An Autobiography

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

‘Go on,’ said Margaret.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes–yes, I do.

Did I really? I suppose so.

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

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

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

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

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

‘I don’t want to.’

‘Do, do!’

‘No, I don’t want to.’

‘Please. I’ll do anything.’

‘Will you let me bite your finger?’

‘Yes.’

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

‘I don’t mind.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V

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

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

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

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

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

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

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