. The stories all returned promptly with the usual slip: ‘The Editor regrets…’ Then I would parcel them up again and send them off to some other magazine.

I also decided that I would try my hand at a novel. I embarked light-heartedly. It was to be set in Cairo. I thought of two separate plots, and at first could not choose between them. In the end, I hesitatingly made a decision and started on one. It had been suggested to my mind by three people we used to look at in the dining-room of the hotel in Cairo. There was an attractive girl–hardly a girl in my eyes, because she must have been close on thirty–and every evening after the dance she would come and have supper there with two men. One was a heavy-set, broad man, with dark hair–a Captain in the Sixtieth Rifles–the other a tall, fair young man in the Coldstream Guards, possibly a year or two younger than she was. They sat one on either side of her; she kept them in play. We learnt their names but we never discovered much more about them, though somebody did make the remark once: ‘She will have to make up her mind between them, some time.’ That was enough for my imagination: If I had known any more about them I don’t think I should have wanted to write about them. As it was, I was able to make up an excellent story, probably far different from their characters, their actions, or anything else. Having gone a certain distance with it I became dissatisfied, and turned to my other plot. This was more light-hearted, dealing with amusing characters. I made, however, the fatal mistake of encumbering myself with a deaf heroine–really I can’t think why: anyone can deal in an interesting manner with a blind heroine, but a deaf heroine is not so easy, because, as I soon found out, once you have described what she is thinking, and what people are thinking and saying of her, she is left with no possibility of conversation, and the whole business comes to a stop. Poor Melancy became ever more insipid and boring.

I went back to my first attempt–and I realised that it was not going to be nearly long enough for a novel. Finally, I decided to incorporate the two. Since the setting was the same, why not have two plots in one? Proceeding on these lines I finally brought my novel to the requisite length. Heavily encumbered by too much plot, I dashed madly from one set of characters to the other, occasionally forcing them to mix with each other in a way which they did not seem to wish to do. I called it–I can’t think why–Snow Upon the Desert.

My mother then suggested, rather hesitantly, that I might ask Eden Philpotts if he could give me help or advice. Eden Philpotts was then at the height of his fame. His novels of Dartmoor were celebrated. As it happened, he was a neighbour of ours, and a personal friend of the family. I was shy about it, but in the end agreed. Eden Philpotts was an odd-looking man, with a face more like a faun’s than an ordinary human being’s: an interesting face, with its long eyes turned up at the corners. He suffered terribly from gout, and often when we went to see him was sitting with his leg bound up with masses of bandages on a stool. He hated social functions and hardly ever went out; in fact he disliked seeing people. His wife, on the other hand, was extremely sociable–a handsome and charming woman, who had many friends. Eden Philpotts had been very fond of my father, and was also fond of my mother, who seldom bothered him with social invitations but used to admire his garden and his many rare plants and shrubs. He said that of course he would read Agatha’s literary attempt.

I can hardly express the gratitude I feel to him. He could so easily have uttered a few careless words of well-justified criticism, and possibly discouraged me for life. As it was, he set out to help. He realised perfectly how shy I was and how difficult it was for me to speak of things. The letter he wrote contained very good advice.

‘Some of these things that you have written,’ he said, ‘are capital. You have a great feeling for dialogue. You should stick to gay natural dialogue. Try and cut all moralisations out of your novels; you are much too fond of them, and nothing is more boring to read. Try and leave your characters alone, so that they can speak for themselves, instead of always rushing in to tell them what they ought to say, or to explain to the reader what they mean by what they are saying. That is for the reader to judge for himself. You have two plots here, rather than one, but that is a beginner’s fault; you soon won’t want to waste plots in such a spendfree way. I am sending you a letter to my own literary agent, Hughes Massie. He will criticise this for you and tell you what chances it has of being accepted. I am afraid it is not easy to get a first novel accepted, so you mustn’t be disappointed. I should like to recommend you a course of reading which I think you will find helpful. Read De Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater–this will increase your vocabulary enormously–he used some very interesting words. Read The Story of my Life by Jefferys, for descriptions and a feeling for nature.’



I forget now what the other books were: a collection of short stories, I remember, one of which was called The Pirrie Pride, and was written round a teapot. There was also a volume of Ruskin, to which I took a violent dislike, and one or two others. Whether they did me good or not, I don’t know. I certainly enjoyed De Quincey and also the short stories.

I then went and had an interview in London with Hughes Massie. The original Hughes Massie was alive at that time, and it was he whom I saw. He was a large, swarthy man, and he terrified me. ‘Ah,’ he said, looking at the cover of the manuscript, ‘Snow Upon the Desert. Mm, a very suggestive title, suggestive of banked fires.’

I looked even more nervous, feeling that was far from descriptive of what I had written. I don’t know quite why I had chosen that title, beyond the fact that I had presumably been reading Omar Khayyam. I think I meant it to be that, like snow upon the desert’s dusty face, all the events that happen in life are in themselves superficial and pass without leaving any memory. Actually I don’t think the book was at all like that when finished, but that had been my idea of what it was going to be.

Hughes Massie kept the manuscript to read, but returned it some months later, saying that he felt it unlikely that he could place it. The best thing for me to do, he said, was to stop thinking about it any more, and to start to write another book.

I have never been an ambitious person by nature, and I resigned myself to making no further struggle. I still wrote a few poems, and enjoyed them, and I think I wrote one or two more short stories. I sent them to magazines, but expected them to come back, and come back they usually did.

I was no longer studying music seriously. I practised the piano a few hours a day, and kept it up as well as I could to my former standard, but I took no more lessons. I still studied singing when we were in London for any length of time. Francis Korbay, the Hungarian composer, gave me singing lessons, and taught me some charming Hungarian songs of his own composition. He was a good teacher and an interesting man. I also studied English ballad singing with another teacher, a woman who lived near that part of the Regent Canal which they call Little Venice and which always fascinates me. I sang quite often at local concerts and, as was the fashion of the time, ‘took my music’ when I was asked out to dinner. There was, of course, no ‘tinned’ music in those days: no broadcasting, no tape-recorders, no stereophonic gramophones. For music you relied on the private performer, who might be good, moderately good, bloody awful. I was quite a good accompanist, and could read by sight, so I often had to play accompaniments for other singers.

I had one wonderful experience when there were performances of Wagner’s Ring in London with Richter conducting. My sister Madge had suddenly become very interested in Wagnerian music. She arranged for a party of four to go to The Ring, and paid for me. I shall always be grateful to her and remember that experience. Van Rooy sang Wotan. Gertrude Kappel sang the principal Wagnerian soprano roles. She was a big, heavy woman with a turned-up nose–no actress, but she had a powerful, golden voice. An American called Saltzman Stevens sang Sieglinde, Isolde, and Elizabeth. Saltzman Stevens I shall always find it hard to forget. She was a most beautiful actress in her motions and gestures, and had long graceful arms that came out of the shapeless white draperies Wagnerian heroines always wore. She made a glorious Isolde. I suppose her voice could not have been equal to that of Gertrude Kappel, but her acting was so superb that it carried one away. Her fury and despair in the first act of Tristan, the lyrical beauty of her voice in the second, and then–most unforgettable, to my mind–that great moment in the third act: that long music of Kurwenal, the anguish and the waiting, with Tristan and Kurwenal together, the looking for the ship on the sea. Finally that great soprano cry that comes from off-stage: ‘Tristan!’

Saltzman Stevens was Isolde. Rushing–yes, rushing one could feel–up the cliff and up on to the stage, running with those white arms outstretched to catch Tristan within their grasp. And then, a sad, almost bird-like stricken cry.

She sang the Liebestod entirely as a woman, not a goddess; sang it kneeling by Tristan’s body, looking down at his face, seeing him with the force of her will and imagination come alive; and finally, bending, bending lower and lower, the last three words of the opera, ‘with a kiss’, came as she bent to touch his lips with hers, and then to fall suddenly across his body.

