Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (5 page)

It seemed only a few weeks afterwards, though it was actually eighteen months, and peace with South Africa had already been signed, that Edward and I were assiduously decorating with flags the railing which divided the lower lawn from the hayfield, when my father came hurriedly up the drive with an anxious face and a newspaper in his hand.

‘You can take down your decorations,’ he announced gloomily. ‘There’ll be no Coronation. The King’s ill!’

That night I prayed earnestly to God to make the dear King better and let him live. The fact that he actually did recover established in me a touching faith in the efficacy of prayer, which superstitiously survived until the Great War proved to me, once for all, that there was nothing in it. To those who were twenty or more at the time of Victoria’s death, the brief reign of Edward - to whatever extent that indefatigable visitor to Paris and Biarritz may have been a factor in the coming of the deluge when it did - must have seemed merely a breathing space between the Victorian age and the German invasion of Belgium. To us, the War generation, it was much more than that, for in those nine years we grew from children into adolescents or adults. Yet of the King himself I remember nothing between his untimely attack of appendicitis, and the pious elegy in the best Victorian manner which I produced at school when my form was told to write a poem in memory of his passing.

3

Not only in its name, Glen Bank, and its white-painted semi-detachment, but in its hunting pictures and Marcus Stone engravings, its plush curtains, its mahogany furniture and its scarcity of books, our Macclesfield house represented all that was essentially middle-class in that Edwardian decade.

Following the long-established example of my father’s parents, we even had prayers before breakfast, during which performance everybody - from my mother, who perturbedly watched the boiling coffee-machine on the table, to the maids who shuffled uneasily in their chairs while the postman banged at the front door and the milkman thundered at the back - presented an aspect of inattentive agitation. The ceremony frequently ended in a tempestuous explosion on the part of my father, since Edward was almost always late, and could never say the Lord’s Prayer as rapidly as the others. As a rule he was still patiently pleading with the Deity to lead him not into ’tation, while the rest of us were thankfully vociferating ‘Amen’.

Although my father, as a self-willed young man in his thirties, was somewhat liable to these outbursts of irritation, they never really alarmed me, for he was always my champion in childhood, and could be relied upon as a safe bulwark against the bewildering onslaughts of his practical-joke-loving younger brothers and sisters, who regarded a small girl as fair game for their riotous ingenuity. Far more disturbing to my peace of mind was the strange medley of irrational fears which were always waiting to torment me - fears of thunder, of sunsets, of the full moon, of the dark, of standing under railway arches or crossing bridges over noisy streams, of the end of the world and of the devil waiting to catch me round the corner (this last being due to a nursemaid who overheard me, at the age of five or six, calling Edward ‘Little fool!’ and immediately commented: ‘There, you’ve done it!
Now
you’ll go to hell!’).

Parents and nurses had by that time outgrown the stage of putting children into dark cupboards as a ‘cure’ for this type of ‘tiresomeness’ - an atrocity once perpetrated on my mother which adversely affected her psychology for ever afterwards - but such terrors did appear to them to have no other origin than a perverse unreasonableness, and I was expostulated with and even scolded for thus ‘giving way’. There seemed to be no one to whom I could appeal for understanding of such humiliating cowardice, nobody whom I instinctively felt to be on my side against the mysterious phenomena which so alarmed me. Since I thus grew up without having my fears rationalised by explanation, I carried them with me, thrust inward but very little transformed, into adulthood, and was later to have only too good reason to regret that I never learnt to conquer them while still a child.

On the whole, in spite of these intermittent terrors, the years in which life is taken for granted were pleasant enough, if not conspicuously reassuring. For as long as I could remember, our house had always been full of music, never first-rate, but tuneful, and strangely persistent in its ability to survive more significant recollections. To the perturbation of my father, who never really cared for music in spite of the early singing lessons, there was always much practising of songs, or pianoforte solos, and later of violin exercises, and in Macclesfield my mother gave periodic ‘musical evenings’, for which Edward and I, at the ages of about seven and nine, used to sit up in order to play tinkling duets together, or innocuous trios with our governess.

