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Illustrations

No Shadows

The celestial light shone most brightly at Cockayne Hatley, a house in Bedfordshire that must always be remembered as the place where the clouds cast no shadows but were always fleecy white, where grass was greener and taller, strawberries bigger and more plentiful, and above all where garden and woods, the house and the family, the servants and villagers, would never change. It was a rather ugly house, verandahed and ivied, which my father had taken, not as I thought for eternity but for perhaps ten years, to house his family of two sons and three daughters. We had grown too big for our London house, 23a Bruton Street, where I was born. (It still stands, unrecognisable with its discreet front door replaced by blatant shop-windows. Not long ago, walking home after dinner in Hill Street, I followed a fire-engine for the first time in my life. It led me to the house of my birth burning brightly, and in the crowd I came shoulder to shoulder with my brother.)

Hatley was an unpretentious house and my mother, I think, did nothing much to improve it. There were assegais in the hall and a gong to say that meals were ready, and a dark dining-room with the Marly horses in black bronze on the chimney-piece. It was a room into which I scarcely went except to say good morning to my father eating his breakfast alone, and to be given a minute tidbit of his roll spread with butter and marmalade, and on ‘occasions’ such as snapdragon at Christmas or when my father showed his magic lantern. Two or three times a year the children and household were given this double treat of magic and contretemps – the burnt finger, the appalling smell of multiple substances burning, the upside-down pictures, the reliable sameness of the slides. These never changed, any more than did the servants, who must have wearied of the programme. All fathers of the nineties had magic lanterns and slides of the Zoo and the Houses of Parliament and Niagara, but we thought ourselves unique and superior by having one – only one – of Father himself and my eldest sister Marjorie, taken in Scotland, with a background of moors.

The drawing-room had a palm and a draped grand piano and three big windows, whose blue curtains were seldom hung in the summer, as they had to be laid out on the lawn to get their inartistic brightness faded by the eternal Hatley sunshine. There were screens and faded red chintz-covered sofas and down-at-castor chairs and an ottoman, and pictures of Cust ancestors and children (the house was owned by Lord Brownlow). There were white fur rugs in profusion, my mother’s touch and a happy one, for children to roll upon, with a more interesting smell than the common knee-excoriating carpet. There was a little room, used only for the Christmas tree, and there was my father’s study, well lined with books and giving on to the garden, into which jutted a glass palm-filled bubble. Today we can admire a Victorian conservatory, but my Pre-Raphaelite mother would have none of it.

Upstairs the house wandered without sense through passages and baize swing-doors, different levels and wings, with no symmetry or plan but to my child’s reason the true design. There was the schoolroom wing and the nurseries. The schoolroom was ruled by Deborah Metzker, a squat, flat-slippered, manly woman, severe and orderly, with no give, few smiles and no caresses, but ‘Debby’ was loved by Marjorie and our brothers Haddon and John. When I was three they were respectively fourteen, eleven and nine. There was an age-bar that allowed us to mix only very occasionally, although the next child, my sister Letty, was already seven. Sometimes the nursery would visit the schoolroom and be impressed by its age and intelligence, its aviary of canaries and bullfinches and its many pugs, the only breed of dog considered ‘safe with children.’ Sitting there one day at tea, high in my mother’s arms, I remember looking down on the sad fair face of my brother Haddon. Soon after he was to die and cause my mother such an anguish of grief that she withdrew into a studio in London, where in her dreadful pain she was able to sculpt a recumbent figure of her dead son. Cut in marble it now lies in the chapel at Haddon Hall, and the plaster cast, which I think more beautiful as being the work of her own hand, is in the Tate Gallery. All her artistic soul went into this tomb, and critics of fifty years later, their vision, values and perspective deformed or reformed by Henry Moore, have bowed to the truth and beauty of what she created. My mother did not live to mourn the death of her other children. She used to tell me at eighty how the thought of this dead child could hurt her as keenly as ever, but that the thought grew ever rarer.

The schoolroom visited the nursery only when they were dressed as musketeers or Romans or clowns and were desperate for an audience. The nursery did not have pets. It had Nanny, who was all and everything. She looked like a little dried-up monkey. I thought her most lovely. Her eyes were blue and almost met, the pink of her cheeks was broken veins; her hair she dealt with once a week with a sponge and some dark liquid in a saucer which resulted in an unsuccessful brown-black; her teeth were long by nature, her body a mummy’s bones. She took her bath every morning behind the nursery screen on which Walter Crane’s Sleeping Beauty, Yellow Dwarf, Beauty and the Beast, etc. were pasted. I was given a Marie biscuit to allay my curiosity and never did I peer through the screen chinks. Nanny always wore black, winter and summer – a bodice and skirt made of ‘stuff.’ On her head she wore for the Park a minute black bonnet that just covered the top of her dear head, moored down with strong black velvet ribbons tied beneath her chin. I loved her dearly, because I was an affectionate, incurious, unenquiring child, so that it seemed only natural that I should not be allowed to take a toy in my perambulator to the Park, or my doll to the garden, and that Nanny would never cuddle or comfort me. Nor did she ever play with me. She sat always at the plain deal nursery table mending our clothes and darning her own stockings on an egg.

