Transcriber’s Note: A few obvious printer’s mistakes have been corrected (in particular in the Index, where entries often didn’t match the spelling given in the main text, and have been changed to do so); any remaining errors are the author’s own.

THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY

COOMBE COTTAGE

THE PUPPET SHOW
OF MEMORY

BY
MAURICE BARING

BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1922

Printed in Great Britain

NOTE

My thanks are due to Messrs. Methuen for allowing me to use in Chapters XVI.-XIX. some matter which has already appeared in A Year in Russia and Russian Essays, two books published by them; to Mr. Leo Maxse for allowing me to use an article on Sarah Bernhardt which appeared in the National Review, and has been re-written for this book; to Father C. C. Martindale and Mr. Desmond MacCarthy for kindly correcting the proofs.

M. B.

TO J.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE
PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY

CHAPTER I
THE NURSERY

When people sit down to write their recollections they exclaim with regret, “If only I had kept a diary, what a rich store of material I should now have at my disposal!” I remember one of the masters at Eton telling me, when I was a boy, that if I wished to make a fortune when I was grown up, I had only to keep a detailed diary of every day of my life at Eton. He said the same thing to all the boys he knew, but I do not remember any boy of my generation taking his wise advice.

On the other hand, for the writer who wishes to recall past memories, the absence of diaries and notebooks has its compensations. Memory, as someone has said, is the greatest of artists. It eliminates the unessential, and chooses with careless skill the sights and the sounds and the episodes that are best worth remembering and recording. The first thing I can remember is a Christmas tree which I think celebrated the Christmas of 1876. It was at Shoreham in Kent, at a house belonging to Mr. H. B. Mildmay, who married one of my mother’s sisters. I was two years old, and I remember my Christmas present, a large bird with yellow and red plumage, which for a long time afterwards lived at the top of the nursery wardrobe. It was neither a bird of Paradise nor a pheasant; possibly only a somewhat flamboyant hen; but I loved it dearly, and it irradiated the nursery to me for at least two years.

The curtain then falls and rises again on the nursery of 37 Charles Street, Berkeley Square, London. The nursery epoch, which lasted till promotion to the schoolroom and lessons began, seems to children as long as a lifetime, just as houses and places seem to them infinitely large. The nursery was on the third floor of the house, and looked out on to the street. There was a small night-nursery next door to it, which had coloured pictures of St. Petersburg on the wall.

I can remember the peculiar roar of London in those days; the four-wheelers and hansoms rattling on the macadam pavement through the fog, except when there was straw down in the street for some sick person; and the various denizens of the streets, the lamplighter and the muffin-man; often a barrel-organ, constantly in summer a band, and sometimes a Punch and Judy. During the war, when the streets began to be darkened, but before the final complete darkness set in in 1917, London looked at night very much as it was in my childhood. But the strange rumbling noise had gone for ever. Sometimes on one of the houses opposite there used to be an heraldic hatchment. The nursery was inhabited by my brother Hugo and myself, our nurse, Hilly, and two nurserymaids, Grace Hetherington, and Annie. Grace was annexed by me; Annie by Hugo. Hilly had been nurse to my sisters and, I think, to my elder brothers too. She had the slightly weather-beaten but fresh agelessness of Nannies, and her most violent threat was: “I’ll bring my old shoe to you,” and one of her most frequent exclamations: “Oh, you naughty boy, you very naughty boy!” The nursery had Landseer pictures in gilt frames, and on the chest of drawers between the two windows a mechanical toy of an entrancing description. It was a square box, one side of which was made of glass, and behind this glass curtain, on a small platform, a lady sat dressed in light blue silk at an open spinet; a dancing master, in a red silk doublet with a powdered wig and yellow satin knee-breeches, on one side of it, conducted, and in the foreground a little girl in short skirts of purple gauze covered with spangles stood ready to dance. When you wound up the toy, the lady played, the man conducted elegantly with an open score in one hand and a baton in the other, and the little girl pirouetted. It only played one short, melancholy, tinkling, but extremely refined dance-tune.

At one of the top windows of the house opposite, a little girl used to appear sometimes. Hugo and I used to exchange signals with her, and we called her Miss Rose. Our mute acquaintance went on for a long time, but we never saw her except across the street and at her window. We did not wish to see more of her. Nearer acquaintance would have marred the perfect romance of the relation.

There were two forms of light refreshment peculiar to the nursery, and probably to all nurseries: one was Albert biscuits, and the other toast-in-water. Children call for an Albert biscuit as men ask for a whisky-and-soda at a club, not from hunger, but as an adjunct to conversation and a break in monotony. At night, after we had gone to bed, we used often to ask monotonously and insistently for a drink of water. “Hilly, I want a drink of water”; but this meant, not that one was thirsty, but that one was frightened and wanted to see a human being. All my brothers and sisters, I found out afterwards, had done the same thing in the same way, and for the same reason, but the tradition had been handed down quite unconsciously. I can’t remember how the nursery epoch came to an end; it merges in my memory without any line of division, into the schoolroom period; but the first visits in the country certainly belonged to the nursery epoch.

We used to go in the summer to Coombe Cottage, near Malden, an ivy-covered, red-brick house, with a tower at one end, a cool oak hall and staircase, a drawing-room full of water-colours, a room next to it full of books, with a drawing-table and painting materials ready, and a long dining-room, of which the narrow end was a sitting-room, and had a verandah looking out on to the garden. There was also a kitchen garden, lawns, a dairy, a gardener, Mr. Baker, who made nosegays, a deaf-and-dumb under-gardener who spoke on his fingers, a farmyard, and a duck-pond into which I remember falling.

Coombe was an enchanted spot for us. My recollection of it is that of a place where it was always summer and where the smell of summer and the sounds of summer evening used to make the night-nursery a fairy place; and sometimes in the morning, red-coated soldiers used to march past playing “The Girl I left behind me,” with a band of drums and fifes. The uniforms of the soldiers were as bright as the poppies in the field, and that particular tune made a lasting impression on me. I never forgot it. I can remember losing my first front tooth at Coombe by tying it on to a thread and slamming the door, and I can remember my sisters singing, “Where are you going to, my pretty Maid?” one of them acting the milkmaid, with a wastepaper basket under her arm for a pail. Best of all, I remember the garden, the roses, the fruit, trying to put salt on a bird’s tail for the first time, and the wonderful games in the hayfields.

We are probably all of us privileged at least once or twice in our lives to experience the indescribable witchery of a perfect summer night, when time seems to stand still, the world becomes unsubstantial, and Nature is steeped in music and silver light, quivering shadows and mysterious sound, when such a pitch of beauty and glamour and mystery is achieved by the darkness, the landscape, the birds, the insects, the trees and the shadows, and perhaps the moon or even one star, that one would like to say to the fleeting moment what Faust challenged and defied the devil to compel him to cry out: “Verweile, Du bist schön.”

It is the moment that the great poets have sometimes caught and made permanent for us by their prodigious conjury: Shakespeare, in the end of the Merchant of Venice, when Lorenzo and Jessica let the sounds of music creep into their ears, and wonder at patines of bright gold in the floor of heaven; Keats, when he wished to cease upon the midnight with no pain; Musset, in the “Nuit de Mai”; Victor Hugo, when, on their lovely brief and fatal bridal night, Hernani and Doña Sol fancy in the moonlight that sleeping Nature is watching amorously over them; and the musicians speak this magic with an even greater certainty, without the need of words: Beethoven, in his Sonata; Chopin, again and again; Schumann, in his lyrics, especially “Frühlingsnacht”; Schubert, in his “Serenade.”

I have known many such nights: the dark nights of Central Russia before the harvest ends, when the watchman’s rattle punctuates and intensifies the huge silence, and a far-off stamping dance rhythm and a bleating accordion outdo Shakespeare and Schubert in magic; June nights in Florence, when you couldn’t see the grass for fireflies, and the croaking of frogs made a divine orchestra; or in Venice, on the glassy lagoon, when streaks of red still hung in the west; May nights by the Neckar at Heidelberg, loud with the jubilee of nightingales and aromatic with lilac; a twilight in May at Arundel Park, when large trees, dim lawns, and antlered shapes seemed to be part of a fairy revel; and nights in South Devon, when the full September moon made the garden and the ilex tree as unreal as Prospero’s island.

But I never in my whole life felt the spell so acutely as in the summer evenings in the night nursery at Coombe Cottage, when we went to bed by daylight and lay in our cots guessing at the pattern on the wall, to wake up later when it was dark, half conscious of the summer scents outside, and of a bird’s song in the darkness. The intense magic of that moment I have never quite recaptured, except when reading Keats’ “Ode to the Nightingale” for the first time, when the door on to the past was opened wide once more and the old vision and the strange sense of awe, unreality, and enchantment returned.