Being me, every night before I dropped off to sleep I used to turn over and over in my mind the dream that one day I might be singing Isolde on a real stage. It did no harm, I told myself–at any rate to go through it in fantasy. Could I, would it ever be possible for me to sing in opera? The answer of course was no. An American friend of May Sturges’ who was over in London, and connected with the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, very kindly came to hear me sing one day. I sang various arias for her, and she took me through a series of scales, arpeggios and exercises. Then she said to me: ‘The songs you sang told me nothing, but the exercises do. You will make a good concert singer, and should be able to do well and make your name at that. Your voice is not strong enough for opera, and never will be.’

So let us take it from there. My cherished secret fantasy to do something in music was ended. I had no ambition to be a concert singer, which was not an easy thing to do anyway. Musical careers for girls did not meet with encouragement. If there had been any chance of singing in opera I would have fought for it, but that was for the privileged few, who had the right vocal cords. I am sure there can be nothing more soul-destroying in life than to persist in trying to do a thing that you want desperately to do well, and to know you are at the best second-rate. So I put wishful thinking aside. I pointed out to mother that she could now save the expense of music lessons. I could sing as much as I liked, but there was no point in going on studying singing. I had never really believed that my dream could come true–but it is a good thing to have had a dream and to have enjoyed it, so long as you do not clutch too hard.

It must have been about this time that I began reading the novels of May Sinclair, by which I was much impressed–and, indeed, when I read them now I am still much impressed. I think she was one of our finest and most original novelists, and I cannot help feeling that there will be a revival of interest in her some day, and that her works will be republished. A Combined Maze, that classic story of a little clerk and his girl, I still think one of the best novels ever written. I also liked The Divine Fire; and Tasker fevons I think a masterpiece. A short story of hers, The Flaw in the Crystal, impressed me so much, probably because I was addicted to writing psychic stories at the time, that it inspired me to write a story of my own somewhat in the same vein. I called it Vision (It was published with some other stories of mine in a volume much later), and I still like it when I come across it again.

I had formed a habit of writing stories by this time. It took the place, shall we say, of embroidering cushion-covers or pictures taken from Dresden china flower-painting. If anyone thinks this is putting creative writing too low in the scale, I cannot agree. The creative urge can come out in any form: in embroidery, in the cooking of interesting dishes, in painting, drawing and sculpture, in composing music, as well as in writing books and stories. The only difference is that you can be a great deal more grand about some of these things than others. I would agree that the embroidering of Victorian cushion-covers is not equal to participating in the Bayeux tapestry, but the urge is the same in both cases. The ladies of the early Williams’s court were producing a piece of original work requiring thought, inspiration and tireless application; some parts of it no doubt were dull to do, and some parts highly exciting. Though you may say that a square of brocade with two clematis and a butterfly on it is a ridiculous comparison, the artist’s inner satisfaction was probably much the same.

The waltz I composed was nothing to be proud of; one or two of my embroideries, however, were good of their kind, and I was pleased with them. I don’t think I went as far as being pleased with my stories–but then there always has to be a lapse of time after the accomplishment of a piece of creative work before you can in any way evaluate it.

You start into it, inflamed by an idea, full of hope, full indeed of confidence (about the only times in my life when I have been full of confidence). If you are properly modest, you will never write at all, so there had to be one delicious moment when you have thought of something, know just how you are going to write it, rush for a pencil, and start in an exercise book buoyed up with exaltation. You then get into difficulties, don’t see your way out, and finally manage to accomplish more or less what you first meant to accomplish, though losing confidence all the time. Having finished it, you know that it is absolutely rotten. A couple of months later you wonder whether it may not be all right after all.


VI

About then I had two near escapes from getting married. I call them near escapes because, looking back now, I realise with certainty that either of them would have been a disaster.

The first one was what you might call ‘a young girl’s high romance’. I was staying with the Ralston Patricks. Constance and I drove to a cold and windy meet, and a man mounted on a nice chestnut rode up to speak to Constance and was introduced to me. Charles was, I suppose, about thirty-five, a major in the 17th Lancers, and he came every year to Warwickshire to hunt. I met him again that evening when there was a fancy dress dance, to which I went dressed as Elaine. A pretty costume: I still have it (and wonder how I could ever have got into it); it is in the chest in the hall which is full of ‘dressing-up things’. It is quite a favourite–white brocade and a pearl cap. I met Charles several times during my visit, and when I went back home we both expressed polite wishes that we should meet again some time. He mentioned that he might be down in Devonshire later.

Three or four days after getting home I received a parcel. In it was a small silver-gilt box. Inside the lid was written: ‘The Asps’, a date, and ‘To Elaine’ below it. The Asps was where the meet had taken place, and the date was the date I had met him. I also got a letter from him saying that he hoped to come to see us the following week when he would be in Devon.

That was the beginning of a lightning courtship. Boxes of flowers arrived, occasional books, enormous boxes of exotic chocolates. Nothing was said that could not have been properly said to a young girl, but I was thrilled. He paid us two more visits, and on the third asked me to marry him. He had, he said, fallen in love with me the first moment he saw me. If one was arranging proposals in order of merit, this one would easily go to the top of my list. I was fascinated and partly carried off my feet by his technique. He was a man with a good deal of experience of women, and able to produce most of the reactions he wanted. I was ready for the first time to consider that here was my Fate, my Mr Right. And yet–yes, there it was–and yet…. When Charles was there, telling me how wonderful I was, how he loved me, what a perfect Elaine, what an exquisite creature I was, how he would spend his whole life making me happy, and so on, his hands trembling and his voice shaking–oh yes, I was charmed like a bird off a tree. And yet–yet, when he was gone away, when I thought of him in absence, there was nothing there. I did not yearn to see him again. I just felt he was–very nice. The alteration between the two moods puzzled me. How can you tell if you are in love with a person? If in absence they mean nothing to you, and in presence they sweep you off your feet, what is your real reaction?

My poor darling mother must have suffered a great deal at that time. She had, she told me later, prayed a great deal that shortly a husband would be provided for me; good, kind, and well-provided with this world’s goods. Charles had appeared much like an answer to prayer, but somehow she wasn’t satisfied. She always knew what people were thinking and feeling, and she must have known quite well that I didn’t know myself what I did feel. While she held her usual maternal view that no man in this world could be good enough for her Agatha, she had a feeling that, even allowing for that, this was not the right man. She wrote to the Ralston Patricks to find out as much as she could about him. She was handicapped by my father not being alive, and by my having no brother who could make what were in those days the usual inquiries as to a man’s record with women, his exact financial position, his family, and so on and so on–very old-fashioned it seems nowadays, but I daresay it averted a good deal of misery.

Charles came up to standard. He had had a good many affairs with women, but that my mother did not really mind: it was an accepted principle that men sowed their wild oats before marriage. He was about fifteen years older than I was, but her own husband had been ten years older than she was, and she believed in that kind of gap in years. She told Charles that Agatha was still very young and that she must not come to any rash decisions. She suggested that we should see each other occasionally during the next month or two, without my being pressed for a decision.

This did not work well because Charles and I had absolutely nothing to talk about except the fact that he was in love with me. Since he was holding himself back on that subject, there was a great deal of embarrassed silence between us. Then he would go away, and I would sit and wonder. What did I want to do? Did I want to marry him? Then I would get a letter from him. He wrote, there was no doubt about it, the most glorious love letters, the kind of love letters that any woman would long to get. I pored over them, re-read them, kept them, decided that this was love at last. Then Charles would come back, and I would be excited, carried off my feet–and yet at the same time had a cold feeling at the back of my mind that it was all wrong. In the end my mother suggested that we should not see each other for six months, and that then I should decide definitely. That was adhered to, and during that period there were no letters–which was probably just as well, because I should have fallen for those letters in the end.