It was a leisured life. I do not think that Nanny did the children’s washing (the laundrymaid saw to that), and she had a nurserymaid to lay the table and dust and make our beds and dress my sister Letty and push the perambulator when in London. Strapped into my navy-blue pram, a crescent balanced on sensitive springs, a wide moufflon cape leaving nothing exposed but my white woollen hands, coifed in a so-called ‘Dutch’ bonnet tied like Nanny’s under the chin, I would be wheeled, long-haired tam-o’-shantered sister Letty walking alongside, to the Nannies’ fashion centre, Rotten Row, where Nanny would meet Nanny Benson and Nanny Poynder to talk of their charges in dark undertones, spelling out the flattering p-r-e-t-t-y, or the ominous d-e-n-t-i-s-t, or to discuss disloyally the ‘enamelled’ Princess of Wales or my Nanny’s unreasonable dislike of the Duke of York. We wheeled along Rotten Row and ladies and gentlemen on tall horses would stop and ask whose children we were. Later, when I was always dressed in black satin, more riders stopped. I was taken out of the pram for leg-stretching, but no romping was allowed. The grass was too dirty, hoops too dangerous, so I walked demurely with Letty and Daisy Benson talking of Christmas and birthdays. On muddy days the one-legged crossing-sweeper always got a penny for the channel he had cleaned, and would grin and touch his cap, passing the time of day with Nanny, whom he called ‘Mrs Whatmore.’ My aunts called her ‘Whatmore.’ Mother said ‘Nanny’ and the aunts thought this as wrong as saying ‘Cook’ or ‘your master.’ I realised life’s monotony and accepted it as one of the natural laws, but it was a great delight to go out, as I sometimes did, with my mother in a hansom cab, even though she did once drop me on the pavement when stepping out on that precarious little foothold – an event that I do not remember but heard tell of a hundred times.

And so back to dinner at one o’clock. I was the baby and in consequence Nanny’s special charge and favourite. As I sat perched high in my baby’s chair, strapped in with a tray for my food that, attached to the chair, came whirling over my head and imprisoned me safely, Nanny would feed me bread and milk, teach me to use my right hand, give me a crust to suck and later a chicken drumstick to gnaw – a bone I see to this day as the symbol of the soul. On my feeder in red cross-stitch was written ‘Don’t be dainty’ and I wasn’t, but poor Letty, like so many children, while not dainty, could not swallow her food. Round and round it went in her mouth, colder and more congealed grew the mutton-fat, further away receded the promising pudding, and very often I saw her unfinished plate put cold into the cupboard for tea. Nanny, typical of her date and dryness, trained us by punishment only, never by reasoning and persuasion. I was so rarely naughty that I came in for very little chastisement: occasionally a ‘bed for the rest of the day’ like life-sentences that never finish their term, so that by teatime I was picked up and given a treat – a paintbox perhaps with magazine pictures to colour and instructions not to lick my brush like grown-ups, who if they licked green paint, known to be arsenic, would surely die. But Letty, although a good child too, got boxed on the ears and, cruellest and most humiliating, a ‘dose’ as a punishment. What seemed dreadful favouritism may have been due to our difference in age. Letty was given rhubarb, an obnoxious yellow powder to be taken in water, milk or jam (Letty chose jam through her tears), while I had a glass of cheerful tinkling citrate of magnesia. I used to cry for Letty’s tears and occasionally bought her a reprieve.

Letty was my be-all, my dayspring, my elder, my accomplice. Hers was the invention. I do not remember having any myself. Hers was the daily ‘strip’ whispered from her bed to mine in darkness – long sagas, no fairy stuff, more family life with my aunts and grandmother or the Dan Leno family, a sort of normal background of home with quite dreadful happenings and tortures predominating. Then Letty could draw well, and Letty rode side-saddle on Cobweb, and Marjorie galloped on Trilby, while I sat in a padded worked chair-saddle, like a howdah, on Shetland. Letty was graceful, I was a blunderbuss. Letty picked up a lot and brought the news to the nursery – tremendous news – that Aunt Kitty had not died of a chill but had drowned herself in the lake at Belvoir, that she had seen our mother sobbing, and that Nanny, said to be on her holiday, was never to return. In argument Letty would gain the point by reminding me that she was four and a half years older, but I thought of us as twins with her as the clever one. She said older prayers – ‘Our Fathers’ – at Nanny’s bath-aproned knee while I, my face glowing from the fire and glistening with lanoline, mumbled ‘Please God bless Papa and Mama’ and ‘Gentle Jesus meek and mild.’