But to go back to nursery life. Our London life followed the ritual, I suppose, of most nurseries. In the morning after our breakfast we went down, washed and scrubbed and starched, into the dining-room, where breakfast was at nine, and kissed our father before he drove to the city in a phaeton, and played at the end of the dining-room round a pedestalled bust of one of the Popes. Then a walk in the Park, and sometimes as a treat a walk in the streets, and possibly a visit to Cremer’s, the toy-shop in Bond Street. Hugo and I detested the Park, and the only moment of real excitement I remember was when one day Hilly told me not to go near the flower-beds, and I climbed over the little railing and picked a towering hyacinth. Police intervention was immediately threatened, and I think a policeman actually did remonstrate; but although I felt for some hours a pariah and an outcast, there was none the less an aftertaste of triumph in the tears; attrition, perhaps, but no contrition.

When we got to be a little older … older than what? I don’t know … but there came our moment when we joined our sisters every morning to say our prayers in my mother’s bedroom, every day before breakfast. They were short and simple prayers—the “Our Father” and one other short prayer. Nevertheless, for years the “Our Father” was to me a mysterious and unintelligible formula, all the more so, as I said it entirely by the sound, and not at all by the sense, thinking that “Whichartinheaven” was one word and “Thykingdomcome” another. I never asked what it meant. I think in some dim way I felt that, could I understand it, something of its value as an invocation would be lost or diminished. I also remember learning at a very early age the hymn, “There is a green hill far away,” and finding it puzzling. I took it for granted that most green hills had city walls round them, though this particular one hadn’t. Besides going to Coombe we went at the end of the summer to Devonshire, to Membland, near the villages of Noss Mayo, and Newton, and not far from the river Yealm, an arm of the sea. It was when getting ready for the first of these journeys that I remember, while I was being dressed in the nursery, my father’s servant, Mr. Deacon, came up to the nursery and asked me whether I would like a ticket. He then gave me a beautiful green ticket with a round hole in it. I asked him what one could do with it, and he said, “In return for that ticket you can get Bath buns, Banbury cakes, jam-rolls, crackers, and pork sausages.” In the bustle of departure I lost it. Paddington Station resounded with the desperate cries of the bereaved ticket-holder. In vain I was given half a white first-class ticket. In vain Mr. Bullock, the guard, offered every other kind of ticket. It was not the same thing. That ticket, with the round hole, had conjured up visions of wonderful possibilities and fantastic exchanges. Sausages and Banbury cakes and Bath buns (all of them magic things), I knew, would be forthcoming to no other ticket. The loss was irreparable. I remember thinking the grown-up people so utterly wanting in understanding when they said: “A ticket? Of course, he can have a ticket. Here’s a ticket for the dear little boy.” As if that white ticket was anything like the unique passport to gifts new and unheard of, anything like that real green ticket with the round hole in it. At the end of one of these journeys, at Kingsbridge Road, the train ran off the line. We were in a saloon carriage, and I remember the accident being attributed to that fact by my mother’s maid, who said saloon carriages were always unsafe. It turned out to be an enjoyable accident, and we all got out and I was given an orange.

Mr. Bullock, the guard, was a great friend of all of us children; and our chief pleasure was to ask him a riddle: “Why is it dangerous to go out in the spring?” I will leave it to the reader to guess the answer, with merely this as a guide, that the first part of the answer to the riddle is “Because the hedges are shooting,” and the second part of the answer is peculiarly appropriate to Mr. Bullock. I am afraid Mr. Bullock never saw why, although no doubt he enjoyed the riddle.

I have already said that I cannot fix any line of division between the nursery and the schoolroom epochs, but before I get on to the subject of the schoolroom I will record a few things which must have belonged to the pre-schoolroom period.

One incident which stands out clearly in my mind is that of the fifty-shilling train. There were at that time in London two toy-shops called Cremer. One was in New Bond Street, No. 27, I think, near Tessier’s, the jeweller; another in Regent Street, somewhere between Liberty’s and Piccadilly Circus.

In the window of the Regent Street shop there was a long train with people in it, and it was labelled fifty shillings. In the year 1921 it is only a small mechanical train that can be bought for fifty shillings. I can’t remember whether I had reached the schoolroom when this happened, but I know I still wore a frock and had not yet reached the dignity of trousers. I used constantly to ask to go and look at this shop window and gaze at the fifty-shilling train, which seemed first to be miraculous for its size, and, secondly, for its price. Who in the world could have fifty shillings all at once?

I never went so far as thinking it was possible to possess that train; but I used to wonder whether there were people in the world who could store up fifty shillings. We were each of us given sixpence every Saturday, but it was always spent at once, nor could I calculate or even conceive how long it would take to save enough sixpences to make fifty shillings.

One evening, when we were at Coombe, in the summer, I was sent for to the drawing-room and then told to go into the dining-room. I opened the door, and there, on the floor, was the fifty-shilling train. If a fairy had flown into the room and lifted me to the ceiling I could not have thought a fact more miraculous. From that moment I knew for certain that miracles could happen and do happen, and subsequent experience has confirmed the belief. Alas! the funnel of the engine was soon broken, and Mr. Toombs, the carpenter, was said to be able to mend it, and I looked forward to another miracle. He did, but in a way which was hardly satisfactory considered as a miracle, although perfect for practical usage. He turned on a lathe a solid funnel made of black wood, but not hollow, and he stuck it in where the funnel ought to be. I pretended I was satisfied, but my private belief was that Mr. Toombs didn’t know how to make funnels.

Another thing which happened when I was six years old was a visit to the Drury Lane pantomime, which was Mother Goose. This, of course, with a transformation scene with a large fairy with moving emerald butterfly-like wings and Arthur Roberts who, when playing a trumpet, spat out all his teeth on to the floor as if they were an encumbrance, was an ecstasy beyond words.

Another event almost more exciting was the arrival of a doll’s house. I played with dolls, but not as girls do, mothering them and dressing them. Mine were little tiny dolls, and could not be dressed or undressed, and they were used as puppets. I made them open Parliament, act plays and stories, and most frequently take the part of the French Merovingian kings. This was at the beginning of the schoolroom period, and the dolls were called Chilpéric, Ermengarde, Clothilde, Blanche de Castille, Frédégonde, Brunehaut, Galswinthe, and Pépin le Bref, and other names belonging to the same remote period of history. One day I was told that a doll’s house was coming. I couldn’t sleep for excitement, and Hilly, Grace, and Annie gravely held a conclave one night when I was in bed and supposed to be asleep, over their supper, and said that so exciting a thing as a doll’s house ought not to be allowed me. It would ruin my health. I feigned deep sleep, and the next day pretended to have lost all interest in dolls’ houses, but when it came, all its furniture was taken out, put on the floor, and arranged in two long rows, with a throne at one end, to enable Chilpéric and Frédégonde to open Parliament.

One year in London I actually saw Queen Victoria drive to the opening of Parliament in a gilded coach with a little crown perched on her head and an ermine tippet. It was not quite a satisfactory crown, but still it was a crown, and the coach had the authentic Cinderella quality.

To go back to the dolls for a moment. I used to go to Membland sometimes for Easter with my father and mother when the rest of the family stayed in London, and Margaret used to write me letters from the dolls, beginning “Cher Papa” and ending “Ermengarde” or “Chilpéric,” as the case might be. These letters used to cover me with confusion and mortification before the grown-up people, as I kept it a secret that I ever played with dolls, knowing it to be thought rather eccentric, and liable to be misunderstood, especially when there were other boys about, which there were.

Of course, in the nursery, Hugo and I had endless games of pretending, especially during bath-time (baths were hip-baths), and I remember Hugo refusing to have his bath because when we were playing at fishes I seized the shark’s part and wouldn’t let him be a shark. “Hilly,” he wailed, “I will be a shark.” But no, I wouldn’t hear of it, and he had to be a whale, which the shark, so I said, easily mastered.

Promotion to the schoolroom meant lessons and luncheon downstairs. The schoolroom was inhabited by my three sisters, Elizabeth, Margaret, and Susan, and ruled over by the French governess, Chérie. I thought Chérie the most beautiful, the cleverest, and altogether the most wonderful person in the world. My earliest recollection of her almost magical powers was when she took a lot of coloured silks and put them behind a piece of glass and said this was une vision. I believed there was nothing she didn’t know and nothing she couldn’t do. I was also convinced that one day I would marry her. This dream was sadly marred by the conduct of my sister Elizabeth. Elizabeth was the eldest, Margaret the second, and Susan the third, of my sisters. I firmly believed in fairies. Elizabeth and Margaret fostered the belief by talking a great deal about their powers as fairies, and Elizabeth said she was Queen of the fairies. One day she said: “Just as you are going to be married to Chérie, and when you are in church, I will turn you into a frog.” This was said in the schoolroom in London. The schoolroom was on the floor over the nursery. No sooner had Elizabeth made this ominous remark when I ran to the door and howled in a manner which penetrated the whole house from the housemaids’ rooms upstairs to the housekeeper’s room in the basement. Screams and yells startled the whole house. Hilly came rushing from the nursery; Chérie came from her bedroom, where she had been doing some sewing; Dimmock, my mother’s maid, whom we called D., came downstairs, saying: “Well, I never”; Sheppy, the housekeeper, peered upwards from the subterranean housekeeper’s room; and, lastly, my mother came from the drawing-room. The cause of the crisis was explained by me through sobs. “She says” … sob, sob, yell … “that she’s a fairy” … sob, sob … “and that she’ll turn me into a frog” … sob, sob … “when I marry Chérie…” All attempts to calm me were in vain. Elizabeth was then appealed to, and the whole house in chorus said to her, “Say you’re not a fairy.” But Elizabeth became marble-constant. She said, “How can I say I’m not a fairy when I am one?” A statement which I felt to be all too true and well founded. More sobs and yells. Universal indignation against Elizabeth. My paroxysm was merely increased by all the efforts everyone made to soothe me. Elizabeth was cajoled, persuaded, argued with, bribed, threatened, exhorted, blamed, anathematised, entreated, appealed to, implored, but all in vain. She would not budge from her position, which was that she was a fairy.

