An Autobiography

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

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

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

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

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

‘Not ruined?’ I said, deeply chagrined.

‘Not ruined,’ said my mother firmly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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