Nanny taught me my letters on building-blocks and taught me to read without tears by the ripe age of four. I learnt that E was like a little carriage with a little seat for the driver, that G looked like a monkey eating a cake, and later that the pig was in the gig and how ten men met in a den. By five or six I was on to Line upon Line and Lines Left Out, which dealt unexpectedly enough with Abraham and Lot’s wife. The first book I read to myself was Stumps, which on finishing I began again. I resolved to do this for ever. The next was Little Christian’s Pilgrim’s Progress, as a serial story in a bound copy of Sunday. I knew Pliable and Obstinate and Faithful (I don’t suppose that Carnal Cogitation figured) as I knew ordinary surnames – Nixon the butler, or Searle or Durrance. They carried no allegorical sense any more than Marderveen, in its fluted pyramidal bottle sealed in scarlet, meant Pommade Divine, sovereign for bumps. I learnt my tables (early ones), and strokes and pothooks came easily, I imagine, since I remember making and enjoying them. Nanny sat and I stood by her side reading aloud, as I followed her guiding pencil, from Little Arthur’s England.

I knew a lot of poems by heart, but never funny ones. My mother did not mind nursery rhymes. She liked only the beautiful in everything. Tolerant of toys, she was unsympathetic to any that were conventional or comic. Japanese dolls and Japanese crinkly-paper books were encouraged. She abhorred anything in the fashionable golliwog style. I am not capable of describing the extraordinary beauty and flavour that emanated from my mother. She had ethereal iridescence, passionate but not over-demonstrative love for her children, and a certain mysterious detachment. I never knew her tired or sad or very gay. Crossness was out of her ken. She would rock me and I would press my face into her cream (never white) silks and laces, and shut my eyes to smell more clearly the faint orris-root that scented them. I hope that as this story moves on she will here and there be seen as she was, but it is too much to expect.

When I was about six the world-shattering news that Hatley was to be sold overwhelmed us all. Shades of the prison-house had begun to close very early for me. I knew that ‘things didn’t last for ever,’ that Nanny had once been a child and would die. Already at five I would tell myself that I too was to be a victim of death. I would say ‘You are only a child. It is too far ahead to think of.’ I suppose that subconsciously it was my brother’s death that had instructed me, although I do not remember the happening, nor my mother’s misery, nor talk among servants and villagers, but there it was, I knew that we were moving on, and superimposed on this little shadow of instability came a black thundering ejecting cloud. Hatley and Bruton Street were to be sold, and a new house bought in London. It was to be goodbye to the known world. A fig for Bruton Street! but Hatley …

The grown-ups too were very sad (in itself disconcerting) – Nanny and Debby and Miss Tritton, and Rose the nurserymaid and the gardeners who were to watch us go, and the groom who was to go but not with us, and Miss Laxton and her old mother in the house across the field, and the clergyman and the washerwoman, and the Peels, the only neighbours. All seemed to be part of this tragedy. Goodbye to the tall grass and the hay, the pond with the island and the little boat, and the frogs in the gruesome pit that pyramided themselves until they toppled over, to the garden and the sun-hot fruit on the kitchen-garden walls. What would go with us? What would be jettisoned? Was the toy-cupboard going as it stood? Yes – a relief but not enough. Funnily, though, I do not remember the last day. I suppose that it was benignantly camouflaged. Shetland went to Belvoir, so did the carriage-horse Svengali. The pugs and canaries came to London, and the excitement of the huge house boasting of electric light and two bathrooms swept us into a new world that dazzled our eyes, putting the past into a shade that now has become the nostalgic fountain-light of being.

The new life in Arlington Street ended babyhood. Taps and electric switches gave one a certain adult power. It was a vast house of exquisite proportions, now half-obliterated and totally deformed by the Overseas League, which has suppressed the William Kent decorations, torn up and roofed over the eighteenth-century cobbled courtyard and built a lot of new rooms. In our day the cab-horse (we never had a carriage of our own) was driven beneath an archway built into the lodge house, in one hutch of which lived Mrs Seed, the white-haired lodge-lady. The horse would slither and slide and panic on the slippery outsize cobblestones, the bells would ring an alarm and we would dash to the third-floor nursery window in the hope of seeing him fall.