My mother, who had an agreeable soprano voice, took singing lessons in Manchester; at musical parties, she sang ‘When the Heart is Young’, ‘Whisper and I Shall Hear’ or ‘The Distant Shore’ - a typical example of Victorian pathos which always reduced me to tears at the point where ‘the mai-den - drooped - and - DIED’. I was much more stimulated by ‘Robert the Devil’, and whenever my mother, her back safely turned towards me, trilled ‘Mercy! Mercy! Mer-russy!’ in her ardent soprano, I flung myself up and down upon the hearthrug in an ecstasy of masochistic fervour.

My first acquaintance with literature was less inspiring, for in Macclesfield the parental library consisted solely of a few yellow-back novels, two or three manuals on paper-making, and a large tome entitled
Household Medicine
, in which the instructions were moral rather than hygienic. Lest anyone should suspect the family of being literary, these volumes were concealed beneath a heavy curtain in the chill, gloomy dining-room. My father was once told by a publisher’s traveller that the Pottery towns held the lowest record for book-buying in England. Being a true son of his district, which has an immense respect for ‘brass’ but none whatever for the uncommercial products of a poetic imagination, he remained faithful in Cheshire as in Staffordshire to his neighbourhood’s reputation.

When I had exhausted my own nursery literature - a few volumes of Andrew Lang’s fairy-tales, one of which was punctiliously presented to me on each birthday, and some of the more saccharine children’s stories of L. T. Meade - I turned surreptitiously to the yellow-back novels. These were mostly by Wilkie Collins, Besant and Rice, and Mrs Henry Wood, and many were the maudlin tears that I wept over the sorrows of Poor Miss Finch and Lady Isabel Vane.

It was not till later, at the age of ten, that I discovered the manifold attractions of
Household Medicine
. The treatment of infectious diseases left me cold, but I was secretly excited at the prospect of menstruation; I also found the details of a confinement quite enthralling, though I had never shown that devotion to dolls which is supposed to indicate a strong maternal instinct. The whole subject of child-birth was completely dissociated in my mind from that of sex, about which I knew little and cared less. I was particularly impressed at the time by the instructions given to the child-bearing woman in the final stage of labour, though I can now only remember that she was advised to braid her hair in two plaits, and to wear an old flannel petticoat under her nightgown.

I must have been about eight when two solitary classics - probably neglected Christmas presents - found their way on to a whist table in the drawing-room. One was
Longfellow’s Complete Poems
, bound in a bilious mustard-brown leather, and the other a copy of Matthew Arnold’s
Sohrab and Rustum
. I soon had Longfellow’s poems - including ‘Tales of a Wayside Inn’ and ‘The New England Tragedies’ - almost by heart, and even now, when I am searching through my memory for an appropriate quotation, ‘Life is real, life is earnest’, and ‘Hadst thou stayed I must have fled!’ will insist upon ousting A. E. Housman and Siegfried Sassoon. But I found
Sohrab and Rustum
even more entrancing than Longfellow, and over and over again, when I was sure of having the drawing-room to myself, I indulged the histrionic instinct which had derived so much satisfaction from ‘Robert the Devil’ by imitating in dumb show the throes of the unfortunate Sohrab,

Lovely in death, upon the common sand.

My mother did her conscientious best to remedy the deficiencies of our literary education by reading Dickens aloud to us on Sunday afternoons. We ploughed through
David Copperfield
and
Nicholas Nickleby
in this manner, which perhaps explains why I have never been able to finish anything else by Dickens except
A Tale of Two Cities
. Far more effective as compensations for the lack of external stimulus were the five ‘novels’ that I wrote before I was eleven, on special books patiently constructed for me by a devoted and intelligent governess out of thick waste paper from the mills, and the exciting legends of a mythical community called ‘The Dicks’, which from my bed in the night nursery I used to relate to Edward across the passage in the day nursery after we were both supposed to be asleep. I was always the inventor and he the recipient of these enthralling communications, which must have begun when I was about six, and continued until I reached the mature age of eleven and went to school.

