Those Wild Wyndhams (30 page)

‘He is
A.
1
.
,’ said Madeline Wyndham delightedly, likening Eddy’s stoicism to the way that they had tested the chandeliers in Clouds’ hall, hanging on them many hundredweight more than they would ever bear: ‘I feel [that he] is like a Chain
tested
to bear so much weight that the
small
weight of every day life must hang light on it.’
¹⁷
Her remark was provoked by an incident in which Pamela, departing from Clouds with the mountains of luggage that accompanied her class’s perambulations, had failed to see that boxes meant for London were marked accordingly. Half their things had disappeared, presumably Stockton-bound. Mary concurred with her mother’s views: Eddy was ‘a very kind good unostentatiously upright & useful man … so wonderfully sweet & gentle & nice’.
¹⁸

At Stockton Eddy and Pamela replaced footmen with housemaids (Margot thought it an affectation). Pamela declared herself Eddy’s ‘loving Wyf [sic]’, and him her ‘dearest husband’, but her descendants believe that by the late 1890s she was already involved in several affairs – one with the ambitious young architect Detmar Blow, a romantic figure with dark curls and dashing manner; another with Ivor Guest, heir to a steel fortune.
¹⁹
Nor, true to her words in Florence, did Pamela forget Harry Cust. They continued to see one another, although, as a scribbled note from Harry to Pamela at the turn of the century attests, they preferred such visits to be made when her husband and children were not around.
²⁰

Pamela’s main focus was her children. Clarissa Madeline Genevieve Adelaide, known as Clare, was born on 13 July 1896, Edward Wyndham Tennant, or ‘Bim’, on 1 July 1897, ‘Kit’, Christopher Grey Tennant, on 14 June 1899, David on 22 May 1902 and Stephen on 21 April 1906. Pamela was enchanted by them – more accurately by her boys. She quickly earned a reputation as a devoted mother. But motherhood did not dispel her lurking unhappiness. All the Wyndham children found it hard to leave the cradle of their family. ‘I feel I have … transplanted
very
badly and am always lean & hungry for want of the soil I am accustomed to –
everywhere
except at home, I feel like a mangy fir tree with a bald top,’ Mary remarked to her mother, on leaving Clouds after a visit, some three years after her own marriage.
²¹
Yet in those early years of her own marriage Pamela wept inconsolably every time she left Clouds.
²²
In later years, she recalled vividly a visit by Wilfrid Blunt to Stockton. ‘I was still so unhappy, and so strangely situated in my new life that I remember answering you almost in a dream when you said how you hoped everything was well with me.’
²³

In her enforced summers at Glen Pamela locked herself away in the library with a pile of books, emerging only to play with her children. At dinners, she sat aloof and silent. Charty taxed her with this. Pamela recounted their conversation to Mary, triumphantly scornful of Charty’s ‘pathetic’ attempts to appeal to her vanity: ‘she said she wished I would take more
trouble
to make people
like
me! and … know how clever I
could
be … “
perhaps
… you may meet a man at dinner &
never
see him again – and he may
never
know what a wonderful memory you have! How you can say pages by heart, how quick you are at understanding & what a lot of funny little stories & things
you know
”’. Pamela added, ‘I said I did not think anyone could recite at dinner & that if one was going to get to know a person I could not shell out
all
I had before fish.’
²⁴

With Pamela’s most recent tearful departure from Clouds fresh in her mind, a worried Madeline Wyndham advised her daughter to ‘get [Philip] Webb or [Detmar] Blow to build you your large Family Cottage for your own that you may live in it & love it & the Babes also’.
²⁵
George came up with another plan. He was fast earning a reputation as one of the most promising young backbenchers of Salisbury’s ministry. His trenchant support of ‘Uitlander’ rights in one of the Boer republics, Paul Kruger’s Transvaal – the Uitlanders were the disenfranchised foreigners exploiting the Transvaal’s gold rush – had earned him the nickname of ‘the Member for South Africa’. George was part of a new breed of imperialists seeking a more aggressive foreign and colonial policy. Their figurehead was Joe Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, who compared the position of Uitlanders to helots, and had secretly colluded in the botched coup of 1895 that attempted to overthrow Kruger’s Government, the Jameson Raid. In 1897, Chamberlain pushed the appointment of Sir Alfred Milner as High Commissioner overseeing Britain’s Southern African republics. Behind a judicious façade, Milner was a fanatical imperialist, determined to render British supremacy in South Africa complete.