The Quality, when the front door opened, found themselves in a darkish pillared hall, to the right of which was a wide and shallow-stepped staircase of stone, beautifully balustraded in wrought iron. Tradesmen darted down a stairway in the lodge and followed a subterranean passage that ran the long length of the courtyard. Huge kitchens were beneath the lodge, so that the food had a long cold journey before it reached the house. On the passage level was a fine big room looking on to Green Park, known as the ‘basement,’ in which stood my brother’s unplaced tomb. There was also a servants’ hall where the nine servants ate and laughed uproariously. Never today are children told to shut the door against the deafening laughter of the staff. The narrow back stairs went up five stone flights with an iron banister curved outwards to give place to ladies’ hooped skirts – a pre-crinoline line. Between these banisters there just fitted a labour-saving letter-box slung between two leather straps and worked by a top-floor wheel and a basement handle. The procedure was to communicate from the upper floors by an echo-age telephone, saying to the cave-dweller ‘I’ve put some letters in the box,’ and he would rush to manipulate the handle. Another device was a small electric gadget on the wall by the front door which, when a little lever was pulled down, would produce in a short time a child of nine dressed in heavy blue serge uniform, a pillbox hiding one ear, who would for sixpence encircle like Puck any distance in forty minutes, bearing letters or parcels.

Giving on to the Park on the courtyard level, connected by an outside stairway to a mangy garden below, was a Kent-decorated dining-room painted cream, a colour now much condemned as a background because it lasted too long as the artistic fashion, and a library for my father, with the Encyclopaedia Britannica, bound copies of the Badminton Magazine, current works of Conan Doyle and Kipling, Hansards, Blue Books, Red Books, Who’s Whos, Burke’s Peerage, Turf Guides and a large writing-table at which he wrote letters to Drummond’s Bank, the Leicestershire Agricultural Club, the Sun Insurance Co., occasional articles on dry-fly fishing for the Badminton Magazine and a blue-moon letter to The Times. I remember the dear man scratching away with his J-nib in an exquisite legible hand. He would lay down his pen to give me a pink sweetie called Otto of Rose against the doubtful breath of smokers, or to dab my nose and chin with a drop of cèdre (a manly scent) from a bottle on his table. No secretary and no typewriter gave a householder two good hours of tiresome work every morning, and the new income tax was another irritating complication. Years later, I remember, it rose to elevenpence in the pound. We all thought Papa would die. He looked too ashen to recover.

My own anxieties had begun. Ruin stared us in the face – everything sold, beggars in the street. This real fear must have come from my father’s perpetual threat of bankruptcy. Another great and yearly dread was the divorce of my parents. Never was such a thing in question. They lived exceedingly happily together, adored their children and were fully conscious of their happy condition. My father had a wayward temper that sometimes ran away with him, and once he threw a napkin at my mother because she had asked Princess Beatrice of Battenberg to luncheon without telling him. This must have started my fears. Heaven no longer lay about me.

To return to the house. There was, looking on to the cobbles, a large morning-room – my mother’s. Had she been less unselfish she would have put my father on the yard side of the house, to be disturbed by the clop-clopping of the horses, and taken for herself the sunny Park-side room, completely noiseless except on Sunday evenings in summer when the military band played Pinafore in the Park bandstand. True, the morning-room had the Kent plasterwork of fruit and flowery swags. It was densely packed with furniture and loved objects, all of sentiment, or things of a colour that she could not resist, such as blue-green Chinese jars or the dead straw of the palm-leaf fan that she used to protect her cheek from the fire. A great many of her drawings hung on the walls. Every room boasted an elaborate chimneypiece of carved wood or marble with an open steel grate.

On the next floor there was a vast ballroom on the court side, generally used as a studio, music and play room, with a piano littered with opera-scores and often an unfinished bust of one of us mobled in wet cloths, a centre-skylit drawing-room elaborately decorated, and two rooms on the Park side with iron balconies. One was a gilded drawing-room (later to become my nursery) and the other my mother’s bedroom, with next door under the stairs a slip of a bathroom with a narrow tin bath like the one in which the brides were drowned. The rooms were enormously high on these three floors and the stairs were very exhausting, especially for the ever-changing seventeen-year-old nurserymaid who carried our trays up the last flight of four, and for the ‘boy’ who carried them up the other three storeys. Many a time did we hear with joy the interminable clatter of a whole tray’s fall, with its horrid mutton and cabbage and tapioca pudding.

On the third floor a passage, the only one above stairs, led from my father’s bedroom and a spare room to the schoolroom, Marjorie’s room and Mrs Page’s, who had now replaced Deborah. On this floor was the special bathroom-cum-box-and-lumber room. My father was very pleased. A six-foot-two man, he had never had but a hip-bath and now he could soak at full length and have a very big sponge. I remember how shocked I was when he told me that he never used soap in his bath. He had Windsor soap, we had Vinolia and Pears (a choice at Belvoir) and drearily innocent Cimolite at home. Above this floor two wooden flights of stairs led to the three-roomed nursery wing and the four-roomed maids’ wing. God knows where the other servants slept – in the basement or lodge presumably.

