Owning Up: The Trilogy (19 page)

On the other hand Eleanor Dodsworth, Cousin Emma’s secretary and eventual paid companion, was a most cheerful person. She was the niece of one of the Brights’ personal maids, and had been in the employment of both the Mellys and the Holts for many years. She liked a cigarette on the sly (Cousin Emma would allow no smoking at Sudley except by the men after dinner in the dining-room) and would respond to anything she agreed with by crying ‘Eggs-actly!’ Bill and I would often amuse ourselves at home by imitating Cousin Emma and Eleanor Dodsworth in conversation.

Bill: ‘Eleanor, would you like a glas of mealk?’

Me: ‘Eggs-actly.’

Around Easter Cousin Emma in her long dove-grey coat and straw bonnet would climb into the back of her Daimler and, with Stanley at the wheel and Eleanor Dodsworth chattering away beside her, leave Sudley behind and head north at a speed not exceeding forty miles an hour. Her destination was a house on the shores of Coniston Water where she spent the summer. It was called Tent Lodge and faced ‘The Old Man’, a mountain frequently invisible in mist and drizzle.

Sometimes Aimee would travel in the front of the Daimler next to Stanley. More often she would have preceded her mistress by train with the reduced staff necessary to service the smaller but by no means insubstantial house. Fires would certainly have been lit and beds aired to welcome Cousin Emma, but if it was a fine afternoon she would walk down to the lake through a pretty little wood to pay homage to Wordsworth by admiring the daffodils.

Tent Lodge was a pretty Regency box of a house so named, although I never saw the logic of it, because the corners of all the rooms were curved instead of angular. The exterior was of buttermilk stucco, the roof low, the main facade facing the lake over a gently sloping field. Next to the house, separated by a steep road, was Tent Cottage. It had a trellis porch and a monkey-puzzle tree in the garden. Here Aimee and Stanley lodged, but here were also some extra bedrooms used on those occasions when there were too many guests for Tent Lodge to accommodate.

On the hill behind the house was a home farm; at the side a kitchen garden. There were brick paths and cold houses, potting frames, piles of wicker baskets, and soft fruit ripening under nets. In fact it was exactly like the kitchen garden in
Peter Rabbit
and Cousin Emma would sometimes hint that it may well have been the source of the original. But although a great admirer of Beatrix Potter’s, and a neighbour, she hadn’t got on with her personally. She had once asked her to tea, expecting a stimulating conversation about her work, much of which Cousin Emma knew by heart, but Mrs Heelis, as she had become after her marriage to a hen-pecked Hindhead solicitor, stumped in wearing dirty boots and would talk about nothing but sheep-breeding. The visit was a disappointment to Cousin Emma and the invitation never extended again.

Although it was a Regency house, Tent Lodge had been furnished by Cousin Emma’s father in mid-Victorian style: a very solid dining-room, a rather fussy but charming drawing-room. The many pictures weren’t a patch on Sudley – mostly pale water-colours of the Lakes or the Italian alps – but there were some of those little paintings of birds’ nests and, on an easel by the dining-room window, an oil of Ruskin writing in his study at Brantwood, the next house along the lake from Tent Lodge. Gampa, staying as a small boy with his Uncle George Holt, had once met Ruskin, and the old gentleman had given him a dedicated book which Gampa had subsequently and rather irritatingly lost.

There was no electricity at Tent Lodge. Oil lamps were brought in at dusk, and on the hall table were candles to take up to the bedrooms with their walls papered with repetitive ribbons of rose buds or honeysuckle.

We stayed occasionally at Coniston either at Easter or for part of the long summer holidays. It rained a lot, but the fine days, or more rarely weeks, were extraordinarily beautiful. There wasn’t all that much to do but we were never bored for long. Sometimes we rolled down the steep grass bank in front of the house until we were dizzy or ‘charged the shrubberies’, a game I’d invented, in which Bill and I – for Andrée was still too young – would run full pelt into the rhododendron bushes which seemed to part before us like the briars in ‘The Sleeping Beauty’. We walked to the village the other side of the lake and visited the Ruskin Museum. It was not all that impressive and furthermore cost a penny to go in. There were Ruskin’s collections of rather dusty minerals, his walking stick, and a few beautiful water-colours of rock formations or Venetian architectural details, but what we liked best was a xylophone he had constructed from pieces of tuned slate laid across a framework of wood and which we were allowed to play with a little felt-covered hammer.