When the six months were up I received a telegram. ‘Cannot stand this indecision any longer. Will you marry me, yes or no.’ I was in bed with a slight feverish attack at the time. My mother brought me the telegram. I looked at it and at the reply-paid form. I took a pencil and wrote the word No. Immediately I felt an enormous relief: I had decided something. I should not have to go through any more of this uncomfortable up-and-down feeling.

‘Are you sure?’ asked mother.

‘Yes,’ I said. I turned over on my pillow and went immediately to sleep. So that was the end of that.

Life was rather gloomy during the next four or five months. For the first time everything I did bored me, and I began to feel that I had made a great mistake. Then Wilfred Pirie came back into my life.

I have mentioned Martin and Lilian Pirie, my father’s great friends, whom we met again abroad, in Dinard. We had continued to meet, though I had not again seen the boys. Harold had been at Eton and Wilfred had been a midshipman in the Navy. Now Wilfred was a fully-fledged sub-lieutenant R.N. He was in a submarine, I think, at that time, and often came in with that portion of the Fleet which visited Torquay. He became an immense friend at once, one of the people in my life I have been fondest of. Within a couple of months we were unofficially engaged.

Wilfred was such a relief after Charles. With him there was no excitement, no doubt, no misery. Here was just a dear friend, somebody I knew well. We read books, discussed them, we had always something to talk about. I was completely at home with him. The fact that I was treating him and considering him exactly like a brother, did not occur to me. My mother was delighted, and Mrs Pirie too. Martin Pirie had died some years ago. It seemed a perfect marriage from everyone’s point of view. Wilfred had a good career ahead of him in the Navy; our fathers had been the closest friends, and our mothers liked each other; mother liked Wilfred, Mrs Pirie liked me. I still feel I was a monster of ingratitude not to have married him.

My life was now settled for me. In a year or two, when it was suitable (young subalterns and young sub-lieutenants were not encouraged to marry too soon) we would be married. I liked the idea of marrying a sailor. I should live in lodgings at Southsea, Plymouth, or somewhere like that, and when Wilfred was away on foreign stations I could come home to Ashfield and spend my time with mother. Really, nothing in the world could have been so right.

I suppose there is a horrible kink in one’s disposition that tends always to kick against anything that is too right or too perfect. I wouldn’t admit it for a long time, but the prospect of marrying Wilfred induced in me a depressing feeling of boredom. I liked him, I would have been happy living in the same house with him, but somehow there wasn’t any excitement about it; no excitement at all!

One of the first things that happens when you are attracted to a man and he is to you is that extraordinary illusion that you think exactly alike about everything, that you each say the things the other had been thinking. How wonderful it is that you like the same books, and the same music. The fact that one of you hardly ever goes to a concert or listens to music doesn’t at that moment matter. He always really liked music, but he didn’t know he did! In the same way, the books he likes you have never actually wished to read, but now you feel that really you do want to read them. There it is; one of Nature’s great illusions. We both like dogs and hate cats. How wonderful! We both like cats and hate dogs, also wonderful.

So life went placidly on. Every two or three weeks Wilfred came for the weekend. He had a car and used to drive me around. He had a dog, and we both loved the dog. He became interested in spiritualism, therefore I became interested in spiritualism. So far all was well. But now Wilfred began to produce books that he was eager for me to read and pronounce on. They were very large books–theosophical mostly. The illusion that you enjoyed whatever your man enjoyed didn’t work; naturally it didn’t work–I wasn’t really in love with him. I found the books on theosophy tedious; not only tedious, I thought they were completely false; worse still, I thought a great many of them were nonsense! I also got rather tired of Wilfred’s descriptions of the mediums he knew. There were two girls in Portsmouth, and the things those girls saw you wouldn’t believe. They could hardly ever go into a house without gasping, stretching, clutching their hearts and being upset because there was a terrible spirit standing behind one of the company. ‘The other day,’ said Wilfred, ‘Mary–she’s the elder of the two–she went into a house and up to the bathroom to wash her hands, and do you know she couldn’t walk over the threshold? No, she absolutely couldn’t. There were two figures there–one was holding a razor to the throat of the other. Would you believe it?’

I nearly said, ‘No, I wouldn’t,’ but controlled myself in time. ‘That’s very interesting,’ I said. ‘Had anyone ever held a razor to the throat of somebody there?’

‘They must have,’ said Wilfred. ‘The house had been let to several people before, so an incident of that kind must have occurred. Don’t you think so? Well, you can see it for yourself, can’t you?’

But I didn’t see it for myself. I was always of an agreeable nature however, and so I said cheerfully, of course, it certainly must have been so.

Then one day Wilfred rang up from Portsmouth and said a wonderful chance had come his way. There was a party being assembled to look for treasure trove in South America. Some leave was due to him and he would be able to go off on this expedition. Would I think it terrible of him if he went? It was the sort of exciting chance that might never happen again. The mediums, I gathered, had expressed approval. They had said that undoubtedly he would come back having discovered a city that had not been known since the time of the Incas. Of course, one couldn’t take that as proof or anything, but it was very extraordinary, wasn’t it? Did I think it awful of him, when he could have spent a good part of his leave with me?

I found myself having not the slightest hesitation. I behaved with splendid unselfishness. I said to him I thought it a wonderful opportunity, that of course he must go, and that I hoped with all my heart that he would find the Incas’ treasures. Wilfred said I was wonderful; absolutely wonderful; not a girl in a thousand would behave like that. He rang off, sent me a loving letter, and departed.

But I was not a girl in a thousand; I was just a girl who had found out the truth about herself and was rather ashamed about it. I woke up the day after he had actually sailed with the feeling that an enormous load had slipped off my mind. I was delighted for Wilfred to go treasure-hunting, because I loved him like a brother and I wanted him to do what he wanted to do. I thought the treasure-hunting idea was rather silly, and almost certain to be bogus. That again was because I was not in love with him. If I had been, I would have been able to see it through his eyes. Thirdly, oh joy, oh joy! I would not have to read any more theosophy.

‘What are you looking so cheerful about?’ mother asked suspiciously. ‘Listen, mother,’ I said. ‘I know it’s awful, but I am really cheerful because Wilfred has gone away.’

The poor darling. Her face fell. I have never felt so mean, so ungrateful as I did then. She had been so happy about Wilfred and me coming together. For one misguided moment I almost felt that I must go through with it, just for the sake of making her happy. Fortunately, I was not quite so sunk in sentimentality as that.

I didn’t write and tell Wilfred what I had decided, because I thought it might have a bad effect on him in the middle of hunting for Inca treasure in steamy jungles. He might have a fever, or some unpleasant animal might leap on him while his mind was distracted–and anyway it would spoil his enjoyment. But I had a letter waiting for him when he came back. I told him how sorry I was, how fond of him I was, but I didn’t think that there was really the proper kind of feeling between us to engage each other for life. He didn’t agree with me, of course, but he took the decision seriously. He said he didn’t think he could bear to see me often, but that we would always remain friendly towards each other. I wonder now if he was relieved as well. I don’t think so, but on the other hand I do not think it cut him to the heart. I think he was lucky. He would have made me a good husband, and would always have been fond of me, and I think I should have made him quite happy in a quiet way, but he could do better for himself–and about three months later he did. He fell violently in love with another girl, and she fell as violently in love with him. They were married in due course, and had six children. Nothing could have been more satisfactory.

As for Charles, about three years later he married a beautiful girl of eighteen.

Really, what a benefactress I was to those two men.



The next thing that happened was that Reggie Lucy came back on leave from Hongkong. Though I had known the Lucys for so many years, I had never met their eldest brother, Reggie. He was a major in the Gunners, and had done his service mostly abroad. He was a shy and retiring person who seldom went out. He liked playing golf, but he had never cared for dances or parties. He was not fair-haired and blue-eyed like the others; he had dark hair and brown eyes. They were a closely-knit family, and enjoyed each other’s society. We went out to Dartmoor together in the usual Lucy-ish fashion–missing trams, looking-up trains which didn’t exist, missing them anyway, changing at Newton Abbot and missing the connection, deciding we’d go to a different part of the Moor, and so on.

