Mysterious Wisdom (50 page)

Palmer's working time would be undisturbed – except at such moments of high drama as when some tinkers came round and turned out their donkeys to graze on his lawn, whereupon Palmer summoned help by loudly tolling the bell, the rope of which dangled down from its tower into his studio room. They would have dinner around midday after which Palmer would relax for a while, puffing away at his pipe and reading a novel and more often than not nodding off for a nap. He would then work again until tea time at five o'clock. In winter, after tea, he and Herbert would occasionally play backgammon before Palmer, pulling out a novel by Scott or Dickens or a volume by some favourite poet, would read to Hannah and Herbert until it was the boy's time for bed. Palmer read very slowly and clearly and without affectation. ‘He abhorred few things more than quick reading,' Herbert said, and detested ‘the modern custom of abbreviating the preterites' as a ‘barbarous innovation'
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that destroyed the sonorous rhythms of English. But some passages – particularly the biblical story of Lazarus who had risen from the dead – would move him so deeply that he would be forced to lay down the book. Palmer hated any disturbance when reading. Interruptions always seemed to him to come at some important moment and he would ostentatiously stop short if there was even so much as a whispered instruction to a servant, a tinkling of tea things or a rattle in making up the fire.

In the summer, when the evenings were long, Herbert and Palmer would go for a stroll, wandering along the ridges, down through the furze slopes and by fields of young corn. ‘Few sunsets have seemed comparable in beauty to those he showed me,' Herbert later remembered, ‘and when he could go no longer the twilights seemed to lose half their poetry.'
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Afterwards, when Herbert had gone to bed, Palmer would light his little paraffin lamp – Nancy he called it (he often gave names to familiar or particularly loved objects) – and return to the ‘congenial solitude'
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of his room, preparing designs, compiling portfolios or just sitting and pondering one of his ‘unsettlers': the paradoxes which he collected and liked to subject to his patient processes of thought. These came in such forms as: ‘How is an artist to be a Christian if, as Michelangelo said, “Art is jealous and demands the whole man?”'
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Usually, with his paraffin lamp glowing and a pot of green tea on a tray piled with books, he would read late into the night, anything from favourite old classics through volumes of sermons to the periodicals to which friends and family gave him subscriptions as a gift. For many years his little black cat would sit on his knee, patting the leaves with her paw now and then. When she finally died, he mourned for her loss. ‘I dearly love solitude, but miss poor Tabby,' he wrote to his son.
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Sundays were rigorously observed. Palmer would don his best clothes: a vast broadcloth coat fitted with enormous pockets and a cravat of an obsolete fashion, which he would tuck into his buttoned-up double-breasted waistcoat. Attired like this, he looked so clerical, Herbert remembered, that a rural clergyman had once asked him to assist with the service. Old-fashioned silver spectacles with very broad rims were used for distant objects; but sometimes these were exchanged for a more ordinary pair which, once lost, he would stumble about groping for, with much accompanying grumbling, often treading upon them in the process of looking. The family would set off early to morning service, walking along the ridge that led from their house to the church. They always got there in good time so that Palmer could study the readings before the rest of the congregation arrived. He particularly loved the collects and psalms. ‘The poor world-withered heart begins to open like shrivelled leaves in a gentle summer shower'
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when it hears them, he said, and when he found their cadences massacred, their ancient phrases scrambled by some young High Church reader, his face would darken with anger. When the service was over, however, religious observances were done with for the day. Palmer was not a fanatic and though he refused to sign any petitions calling for the opening of art galleries on Sundays, he disliked the idea that this day should be made miserable by forcing children to put their playthings away. ‘A little child brought up in this way asked its mother what Heaven was like,' he once told a friend. ‘“My love,” said mama, “Heaven is a perpetual Sabbath”; upon which the poor little thing expressed a wish that, when she died, she might go
elsewhere
!'
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‘Unaffected piety was as marked a feature in his character as a craving for knowledge,' said his son, ‘but he never attempted to cram either intellectual or moral food down unwilling throats. The young mind was allured but never driven to its fairest pastures.'
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Readers of his unrelenting letters to More may be surprised by this opinion. Perhaps Palmer had learnt a lesson. Certainly, for the devoted Herbert, a Sunday spent with his father was counted the happiest day of the week.

 

 

‘Herbert is a most dear amiable charming child,' Palmer had written shortly after his eldest son had died. ‘He has lived with me eight years without once displeasing me – but they say he is too weak to be educated – and education including as its foundation the fear and love of God is all in all – besides experience leads me to suppose that I shall lose him like the rest and I love him violently.'
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Palmer seemed almost frightened to open his heart again and Herbert, still only seven when his elder brother fell sick, must often have felt himself to be inadequate. He longed for his father's approval; but instead, after More's death, came a long separation. He was taken by his mother to live with his grandparents. To a boy who had just spent the summer running free with the farm lads, riding shaggy horses and roaming wild hills, the routine at Redstone must have felt oppressive. It was not a relaxed place. Frances Redgrave remembered visiting as a child. Though she had liked chatting with Mrs Linnell by her bedroom fire, she had always been wary of the presiding patriarch. Where Palmer's conversation had always been ‘so delightful and so amusing and so enlightening', Mr Linnell's remarks on the whole were admonishing, she recalled.
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Palmer described Herbert at the age of ten as looking ‘old and unchildlike'.
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He had had a difficult boyhood. Growing up in a house of mourning, he remembered often being miserable during his years at Furze Hill. Trips with his mother into town did little to alleviate loneliness since, what might otherwise have provided a pleasant opportunity to get out and meet neighbouring children, became an ordeal because of his clothes. Dressed in homemade petticoats with a frill for a collar and a ridiculous coat, he was openly mocked by the local boys as he passed. When no one was visiting – which was often – he was much neglected. His mother would retire to her study to write letters and his father to his studio to paint, leaving Herbert alone amid the polished mahogany, the neatly ranked ornaments and regimented books. A visit to the Wright family was a revelation. ‘For the first time I saw toys and games (of which there were a multitude in the “Play-room”),' he remembered, ‘and for the first time I tried to take a share in a round game. And it was there on Xmas Day 1862 at the great glittering table I saw for the first time what English hospitality and unstinted wealth could accomplish with unostentatious pride. There also I saw with astonishment the great pile of presents round the Xmas tree for everybody in that great company down to the cowman and the page. It was then that I received my first gift a little pencil case.'
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The younger son, Howard, was to become Herbert's close friend.