Mostly though we fished, first collecting minnows in a celluloid trap with bread crumbs on it suspended by a piece of string at the end of Cousin Emma’s jetty, and subsequently transferring them to a bucket to use for live bait. We’d row far out on to the lake in a dinghy but all we ever caught were small perch with their bright striped bodies and treacherous erectile spines. We’d carry them proudly up to the house nevertheless, although nobody was in the least interested except for the piebald farmyard cats. The excitement was to sit in the dinghy with its creaking rowlocks and faint smell of tar and to watch the red and white float bob tentatively once or twice before jerking resolutely under the water while we imagined that
this
time it was going to be a whopper. Indeed, just once, out in the boat with my father, I hooked a pike which consented to be reeled up to the surface, looked at us contemptuously with its cold eye, turned, snapped the cast, and swam unhurriedly down towards the bottom again.

I wished there had been trout in Coniston instead of perch and Tom told me that there used to be, but with the coming of the tourists it had been fished .dry. When he was a small child he had gone off one misty morning to find his father who was casting from the shore. He thought he recognised him but, on drawing close, discovered it to be another gentleman. A little further on was someone else who he was sure was his father. It was not, but here, in the distance, was yet another angler. He ran towards him, but this was a stranger too. Soon he was miles from Tent Lodge and so exhausted he sat down and burst into tears. A kind man found him and took him back. Gampa had gone the other way along the shore and was within two hundred yards of the house all the time.

If we were at Tent Lodge in the summer there were other major expeditions involving grown-ups. There were picnics on Peel Island at the far end of the lake and at least an hour’s row. It was a lucky little island, covered in gorse and pine trees, a marvellous place to play pirates. Sometimes we climbed The Old Man, which was steep but unchallenging, more a stiff walk than a proper climb. At the top was a cairn, a tall irregular mound of pieces of slate. You added a new one on which you’d scratched your name and the date. You could only climb The Old Man on a clear day. There were mountains all around you, cradling the flat green valleys with their lakes and tarns, and in the distance the sea. The roofs of the village lay directly below and across Coniston Water was Tent Lodge itself, a neat little doll’s house. Getting down was harder than climbing up. It was difficult not to slip and slide on the rough shale. There was a slate quarry at the bottom.

Occasionally we’d be driven to a sheep-dog trial, watching the patient dogs circling the stupid, hysterical sheep, now creeping, now running as they did their best to drive them all into the pens, and time after time one sheep would turn aside almost at the gate and belt off up the hill, allowing the rest to disperse again. There were other entertainments at the trials, especially Cumberland wrestling in which huge men, stripped to the waist, would move cautiously and very slowly round each other before encircling each other’s bodies with their great arms and attempting, rather ponder-ously, to force their rivals off-balance. Bill and I would try it when we got back home and Bill, although three years younger, usually won, unless I lost (but concealed that I’d lost) my temper.

Cousin Emma was not always there when we stayed at Tent Lodge although whether she went to visit other elderly ladies or returned temporarily to Sudley I have no idea. Like her parents she would often lend the house to members of the family for holidays or honeymoons. After their marriage Maud and Tom had stayed there on their way to Scotland where Tom was to fish; an unselfish or masochistic concession on my mother’s part as she had no interest in fishing whatsoever. On arrival at Coniston my father developed a quinsy – a very painful boil in the throat for which there is no relief until it bursts. My mother was so distracted she sent for Gangie, who came hurrying north to look after ‘poor dear Thomas’. Walking with her mother-in-law in the fields, Maudie had worried that anyone spotting them would imagine their marriage was already on the rocks. The quinsy finally burst and my parents left for Carlisle where they were to spend a night in a hotel. On the notice board was a letter addressed to Thomas Quinsy Esq. Imagining it to be a joke, probably the work of John Melly, my father crossly tore it in two only to discover, to his considerable embarrassment, that there was a real Thomas Quinsy staying there.

Cousin Emma died in 1944. She left Sudley and the pictures to the City of Liverpool, and the house and the collection are open to the public. In one of the rooms the Chatty drawing-room furniture is displayed behind little ropes. She left Tent Cottage to Eleanor Dodsworth, and Tent Lodge to Willie Bert Rawdon Smith; a reward perhaps for his unselfishness in escorting her and Aunt Eva home half-way through the Sandon Cabaret. He lived there for a few years and then sold it and moved, with his wife Daisy, into a bungalow he had built in the outskirts of the village, where he stayed put until he too died.