Then Reggie offered to improve my golf. My golf at this stage might be said to have been practically non-existent. Various young men had done their best for me, but much to my own regret, I was not good at games. The irritating thing was that I was always a promising beginner. At archery, at billiards, at golf, at tennis, and at croquet I promised very well; but the promise was never fulfilled: another source of humiliation. The truth is, I suppose, that if you haven’t got a good eye for balls you haven’t. I played in croquet tournaments with Madge where I had the advantage of the utmost number of bisques that was allowed.

‘With all your bisques,’ said Madge, who played well, ‘we ought to win easily.’

My bisques helped, but we didn’t win. I was good at the theory of the game, but I invariably missed ridiculously easy shots. At tennis I developed a good forehand drive which sometimes impressed my partners, but my backhand was hopeless. You cannot play tennis with a forehand drive alone. At golf I had wild drives, terrible iron shots, beautiful approach shots, and completely unreliable putts.

Reggie, however, was extremely patient, and he was the kind of teacher who did not mind in the least whether you improved or not. We meandered gently round the links; we stopped whenever we felt like it. The serious golfers went by train to Churston golf course. The Torquay course was also the race-course three times a year, and was not much patronised or well kept-up. Reggie and I would amble round it, then we would go back to tea with the Lucys and have a sing-song, having made fresh toast because the old toast was now cold. And so on. It was a happy lazy life. Nobody ever hurried, and time didn’t matter. Never any worry, never any fuss. I may be entirely wrong, but I feel certain that none of the Lucys ever had duodenal ulcers, coronary thromboses, or high blood pressure.

One day Reggie and I had played four holes of golf, and then, since the day was extremely hot, he suggested that really it would be much more agreeable to sit down under the hedge He got out his pipe, smoked companionably, and we talked in our usual way, which was never continuously, but a word or two on a subject or a person, then restful pauses. It is the way I most like holding a conversation. I never felt slow or stupid, or at a loss for things to say, when I was with Reggie.

Presently, after various puffs at his pipe, he said thoughtfully: ‘You’ve got a lot of scalps, Agatha, haven’t you? Well, you can put mine with them any time you like.’

I looked at him rather doubtfully, not quite sure of his meaning.

‘I don’t know whether you know I want to marry you,’ he said, ‘you probably do. But I may as well say it. Mind you, I’m not pushing myself forward in any way; I mean there’s no hurry’–the famous Lucy phrase came easily from Reggie’s lips–‘You are very young still, and it would be all wrong on my part to tie you down now.’

I said sharply that I was not so very young.

‘Oh yes you are, Aggie, compared with me.’ Though Reggie had been urged not to call me Aggie, he frequently forgot, because it was so natural for the Lucys to call each other names like Margie, Noonie, Eddie, and Aggie. ‘Well, you think about it,’ went on Reggie. ‘Just bear me in mind, and if nobody else turns up–there I am, you know.’

I said immediately that I didn’t need to think about it; I would like to marry him.

‘I don’t think you can have thought properly, Aggie.’

‘Of course I’ve thought properly. I can think in a moment about a thing like that.’

‘Yes, but it’s no good rushing into it, is it? You see, a girl like you–well, she could marry anybody.’

‘I don’t think I want to marry anybody. I think I’d rather marry you.’

‘Yes, but you’ve got to be practical, you know. You’ve got to be practical in this world. You want to marry a man with a good lot of money, a nice chap, one you like, who can give you a good time and look after you properly, give you all the things you ought to have.’

‘I only want to marry the person I want to marry; I don’t mind about a lot of things.’

‘Yes, but they are important, old girl. They are important in this world. It is no good being young and romantic.’ He went on, ‘My leave’s up in another ten days. I thought I’d better speak before I went. Before that I thought I wouldn’t…I thought that I’d wait. But I think you–well, I think I’d like you just to know that I’m here. When I come back in two years’ time, if there isn’t anybody–’

‘There won’t be anyone,’ I said. I was quite positive.

And so Reggie and I became engaged. It was not called an engagement: it was on the ‘understanding’ system. Our families knew we were engaged, but it would not be announced or put in the paper, and we would not tell our friends about it, though I think most of them knew.

‘I can’t think,’ I said to Reggie, ‘why we can’t be married. Why didn’t you tell me sooner, then we would have had time to make preparations.’

‘Yes, of course, you’ve got to have bridesmaids and a slap-up wedding and all the rest of it. But anyway, I shouldn’t dream of letting you get married to me now. You must have your chance.’

I used to get angry over this, and we would almost quarrel. I said I didn’t think it was flattering for him to be so ready to turn down my offer to marry him at once. But Reggie had fixed ideas as to what was due to the person he loved, and he had got it into his long, narrow head that the right thing for me to do was to marry a man with a place, money, and all the rest of it. In spite of our disputes, though, we were very happy. The Lucys all seemed pleased, saying, ‘We’ve thought Reggie had his eye on you, Aggie, for some time. He doesn’t usually look at any of our girl friends. Still, there’s no hurry. Better give yourself plenty of time.’

There were one or two moments when what I had enjoyed so much with the Lucys–their insistence on there being plenty of time for anything–roused a certain antagonism in me. Romantically, I would have liked Reggie to say that he couldn’t possibly wait two years, that we must get married now. Unfortunately, it was the last thing Reggie would have dreamed of saying. He was a very unselfish man, and diffident about himself and his prospects.

My mother was, I think, happy about our engagement. She said, ‘I have always been fond of him. I think he is one of the nicest people I have ever met. He will make you happy. He is gentle and kind, and he will never hurry you, or bother you. You won’t be very well off, but you will have enough now that he has reached the rank of major–you’ll manage all right. You’re not the sort of person who cares very much about money, and who wants parties and a gay life. No, I think this will be a happy marriage.’

Then she said, after a slight pause, ‘I wish he’d told you a little earlier, so that you could have married straight away.’

So she, too, felt as I did. Ten days later, Reggie left to go back to his Regiment and I settled down to wait for him.



Let me add here a kind of postscript to my account of my courtship days.

I have described my suitors–but, rather unfairly, have not commented on the fact that I, too, lost my heart. First to a very tall young soldier, whom I met when staying in Yorkshire. If he had asked me to marry him, I should probably have said yes before the words were out of his mouth! Very wisely from his point of view, he didn’t. He was a penniless subaltern, and about to go to India with his regiment. I think he was more or less in love with me, though. He had that sheep-like look. I had to make do with that. He went off to India, and I yearned after him for at least six months.

Then, a year or so later, I lost my heart again, when acting in a musical play got up by friends in Torquay–a version of Bluebeard, with topical words, written by themselves. I was Sister Anne, and the object of my affections later became an Air Vice-Marshal. He was young then–at the beginning of his career. I had the revolting habit of singing to a teddy bear in a coy fashion the song of the moment:

I wish I had a Teddy Bear

To sit upon my knee

I’d take it with me everywhere

To cuddle up to me.



All I can offer in excuse is that all the girls did that sort of thing–and it went down very well.

Several times in later life I came near meeting him again–since he was a cousin of friends–but I always managed to avoid it. I have my vanity.

I have always believed that he has a memory of me as a lovely girl at a moonlight picnic on Anstey’s Cove on the last day of his leave. We sat apart from the rest on a rock sticking out to sea. We didn’t speak–just sat there holding hands.

After he left he sent me a little gold Teddy Bear brooch.

I cared enough to want him still to remember me like that–and not to sustain the shock of meeting thirteen stone of solid flesh and what could only be described as ‘a kind face’.