For years, however, Herbert's main companion was Palmer, though he was only too pitifully aware that he was not the first choice. ‘You may please God be a balm to my heart – but I fear the odds are against it,'
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his father had once told him. And yet, as Herbert pragmatically put it, he was ‘one of those who love the society of their children and, as we were now thrown together more than before, I soon learned to look upon him not only as a most indulgent teacher, but as a favourite companion'.
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To the isolated Hub, to be with his parent was to step into a charmed sphere. He hardly missed playthings, he said, for there were artistic projects to take the place of toys and Palmer knew how to make these amusing. One of Herbert's earliest memories was of sitting in a baby chair helping to mount drawings: ‘an opportunity for mischief and mess which he turned into an elementary lesson in painstaking',
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he recalled. Palmer bore patiently with childhood bunglings and he and his son became brothers-in-arms against Hannah's domestic onslaughts. They would retreat into the studio together to work on assorted makeshifts, to mend slippers with boiling cobbler's wax or prepare materials for art. Sometimes they made expeditions to other parts of the house for various purposes kept secret from Hannah, once firing a gun up the flue of the hall chimney in a catastrophic attempt to clean out the soot.

Herbert would have liked to have gone to school but his parents were terrified for his health. ‘Dear Herbert is so delicate, though without any specific disease, that we hardly think he will live to grow up,'
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Palmer told the boy's godfather, Reed. Besides there was no educational establishment in the area that seemed quite to suit because, although there was a local grammar school with a clergyman for a headmaster, Hannah, having heard that the blacksmith's son went there, wouldn't let her own son attend. Palmer mocked her snobbery and yet accepted it: Herbert was kept at home where his father started teaching him, giving him lessons in Latin, arithmetic, drawing and English. These were administered in infinitesimal doses, Herbert remembered. He would have liked to work more, but Palmer, while acknowledging that he was quite as quick as his brother, would not let him, even when he was twelve, spend more than half an hour with his lesson books.

When Harry Cope was sent down by his parents to avoid a London epidemic, or when the Redgraves and their daughters came to visit, Herbert was thrilled. He loved his stays at the Hooks' or the Wrights' and was delighted when he was sent a little white dog called Phil to look after. He fed it sugar lumps and rolled around with it playfully on the lawn. Unfortunately the dog was less happy, growing more and more homesick, expressing its grief in a continuous falsetto howl until eventually, making a dash for the gate, it escaped. When it returned a week later it looked emaciated and the pads of its feet were quite worn.

A friend encouraged Herbert to start collecting beetles, a hobby that soon developed into an entomological mania as he spent hour after hour in pursuit of butterflies and moths. He wanted to be a naturalist when he grew up. His father was not completely discouraging. ‘He allowed me to gloat over my captures,' Herbert remembered, ‘thinking that good might come in the shape of nicety of handling, and habits of observation.'
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But when he tried further to enlist his father's attention and showed him his boxes and setting boards he was firmly rebuffed. ‘The proper study of mankind is man,' his father admonished with a quotation from Pope. He far preferred ‘the other B – Biography' to beetles. ‘It's biography that makes moral muscle,' he said. ‘All the great men have set venerated models before them, and tried to work up to them.'
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For all the many years that he had lived in rural Shoreham, for all the long hours he had spent admiring natural beauty, his father could not have answered even the most elementary questions on the sciences, Herbert said. Palmer could not have recognised any but the most common of plants, insects or birds. Herbert did not give up his hobby, however, and his uncle, John Linnell, who had become the curator of the entomological collection at Reigate Museum, would occasionally invite him to visit. Herbert learned to handle the tiny brittle specimens without breaking them and it was to this precision of touch that he was later to attribute the aptitude for etching which his father would one day appreciate.

Herbert's other childhood pastime was, somewhat improbably, military drill. It was Mrs Redgrave who had recommended it, she alone realising that the boy, walled up with his grieving parents and lacking proper exercise, ran a very real risk of going into decline. There followed, Herbert said, ‘a long and delightful period of instruction by an ex-sergeant major of the Grenadier Guards; whose course in my case went further than usual and included Broad-sword exercise with single-sticks'.
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It was to lead to a lifelong fascination with firearms. When Herbert was seventeen, the eccentric Mrs George presented him with a gun: a splendid fowling piece that he showed his drill master. ‘The sergeant thought the stock quite a master-piece,' Palmer recorded, ‘and kept fondling it after the manner of a doll.'
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