Emma, although so kind and gentle, was not without convictions. One summer she had a running battle with the new vicar of Coniston who wanted to let girl hikers attend the services in headscarves. Cousin Emma was strong for hats. She was also at the forefront of those residents who protested about Sir Malcolm Campbell’s decision to try and break the water speed record on Coniston in his boat
Bluebird.
I doubt, however, that she was among those who went so far as to booby-trap the route with submerged logs. Nor did she protest when we all got up at five on the morning of the attempt to watch Sir Malcolm roar to noisy victory in the still grey dawn, shattering the reflection of The Old Man. She just felt that Windermere would have been more suitable.

Tent Lodge and Coniston are among the green places of my childhood. There the imaginary world of Beatrix Potter and the reality on which she based it became one. I have always had this dubious need to reinforce life through art or literature, to appreciate it at second-hand, and it was at Coniston, however unconsciously, that I was first aware of this. In the little lanes between dry-stone walls I imagined meeting Mrs Tiggy-Winkle waddling along with her basket of washing, or spotting, emerging from the mound of lawn-clippings in the far right-hand corner of Cousin Emma’s kitchen garden, the black-tipped ears of the Flopsy bunnies sleeping off the soporific effect of lettuces.

9

When I was four I was sent to school, a kindergarten called Camelot. It was just around the corner from 22 Ivanhoe Road and was run by a short but formidable lady called Miss Katie Yates. She was very erect, had a rather sallow skin but fine aquiline features, and carried pince-nez on a gold chain which rested on her shelf-like bosom. She had kindly but alert brown eyes, wore her hair up and spoke quietly, but with considerable authority. Her sister, although it seemed unlikely, was a great champion of the gypsies, or Romanies as she preferred to call them, had lived among them and written several books on the subject.

Miss Yates had started her school thirty years before in a room over a shop in Lark Lane where Uncle Alan had been among her first pupils. Success had enabled her to move the hundred yards to Waverley Road where she lived in a flat on the top floor. The rest of the house, which was rather bigger than ours, was devoted to the class-rooms, minimally furnished. Woodwork was taught in the cellar, and the big double room on the ground floor acted as an assembly hall and as a setting for end of term concerts and the Christmas play. There were no carpets at Camelot, but the floors of stained wooden boards were kept highly polished by a solitary, rather grumpy, elderly maid. There were few pictures, but I was early on both fascinated and frightened by a sepia reproduction of a Roman soldier guarding some prisoners at Pompeii while the molten lava fell from the air about him. It was called
Faithful unto Death
and the life-size original was in the Walker Art Gallery, although oddly enough I found it less terrifying than its smaller replica. I was extremely in awe of any destructive natural phenomena, but especially of tidal waves, earthquakes and volcanoes, none of which was likely to prove much of a hazard in suburban Liverpool. I dreamt once of red-hot lava creeping and bubbling into the hall of Ivanhoe Road and gradually rising in level as I, with great difficulty, climbed the stairs only a step or two ahead of it. As it rose it spoke in a boily-bubbly voice. ‘I’m coming,’ it said, ‘I’m coming, I’m coming
for you
!’

Faithful unto Death
was in the assembly room, and I frequently had a chance to examine it. At nine on the dot, while we all stood in makeshift rows under the supervision of one of the mistresses, Miss Yates would make her entrance. ‘Good morning, everybody,’ she would say briskly, and we in our piping and ragged trebles, but with all the enthusiasm which children experience in fulfilling a ritual, would answer her in unison: ‘Good morning, Miss Yates.’ What then took place was some form of non-denominational prayers, for several of the pupils were Jewish or Catholic, followed by a hymn, usually ‘All things Bright and Beautiful’ accompanied by Miss Gibbons or Miss Edwards at the upright piano.

It was seldom however that this daily scenario went through without a hitch. Most days one of the several children who suffered from either nerves or a bilious digestive system would suddenly throw up on the polished wooden floor. At this, no matter what point we’d reached, Miss Yates would clap her hands and tell everyone else to ‘turn away’ – further embarrassing, I should have thought, the unfortunate child. On cue, for it was her daily chore to hover outside during assembly, the elderly maid would come into the room and mop up the mess with the dish-cloth and bucket of water which she kept in the hall at the ready. It was during these interruptions that I had the chance to study in detail the courageous centurion at his terminal post. Miss Yates would also take the opportunity during assembly to admonish, although never by name, any child who had been reported for letting down the tone of her little school. These crimes were not grave. The most heinous I can recall was someone who had been seen eating sweets on a tram.