So much for 16 Arlington Street, one of the most unspoilt eighteenth-century houses in London, built at the end of a cul-de-sac, where daily lingered a hope of a barrel organ (to whose now lost music the clumsy-booted children danced, holding wide their skirts with more graceful fingers), wrapped in its inevitable overalling of patterned green baize complete with Italian grinder, corseted, mortar-boarded wife and the soliciting monkey in regimental red, equipped to present arms. Or very rarely the dramas of Punch’s life, and Judy’s death, and Toby’s indifference, ringed round with a knot of smaller children, cabbies, and flocks of pigeons and sparrows squabbling for the grain that fell from the poor horses’ nosebag, horses that in cul-de-sacs never found the straw to deaden their hoof-fall for dying ears.

Here my mother drew, and entertained very occasionally. Here my father wrote his letters, laced on his boots at mid-day and walked down Bond Street, taking off his top hat to bow to acquaintances at every other step. Here we all had our meals at one and two o’clock respectively on different floors. From here Marjorie went for casual education to Miss Wolff’s classes in South Street, Mayfair, and to art schools in Kensington, and Letty too later on, and brother John came and went to school.

I became a good little girl, affectionate and, Nanny said, ‘well built.’ No one thought me pretty but my mother. My hair was put into curl-papers every night since memory starts. It was all a pale yellow fuzz in the morning and at parties, but fell lankily at the end of the day or when it rained. I wore scarlet shoes with rosettes like Harriet’s (and the Matches), and for best a black satin Vandyck dress with collar, cuffs, and apron of lawn and real lace. I also had a short sensible black satin coat for the Park. I was a happy trusting child, a little frightened of the dark and never allowed the chink of open door that would have helped me. Spitting out cod-liver oil in the ‘place’ was my only deceit I remember.

My mother spent the mornings in bed. I see her sitting cross-legged in her bed writing endless letters with a flowing quill pen. On her knee was balanced a green morocco folding letter-case, with blotting paper and a pot of ink which, curiously enough, never got splashed on the Irish linen sheets. It had a bristled penwiper and pockets for letters written and unwritten. Having no telephone, in urgency she would give a stylised scream to attract her maid Tritton, to whom she would hand a letter marked ‘Messenger Boy’ to be put in the box. My mother would not take long to get up or to wash in soft sterilised water poured out of high stone bottles bought from the chemist. She used very little powder (Fuller’s Earth) and a speck of Roger & Gallet’s pink lip-salve (the same that she would surreptitiously smear on my resisting mouth for fancy balls).

My mother entertained occasionally at two o’clock luncheon. Very beautiful women were always round the table. Lady Westmorland was the most lovely in my eyes, perhaps because she painted her face. I would come down in my embroidered-with-wheat-ears lawn frock and scarlet shoes and stand by my mother’s chair while she plucked admiringly at my hair and let it flutter slowly through her fingers. No one saw me with her eyes. The gentlemen were kind. I was told particularly to remember Cecil Rhodes, a thick square man who stared at me and did not know what to say either. Later on I remember the bearded Lord Salisbury (Prime Minister on and off), to whom my father was secretary. I remember him chiefly because I dropped a valued sixpence behind a bookcase in the drawing-room and half-crying told him, so he gave me another. I was scolded for asking gentlemen for money.

My father went down to the House of Lords in the afternoon. My mother would etherealise Cecil Rhodes, Paderewski, Arthur Balfour or George Meredith with her skilled pencil. Queen Victoria she drew, but with only one sitting (Deborah Metzker, a pudding-basin and mantilla on her head, had to pose for the accessories). She was a justly renowned artist. In 1902 at the Grosvenor Gallery, in collaboration with Benjamin Constant, she gave an exhibition of 192 pencil portraits. Two were bought by the Luxembourg. All the celebrities of politics, literature or the stage, all the beauties of their day, were pleased to sit to her and see themselves through her beatifying eyes. We were often her models, statue-still for hours at a time. Lessons went forward with Nanny, and I would go every morning to the schoolroom for piano lessons from Mrs Page. This idyllic life was varied by visits to Belvoir, my grandfather’s castle in Leicestershire, and to Sussex, where my mother rented cottages beside the summer sea.