The drama proceeded. Nothing stopped the stream of convulsive sobs, the flood of anguish—not all Chérie’s own assurances that the wedding would be allowed to take place.

Elizabeth was taken downstairs to be reasoned with, and after an hour and a half’s argument, and not before she had been first heavily bribed with promises and then sent to bed, she finally consented to compromise. She said, as a final concession, “I’ll say I’m not a fairy, but I am.” When this concession was wrung from her the whole relieved household rushed up to tell me the good news that Elizabeth had said she was not a fairy. The moment I heard the news my tears ceased, and perfect serenity was restored. But although Elizabeth capitulated, Margaret was firmer, and she continued to mutter (like Galileo) for the rest of the afternoon, “But I am a fairy all the same.”

Margaret was the exciting element in the schoolroom. She was often naughty, and I remember her looking through the schoolroom window at Coombe, while I was doing lessons with Chérie, and making faces. Chérie said to her one day: “Vous feriez rougir un régiment.” Elizabeth was pleasantly frivolous, and Susan was motherly and sensible, and supposed to be the image of her father, but Margaret was dramatic and imaginative, and invincibly obstinate.

She knew that for Chérie’s sake I didn’t like admitting that the English had ever defeated the French in battle, so every now and then she would roll out lists of battles fought by the English against the French and won, beginning with Creçy, Poitiers, getting to Agincourt with a crescendo, and ending up in a tremendous climax with Waterloo. To which I used to retort with a battle called Bouvines, won by Philippe Auguste, in some most obscure period over one of the Plantagenet kings, and with Fontenoy. I felt them both to be poor retorts.

Another invention of Margaret’s was a mysterious Princess called Louiseaunt, who often came to see her, but as it happened always when we were out. If we suddenly came into the room, Margaret would say, “What a pity! Louiseaunt has just been here. She’ll be so sorry to have missed you.” And try as we would, we always just missed Louiseaunt.

If we went out without Margaret, Louiseaunt was sure to come that day. We constantly just arrived as Louiseaunt had left, and the inability ever to hit off Louiseaunt’s precise visiting hours was a lasting exasperation.

Another powerful weapon of Margaret’s was recitation. She used to recite in English and in French, and in both languages the effect on me was a purge of pity and terror. I minded most “Lord Ullin’s Daughter,” declaimed with melodramatic gesture, and nearly as much a passage from Hernani, beginning—

“Monts d’Aragon! Galice! Estramadoure!

Oh! Je porte malheur à tout ce qui m’entoure!”

which she recited, rolling her eyes in a menacing attitude.

“Lord Ullin’s Daughter,” said with the help of Susan, whose rendering had something reassuringly comfortable and homely about it—Susan couldn’t say her “r’s,” and pronounced them like “w’s”—in contradistinction to Margaret’s sombre and vehement violence, did a little to mitigate the effect, but none the less it frightened me so much that it had to be stopped. Hugo was not yet in the schoolroom then.

Lessons in London began soon after breakfast. They were conducted by Chérie and by an English governess, Mrs. Christie, who used to arrive in a four-wheeler, always the same one, from Kentish Town, and teach us English, Arithmetic, and Latin. Mrs. Christie was like the pictures of Thackeray, with spectacles, white bandeaux, and a black gown. During lessons she used to knit. She was in permanent mourning, and we knew we must never ask to learn “Casabianca,” as her little boy who had died had learnt it. She used to arrive with a parcel of books from the London Library, done up in a leather strap. She was the first of a long line of teachers who failed to teach me Arithmetic. She used to stay the whole morning, or sometimes only part of it. During lessons she used to have a small collation, a glass of claret, and a water biscuit. She also taught other families.

At Coombe the schoolroom looked out on the lawn, a long, flat lawn which went down by steps on a lower lawn, at the bottom of which we had our own gardens and where there was a summer-house. I remember sitting in the schoolroom next to Chérie while, with a large knitting needle, she pointed out the words pain and vin written large in a copy-book, with a picture of a bottle of red wine and a picture of a piece of bread, to show what the words meant, while Margaret was copying out Clarence’s dream in a copy-book and murmuring something about skulls, and all the time through the window framed with clematis came the sound, the magic sound of the mowing-machine, the noise of bees, and a smell of summer, tea-roses and of hayfields.

On certain days of the week Mademoiselle Ida Henry used to come and give us music lessons. Our house was saturated with an atmosphere of music. My mother played the violin and was a fine concertina player, and almost before I could walk I had violin lessons from no less a person than Mr. Ries. Until I was three I was called Strad, and I think my mother cherished the dream that I would be a violinist, but I showed no aptitude.

My first music lesson I received from Mademoiselle Ida over Stanley Lucas’ music shop in Bond Street. I was alone in London with my mother and father, one November, and I suppose about six. Mademoiselle Ida was very encouraging, and—unduly, as it turned out—optimistic, and said: “Il a des mains faites pour jouer le piano,” and soon my morceau was Diabelli’s duets. While I was learning Diabelli’s duets, Susan was learning a Fantasia by Mozart, which I envied without malice. It had one particular little run in it which I learnt to play with one finger. One day I played this downstairs in the drawing-room. A few days later Mademoiselle Ida came to luncheon, and my mother said: “Play that little bar out of the Mozart to Mademoiselle Ida.” I was aghast, feeling certain, and quite rightly, that Mademoiselle Ida would resent my having encroached on a more advanced morceau, and indeed, as it became clear to her what the bar in question was, she at once said: “Je ne veux pas que tu te mêles des morceaux des autres.” That was what I had feared. My mother was quite unconscious of the solecism that she was committing, and pressed me to play it. Finally I hummed the tune, which satisfied both parties.

I never liked music lessons then or ever afterwards, but I enjoyed Mademoiselle Ida’s conversation and company almost more than anything. Every word she ever said was treasured. One day she said to Mrs. Christie: “Bonjour, Madame Christé. J’ai bien mal à la tête.” “Je suis très fachée de le savoir, Mademoiselle Henri,” said Mrs. Christie in icy tones, and this little dialogue was not destined ever to be forgotten by any of us. We used often afterwards to enact the scene.

Elizabeth and Susan learnt the piano, and Margaret was taught the violin by Herr Ludwig, a severe German master. John, my eldest brother, was an accomplished pianist and organist; Everard, my third brother, played the piccolo. Cecil sang, and my mother was always bewailing that he had not learnt music at Eton, because his house-master said it would be more useful for him to learn how to shoe a horse. This, alas! did not prove to be the case, as he has seldom since had the opportunity of making use of his skill as a blacksmith. The brothers were all at Eton when I first went into the schoolroom, but they often used to visit us in the evening at tea-time, and sometimes they used to listen when Chérie read aloud after tea.

Echoes of the popular songs of the day reached both the nursery and the schoolroom, and the first I can remember the tunes of are: “Pop goes the Weasel,” which used to be sung to me in the nursery; “Tommy, make room for your Uncle”; “My Grandfather’s Clock”; “Little Buttercup” from Pinafore, which used to be played on a musical box; “Oh where and oh where is my little wee Dog?” with its haunting refrain.

Later we used to sing in chorus and dancing a pas de trois, a song from a Gaiety burlesque:

“We’ll never come back any more, boys,

We’ll never come back any more.”

And, later still, someone brought back to London for Christmas the unforgettable tune of “Two Lovely Black Eyes,” which in after-life I heard all over the world—on the lagoon of Venice and in the villages of Mongolia.

One day after luncheon—on Sunday—John played the “Two Grenadiers” at the pianoforte, and I remember the experience being thrilling, if a little alarming, but a revelation, and a first introduction into the world of music.

CHAPTER II
THE NURSERY AND THE SCHOOLROOM

Life was divided between London from January to August, then Devonshire till after Christmas. In the nursery and the early part of the schoolroom period we used to go to Coombe in the summer. Coombe seemed to be inextricably interwoven with London and parallel to it; and I remember dinner-parties happening, and a Hungarian band playing on the lawn, unless I have dreamt that. But there came a time, I think I must have been six or seven, when Coombe was sold, and we went there no more, and life was confined to Membland and Charles Street. London in the winter, and summer in Devonshire, with sometimes brief visits to Devonshire at Easter and Whitsuntide, and brief visits to London in November, when my father and mother went up by themselves.