The imperialist faction was buoyed by the glorious spectacle of the Queen’s 1897 Diamond Jubilee. Almost half a million imperial troops and a panoply of native royalties processed through a London garlanded in bunting, past billboards advertising the very best imperial products, to pledge allegiance to their Empress at a service of thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral. Gladstone dismissed it as ‘the spirit of Jingoism under the name of Imperialism’, while Salisbury privately deprecated its vulgarity, but the public was intoxicated by this visual reminder of the sheer reach of Britain’s power. Gloomy political naysayers began almost immediately to look for the nadir that must follow this imperial zenith, referencing Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
.
²⁶

Polymath George had been dabbling in journalism for a number of years, earning his reputation with a promising introduction to North’s
Plutarch
and translations of Ronsard’s poems. In the winter of 1897/8 he was in the process of launching
Outlook
, a periodical intended to combine in a weekly paper his favourite interests, politics and literature, with a strongly imperialist slant.

George thought Pamela would be the perfect contributor. Shortly after her engagement, Percy had teased her and Mananai with a newspaper cutting, claiming that they, with their Liberal husbands, were nonetheless ‘Tory by birth & conviction’.
²⁷
Furthermore, both Charlie and Eddy fell to the far right of their party’s spectrum, Liberal Imperialists, or ‘Liberal Imps’, who privately harboured doubts about Home Rule and were reluctant to advocate disestablishment. One might call them Liberal by birth rather than by conviction. Pamela’s early attempts to educate herself politically had quickly failed for lack of interest, but instinctively such views as she had corresponded with George’s: romantic, nostalgic and imperialist. George thought her writing skill might even be better than his. ‘How I wish you would write something, anything!’ he told her early in the new year of 1898. Urged on by her brother and her family, Pamela began.

For the first time in her life when faced with a blank sheet of paper, she baulked. Since childhood she had shown an interest in letter-writing unmatched by her sisters: crossing words out and replacing them with others more apposite, dwelling on form as well as substance. But now her mind, she admitted to George, felt like the five fingers of the hand, all spread out in different directions. She agonized that she couldn’t possibly know enough to start; or that she had more to say than she could ever put down. ‘My dear when you have seen more, felt more and thought more than others, you have
always
too much to say,’ replied George. Whatever she wrote was sure to be interesting, ‘the point is to make it intelligible’.
²⁸
Words were something to be wrestled with, stripped down to sinews and bones: ‘a
faculty
for writing is a pearl of contentment’, George proclaimed, writing lyrically of days in his own turret writing room at Saighton, with its whitewashed, book-lined walls, oak writing desk and two armchairs in cosy conversation before the fire.
²⁹

Once Pamela took ‘the plunge!’ she scarcely looked back.
³⁰
Sheaves of letters whisked between brother and sister as they discussed everything from subject matter to Pamela’s proposed pen-name. Pamela agonized over editing; George discursed on the art of prose-writing and the importance of style, counselling brevity as he lectured at length. Pamela’s Glen days were now full as she scribbled and crossed out, read, read more, and rewrote. At George’s suggestion she began with a series of sketches, ‘painting in words’ the world around her. He suggested that she look at an essay by a young Irish writer in the periodical
Nineteenth Century
. William Butler Yeats was doing ‘for Irish Faery lore just what you could do for Wiltshire … invent new names for your people and places and then reproduce their words exactly … giving the sensation which they aroused in you’.
³¹

