And the Band Played On (20 page)

For Andrew, the summer season away from home on the Lancashire coast provided a welcome break from recalcitrant pupils and from the pressures of family life. It was fun as well as providing valuable publicity and kudos. On his return, Andrew booked a prominent advertisement in the
Standard
, which now said:

Mr Hume has resumed TEACHING.

Now the Local Representative for College of Violinists. Pupils Prepared for above examination in December next.

Syllabus and Terms on application.

Andrew’s reputation was growing. In January 1897, the
Standard
reported: ‘Mr A. Hume, the well-known Dumfries violinist, was on Thursday night playing at a grand concert in Cumnock – one of the most musical towns in the west of Scotland – when he completely captivated his audience which was both large and critical. His solos were strictly classical.’

Four years had now passed since the birth of the Humes’ youngest child, Grace. Andrew’s wife Grace did not enjoy good health – indeed, Andrew took pleasure in telling people that she enjoyed ill health – and she had suffered two early miscarriages. Although the miscarriages had confined Grace to bed for a month at a time and left her severely depressed, they had come as a relief to Andrew, who was finding even three children a distraction from his work. And he did not relish the cost of having to move home again.

But Andrew’s summer sortie to Morecambe seems to have rekindled his ardour for Grace, who discovered shortly before Christmas that she was pregnant again. Grace took to her bed for fear of losing another child, while Andrew – furious with his wife as well as with himself – went house-hunting for a larger property. On 28 June 1897 Catherine (‘Kate’) Hume was born in their new apartment in a long line of terraced houses in Whitesands, overlooking the River Nith. She cried a lot, but not as much or as often, as her father would later unkindly relate, as she sobbed as a teenager.

With four females in the house competing for his attention, Andrew started to bond with the only other male in the house, his son Jock, who was now seven. Nellie, Andrew had decided, was tone deaf. Grace had briefly showed some interest in music but had withdrawn after being smacked hard over the fingers by her father for hitting a wrong key when practising her scales on the piano. But Jock had inherited his father’s natural gift for music and was now playing both the piano and the violin. When Andrew wasn’t away from home, he gave his son an hour’s tuition every day and made him rehearse for an hour on his own before bedtime at 7 p.m.

In spite of the extra space that Whitesands afforded, Andrew hated living there from the moment they moved in and he blamed Grace, even though he had chosen it himself. The pleasant view of the River Nith did not compensate for the damage caused by flooding every time the Nith burst its banks, which it did twice in the first year, entering the house and coming half-way up the stairs. Andrew wished he had paid more attention to the river when considering the property. Nor, when he had walked round the house before signing the lease, had Andrew noticed that his bedroom window overlooked the very place where he had been arrested for poaching. The memory of it still rankled. And, when the wind blew in a certain direction, there was an unpleasant, sickly smell from the half dozen tanneries that were established near the river. But most of all, Andrew felt the street was not appropriate for a person in his position.

The wide open space between the row of terraced houses and the river had made Whitesands a natural place for public gatherings, including the annual Rood Fair. Although the fair took place only once a year, there were many other occasions when it seemed to Andrew Hume that the entire population of Dumfries was camping on his doorstep. There were livestock sales most months, for instance. Andrew particularly hated these, as the smell of dung and the early-morning mooing of cattle and bleating of sheep reminded him of his childhood on the farm in Lochfoot, a period in his life he preferred to forget. From time to time gypsies would turn up en masse in their caravans to sell ponies, sometimes staying for days at a time. The general disruption of these events, not to mention the constant cackling of geese and the clatter of horses’ shoes, made it an unsuitable location for a teacher of music.

One of the original attractions of Whitesands for Andrew had been the proximity of the Coach and Horses, a hostelry much favoured by Burns, giving it a literary reputation. But it had taken a turn for the worse since Burns was last there and was now better known as the haunt of the notorious prostitute Margaret Hog and a magnet for drunks whenever there was a gathering. Sometimes they would spill out of the Coach and Horses on to Andrew’s doorstep, shouting profanities up at the window.