The Castle on the Hill

The Castle stands high on a hill overlooking the vale of Belvoir, then a contented vale of solid farms and farmers who followed foxhounds and thought of their acres in terms of ‘runs,’ ‘jumps’ and ‘coverts.’ The Duchess who had built this Valhalla was a Howard from Castle Howard and as a bride had been grievously disappointed at the low wandering Charles II house built on the foundations of a Norman stronghold. She had expected better, so her kind rich husband allowed her to raze it to the ground and to build on the old foundations a real castle, neo-Norman, neo-Gothic, neo-everything. Scarcely had she got it up than it was burnt almost out, with many of its prized treasures. Undaunted she built it up again. So steep was its hill that she made a cyclopic causeway to link it to a neighbouring mound. She furnished it lavishly. She hung it with the family chefs d’œuvre and a respectable collection of Italian and Dutch Masters, with Gobelin tapestries and all the stained glass, the dogtooth, the red and the gold of the day. This second castle was opened by the Prince Regent in 1820.

The Duchess bore about ten children and died of what must have been an appendicitis at forty. She had prepared her mausoleum on the further mound, where in statuary she floats heavenward towards her recovered marble-winged babies. Blue and yellow hidden windows light her flight. Her sorrowing husband did not re-marry, and at his death his son succeeded him – Uncle Granby to my ears but not to my eyes, for he died before my birth, and his brother John, my grandfather, inherited the estate. The fortunes had been sadly depleted by the castle-building.

Lord John (now the Duke) was a beautiful bent old man. I can see him very clearly, walking down the endless corridors of Belvoir, wrapped warmly in a thick black cape buttoned down the front, for these passages in winter were arctic – no stoves, no hot pipes, no heating at all. He would unbutton his cape at the drawing-room door and hang it on a long brass bar with many others. He joined his large family at lunch, but I do not remember his talking very often. I would sit on his bony knees when the meal was over, and be allowed to blow open his gold hunter watch, and ask for a comical poem that he and I both liked to hear recited in a sing-song tone that has stayed with me until now. A strange choice for a child of six, it was about a cuckolded Roundhead whose wife was hiding an escaped Cavalier:

I went into the dairy to see what I could see,

And there I saw a gentleman’s boot

Where a gentleman’s boot ought never to be.

So I called to my wife and I said ‘My dear,

Pray what is this gentleman’s boot doing here?’

‘Why, you old goose, you blind old goose,

And can’t you very well see

That it is a milking-pail

My granny has sent to me?’

‘Hobs bobs, here’s fun!

Milking-pails with spurs on.’

I went into the kitchen to see what I could see,

And there I saw a gentleman’s sword

Where a gentleman’s sword ought never to be.

So I called to my wife and I said ‘My dear,

Pray what is this gentleman’s sword doing here?’

‘Why, you old goose, you blind old goose,

And can’t you very well see

That it is a toasting-fork

My granny has sent to me?’

‘Hobs bobs, here’s fun!

Toasting-forks with scabbards on.’

I went into the chamber to see what I could see,

And there I saw a gentleman

Where a gentleman ought never to be.

So I called to my wife and I said ‘My dear,

Pray what is this gentleman doing here?’

‘Why, you old goose, you blind old goose,

And can’t you very well see

That it is a waiting-maid

My granny has sent to me?’

‘Hobs bobs, here’s fun!

Waiting-maids with breeches on.’

After this poem, or another starting ‘O that my lips might bleat like buttered peas,’ lisping Aunt Queenie would say ‘Tingaly the bingaly, Farver,’ and he would let me ring the gold bell on the table. The groom of the chambers, thus summoned, would ask what orders for the stables. Some days the answer was ‘Perfection round at a quarter before three, if you please.’ These were the good days for me and Letty. We would watch my grandfather mount Perfection from the mounting-stone against the castle wall. Perfection was snow-white, very fat and quiet. Either one of his sons or Mr Knox, his private chaplain, would ride beside him, while a smart old groom, liveried in blue and buttoned in silver, top-hatted and cockaded, jogged behind.

The Rev. Knox, our private chaplain, was ‘extra-parochial.’ I have never heard of another ordained clergyman being extra-parochial. My grandfather was his bishop. He could, I suppose, have celebrated Black Mass in the little white plaster gothic chapel, and nothing said. But Mr Knox was not a Black Masser. He was a black Irish Protestant with a brogue, who played a jig on the fiddle and had the hands and legs of a man who thinks of horses even in the pulpit. We had prayers every morning, and church, morning and evening, on Sunday. We said our prayers and sung our canticles out of morocco-bound, octavo books printed with f’s for s’s, and prayers for the eternal health of Queen Adelaide. How well we knew, by the speed of the morning prayers, if Mr Knox was hunting that day or not, and how far off the meet was. We used to believe that he wore his spurs under his cassock and surplice.