It is not any false illusion or the glamour of the past that makes the whole of that period of life until school-time was reached seem like fairyland. I thought so at the time, and grown-up people who came to Coombe and Membland felt, I think, that they had come to a place of rare and radiant happiness.

But I will begin with London first.

This was the routine of life. We all had breakfast at nine downstairs. I remember asking how old my father was, and the answer was fifty-three. As he was born in 1828 and I was born in 1874, I must have been seven years old at the time of this question. I always thought of my father as fifty-three years old. My brothers John, Cecil, and Everard were at Eton at Warre’s House, and Hugo was five years old and still in the nursery.

After breakfast, at about a quarter to ten, my father drove to the City, and he never came home to luncheon except on Saturdays.

We went for a walk with Chérie, and after this lessons lasted from eleven, I think, till two, in the schoolroom.

The schoolroom was a long room with three windows looking out on to the street. There was a cottage pianoforte at an angle, and in the niche of one of the windows a small table, where Chérie used to sit and read the Daily News in the morning. We each of us had a cupboard for our toys, and there were some tall bookcases, containing all the schoolroom books, Noel and Chapsal’s Grammar, and many comfortable, shabby books of fairy-tales. We each of us had a black writing-desk, with a wooden seat attached to it, in which we kept our copybooks, and at which we did our work. A long table ran right down the middle of our room, where we did our lessons, either when everyone did them together, collectively, with Chérie, who sat at the head of the table, or with Mrs. Christie, who sat at one side of the table at the farther end.

At two o’clock we all came down to luncheon, and as my mother was at home to luncheon every day, stray people used to drop in, and that was a great excitement, as the guests used to be discussed for hours afterwards in the schoolroom.

Lady Dorothy Nevill, who lived in the same street, used often to come to luncheon and make paper boats for me. She used also to shock me by her frank expression of Tory principle, not to say prejudice, as we were staunch Liberals, and Lady Dorothy used to say that Mr. Gladstone was a dreadful man.

Mr. Alfred Montgomery was a luncheon visitor, and one day Bobby Spencer, who was afterwards to be Margaret’s husband, was subjected to a rather sharp schoolroom criticism owing to the height of his collars. I sometimes used to embarrass Chérie by sudden interpellations. One day, when she had refused a dish, I said: “Prends en, Chérie, toi qui es si gourmande.” Another day at luncheon a visitor called Colonel Edgcumbe bet my mother a pound there would be war with France within three years. I expect he forgot the bet, but I never did. Another time my mother asked Mademoiselle Ida what was the most difficult piece that existed for the pianoforte, and Mademoiselle Ida said Liszt’s “Spinnelied.” My mother bet her a pound she would learn it in a month’s time (and she did).

There were two courses at luncheon, some meat and a sweet, and then cheese, and we were not allowed to have the sweet unless we had the meat first, but we could always have two helpings if we liked. After luncheon we went for another walk. At five there were more lessons, and then schoolroom tea, presided over by Chérie, and after that various games and occupations, and sometimes a visit to the drawing-room.

There were two drawing-rooms downstairs, a front drawing-room with three windows looking out on to the street, and a back drawing-room at right angles to it. The drawing-rooms had a faded green silk on the walls. Over the chimney-piece there was a fine picture by Cuyp, which years later I saw in a private house in the Bois de Boulogne. The room was full of flowers and green Sèvres china. In the back drawing-room there was a grand pianoforte and some bookcases, and beyond that a room called the gilding-room, a kind of workshop where my mother did gilding. I only once saw a part of the operation, which consisted of making size. Later on this room became the organ room and was enlarged. The drawing-room led to a small landing and a short staircase to the front hall. On the landing wall there was an enormous picture of Venice, by Birket Foster, and from this landing, when there was a dinner-party, we used to peer through the banisters and watch the guests arriving. We were especially forbidden to slide down the banisters, as my mother used to tell us that when she was a little girl she had slid down the banisters and had a terrible fall which had cut open her throat, so that when you put a spoon in her mouth it came out again through her throat. When Hugo, the last of the family to be told this story, heard it, he said, “Did you die?” And my mother was obliged to say that she did not.

On the ground floor was a room looking out into the street, called the library, but it only possessed two bookcases let into Louis XV. white walls, and this led into the dining-room, beyond which was my father’s dressing-room, where, when we were quite small, we would watch him shave in the morning.

Dinner downstairs was at eight, and when we were small I was often allowed to go down to the beginning of dinner and draw at the dinner-table on a piece of paper, and the girls used to come down to dessert, bringing an occupation such as needlework. We were always supposed to have an occupation when we were downstairs, and I remember Susan, being asked by Chérie what needlework she was going to take to the dining-room, saying: “Mon bas, ma chemise, et ma petite wobe, Chéwie.”

On Saturday afternoons we often had a treat, and went to the German Reed’s entertainment and Corney Grain, or to Maskelyne and Cook, and Hengler’s Circus, and on Sundays we often went to the Zoo, or drove down to Coombe when Coombe existed.

Lessons were in the hands of Chérie and Mrs. Christie. Chérie taught me to read and write in French, French history out of Lamé Fleury, not without arguments on my part to learn it from the bigger grown-up book of Guizot, and French poetry. Every day began with a hideous ordeal called “La Page d’Ecriture.” Chérie would write a phrase in enormous letters in a beautiful copy-book handwriting on the top line of the copy-book, and we had to copy the sentence on every other line, with a quill pen. Mrs. Christie, besides struggling with my arithmetic, used to teach us English literature, and make us learn passages from Shakespeare by heart, which were quite unintelligible to me, and passages from Byron, Walter Scott, Campbell, and Southey, and various pieces from the Children’s Garland and Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome. I enjoyed the latter whole-heartedly.

Sometimes Mrs. Christie and Chérie used to have conversations across the children, as it were, during lessons. I remember Mrs. Christie saying to Chérie while I was doing my lessons by Chérie’s side one day: “That child will give you more trouble than all the others.”

I liked history lessons, especially Lamé Fleury’s French history and mythology; and in Lamé Fleury’s French history the favourite chapter was that beginning: “Jean II. dit le bon commença son règne par un assassinat.” The first book I read with Mrs. Christie was called Little Willie, and described the building of a house, an enchanting book. I did not like any of the English poetry we read, not understanding how by any stretch of the imagination it could be called poetry, as Shakespeare blank verse seemed to be a complicated form of prose full of uncouth words; what we learnt being Clarence’s dream, King Henry IV.’s battle speeches, which made me most uncomfortable for Chérie’s sake by their anti-French tone, and passages from Childe Harold, which I also found difficult to understand. The only poems I remember liking, which were revealed by Mrs. Christie, were Milton’s L’Allegro and Penseroso, which I copied out in a book as soon as I could write. One day she read me out Gray’s Elegy and I was greatly impressed. “That is,” she said, “the most beautiful Elegy in the language.” “Is it the most beautiful poem in the language?” I asked, rather disappointed at the qualification, and hankering for an absolute judgment. “It’s the most beautiful Elegy in the language,” she said, and I had to be content with that.

I don’t want to give the impression that we, any of us, disliked Mrs. Christie’s lessons in English literature. On the contrary, we enjoyed them, and I am grateful for them till this day. She taught us nothing soppy nor second-rate. The piece of her repertoire I most enjoyed, almost best, was a fable by Gay called “The Fox at the Point of Death.” She was always willing to explain things, and took for granted that when we didn’t ask we knew. This was not always the case. One of the pieces I learnt by heart was Shelley’s “Arethusa,” the sound of which fascinated me. But I had not the remotest idea that it was about a river. The poem begins, as it will be remembered:

“Arethusa arose

From her couch of snows

In the Acroceraunian mountains.”

For years I thought “Acroceraunian” was a kind of pin-cushion.

Mrs. Christie had a passion for Sir Walter Scott and for the Waverley Novels. “You can’t help,” she said, “liking any King of England that Sir Walter Scott has written about.” She instilled into us a longing to read Sir Walter Scott by promising that we should read them when we were older. One of the most interesting discussions to me was that between Chérie and Mrs. Christie as to what English books the girls should be allowed to read in the country. Mrs. Christie told, to illustrate a point, the following story. A French lady had once come across a French translation of an English novel, and seeing it was an English novel had at once given it to her daughter to read, as she said, of course, any English novel was fit for the jeune personne. The novel was called Les Papillons de Nuit. “And what do you think that was?” said Mrs. Christie. “Moths, by Ouida!”