Pamela’s resulting essays were serialized in
Outlook
under the pen-name of ‘Clarissa’. While comparisons with Yeats were fallacious, her keen ear for dialect and her ability to skewer an apposite and unexpected turn of phrase gave them a certain charm. ‘I love your imagination,’ said George; ‘sometimes I think of it as a horse turned out to grass: so happy and irresponsible and quaint.’
³²

For the same reasons that Pamela’s writing so appealed to
Outlook
’s readership, it has not stood the test of time. Pamela depicted a sun-lit, semi-feudal world in which peasants tugged their forelocks and uttered naive wisdom; children were tow-headed and rosy-cheeked, the aristocracy wise, benevolent and handsome. As imperial propaganda, it was magnificent. It was not a realistic portrait of the nation. When Heinemann published ‘Clarissa’s’ essays as
Village Notes
under Pamela’s own name in 1900 braver critics hinted as much. It was marketed as studies of life in ‘a typical country village’, illustrated by fourteen photogravure illustrations that ‘Mrs. Tennant … an amateur photographer’ had taken herself. ‘The modern cottager is a very wide-awake person, who reads penny novelettes and likes her clothes made “in the fashion”,’ pointed out the
World
. The
Glasgow Herald
took exception to Pamela’s rendition of the Scottish dialect (‘“Parn” is not the Scotch for pan, nor “coof” for cough’). But by and large the reviews were soft and deferential. They praised Pamela’s fresh and sympathetic approach, and the restraint and sparseness of her style. It was ‘eminently soothing’, said the
Pall Mall Gazette
(still under Harry Cust’s editorship),
just the kind of thing to read in a hammock; she had written it
con amore
, reported the
Globe
, in a typically breathless phrase.
³³
Pamela was not so foolish as to take these condescensions as compliments. ‘The harshest blow was “pretty booklet”,’ she commented wryly to Mary.
³⁴

Yet Pamela did not wish to engage in the actuality that might take her work beyond ‘pretty’ and ‘soothing’. Like many great ladies, Pamela visited London’s slums, Bim trailing behind her, clutching a tin of sweets for the ‘poor children’. She did a considerable amount of charity work, later in life, becoming involved in a home for working mothers in Westminster, offering those mothers an annual fortnight’s holiday in her Wiltshire village.
³⁵
But that was not her reality. She stopped Bim’s visits to the slums when he grew too disturbed by the squalor,
³⁶
physically removing him from the cause of distress. She similarly excised from her interior world unpalatable facts that might cause her that same distress, or even bring her to face mundane reality. Pamela’s literary world was no mere fiction. It expressed how she willed her existence to be.

In December 1898 Percy received a letter from an American expatriate who had inherited Watts’s mantle as the finest portrait painter of the day. ‘I am looking forward with the greatest of interest to painting your three daughters,’ Sargent told Percy.
¹
A price of £2,000 was agreed, and a preliminary meeting between painter and subjects at 44 Belgrave Square arranged to take place early in the new year. Percy had begun thinking of commissioning a portrait of his daughters in 1895, as soon as Pamela became engaged. His pencil sketch of stick figures from that time is fortunately made intelligible by a written explanation: ‘Mary at tea table with pot in right hand. Pamela guitar by her side (dog in lap?). Mananai first finger of right hand within leaves of a book, background of trees; tennis racquets and balls in foreground – all three looking out of the picture’.
²

Three years later Percy made good on his plan. The Wyndhams were flourishing and finally seemed to be attaining the fame that Madeline Wyndham had always thought they deserved. Guy Wyndham had been stationed in South Africa, although his wife Minnie (now mother of his three small children), Mananai and Madeline Wyndham mourned that he was not being promoted as quickly as he ought. George as always was achieving the lion’s share of glory. On 10 October 1898 he took a long stride towards his goal of being ‘a Minister of Victoria’ when he was appointed Under-Secretary at the War Office: the youngest MP to sit in that office since Lord Hartington in 1865. George was jubilant at his promotion, largely ‘because it will please you & Papa’, he told his mother. In strictest confidence he sent his parents Salisbury’s letter offering him the post: ‘it belongs to us three for the present and to the archives at Clouds when we are all gone’.
³