Unfortunately, Andrew had committed to a long lease on the house in Whitesands and it was three years before they were able to move back to Nith Place, an altogether much more attractive street at that time, this time to a first-floor apartment at number 9, sandwiched between a butcher’s shop and a children’s outfitters. It was here that the Hume’s fifth and last child, Andrew, was born on 4 November 1901.

Andrew senior would say later that Grace took to her bed for the birth of their son Andrew and seldom got out of it again until her death four and a half years later. He attributed her retreat from family life to ‘nerves’ and ‘women’s troubles’ and continued with his life as if she no longer existed, employing a nurse to attend to Grace and a nanny to take care of the children so that he was free to accept musical engagements.

Andrew’s musical reputation continued to grow. In 1902 he organised an orchestra to play in Dock Park. The
Dumfries & Galloway Standard
reported:

On Wednesday evening the orchestra organised by Mr Hume, Nith Place, made its first appearance on the bandstand when they submitted a program of high-class music. There was a large attendance of the general public and the efforts of the orchestra were much appreciated . . .

One evening each week will be devoted to getting up a first-class repertoire of music. Additional string players will be heartily welcomed and will receive music to practice at home. The intention is to give a concert during the winter season in aid of local charities.

Meanwhile, Grace’s health was deteriorating. Her ‘nerves’ were almost certainly post-natal depression and her physical weakness would have been the early onset of the disease that killed her after stealing her gentle voice: cancer of the oesophagus. The children spent the next four years watching their mother grow weaker while Andrew, relentlessly, pursued other interests. He was thirty-seven years old, a successful musician, attractive to the opposite sex and married to a woman who was in no position to ask awkward questions. Not for the first time he began to see his five children – the youngest, Andrew, a baby, the oldest, Nellie, a girl of thirteen – as a serious encumbrance to his ambitions. Not for the first time, either, did he start looking around for a woman who could fill the gap left in his life by the ailing Grace.

The solution to both problems came in the convenient form of Alice Mary Alston, a good-looking thirty-seven-year-old woman who ran the ladies and children’s outfitters next door – a shop where Grace had always bought the children’s clothes – and was therefore known to all the family. Alice, who had never been married and had no children, was the daughter of a wool spinner from Peebles, Thomas Alston. The family had moved to Troqueer, Dumfries, soon after Alice was born.

Alice, feeling sorry for the good-looking musician, offered to look after the children if Andrew ever needed help. Conveniently, she lived a few hundred yards away in Castle Street. It wasn’t long before the children were invited to address Alice as ‘Aunt Alice’, instead of ‘Miss Alston’. ‘This is so kind of you, Alice,’ Grace Hume used to whisper before the cancer took away her voice.

Responsibilities had been piled on Nellie, the oldest of the Hume children, since the birth of her younger brother Andrew. For almost two years she had been an unpaid nanny to the child whom, surprisingly, she nevertheless liked. Now, aged fourteen, she was an unpaid nurse to her dying mother and unwilling witness to her father’s courtship of Alice. She might have borne this with more fortitude had she not been treated like a child by her father, whose criticism and disapproval of her appearance were crushing her self-confidence while igniting a desperate desire for freedom. Along with all the children, Nellie was required to be in bed by 7 p.m. and up at 6 a.m. to help with household chores. She was not allowed to bring friends home, nor was she was allowed to see them outside school hours, even during the holidays.

Throughout the children’s lives their father had resorted to the belt to punish disobedience or misbehaviour; the belt had been his own father’s way of maintaining order and discipline, he told them by way of self-justification. As Nellie reached puberty he seemed to look for opportunities to beat her, she would later say; sometimes these punishments would be administered with a riding crop.