He was, among other unclerical activities, Captain of the Belvoir Fire Brigade. That was a magnificent turn-out. The alarm would ring and the brigade would muster, some of them from a mile away with a precipitous hill to climb. They had axes and Britannia helmets. The engine was hand-pumped and went out for real business, in my recollection, but once – to a burning stately home of a neighbour eight miles away. I think that its going was more in the nature of a gesture than anything else. The house was burnt to the ground.

But the days when my grandfather did not ride were not so free for us. A lengthy discussion would be carried on between him, some aunts and the groom of the chambers as to whether it was to be the landau, the victoria or the barouche that should be used for the drive. I never understood what the issue was – the size of the vehicle, the state of the roads or the condition of the horses. Anyhow, the decision was made and the children were dressed for the afternoon drive. I remember genuinely hating it, I don’t know why. It was not more boring than the pram and the walks holding Nanny’s hand, never for one second being allowed to relinquish it. Perhaps it was because I, for one, always felt sick and dreaded the smell of the blue leather padding and the hot horses, and sitting backward, sometimes on the vast landau seat, sometimes on the minute stool of the victoria. Whatever it was, I hated it. I would be dressed, as usual, in a black satin coat, black satin bonnet and scarlet shoes with rosettes. We would drive for an hour and a half through country roads of very little interest. There was no town within eight miles and scarcely any neighbours to leave cards upon. So round and round the muddy lanes of the estate we splashed, with an immense apoplectic coachman on the box and an alert footman in a fawn boxcloth liveried coat, check-lined and almost to the ground, who sprang up and down to open the too many gates.

When we reached home, a large crowd of tourists would have collected on each side of the last hundred yards of the approach, and my grandfather would uncover his head and bow very slightly with a look of pleasure and welcome on his delicate old face. He loved his tourists. They represented to him England and liberty and the feudal system, and were a link between the nobility and the people. The house was open to them three times a week and on all bank holidays. They would arrive in four-in-hand charabancs from all over the country. Bedrooms and one drawing-room, one study and a dining-room were excluded from their tour. Otherwise, from morning to dark, armies of sightseers tramped through that welcoming house. No efforts were made to improve it for them. There were no signed photographs of royalty or of the family, no special flowers or Coronation robes draped casually over a chair, coronet to hand, no tables laid or crumpled newspapers. Nor could they have any idea of how we really lived. In the summer my mother arranged for us children to picnic out and not to return until the hordes had departed, for in truth the atmosphere – the smell – was asphyxiating. Not that one could get away with one’s picnic – they all brought picnics too and were encouraged to eat and sleep and take their boots off and comb their hair in the garden, on the terraces, all about and everywhere. They paid no admittance and two or three elderly ladies in black dresses – Lena the head housemaid, the controller of a regiment of maids and the terror of our chapel choir (she sang loud and false to poor Miss Thursby’s pedal-sore harmonium), and Mrs Smith the housekeeper, sparkling with jet arabesques, or a pensioned retainer – would shepherd them round.

On Sundays the family, its guests, its governesses and nurses, my grandfather’s gentlemen secretaries, his chaplain, Mrs Knox and their child, made a tour of the demesne. Soon after lunch church clothes were changed for equally long close-fitting costumes. The pony chaise was ordered for my grandfather, and a groom to lead it. We would make first for the stables. Mr Durrance, the head groom, would be standing there in blue and silver, carrots in hand, to receive us. The gigantic Princes, Belvoirs and Wellingtons that drew the carriages, lined up hind-end foremost, were given a pat on the withers by my grandfather’s withered hand, and a carrot was proffered to each twitching muzzle. Next the sore backs of the hunters were looked at reprovingly. An apple for my Shetland pony, and the doors closed on the champing, the ammonia smell and the exquisitely-plaited selvedge of straw. A minute’s glance at the harness-room’s gleaming crests of peacocks on blinkers, another at the carriages, dog- and tub-carts and the sleigh. I never knew a great house that did not sport a sleigh, and yet I never saw one used in England. How did they ever come to the coach-houses and where are they sliding to now? Did Russian princes present them, or were they mascots to ward off the hunter’s dread of ice and snow?

After the stables came the gardens. Mr Divers, the head gardener, had a black W. G. Grace beard covering his chest, a black cut-away coat, Homburg hat and a bunch of Bluebeard keys. It was impossible to imagine a spade in his hands. He would cut us off a fine bunch of white grapes from the thousand hanging clusters in the vinery, pick us a camellia apiece and offer some not-up-to-much apples to munch on the walk. My grandfather would congratulate him on his last-won horticultural medal and pretend to understand the Latin names of his flowers. I liked the poultry yard better because there was a muster of peacocks, and best perhaps the dairy and Miss Saddlebridge the dairymaid (whose face was not her fortune), who filled the dishes with creamy milk and churned yellow butter-pats crested with peacocks. The kennels next, but they smelt of dead horse, and hounds are not trained to know the difference between men and doorposts, so ladies often weakened on this last call. It was an exhausting walk and my legs were very short. I got a lift sometimes on my grandfather’s lap in his chaise, but it was hard on the polite and reluctant men and women who trudged a good three miles, the ladies gathering up their long skirts in their little frozen hands.