‘Amyas always asks after you,’ my friends would say. ‘He would so like to meet you again.’

Meet me at a ripe sixty? No fear. I would like to be an illusion still to somebody.


VII

Happy people have no history, isn’t that the saying? Well, I was a happy person during this period. I did mostly the same things as usual: met my friends, went to stay away occasionally–but there was anxiety about my mother’s eyesight, which was getting progressively worse. She had great difficulty in reading now, and trouble seeing things in a bright light. Spectacles did not help. My grandmother at Ealing was also rather blind, and had to peer about for things. She was also getting, as elderly people do, progressively more suspicious of everybody: of her servants, of men who came to mend the pipes, of the piano tuner, and so on. I always remember Grannie leaning across the dining-table and saying, either to me or to my sister, ‘Ssh!’–a deep hissing sound–‘Speak low, where is your bag?’

‘In my room, Grannie.’

‘You’ve left it there? You mustn’t leave it there. I heard her, upstairs, just now.’

‘Well, but that’s all right, isn’t it?’

‘You never know, dear, you never know. Go up and fetch it.’

It must have been about this time that my mother’s mother, Granny B., fell off a bus. She was addicted to riding on the top of buses, and I suppose by now must have been eighty. Anyway, the bus went on suddenly as she was coming downstairs, and she fell off; broke, I think, a rib, and possibly an arm as well. She sued the bus company with vigour, was awarded handsome compensation–and sternly forbidden by her doctor ever to ride on the top of a bus again. Naturally, being Granny B., she disobeyed him constantly. Up to the last Granny B. was always the old soldier. She had an operation, too, somewhere about this time. I imagine it was cancer of the uterus, but the operation was entirely successful, and she never had any recurrence. The only deep disappointment was her own. She had looked forward to having this ‘tumour’, or whatever it was, removed from her inside, because, she thought, she would be quite nice and slim after it. She was by this time an immense size, bigger than my other grandmother. The joke of the fat woman who was stuck in the bus door, with the bus conductor crying to her, ‘Try sideways, ma’am, try sideways’–‘Lor, young man, I ain’t got no sideways!’ could have applied perfectly to her.

Though strictly forbidden to get out of bed by the nurses after she had come out of the anaesthetic, and they had left her to sleep, she rose from her bed and tiptoed to the pier-glass. What a disillusion. She appeared to be as stout as ever.

‘I shall never get over the disappointment, Clara,’ she said to my mother. ‘Never. I counted on it! It carried me through that anaesthetic and everything. And look at me: just the same!’



It must have been about then that my sister Madge and I had a discussion which was to bear fruit later. We had been reading some detective story or other; I think–I can only say I think because one’s remembrances are not always accurate: one is apt to rearrange them in one’s mind and get things in the wrong date and sometimes in the wrong place–I think it was The Mystery of the Yellow Room, which had just come out, by a new author, Gaston Le Roux, with an attractive young reporter as detective–his name was Rouletabille. It was a particularly baffling mystery, well worked out and planned, of the type some call unfair and others have to admit is almost unfair, but not quite: one could just have seen a neat little clue cleverly slipped in.

We talked about it a lot, told each other our views, and agreed it was one of the best. We were connoisseurs of the detective story: Madge had initiated me young to Sherlock Holmes, and I had followed hot-foot on her trail, starting with The Levenworth Case, which had fascinated me when recounted to me by Madge at the age of eight. Then there was Arsene Lupin–but I never quite considered that a proper detective story, though the stories were exciting and great fun. There were also the Paul Beck stories, highly approved, The Chronicles of Mark Hewitt–and now The Mystery of the Yellow Room. Fired with all this, I said I should like to try my hand at a detective story.

‘I don’t think you could do it,’ said Madge. ‘They are very difficult to do. I’ve thought about it.’

‘I should like to try.’

‘Well, I bet you couldn’t,’ said Madge.

There the matter rested. It was never a definite bet; we never set out the terms–but the words had been said. From that moment I was fired by the determination that I would write a detective story. It didn’t go further than that. I didn’t start to write it then, or plan it out; the seed had been sown. At the back of my mind, where the stories of the books I am going to write take their place long before the germination of the seed occurs, the idea had been planted: some day I would write a detective story.


VIII

Reggie and I wrote to each other regularly. I gave him the local news, and tried to write him the best letter I could–letter writing has never been one of my strong points. My sister Madge, now, was what I can only describe as a model of the art! She could make the most splendid stories out of nothing at all. I do envy that gift.

My dear Reggie’s letters were exactly like Reggie talking, which was nice and reassuring. He urged me at great length, always, to go about a lot.

‘Now don’t stay at home moping, Aggie. Don’t think that is what I want, because it isn’t; you must go out and see people. You must go to dances and things and parties. I do want you to have every chance, before we get settled down.’

Looking back now, I wonder whether at the back of my mind I may not have slightly resented this point of view. I don’t think I recognised it at the time; but does one really like to be urged to go about, to see other people, ‘to do better for yourself’ (that extraordinary phrase)? Is it not nearer to the truth that every female would prefer her love-letters to exhibit a show of jealousy?

‘Who is that fellow so-and-so you write about? You’re not getting too fond of him, are you?’

Isn’t that what we really want as a sex? Can we take too much unselfishness? Or does one read back into one’s mind things that perhaps weren’t there?

The usual dances were given in the neighbourhood. I didn’t go to them because, as we had no car, it would not have been practicable to accept any invitations of more than a mile or two away. Hiring a cab or car would have been too expensive except for a very special occasion. But there were times when a hunt for girls was on, and then you would be asked to stay, or fetched and returned.

The Cliffords at Chudleigh were giving a dance to which they were asking members of the Garrison from Exeter, and they asked some of their friends if they could bring a likely girl or two along. My old enemy Commander Travers, who was now retired and living with his wife in Chudleigh, suggested that they should bring me. Having been my pet abomination as a small child, he had graduated from that into old family friend. His wife rang up and asked if I would come and stay with them and go to the Cliffords’ dance. I was delighted to do so, of course.

I also got a letter from a friend called Arthur Griffiths, whom I had met when staying with the Matthews at Thorpe Arch Hall in Yorkshire. He was the local vicar’s son, and a soldier–a gunner. He and I had become great friends. Arthur wrote to say that he was now stationed at Exeter, but that unfortunately he was not one of the officers going to the dance, and that he was very sad about it because he would have liked to dance with me again. ‘However,’ he said, ‘there’s a fellow from our Mess going, Christie by name, so look out for him, won’t you? He’s a good dancer.’

Christie came my way quite soon in the dance. He was a tall, fair young man, with crisp curly hair, a rather interesting nose, turned up not down, and a great air of careless confidence about him. He was introduced to me, asked for a couple of dances, and said that his friend Griffiths had told him to look out for me. We got on together very well; he danced splendidly and I danced again several more times with him. I enjoyed the evening thoroughly. The next day, having thanked the Travers, I was driven home by them as far as Newton Abbot, where I took the train back.

It must have been, I suppose, a week or ten days later; I was having tea with the Mellors at their house opposite ours. Max Mellor and I still practised our ballroom dancing, though mercifully waltzing upstairs was out of fashion. We were, I think, tango-ing, when I was summoned to the telephone. It was my mother.

‘Come home at once, will you, Agatha?’ she said. ‘There’s one of your young men here–I don’t know him, never seen him before. I’ve given him tea, but he seems to be staying on and on hoping to see you.’

My mother was always intensely irritated if she had to look after my young men unaided; she regarded such entertainment as strictly my business.

I was cross at coming back; I was enjoying myself. Besides, I thought I knew who it was–a rather dreary young naval lieutenant, the one who used to ask me to read his poems. So I went unwillingly, with a sulky expression on my face.