The first poem that really moved me was not shown me by Mrs. Christie, but by Mantle, the maid who looked after the girls. It was Mrs. Hemans’: “Oh, call my Brother back to me, I cannot play alone.” This poem made me sob. I still think it is a beautiful and profoundly moving poem. Besides English, Mrs. Christie used to teach us Latin. I had my first Latin lesson the day after my eighth birthday. This is how it began: “Supposing,” said Mrs. Christie, “you knocked at the door and the person inside said, ‘Who’s there?’ What would you say?” I thought a little, and then half-unconsciously said, “I.” “Then,” said Mrs. Christie, “that shows you have a natural gift for grammar.” She explained that I ought reasonably to have said “Me.” Why I said “I,” I cannot think. I had no notion what her question was aiming at, and I feel certain I should have said “Me” in real life. The good grammar was quite unintentional.

As for arithmetic, it was an unmixed pain, and there was an arithmetic book called Ibbister which represented to me the final expression of what was loathsome. One day in a passion with Chérie I searched my mind for the most scathing insult I could think of, and then cried out, “Vieille Ibbister.”

I learnt to read very quickly, in French first. In the nursery Grace and Annie read me Grimm’s Fairy Tales till they were hoarse, and as soon as I could read myself I devoured any book of fairy-tales within reach, and a great many other books; but I was not precocious in reading, and found grown-up books impossible to understand. One of my favourite books later was The Crofton Boys, which Mrs. Christie gave me on 6th November 1883, as a “prize for successful card-playing.” It is very difficult for me to understand now how a child could have enjoyed the intensely sermonising tone of this book, but I certainly did enjoy it.

I remember another book called Romance, or Chivalry and Romance. In it there was a story of a damsel who was really a fairy, and a bad fairy at that, who went into a cathedral in the guise of a beautiful princess, and when the bell rang at the Elevation of the Host, changed into her true shape and vanished. I consulted Mrs. Christie as to what the Elevation of the Host meant, and she gave me a clear account of what Transubstantiation meant, and she told me about Henry VIII., the Defender of the Faith, and the Reformation, and made no comment on the truth or untruth of the dogma. Transubstantiation seemed to me the most natural thing in the world, as it always does to children, and I privately made up my mind that on that point the Reformers must have been mistaken. One day Chérie said for every devoir I did, and for every time I wasn’t naughty, I should be given a counter, and if I got twenty counters in three days I should get a prize. I got the twenty counters and sallied off to Hatchard’s to get the prize. I chose a book called The Prince of the Hundred Soups because of its cover. It was by Vernon Lee, an Italian puppet-show in narrative, about a Doge who had to eat a particular kind of soup every day for a hundred days. It is a delightful story, and I revelled in it. On the title-page it was said that the book was by the author of Belcaro. I resolved to get Belcaro some day; Belcaro sounded a most promising name, rich in possible romance and adventure, and I saved up my money for the purpose. When, after weeks, I had amassed the necessary six shillings, I went back to Hatchard’s and bought Belcaro. Alas, it was an æsthetic treatise of the stiffest and driest and most grown-up kind. Years afterwards I told Vernon Lee this story, and she promised to write me another story instead of Belcaro, like The Prince of the Hundred Soups. The first book I read to myself was Alice in Wonderland, which John gave to me. Another book I remember enjoying very much was The King of the Golden River, by Ruskin.

I enjoyed my French lessons infinitely more than my English ones. French poetry seemed to be the real thing, quite different from the prosaic English blank verse, except La Fontaine’s Fables, which, although sometimes amusing, seemed to be almost as prosy as Shakespeare. They had to be learnt by heart, nevertheless. They seemed to be in the same relation to other poems, Victor Hugo’s “Napoléon II.” and “Dans L’Alcove sombre,” which I thought quite enchanting, as meat was to pudding at luncheon, and I was not allowed to indulge in poetry until I had done my fable, but not without much argument. I sometimes overbore Chérie’s will, but she more often got her way by saying: “Tu as toujours voulu écrire avec un stylo avant de savoir écrire avec une plume.” I learnt a great many French poems by heart, and made sometimes startling use of the vocabulary. One day at luncheon I said to Chérie before the assembled company: “Chérie, comme ton front est nubile!” the word nubile having been applied by the poet, Casimir de la Vigne, to Joan of Arc.

The first French poem which really fired my imagination was a passage from Les Enfants d’Édouard, a play by the same poet, in which one of the little princes tells a dream, which Margaret used to recite in bloodcurdling tones, and his brother, the Duke of York, answers lyrically something about the sunset on the Thames.[1] Those lines fired my imagination as nothing else did. We once acted a scene from this play, Margaret and I playing the two brothers, and Susan the tearful and widowed queen and mother, and Hugo as a beefeater, who had to bawl at the top of his voice: “Reine, retirez-vous!” when the queen’s sobs became excessive, and indeed in Susan’s rendering there was nothing wanting in the way of sobs, as she was a facile weeper, and Margaret used to call her “Madame la Pluie.” Indeed there was a legend in the schoolroom that the decline of Louis XIV., King of France, moved her to tears, and being asked why she was crying, she sobbed out the words: “la vieillesse du grand Woi.”

As far back as I remember we used to act plays in French. The first one performed in the back drawing-room in Charles Street was called Comme on fait son lit on se couche, and I played some part in it which I afterwards almost regretted, as whenever a visitor came to luncheon I was asked to say a particular phrase out of it, and generally refused. This was not either from obstinacy or naughtiness; it was simply to spare my mother humiliation. I was sure grown-up people could not help thinking the performance inadequate and trifling. I was simply covered with prospective shame and wished to spare them the same feeling. One day, when a Frenchman, Monsieur de Jaucourt, came to luncheon, I refused to say the sentence in question, in spite of the most tempting bribes, simply for that reason. I was hot with shame at thinking what Monsieur de Jaucourt—he a Frenchman, too—would think of something so inadequate. And this shows how impossible it is for grown-up people to put themselves in children’s shoes and to divine their motives. If only children knew, it didn’t matter what they said!

Another dramatic performance was a scene from Victor Hugo’s drama, Angelo, in which Margaret, dressed in a crimson velvet cloak bordered with gold braid, declaimed a speech of Angelo Podesta of Padua, about the Council of Ten at Venice, while Susan, dressed in pink satin and lace, sat silent and attentive, looking meek in the part of the Venetian courtesan.

All this happened during early years in London.

Mademoiselle Ida used to enliven lessons with news from the outside world, discussions of books and concerts, and especially of other artists. One day when I was sitting at my slate with Mrs. Christie, she was discussing English spelling, and saying how difficult it was. Mrs. Christie rashly said that I could spell very well, upon which Mademoiselle Ida said to me, “You would spell ‘which’ double u i c h, wouldn’t you?” And I, anxious to oblige, said, “Yes.” This was a bitter humiliation.

Besides music lessons we had drawing lessons, first from a Miss Van Sturmer. Later we had lessons from Mr. Nathaniel Green, a water-colourist, who taught us perspective. One year I drew the schoolroom clock, which Mr. Jump used to come to wind once a week, as a present for my mother on her birthday, the 18th of June.

Sometimes I shared my mother’s lesson in water-colours. Mr. Green used to say he liked my washes, as they were warm. He used to put his brush in his mouth, which I considered dangerous, and he sometimes used a colour called Antwerp blue, which I thought was a pity, as it was supposed to fade. I was passionately fond of drawing, and drew both indoors and out of doors on every possible opportunity, and constantly illustrated various episodes in our life, or books that were being read out at the time. I took an immense interest in my mother’s painting, especially in the colours: Rubens madder, cyanine, aureoline, green oxide of chromium, transparent—all seemed to be magic names. The draughtsman of the family was Elizabeth. None of my brothers drew. Elizabeth used to paint a bust of Clytie in oils, and sometimes she went as far as life-size portraits. Besides this, she was an excellent caricaturist, and used to illustrate the main episodes of our family life in a little sketch-book.

Lessons, on the whole, used to pass off peacefully. I don’t think we were ever naughty with Mrs. Christie, although Elizabeth and Margaret used often to rock with laughter at some private joke of their own during their lessons, but with Chérie we were often naughty. The usual punishment was to be privé de pudding. When the currant and raspberry tart came round at luncheon we used to refuse it, and my mother used to press it on us, not knowing that we had been privé. Sometimes, too, we had to write out three tenses of the verb aimer, and on one occasion I refused to do it. It was a Saturday afternoon; there was a treat impending, and I was told I would not be allowed to go unless I copied out the tenses, but I remained firm throughout luncheon. Finally, at the end of luncheon I capitulated in a flood of tears and accepted the loan of my mother’s gold pencil-case and scribbled J’aime, tu aimes, il aime, etc., on a piece of writing-paper.

In the drawing-room we were not often naughty, but we were sometimes, and tried the grown-ups at moments beyond endurance. My mother said that she had had to whip us all except Hugo. I was whipped three times. Before the operation my mother always took off her rings.

Upstairs, Margaret and Elizabeth used sometimes to fight, and Susan would join in the fray, inspired by the impulse of the moment. She was liable to these sudden impulses, and on one occasion—she was very small—when she was looking on at a review of volunteers, when the guns suddenly fired, she stood up in the carriage and boxed everyone’s ears.