Edward was always a good listener, since his own form of self-expression then consisted in making unearthly and to me quite meaningless sounds on his small violin. I remember him, at the age of seven, as a rather solemn, brown-eyed little boy, with beautiful arched eyebrows which lately, to my infinite satisfaction, have begun to reproduce themselves, a pair of delicate question-marks, above the dark eyes of my five-year-old son. Even in childhood we seldom quarrelled, and by the time that we both went away to boarding-school he had already become the dearest companion of those brief years of unshadowed adolescence permitted to our condemned generation.

4

When I was eleven our adored governess departed, and my family moved from Macclesfield to a tall grey stone house in Buxton, the Derbyshire ‘mountain spa’, in order that Edward and I might be sent to ‘good’ day-schools. His was a small preparatory school of which a vigorous Buxton man was then headmaster; mine inevitably described itself as ‘a school for the daughters of gentlemen’. My brother’s school, which certainly gave him a better grounding than I received from mine, will always be associated in my recollection with one significant experience.

Soon after Edward went there I happened, on my way to the town, to pass the school playground at a time when the boys were uproariously enjoying an afternoon break. Seeing Edward, I stopped; he called several of his newly made cronies, and we spent a few moments of pleasant ‘ragging’ across the low wall. I felt no consciousness of guilt, and was unaware that I had been seen, on their return home along an adjacent road, by my mother and an aunt who was staying with us. At tea-time a heavy and to me inexplicable atmosphere of disapproval hung over the table; shortly afterwards the storm exploded, and I was severely reprimanded for my naughtiness in thus publicly conversing with Edward’s companions. (I think it was the same aunt who afterwards informed me that the reason why our letters had to be left open at my school was ‘in case any of the girls should be so wicked as to write to boys’. Probably this was true of most girls’ schools before the War.)

The small incident was my first intimation that, in the eyes of the older generation, free and unself-conscious association between boys and girls was more improper than a prudish suspicion of the opposite sex. It aroused in me a rebellious resentment that I have never forgotten. I had not heard, in those days, of co-educational schools, but had I been aware of their experimental existence and been able to foresee my far-distant parenthood, I should probably have decided, then and there, that my own son and daughter should attend them.

I do not remember much about my day-school except that when I first went there I was badly bullied by two unpleasant little girls, who soon tired of the easy physical advantage given them by their superior age and stature, and instead endeavoured to torment my immature mind by forcing upon it items of sexual information in their most revolting form. My parents, who had suffered such qualms of apprehension over my entirely wholesome friendliness with Edward’s riotous companions, remained completely unaware of this real threat to my decency and my peace. I never mentioned it to them owing to a bitter sense of shame, which was not, however, aroused by my schoolfellows’ unæsthetic communications, but by my inability to restrain my tears during their physical assaults. So ambitious was I already, and so indifferent to sex in all its manifestations, that their attempts to corrupt my mind left it as innocent as they found it, and I resented only the pinchings and wrist-twistings which always accompanied my efforts to escape.

Though my school took a few boarders, most of its pupils were local; in consequence the class-room competition was practically non-existent. At the age of twelve I was already preening the gay feathers of my youthful conceit in one of the top forms, where the dull, coltish girls of sixteen and seventeen so persistently treated me as a prodigy that I soon lost such small ability as I had possessed to estimate my modest achievements at their true and limited worth.

When I first went to the school, it was in charge of an ancient mistress who was typical of the genteel and uncertificated past, but soon afterwards a new Principal was appointed with an unimpeachable Degree acquired from Cheltenham. In Buxton this was regarded as quite a remarkable qualification for a headmistress, and in those days my parents’ standards of scholarship were almost as unexacting. They had never, indeed, had much opportunity to become otherwise, for my mother had received a very spasmodic and unorthodox education, while my father, after reacting with characteristic if pardonable obstinacy against the rigours of Malvern in the eighteen-seventies, had been sent to the High School at Newcastle-under-Lyme, where the boys’ only consistent occupation was a perpetual baiting of the much-enduring masters.