I came into the drawing-room, and a young man stood up with a good deal of relief. He was rather pink in the face and clearly embarrassed, having had to explain himself. He was not even much cheered by seeing me–I think he was afraid I shouldn’t remember him. But I did remember him, though I was intensely surprised. It had not occurred to me that I should ever see Griffiths’ friend, young Christie, again. He made some rather hesitating explanations–he had had to come over to Torquay on his motor-bike, and thought he might as well look me up. He avoided mentioning the fact that he must have gone to a certain amount of trouble and embarrassment to find out my address from Arthur Griffiths. However, things went better after a minute or two. My mother was intensely relieved by my arrival. Archie Christie looked more cheerful, having got his explanations over, and I felt highly flattered.

The evening wore on as we talked. In the sacred code sign, common between women, the question was raised between mother and me as to whether this unasked visitor was going to be invited to stay to supper, and if so what food there was likely to be in the house. It must have been soon after Christmas, because I know there was cold turkey in the larder. I signalled yes to mother, and she asked Archie if he would care to stay and have a scratch meal with us. He accepted promptly. So we had cold turkey and salad and something else, cheese I think, and spent a pleasant evening. Then Archie got on his motor-bike and went off in a series of explosive bumps to Exeter.

For the next ten days he made frequent and unexpected appearances. That first evening he had asked me if I would like to come to a concert at Exeter–I had mentioned at the dance that I was fond of music–and that he would take me to the Redcliffe Hotel to tea afterwards. I said I would like to come very much. Then there was a somewhat embarrassed moment when mother made it clear that her daughter did not accept invitations to come to Exeter for concerts by herself. That damped him a bit, but he hastily extended the invitation to her. Mother relented, decided she approved of him, and said that it would be quite all right for me to go to the concert, but that she was afraid that I could not go to tea with him at a hotel. (I must say, looking at it nowadays, I think we had peculiar rules. One could go alone with a young man to play golf, to ride a horse, or to roller-skate, but having tea with him in a hotel had a kind of risque appearance which good mothers did not fancy for their daughters.) A compromise was made in the end, that he might give me tea in the refreshment room on Exeter station. Not a very romantic spot. Later, I asked him if he would like to come to a Wagnerian concert that was to take place at Torquay in four or five days’ time. He said he would like it very much.

Archie told me all about himself, how he was waiting impatiently to get into the newly-formed Royal Flying Corps. I was thrilled by this. Everyone was thrilled by flying. But Archie was entirely matter-of-fact. He said it was going to be the service of the future: if there was a war, planes would be the first thing needed. It wasn’t that he was mad keen on flying, but it was a chance to get on in your career. There was no future in the Army. As a Gunner, promotion was too slow. He did his best to take the romance out of flying for me, but didn’t quite succeed. All the same it was the first time that my romanticism came up against a practical, logical mind. In 1912 it was still a fairly sentimental world. People called themselves hard-boiled, but they had no real idea what the term meant. Girls had romantic ideas about young men, and young men had idealistic views about young girls. We had, however, come a long way since my grandmother’s day.

‘You know, I like Ambrose,’ she said, referring to one of my sister’s suitors. ‘The other day, after Madge had walked along the terrace, I saw Ambrose get up and follow her, and he bent down and picked up a handful of gravel, where her feet had trodden, and put it in his pocket. Very pretty I thought it was, very pretty. I could imagine that happening to me when I was young.’

Poor darling Grannie. We had to disillusion her. Ambrose, it turned out, was deeply interested in geology, and the gravel had been of a particular type which interested him.

Archie and I were poles apart in our reactions to things. I think that from the start that fascinated us. It is the old excitement of ‘the stranger’. I asked him to the New Year Ball. He was in a peculiar mood the night of the dance: he hardly spoke to me. We were a party of four or six, I think, and every time I danced with him and we sat out afterwards he was completely silent. When I spoke to him he answered almost at random, in a way that did not make sense. I was puzzled, looking at him once or twice, wondering what was the matter with him, what he was thinking of. He seemed no longer interested in me.

I was rather stupid, really. I should have known by now that when a man looks like a sick sheep, completely bemused, stupid and unable to listen to what you say to him, he has, vulgarly, got it badly.

What did I know? Did I know what was happening to me? I remember picking up one of Reggie’s letters when it came, saying to myself, ‘I’ll read this later,’ and shoving it quickly into the hall drawer. I found it there some months afterwards. I suppose, deep down, I already knew.

The Wagnerian concert was two days after the ball. We went to it, and came back to Ashfield afterwards. As we went up to the schoolroom to play the piano, as was our usual custom, Archie spoke to me almost desperately. He was leaving in two days’ time, he said: he was going to Salisbury Plain, to start his Flying Corps training. Then he said fiercely, ‘You’ve got to marry me, you’ve got to marry me.’ He said he had known it the first evening he danced with me. ‘I had an awful time getting your address and finding you. Nothing could have been more difficult. There will never be anyone but you. You’ve got to marry me.’

I told him it was impossible, that I was already engaged to someone. He waved away engagements with a furious hand. ‘What on earth does that matter?’ he said. ‘You’ll just have to break it off, that’s all.’

‘But I can’t. I couldn’t possibly do that.’

‘Of course you could. I’m not engaged to anyone else, but if I was I’d break it off in a minute without even thinking about it.’

‘I couldn’t do this to him.’

‘Nonsense. You have to do things to people. If you were so fond of each other, why didn’t you get married before he went abroad?’ ‘We thought–’ I hesitated–‘it better to wait.’

‘I wouldn’t have waited. I’m not going to wait either.’

‘We couldn’t be married for years,’ I said. ‘You’re only a subaltern. And it would be the same in the Flying Corps.’

‘I couldn’t possibly wait years. I should like to be married next month or the month after.’

‘You’re mad,’ I said. ‘You don’t know what you are talking about.’

I don’t think he did. He had to come down to earth in the end. It was a terrible shock for my poor mother. I think she had been anxious, though no more than anxious, and she was deeply relieved to hear that Archie was going away to Salisbury Plain–but to be presented so suddenly with a fait accompli shook her.

I had said to her: ‘I’m sorry, mother. I’ve got to tell you. Archie Christie has asked me to marry him, and I want to, I want to dreadfully.’

But we had to face facts–Archie unwillingly, but mother was very firm with him. ‘What do you have to get married on?’ she asked. ‘Either of you.’

Our financial position could hardly have been worse. Archie was a young subaltern, only a year older than I was. He had no money, only his pay and a small allowance, which was all that his mother could afford. I had only the solitary hundred a year which I had inherited under my grandfather’s will. It would be years at the best before Archie was in any position to marry.

He said to me rather bitterly before he went: ‘Your mother’s brought me down to earth. I thought nothing would matter! We would get married somehow or other, and things would be all right. She has made me see that we can’t, not at present. We shall have to wait–but we won’t wait a day longer than we can help. I shall do everything, everything I can think of. This flying business will help…only of course they don’t like your being married either in the Army or the Flying Corps while you are young.’ We looked at each other, we were young, desperate–and in love.

We had an engagement that lasted a year and a half. It was a tempestuous time, full of ups and downs and deep unhappiness, because we had the feeling that we were reaching out for something we would never attain.

I put off writing to Reggie for nearly a month, mainly, I suppose, out of guilt, and partly because I could not bring myself to believe that what had suddenly happened to me could possibly have been real–soon I would wake up from it and go back to where I was.

But I had to write in the end–guilty, miserable, and without a single excuse. It made it worse, I think, the kindly and sympathetic way that Reggie took it. He told me not to distress myself; it wasn’t my fault he was sure; I could not have helped it; these things happen.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘it’s been a bit of a blow for me, Agatha, that you are marrying a chap who is even less able to support you than I am. If you were marrying somebody well off, a good match and everything, I should have felt that it didn’t matter so much, because it would be more what you ought to have, but now I can’t help wishing that I’d taken you at your word and that we’d got married and that I’d brought you out here with me straight away.’