My grandfather would come to London for the season. He had a house in Cambridge Gate, the only ugly row of Regent’s Park. He would send the carriage and pair to fetch us to tea occasionally. It was no fun.

We were not very fond of our aunts and uncles who lived with him at Belvoir. There was poor Aunt Kitty who drowned herself. Unarmed for life, artistic and frustrated, she sought and never found relief, neither by joining the Church of Rome nor by becoming a nurse at Guy’s – a highly-commended move in 1914 when I followed her to that great hospital, but in her day condemnable. These departures exasperated her eccentric mother (my grandfather’s second wife), so Aunt Kitty, decked in what jewellery she possessed and marking the fatal brink with her parasol, found peace in the deep Belvoir lake. When his Duchess died, Aunt Queenie kept house for my grandfather. She painted water colours and wrote about art for the Connoisseur. Aunt Elsie, the youngest and our favourite, married Lord George Scott, who came over the Border like Young Lochinvar to court her. She scarcely knew him when they were married in the Belvoir chapel. I was bridesmaid in a Vandyck dress (cream satin this time). She died alas! too young.

Uncle Cecil was a big success with children, being always on all fours. He went to the Boer War as a reporter. He quarrelled with the family. He suffered from spy-fever and at the age of eighty, I am sorry to say, could no longer endure life itself so ended it beneath a train at Crowborough. Uncle Billy died young of fits, and Uncle Edward, the eldest of my father’s half-brothers, died of tuberculosis and other dread diseases. Uncle Bobby, the youngest, had all the strength and health and character that the others seemed to lack. A gallant soldier in the Boer War, with a D.S.O. for us to admire, he became Master of the Belvoir Hounds. He wore an eyeglass and had a drawl, though he very rarely spoke. I remember his man asking us when or where some event was to happen, adding ‘I’ve asked His Lordship, and all His Lordship says is “Aw”.’ He was forty-five in 1915 and on the reserve of the Sixtieth Rifles, so the war took him and killed him.

We were chiefly at Belvoir in winter, I suppose, for I think of the tobogganing down slopes worthy of a world’s fair, and my fear of the horse-pond ice breaking and drowning Letty, and of day-and-night prayers for snow. The elders outprayed me in their petitions for thaw and for the Meet of the Belvoir Hounds at the Castle door. Bright and beautiful as meets were, I would rather have had snow. Meets were two a penny, and following the hunt in a pony-cart frankly bored me. The ladies wore top hats or billycocks with very black veils drawn taut across their cold noses, and fringes and buns. The men were in pink, with glossy white ‘leathers,’ swigging down cherry brandy from their saddles to keep out the cold. Hounds making a faint music of excitement were dexterously and mercilessly being whipped into a pack by Ben Capel and his underlings. The Master, Sir Gilbert Greenall, was popular though seldom seen, and in his place would be his redoubtable wife surrounded by the horses pawing and twitching and foaming at the mouth, some incorrigibles sporting red bows on their tails that said ‘I kick.’ Then they would be off, with a flinty clatter of hooves and suppressed oaths and the language horses are thought to understand, through the bare woods to the open Vale, the second horsemen following demurely. They would hack home cold, weary and fulfilled in the twilight, generally caked in mud and smelling of horse, and fall upon the tea and boiled eggs, and discuss the runs and falls and scandals until the gong rang for dressing-time, getting louder and louder as it approached down the unending passages.

The gong man was an old retainer, one of those numberless ranks of domestic servants which have completely disappeared and today seem fabulous. He was admittedly very old. He wore a white beard to his waist. Three times a day he rang the gong – for luncheon, for dressing-time, for dinner. He would walk down the interminable passages, his livery hanging a little loosely on his bent old bones, clutching his gong with one hand and with the other feebly brandishing the padded-knobbed stick with which he struck it. Every corridor had to be warned and the towers too, so I suppose he banged on and off for ten minutes, thrice daily.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY LADY DIANA COOPER

LADY DIANA COOPER

The Rainbow
Comes and Goes

Illustrations

1

No Shadows

2

The Castle on the Hill

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY LADY DIANA COOPER

LADY DIANA COOPER

The Rainbow Comes and Goes

Illustrations

1

No Shadows

2

The Castle on the Hill

The Rainbow
Comes and Goes