Not long ago we found an old mark-book which belonged to this epoch of schoolroom life, and in it was the following entry in Chérie’s handwriting: “Elizabeth et Marguerite se sont battues, Suzanne s’est jetée sur le pauvre petit Maurice.” Whenever Margaret saw that I was on the verge of tears she used to say that I made a special face, which meant I was getting ready to cry, and she called this la première position; when the corners of the mouth went down, and the first snuffle was heard, she called it la seconde position; and when tears actually came, it was la troisième position. Nearly always the mention of la première position averted tears altogether.

On Monday evenings in London my mother used to go regularly to the Monday Pops at St. James’s Hall, and on Saturday afternoon also. Dinner was at seven on Mondays, and we used to go down to it, and watch my mother cut up a leg of chicken and fill it with mustard and pepper and cayenne pepper to make a devil for supper. Margaret was sometimes taken to the Monday Pop, as she was supposed to like it, but the others were seldom taken, in case, my mother used to say, “You say when you are grown up that you were dragged to concerts, and get to dislike them.” The result was a feverish longing to go to the Monday Pop. I don’t remember going to the Monday Pop until I was grown up, but I know that I always wanted to go. I was taken to the Saturday Pop sometimes, and the first one I went to was on 8th November 1879. I was five years old. This was the programme:

Every winter we were taken to the pantomime by Lord Antrim, and the pantomimes I remember seeing were Mother Goose, Robinson Crusoe, Sinbad the Sailor, Aladdin, and Cinderella, in which the funny parts were played by Herbert Campbell and Harry Nicholls, and the Princess sometimes by the incomparably graceful dancer, Kate Vaughan.

I also remember the first Gilbert and Sullivan operas. Pinafore I was too young for; but I saw the Children’s Pinafore, which was played by children. Patience and Iolanthe and Princess Ida I saw when they were first produced at the Savoy.

Irving and Ellen Terry we never saw till I went to school, as Irving’s acting in Shakespeare made my father angry. When he saw him play Romeo, he was heard to mutter the whole time: “Remove that man from the stage.”

Then there were children’s parties. Strangely enough, I only remember one of these, so I don’t expect I enjoyed them. But I remember a children’s garden party at Marlborough House, and the exquisite beauty, the grace, and the fairy-tale-like welcome of the Princess of Wales.

Two of the great days for the children in London were Valentine’s Day, on the eve of which we each of us sent the whole of the rest of the family Valentines, cushioned and scented Valentines with silken fringes; and the 1st of April, when Susan was always made an April fool, the best one being one of Chérie’s, who sent her to look in the schoolroom for Les Mémoires de Jonas dans la baleine. She searched conscientiously, but in vain, for this interesting book.

On one occasion, on the Prince of Wales’ wedding-day, in March, the whole family were invited to a children’s ball at Marlborough House. The girls’ frocks were a subject of daily discussion for weeks beforehand, and other governesses used to come and discuss the matter. They were white frocks, and when they were ready they were found to be a failure, for some reason, and they had to be made all over again at another dressmaker’s, called Mrs. Mason. It was on this occasion that Chérie made a memorable utterance and said: “Les pointes de Madame Mason sont incomparables,” as Elizabeth had for the first time risen to the dignity of a pointe (the end of the pointed “bodies” of the fashions of that day). It was doubtful whether the new frocks would be ready in time. There was a momentous discussion as to whether they were to wear black stockings or not. Finally the frocks arrived, and we were dressed and were all marshalled downstairs ready to start. My father in knee-breeches and myself in a black velvet suit, black velvet breeches, and a white waistcoat. I was told to be careful to remember to kiss the Princess of Wales’ hand.

I can just remember the ballroom, but none of the grown-up people—nothing, in fact, except a vague crowd of tulle skirts.

One night there was a ball, or rather a small dance, in Charles Street, and I was allowed to come down after going to bed all day. People shook their heads over this, and said I was being spoilt, to Chérie, but Chérie said: “Cet enfant n’est pas gâté mais il se fait gâter.”

The dance led off with a quadrille, in which I and my father both took part. After having carefully learnt the pas chassé at dancing lessons, I was rather shocked to find this elegant glide was not observed by the quadrille dancers.

All this was the delightful epoch of the ’eighties, when the shop windows were full of photographs of the professional beauties, and bands played tunes from the new Gilbert and Sullivan in the early morning in the streets, and people rode in Rotten Row in the evening, and Chérie used to rush us across the road to get a glimpse of Mrs. Langtry or the Princess of Wales.

Dancing lessons played an important part in our lives. Our first dancing instructor was the famous ex-ballerina, Madame Taglioni, a graceful old lady with grey curls, who held a class at Lady Granville’s house in Carlton House Terrace. It was there I had my first dancing lesson and learnt the Tarantelle, a dance with a tambourine, which I have always found effective, if not useful, in later life. Then Madame Taglioni’s class came to an end, and there was a class at Lady Ashburton’s at Bath House, which was suddenly put a stop to owing to the rough and wild behaviour of the boys, myself among them. Finally we had a class in our own house, supervised by a strict lady in black silk, who taught us the pas chassé, the five positions, the valse, the polka, and the Lancers.

Another event was Mrs. Christie’s lottery, which was held once a year at her house at Kentish Town. All her pupils came, and everyone won a prize in the lottery. One year I won a stuffed duck. After tea we acted charades. On the way back we used to pass several railway bridges, and Chérie, producing a gold pencil, used to say: “Par la vertu de ma petite baguette,” she would make a train pass. It was perhaps a rash boast, but it was always successful.

We used to drive to Mrs. Christie’s in a coach, an enormous carriage driven by Maisy, the coachman, who wore a white wig. It was only used when the whole family had to be transported somewhere.

Another incident of London life was Mademoiselle Ida’s pupils’ concert, which happened in the summer. I performed twice at it, I think, but never a solo. A duet with Mademoiselle Ida playing the bass, and whispering: “Gare au dièse, gare au bémol,” in my ear. What we enjoyed most about this was waiting in what was called the artists’ room, and drinking raspberry vinegar.

But the crowning bliss of London life was Hamilton Gardens, where we used to meet other children and play flags in the summer evenings.

This was the scene of wild enjoyment, not untinged with romance, for there the future beauties of England were all at play in their lovely teens. We were given tickets for concerts at the Albert Hall and elsewhere in the afternoon, but I remember that often when Hugo and I were given the choice of going to a concert or playing in the nursery, we sometimes chose to play. But I do remember hearing Patti sing “Coming thro’ the Rye” at the Guildhall, and Albani and Santley on several occasions.

But what we enjoyed most of all was finding some broken and derelict toy, and inventing a special game for it. Once in a cupboard in the back drawing-room I came across some old toys which had belonged to John and Cecil, and must have been there for years. Among other things there was an engine in perfectly good repair, with a little cone like the end of a cigar which you put inside the engine under the funnel. You then lit it and smoke came out, and the engine moved automatically. This seemed too miraculous for inquiry, and I still wonder how and why it happened. Then the toy was unaccountably lost, and I never discovered the secret of this mysterious and wonderful engine.

During all this time there were two worlds of which one gradually became conscious: the inside world and the outside world. The centre of the inside world, like the sun to the solar system, was, of course, our father and mother (Papa and Mamma), the dispenser of everything, the source of all enjoyment, and the final court of appeal, recourse to which was often threatened in disputes.

Next came Chérie, then my mother’s maid, Dimmock, then Sheppy, the housekeeper, who had white grapes, cake, and other treats in the housekeeper’s room. She was a fervent Salvationist and wore a Salvationist bonnet, and when my father got violent and shouted out loud ejaculations, she used to coo softly in a deprecating tone.

Then there was Monsieur Butat, the cook, who used to appear in white after breakfast when my father ordered dinner; Deacon, his servant, was the source of all worldly wisdom and experience, and recommended brown billycock hats in preference to black ones, because they did not fade in the sea air; Harriet, the housemaid, who used to bring a cup of tea in the early morning to my mother’s bedroom, and Frank the footman. I can’t remember a butler in London, but I suppose there was one; but if it was the same one we had in the country, it was Mr. Watson.

Dimmock, or D., as we used to call her, played a great part in my early life, because when I came up to London or went down to the country alone with my father and mother she used to have sole charge of me, and I slept in her room. One day, during one of these autumnal visits to London, I was given an umbrella with a skeleton’s head on it. This came back in dreams to me with terrific effect, and for several nights running I ran down from the top to the bottom of the house in terror. The umbrella was taken away. I used to love these visits to London when half the house was shut up, and there was no one there except my father and mother and D., and we used to live in the library downstairs. There used to be long and almost daily expeditions to shops because Christmas was coming, as D. used to chant to me every morning, and the Christmas-tree shopping had to be done. D. and I used to buy all the materials for the Christmas-tree—the candles, the glass balls, and the fairy to stand at the top of it—in a shop in the Edgware Road called Eagle. I used to have dinner in the housekeeper’s room with Sheppy, and spent most of my time in D.’s working-room. One day she gave me a large piece of red plush, and I had something sewn round it, and called it Red Conscience. Never did a present make me more happy; I treated it as something half sacred, like a Mussulman’s mat.