Did I wish also that he’d done that? I suppose not–not by that time–and yet perhaps there was always the feeling of wanting to go back, wanting to have once more a safe foot on shore. Not to swim out into deep water. I had been so happy, so peaceful with Reggie, we had understood each other so well; we’d enjoyed and wanted the same things.

What had happened to me now was the opposite. I loved a stranger; mainly because he was a stranger, because I never knew how he would react to a word or a phrase and everything he said was fascinating and new. He felt the same. He said once to me, ‘I feel I can’t get at you. I don’t know what you’re like.’ Every now and then we were overwhelmed by waves of despair, and one or other of us would write and break it off. We would both agree that it was the only thing to do. Then, about a week later, we would find ourselves unable to bear it, and we would be back on the old terms.

Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. We were badly enough off anyway, but now a fresh financial blow fell upon my family. The H. B. Chaflin Company in New York, the firm of which my grandfather had been a partner, went suddenly into liquidation. It was an unlimited company too, and I gathered that the position was serious. In any case, it meant that the income which my mother had received from it, which was the only income she had, would now cease completely. My grandmother, by good fortune, was not quite in the same situation. Her money had also been left to her in H. B. Chaflin shares, but Mr Bailey, who was the member of the firm who looked after her affairs, had been worried for some time. Charged with the care of Nathaniel Miller’s widow, he felt responsible for her. When Grannie wanted money she merely wrote to Mr Bailey, and Mr Bailey, I think, sent it her in cash–it was as old-fashioned as that. She was disturbed and upset when one day he suggested to her that she should allow him to reinvest her money for her.

‘Do you mean take my money out of Chaflin’s?’

He was evasive. He said that you had to watch investments, that it was awkward for her, being English by birth and living in England, as the widow of an American. He said several things which, of course, were not the real explanation at all, but Grannie accepted them. Like all women of that time, you accepted completely any business advice that was given you by anyone you trusted. Mr Bailey said leave it to him, he would reinvest her money in a way that would give her nearly as much income as she had now. Reluctantly Grannie agreed; and therefore, when the crash came, her income was safe. Mr Bailey was dead by that time, but he had done his duty for the partner’s widow, without giving away his fears about the solvency of the company. Younger members of the firm had, I believe, launched out in a big way, and had seemed successful, but actually they had expanded too much, had opened too many branches all over the country, and spent too much money on salesmanship. Whatever its cause, the crash was a complete one.

It was like a recurrence of my childhood’s experience, when I had heard mother and father talking together about money difficulties, and had pranced down happily to announce to the household below stairs that we were ruined. ‘Ruin’ had seemed to me then a fine and exciting thing. It did not seem nearly so exciting now; it spelt final disaster for Archie and myself. The £100 a year I had belonging to me must of course go to support mother. No doubt Madge would help also. By selling Ashfield she might just be able to exist.

Things turned out to be not quite so bad as we thought, because Mr John Chaflin wrote from America to my mother and said how deeply grieved he was. She might count on an income of £300 a year, sent to her not from the firm, which was bankrupt, but from his own private fortune, and this would last until her death. That relieved us of the first anxiety. But when she died that money would cease. £100 a year and Ashfield was all I could count upon for the future. I wrote and told Archie that I could never marry him, that we should have to forget each other. Archie refused to listen to this. Somehow or other he was going to make money. We would get married, and he might even be able to help support my mother. He made me confident and hopeful. We got engaged again.

My mother’s eyesight became much worse, and she went to a specialist. He told her she had cataracts in both eyes, and that for various reasons it would be impossible to operate. They might not grow fast, but in time would certainly lead to blindness. Again I wrote to Archie, breaking off the engagement, saying that it was obviously not meant to be, and that I could never desert my mother if she were blind. Again he refused to concur. I was to wait and see how my mother’s eyesight got on–there might be a cure for it, an operation might be possible, and anyway she wasn’t blind now so we might as well remain engaged. We did remain engaged. Then I had a letter from Archie, saying, ‘It’s no good, I can never marry you. I am too poor. I have been trying one or two small investments with what I had, and it’s no good whatsoever, I’ve lost it. You must give me up.’ I wrote and said I would never give him up. He wrote back and said I must. We then agreed we would give each other up.

Four days later Archie managed to get leave and arrived suddenly on his motor-bicycle from Salisbury Plain. It was no good, we had got to be engaged again, we had got to be hopeful and wait–something would happen, even if we had to wait four or five years. We went through emotional storms, and in the end, once more, our engagement was on, though every month the possibility of marriage receded further into the distance. It was hopeless, I felt in my heart, but I wouldn’t recognise it. Archie thought it was hopeless too, but we still clung desperately to the belief that we could not live without each other, so we might as well remain engaged and pray for some sudden stroke of fortune.

I had by now met Archie’s family. His father had been a Judge in the Indian Civil Service, and had had a severe fall from a horse. He became rapidly ill after that–the fall had affected his brain–and had finally died in hospital in England. After some years of widowhood, Archie’s mother had remarried William Hemsley. No one could have been kinder to us or more fatherly than he always was. Archie’s mother, Peg, came from Southern Ireland, near Cork, and was one of twelve children. She had been staying with her eldest brother, who was in the Indian Medical, when she had met her first husband. She had two boys, Archie and Campbell. Archie had been head of the school at Clifton, and had passed fourth into Woolwich: he had brains, resource, audacity. Both boys were in the Army.

Archie broke the news of his engagement to her, and sang my praises in the way that sons are apt to do in describing the girl of their choice. Peg looked at him with a doubtful eye, and said in a rich Irish voice: ‘Would she now be one of those girls that’s wearing one of these newfangled Peter Pan collars?’ Rather uneasily Archie had to admit that I did wear Peter Pan collars. They were rather a feature of the moment. We girls had at last abandoned the high collars to our blouses, which were stiffened by little zigzag bones, one up each side and one at the back, so as to leave red, uncomfortable marks on the neck. A day came when people determined to be daring and achieve comfort. The Peter Pan collar was designed, presumably, from the turned-down collar worn by Peter Pan in Barrie’s play. It fitted round the bottom of the neck, was of soft material, had nothing like a bone about it, and was heaven to wear. It could hardly have been called daring. When I think of the reputation for possible fastness that we girls incurred, just by showing the four inches of neck from below the chin, it seems incredible. Looking round and seeing girls in bikinis on the beach now makes one realise how far one has gone in fifty years.

Anyway, I was one of these go-ahead girls who, in 1912, wore a Peter Pan collar.

‘And she looks lovely in it,’ said the loyal Archie.

‘Ah, she would, no doubt,’ said Peg. Whatever doubts she may have had about me on account of this, however, she greeted me with extreme kindness, and indeed what I almost thought of as gush. She professed to be so fond of me, so delighted–I was just the girl she had wanted for her boy, and so on and so on–that I didn’t believe a word of it. The real truth was that she thought her son much too young to marry. She had no particular fault to find with me–I could no doubt have been much worse. I might have been a tobacconist’s daughter (always accounted a symbol of disaster) or a young divorcee–there were some about by then–or even a chorus-girl. Anyway, she doubtless decided that with our prospects the engagement would come to nothing. So she was very sweet to me, and I was slightly embarrassed by her. Archie, true to temperament, was not particularly interested in what she thought of me or I of her. He had the happy attribute of going through life without the least interest in what anyone thought of him or his belongings: his mind was always entirely bent on what he wanted himself.

So there we were, still engaged, but no nearer getting married–in fact, rather further off. Promotion did not seem likely to come more quickly in the Flying Corps than anywhere else. Archie had been dismayed to find that he suffered a good deal from sinus trouble when flying a plane. He had a good deal of pain, but carried on. His letters were full of technical accounts of Farman biplanes and Avros: his opinions on the planes that meant more or less certain death for the pilot, and the ones that were pretty steady and ought to develop well. The names of his squadron became familiar to me: Joubert de la Ferte, Brooke-Popham, John Salmon. There was also a wild Irish cousin of Archie’s who had by now crashed so many machines that he was more or less permanently grounded.