Eventually, Nellie left home and found work as a domestic servant in a local hotel. It was lonely and humiliating but preferable to remaining at home. What hurt her most was that neither her mother nor her father tried to stop her. ‘It’s probably for the best,’ was all her mother said, realising that she was in no position to protect her eldest daughter any longer. ‘It’s time you earned your own keep, lassie,’ said her father. But the ‘secret society’ – the bond between the older four Hume children, Nellie, Jock, Grace and Kate – held them all together for the time being and a year later, when Nellie went to work in the glove factory, she became friends with Mary Costin whom she introduced to Jock.

For all Andrew Hume’s aspirations and pretensions to be a man of culture, his attitude to his children and their education remained that of a working-class Victorian father, frozen in a time when the poor were forced by necessity to get their children out to work as early as possible to start contributing to the family. It was not the norm then for children at St Michael’s, Dumfries, to cease full-time education at thirteen: parents were encouraged to leave their children in school until at least fifteen. But, like his sisters, Jock left school aged thirteen, finding a temporary job in a solicitor’s office while still living at home, where he continued to receive intensive music lessons from his father who saw his gift for music as a stream of income in the future. There were few constraints on Jock’s movements, unlike the curfew imposed on his sisters, and he used his violin to escape temporarily the tense atmosphere at home and earn a few pennies playing in inns and at celebrations in Dumfries, with the occasional appearance at the Theatre Royal.

Andrew’s wife Grace died on 4 May 1906, his mother Helen, succumbing to pneumonia a few months later, soon after Christmas. It must have been difficult for the five Hume children to lose their mother and their grandmother so close together. But it would seem it was not so difficult for their father to lose his wife and mother. Just when Andrew Hume and Alice Alston consummated their affair we will never know, but by the time Grace died Alice had left her parents’ home and was living conveniently close, above the shop next door in Nith Place. On 19 July 1907, fourteen months after Grace’s death, Andrew and Alice married. They were both aged forty-three. A few months later they moved into a substantial Georgian town house at 42 George Street on the corner of Castle Street where, Andrew said, the family ‘could make a new start’.

Except they wouldn’t. Nellie had already fled the nest; Jock was spending more and more time away from home playing on board passenger ships; and Grace, aged fifteen, was making her own plans to move out, having had a series of blazing rows with her stepmother. That left only the two youngest, Kate and Andrew, at home with their father and new stepmother.

Alice was quick to make her own rules in George Street. This was now her territory, not their mother’s. The children, she said, had ‘lacked discipline’ during their mother’s long illness and were out of control. In future they would be in bed by 8 p.m. every night, regardless of age, having spent an hour practising the piano or violin. Rudeness and misbehaviour would be brought to their father’s attention, to be punished in the usual way.

From the moment the Humes moved in, 42 George Street was not the happy family home that Andrew Hume had hoped it would be.

14

John Jacob Astor VI

14 August, New York

On the evening of Tuesday 13 August 1912, newspaper reporters and photographers gathered outside number 840 Fifth Avenue, New York, better known to their readers as ‘the Astor home’. Door-stepping the Astor home was a long-established tradition among New York pressmen and it reaped rich rewards – the comings and goings of the wealthy, the powerful and the beautiful invariably producing a story or a photograph worthy of the front page.

The last time the press had been there in force had been in May, when the body of Colonel J. J. Astor was brought home from Halifax. Hundreds of column inches had been filled by reporters who came no nearer to the family than the sidewalk yet managed to convey to their readers the tragedy that was unfolding in the house. Tonight was a more joyous occasion, but no less competitive: the press had been tipped off that the birth of Astor’s posthumous child was ‘imminent’. The huge public interest in the event spawned a wholly new press institution, which continues to this day, known as ‘the birth watch’. I experienced it myself when editing the
Daily Express
when Diana, Princess of Wales, went into labour. We produced two front pages in advance of an announcement from Buckingham Palace: one saying, ‘It’s a Boy’, the other saying, ‘It’s a Girl’. We were first off the press with the boy.