On one occasion D. and I went to a matinée at St. James’s Theatre to see A Scrap of Paper, played by Mr. and Mrs. Kendal. This year I read the play (it was translated from Sardou’s Pattes de Mouche) for the first time, and I found I could recollect every scene of the play, and Mrs. Kendal’s expression and intonation.

Another time Madame Neruda, who was a great friend of my mother’s, whom we saw constantly, gave me two tickets for a ballad concert at which she was playing. The policeman was told to take me into the artists’ room during the interval. D. was to take me, but for some reason she thought the concert was in the evening, and it turned out to be in the afternoon; so as a compensation my father sent us to an operetta called Falka, in which Miss Violet Cameron sang. I enjoyed it more than any concert. The next day Madame Neruda came to luncheon and heard all about the misadventure. “And did you enjoy your operetta?” she asked. “Yes,” I said, with enthusiasm. “Say, not as much as you would have enjoyed the ballad concert,” said my mother. But I didn’t feel so sure about that.

I used to do lessons with Mrs. Christie, and have music lessons from Mademoiselle Ida, and in the afternoon I often used to go out shopping in the carriage with my mother, or for a walk with D. But I will tell more about her later when I describe Membland.

The girls had a maid who looked after them called Rawlinson, and she and the nursery made up the rest of the inside world in London.

In the outside world the first person of importance I remember was Grandmamma, my mother’s mother, Lady Elizabeth Bulteel, who used to paint exquisite pictures for the children like the pictures on china, and play songs for us on the pianoforte. She often came to luncheon, and used to bring toys to be raffled for, and make us, at the end of luncheon, sing a song which ran:

“A pie sat on a pear tree,

And once so merrily hopped she,

And twice so merrily hopped she,

Three times so merrily hopped she,”

Each singer held a glass in his hand. When the song had got thus far, everyone drained their glass, and the person who finished first had to say the last line of the verse, which was:

“Ya-he, ya-ho, ya-ho.”

And the person who said it first, won.

Everything about Grandmamma was soft and exquisite: her touch on the piano and her delicate manipulation of the painting-brush. She lived in Green Street, a house I remember as the perfection of comfort and cultivated dignity. There were amusing drawing-tables with tiles, pencils, painting-brushes; chintz chairs and books and music; a smell of potpourri and lavender water; miniatures in glass tables, pretty china, and finished water-colours.

In November 1880—this is one of the few dates I can place—we were in London, my father and mother and myself, and Grandmamma was not well. She must have been over eighty, I think. Every day I used to go to Green Street with my mother and spend the whole morning illuminating a text. I was told Grandmamma was very ill, and had to take the nastiest medicines, and was being so good about it. I was sometimes taken in to see her. One day I finished the text, and it was given to Grandmamma. That evening when I was having my tea, my father and mother came into the dining-room and told me Grandmamma was dead. The text I had finished was buried with her.

The next day at luncheon I asked my mother to sing “A pie sat on a pear tree,” as usual. It was the daily ritual of luncheon. She said she couldn’t do “Hopped she,” as we called it, any longer now that Grandmamma was not there.

Another thing Grandmamma had always done at luncheon was to break a thin water biscuit into two halves, so that one half looked like a crescent moon; and I said to my mother, “We shan’t be able to break biscuits like that any more.”

CHAPTER III
MEMBLAND

To mention any of the other people of the outside world at once brings me to Membland, because the outside world was intimately connected with that place. Membland was a large, square, Jacobean house, white brick, green shutters and ivy, with some modern gabled rough-cast additions and a tower, about twelve miles from Plymouth and ten miles from the station Ivy Bridge.

On the north side of the house there was a gravel yard, on the south side a long, sweeping, sloping lawn, then a ha-ha, a field beyond this and rookery which was called the Grove.

When you went through the front hall you came into a large billiard-room in which there was a staircase leading to a gallery going round the room and to the bedrooms. The billiard-room was high and there were no rooms over the billiard-room proper—but beyond the billiard-table the room extended into a lower section, culminating in a semicircle of windows in which there was a large double writing-table.

Later, under the staircase, there was an organ, and the pipes of the great organ were on the wall.

There was a drawing-room full of chintz chairs, books, potpourri, a grand pianoforte, and two writing-tables; a dining-room looking south; a floor of guests’ rooms; a bachelors’ passage in the wing; a schoolroom on the ground floor looking north, with a little dark room full of rubbish next to it, which was called the Cabinet Noir, and where we were sent when we were naughty; and a nursery floor over the guests’ rooms.

From the northern side of the house you could see the hills of Dartmoor. In the west there was a mass of tall trees, Scotch firs, stone-pines, and ashes.

There was a large kitchen garden at some distance from the house on a hill and enclosed by walls.

Our routine of life was much the same as it was in London, except that the children had breakfast in the schoolroom at nine, as the grown-ups did not have breakfast till later.

Then came lessons, a walk, or play in the garden, further lessons, luncheon at two, a walk or an expedition, lessons from five till six, and then tea and games or reading aloud afterwards. One of the chief items of lessons was the Dictée, in which we all took part, and even Everard from Eton used to come and join in this sometimes.

Elizabeth won a kind of inglorious glory one day by making thirteen mistakes in her dictée, which was the record—a record never beaten by any one of us before or since; and the words treize fautes used often to be hurled at her head in moments of stress.

After tea Chérie used to read out books to the girls, and I was allowed to listen, although I was supposed to be too young to understand, and indeed I was. Nevertheless, I found the experience thrilling; and there are many book incidents which have remained for ever in my mind, absorbed during these readings, although I cannot always place them. I recollect a wonderful book called L’Homme de Neige, and many passages from Alexandre Dumas.

Sometimes Chérie would read out to me, especially stories from the Cabinet des Fées, or better still, tell stories of her own invention. There was one story in which many animals took part, and one of the characters was a partridge who used to go out just before the shooting season with a telescope under his wing to see whether things were safe. Chérie always used to say this was the creation she was proudest of. Another story was called Le Prince Muguet et Princesse Myosotis, which my mother had printed. I wrote a different story on the same theme and inspired by Chérie’s story when I grew up. But I enjoyed Chérie’s recollections of her childhood as much as her stories, and I could listen for ever to the tales of her grand-mère sévere who made her pick thorny juniper to make gin, or the story of a lady who had only one gown, a yellow one, and who every day used to ask her maid what the weather was like, and if the maid said it was fine, she would say, “Eh bien, je mettrai ma robe jaune,” and if it was rainy she would likewise say, “Je mettrai ma robe jaune.” Poor Chérie used to be made to repeat this story and others like it in season and out of season.

She would describe Paris until I felt I knew every street, and landscapes in Normandy and other parts of France. The dream of my life was to go to Paris and see the Boulevards and the Invalides and the Arc de Triomphe, and above all, the Champs Elysées.

Chérie had also a repertory of French songs which she used to teach us. One was the melancholy story of a little cabin-boy:

“Je ne suis qu’un petit mousse

A bord d’un vaisseau royal,

Je vais partout où le vent me pousse,

Nord ou midi cela m’est égale.

Car d’une mère et d’un père

Je n’ai jamais connu l’amour.”

Another one, less pathetic but more sentimental, was:

“Pourquoi tous les jours, Madeleine,

Vas-tu au bord du ruisseau?

Ce n’est pas, car je l’espère,

Pour te regarder dans l’eau,

‘Mais si,’ répond Madeleine,

Baissant ses beaux yeux d’ébêne.

Je n’y vais pour autre raison.”

I forget the rest, but it said that she looked into the stream to see whether it was true, as people said, that she was beautiful—“pour voir si gent ne ment pas”—and came back satisfied that it was true.

But best of all I liked the ballad:

“En revenant des noces j’étais si fatiguée

Au bord d’un ruisseau je me suis reposée,

L’eau était si claire que je me suis baignée,

Avec une feuille de chêne je me suis essuyée,

Sur la plus haute branche un rossignol chantait,

Chante, beau rossignol, si tu as le cœur gai,

Pour un bouton de rose mon ami s’est fâché,

Je voudrais que la rose fût encore au rosier,”

or words to that effect.

Besides these she taught us all the French singing games: “Savez-vous planter les choux?” “Sur le pont d’Avignon,” and “Qu’est qui passe ici si tard, Compagnons de la Marjolaine?” We used to sing and dance these up and down the passage outside the schoolroom after tea.

Round about Membland were several nests of relations. Six miles off was my mother’s old home Flete, where the Mildmays lived. Uncle Bingham Mildmay married my mother’s sister, Aunt Georgie, and bought Flete; the house, which was old, was said to be falling to pieces, so it was rebuilt, more or less on the old lines, with some of the old structure left intact.