It seems odd that I don’t remember being at all worried about Archie’s safety. Flying was dangerous–but then so was hunting, and I was used to people breaking their necks in the hunting field. It was just one of the hazards of life. There was no great insistence on safety then; the slogan ‘Safety first’ would have been considered rather ridiculous. To be concerned with this new form of locomotion, flying, was glamorous. Archie was one of the first pilots to fly–his pilot’s number was, I think, just over the hundred: 105 or 106. I was enormously proud of him.

I think nothing has disappointed me more in my life than the establishment of the aeroplane as a regular method of travel. One had dreamed about it as resembling the flying of a bird–the exhilaration of swooping through the air. But now, when I think of the boredom of getting in an aeroplane and flying from London to Persia, from London to Bermuda, from London to Japan–could anything be more prosaic? A cramped box with its narrow seats, the view from the window mostly wings and fuselage, and below you cotton-wool clouds. When you see the earth, it has the flatness of a map. Oh yes, a great disillusionment. Ships can still be romantic. As for trains–what can beat a train? Especially before the diesels and their smell arrived. A great puffing monster carrying you through gorges and valleys, by waterfalls, past snow mountains, alongside country roads with strange peasants in carts. Trains are wonderful; I still adore them. To travel by train is to see nature and human beings, towns and churches and rivers–in fact, to see life.

I don’t mean that I am not fascinated by the conquering of air by man, by his adventures into space, possessed of that one gift that other forms of life do not have, the sense of adventure, the unconquerable spirit, and with it courage–not merely the courage of self-defence, which all animals have, but the courage to take your life into your hands and go out into the unknown. I am proud and excited to feel that all this has happened in my lifetime, and I would like to be able to look into the future to see the next steps: one feels they will follow quickly on one another now, with a snowballing effect.

What will it all end in? Further triumphs? Or possibly the destruction of man by his own ambition? I think not. Man will survive, though possibly only in pockets here and there. There may be some great catastrophe–but not all mankind will perish. Some primitive community, rooted in simplicity, knowing of past doings only by hearsay, will slowly build up a civilisation once more.


IX

I don’t remember in 1913 having any anticipation of war. Naval officers occasionally shook their heads and murmured ‘Der Tag’, but we had been hearing that for years, and paid no attention. It served as a suitable basis for spy stories–it wasn’t real. No nation could be so crazy as to fight another except on the N.W. frontier or some far away spot.

All the same, First Aid and Home Nursing classes were popular during 1913, and at the beginning of 1914. We all went to these, bandaged each other’s legs and arms, and even attempted to do neat head-bandaging: much more difficult. We passed our exams, and got a small printed card to prove our success. So great was female enthusiasm at this time that if any man had an accident he was in mortal terror of ministerng women closing in on him.

‘Don’t let those First Aiders come near me!’ the cry would rise. ‘Don’t touch me, girls. Don’t touch me!’

There was one extremely snuffy old man amongst the examiners. With a diabolical smile he laid traps for us. ‘Here is your patient,’ he would say, pointing to a boy scout prostrate on the ground. ‘Broken arm, fractured ankle, get busy on him.’ An eager pair, I and another, swooped upon him and trotted out our bandages. We were good at bandaging–beautiful, neat bandages we had practised–carefully reversing as we went up a leg, so that the whole thing looked deliciously taut and tidy, with a few figure-of-eights thrown in for good measure. In this case, however, we were taken aback–there was to be no neatness or beauty here: stuff was already bulkily wound round the limb. ‘Field dressings,’ said the old man. ‘Put your bandages on top of them; you’ve nothing else to replace them by, remember.’ We bandaged. It was much more difficult to bandage this way, making neat turns and twists. ‘Get on with it,’ said the old man. ‘Use the figure-of-eight: you’ll have to come to it in the end. No good trying to go by the text-books and reverse from top to bottom. You’ve got to keep the dressing on, girl, that’s the point of it. Now then, the bed is through the hospital doors there.’ We picked up our patient, having duly fixed, we hoped, the splints where splints should be fixed, and carried him to the bed.

Then we paused, slightly taken aback–neither of us had thought of opening up the bed clothes before arriving with the patient. The old man cackled with glee. ‘Ha ha! Haven’t thought of everything, have you, young ladies? Ha ha–always see your bed is ready for your patient before you start carrying him there.’ I must say that, humiliated as he made us feel, that old man taught us a great deal more than we had learnt in six lectures.

Besides our text-books, there was some practical work arranged for us. Two mornings a week we were allowed to attend the local hospital in the out-patients ward. That was intimidating, because the regular nurses, who were in a hurry and had a lot to do, despised us thoroughly. My first job was to remove the dressing from a finger, prepare warm boracic and water for it, and soak the finger for the requisite time. That was easy. The next job was an ear that needed syringing, and that I was quickly forbidden to touch. Syringing an ear was a highly technical thing, said the Sister. Nobody unskilled should attempt it.

‘Remember that. Don’t think you’re being useful by doing what you haven’t learned to do. You might do a lot of harm.’

The next thing I had to do was to remove the dressings from the leg of a small child who had pulled over a boiling kettle on itself. That was the moment when I nearly gave up nursing for good. The bandages had, as I knew, to be soaked off gently in lukewarm water, and whatever way you did this, or touched them, the pain was agonising to the child. Poor little thing, she was only about three years old. She screamed and screamed: it was horrible. I felt so upset that I thought I was going to be sick then and there. The only thing that saved me was the sardonic gleam in the eye of a staff nurse nearby. These stuck-up young fools, the eyes said, think they can come in here and know all about everything–and they can’t manage the first thing they are asked to do. Immediately I determined that I would stick it. After all, it had got to be soaked off–not only the child had to bear her pain, but I had to bear her pain also. I went on with it, still feeling sick, setting my teeth, but managing it, and being as gentle as I could. I was quite taken aback when the staff nurse said suddenly to me: ‘Not a bad job you’ve done there. Turned you up a bit at first, didn’t it? It did me once.’

Another part of our education was a day with the District Nurse. Here again, two of us were taken on one day of the week. We went round a number of small cottages, all of them with windows tightly closed, some of them smelling of soap, others of something quite different–the yearning to throw open a window was sometimes almost irresistible. The ailments seemed rather monotonous. Practically everyone had what was tersely referred to as ‘bad legs’. I was slightly hazy as to what bad legs were. The District Nurse said, ‘Blood poisoning is very common–some the result of venereal disease, of course–some ulcers–bad blood all of it.’ Anyway that was the generic name for it among the people themselves, and I understood much better in years to come when my daily help would always say, ‘My mother’s ill again.’

‘Oh, what’s the matter with her?’

‘Oh, bad legs–she’s always had bad legs.’

One day on our rounds we found one of the patients had died. The District Nurse and I laid out the body. Another experience. Not so heart-rending as scalded children, but unexpected if you had never done it before.

When, in far off Serbia, an archduke was assassinated, it seemed such a faraway incident–nothing that concerned us. After all, in the Balkans people were always being assassinated. That it should touch us here in England seemed quite incredible–and I speak here not only for myself but for almost everybody else. Swiftly, after that assassination, what seemed like incredible storm clouds appeared on the horizon. Extraordinary rumours got about, rumours of that fantastic thing–War! But of course that was only the newspapers, No civilised nations went to war. There hadn’t been any wars for years; there probably never would be again.

No, the ordinary people, everyone in fact, apart from, I suppose, a few senior Ministers and inner circles of the Foreign Office, had no conception that anything like war might happen. It was all rumours–people working themselves up and saying it really looked ‘quite serious’–speeches by politicians. And then suddenly one morning it had happened.

England was at war.

Posted in An Autobiography