At Pamflete, three miles off, lived my mother’s brother, Uncle Johnny Bulteel, with his wife, Aunt Effie, and thirteen children.

And in the village of Yealmpton, three miles off, also lived my great-aunt Jane who had a sister called Aunt Sister, who, whenever she heard carriage wheels in the drive, used to get under the bed, such was her disinclination to receive guests. I cannot remember Aunt Sister, but I remember Aunt Jane and Uncle Willie Harris, who was either her brother or her husband. He had been present at the battle of Waterloo as a drummer-boy at the age of fifteen. But Aunt Sister’s characteristics had descended to other members of the family, and my mother used to say that when she and her sister were girls my Aunt Georgie had offered her a pound if she would receive some guests instead of herself.

On Sundays we used to go to church at a little church in Noss Mayo until my father built a new church, which is there now.

The service was long, beginning at eleven and lasting till almost one. There was morning prayer, the Litany, the Ante-Communion service, and a long sermon preached by the rector, a charming old man called Mr. Roe, who was not, I fear, a compelling preacher.

When we went to church I was given a picture-book when I was small to read during the sermon, a book with sacred pictures in colours. I was terribly ashamed of this. I would sooner have died than be seen in the pew with this book. It was a large picture-book. So I used every Sunday to lose or hide it just before the service, and find it again afterwards. On Sunday evenings we used sometimes to sing hymns in the schoolroom. The words of the hymns were a great puzzle. For instance, in the hymn, “Thy will be done,” the following verse occurs—I punctuate it as I understood it, reading it, that is to say, according to the tune—

“Renew my will from day to day,

Blend it with Thine, and take away.

All that now makes it hard to say

Thy will be done.”

I thought the blending and the subsequent taking away of what was blent was a kind of trial of faith.

After tea, instead of being read to, we used sometimes to play a delightful round game with counters, called Le Nain Jaune.

Any number of people could play at it, and I especially remember Susan triumphantly playing the winning card and saying:

“Le bon Valet, la bonne Dame, le bon Woi. Je wecommence.”

In September or October, Chérie would go for her holidays. I cannot remember if she went every year, but we had no one instead of her, and she left behind her a series of holiday tasks.

During one of her absences my Aunt M’aimée, another sister of my mother’s, came to stay with us. Aunt M’aimée was married to Uncle Henry Ponsonby, the Queen’s Private Secretary. He came, too, and with them their daughter Betty. Betty had a craze at that time for Sarah Bernhardt, and gave a fine imitation of her as Doña Sol in the last act of Hernani. It was decided we should act this whole scene, with Margaret as Hernani and Aunt M’aimée reading the part of Ruy Gomez, who appears in a domino and mask.

Never had I experienced anything more thrilling. I used to lie on the floor during the rehearsals, and soon I knew the whole act by heart. I thought Betty the greatest genius that ever lived.

When Chérie came back she was rather surprised and not altogether pleased to find I knew the whole of the last act of Hernani by heart. She thought this a little too exciting and grown-up for me, and even for Margaret, but none the less she let me perform the part of Doña Sol one evening after tea in my mother’s bedroom, dressed in a white frock, with Susan in a riding-habit playing the sinister figure of Ruy Gomez. I can see Chérie now, sitting behind a screen, book in hand to prompt me, and shaking with laughter as I piped out in a tremulous and lisping treble the passionate words:

“Il vaudrait mieuxzaller (which I made all one word) au tigre même

Arracher ses petits qu’à moi celui que j’aime.”

Chérie’s return from her holidays was one of the most exciting of events, for she would bring back with her a mass of toys from Giroux and the Paradis des Enfants, and a flood of stories about the people and places and plays she had seen, and the food she had eaten.

One year she brought me back a theatre of puppets. It was called Théâtre français. It had a white proscenium, three scenes and an interior, a Moorish garden by moonlight, and a forest, and a quantity of small puppets suspended by stiff wires and dressed in silk and satin. There was a harlequin, a columbine, a king, a queen, many princesses, a villain scowling beneath black eyebrows, an executioner with a mask, peasants, pastry-cooks, and soldiers with halberds, who would have done honour to the Papal Guard at the Vatican, and some heavily moustached gendarmes. This theatre was a source of ecstasy, and innumerable dramas used to be performed in it. Chérie used also to bring back some delicious cakes called nonnettes, a kind of gingerbread with icing on the top, rolled up in a long paper cylinder.

She also brought baskets of bonbons from Boissier, the kind of basket which had several floors of different kinds of bonbons, fondants on the top in their white frills, then caramels, then chocolates, then fruits confits. All these things confirmed one’s idea that there could be no place like Paris.

In 1878, when I was four years old, another brother was born, Rupert, in August, but he died in October of the same year. He was buried in Revelstoke Church, a church not used any more, and then in ruins except for one aisle, which was roofed in, and provided with pews. It nestled by the seashore, right down on the rocks, grey and covered with ivy, and surrounded by quaint tombstones that seemed to have been scattered haphazard in the thick grass and the nettles.

I think it was about the same time that one evening I was playing in my godmother’s room, that I fell into the fire, and my little white frock was ablaze and my back badly burnt. I remember being taken up to the nursery and having my back rubbed with potatoes, and thinking that part, and the excitement and sympathy shown, and the interest created, great fun.

All this was before Hugo was in the schoolroom, but in all my sharper memories of Membland days he plays a prominent part. We, of course, shared the night nursery, and we soon invented games together, some of which were distracting, not to say maddening, to grown-up people. One was an imaginary language in which even the word “Yes” was a trisyllable, namely: “Sheepartee,” and the word for “No” was even longer and more complicated, namely: “Quiliquinino.” We used to talk this language, which was called “Sheepartee,” and which consisted of unmitigated gibberish, for hours in the nursery, till Hilly, Grace, and Annie could bear it no longer, and Everard came up one evening and told us the language must stop or we should be whipped.

The language stopped, but a game grew out of it, which was most complicated, and lasted for years even after we went to school. The game was called “Spankaboo.” It consisted of telling and acting the story of an imaginary continent in which we knew the countries, the towns, the government, and the leading people. These countries were generally at war with one another. Lady Spankaboo was a prominent lady at the Court of Doodahn. She was a charming character, not beautiful nor clever, and sometimes a little bit foolish, but most good-natured and easily taken in. Her husband, Lord Spankaboo, was a country gentleman, and they had no children. She wore red velvet in the evening, and she was bien vue at Court.

There were hundreds of characters in the game. They increased as the story grew. It could be played out of doors, where all the larger trees in the garden were forts belonging to the various countries, or indoors, but it was chiefly played in the garden, or after we went to bed. Then Hugo would say: “Let’s play Spankaboo,” and I would go straight on with the latest events, interrupting the narrative every now and then by saying: “Now, you be Lady Spankaboo,” or whoever the character on the stage might be for the moment, “and I’ll be So-and-so.” Everything that happened to us and everything we read was brought into the game—history, geography, the ancient Romans, the Greeks, the French; but it was a realistic game, and there were no fairies in it and nothing in the least frightening. As it was a night game, this was just as well.

Hugo was big for his age, with powerful lungs, and after luncheon he used to sing a song called “Apples no more,” with immense effect. Hugo was once told the following riddle: “Why can’t an engine-driver sit down?”—to which the answer is, “Because he has a tender behind.” He asked this to my mother at luncheon the next day, and when nobody could guess it, he said: “Because he has a soft behind.” There was a groom in the stables who had rather a Japanese cast of face, and we used to call him le Japonnais. One day Hugo went and stood in front of him and said to him: “You’re the Japonais.” On another occasion when Hugo was learning to conjugate the auxiliary verb être, Chérie urged him to add a substantive after “Je suis,” to show he knew what he was doing. “Je suis une plume,” said Hugo.

We were constantly in D.’s room and used to play sad tricks on her. She rashly told us one day that her brother Jim had once taken her to a fair at Wallington and had there shown her a Punch’s face, in gutta-percha, on the wall. “Go and touch his nose,” had said Jim. She did so, and the face being charged with electricity gave her a shock.

This story fired our imagination and we resolved to follow Jim’s example. We got a galvanic battery, how and where, I forget, the kind which consists of a small box with a large magnet in it, and a handle which you turn, the patient holding two small cylinders. We persuaded D. to hold the cylinders, and then we made the current as strong as possible and turned the handle with all our might. Poor D. screamed and tears poured down her cheeks, but we did not stop, and she could not leave go because the current contracts the fingers; we went on and on till she was rescued by someone else.

Another person we used to play tricks on was M. Butat, the cook, and one day Hugo and I, to his great indignation, threw a dirty mop into his stock-pot.

A great ally in the house was the housekeeper, Mrs. Tudgay. Every day at eleven she would have two little baskets ready for us, which contained biscuits, raisins and almonds, two little cakes, and perhaps a tangerine orange.

To the outside world Mrs. Tudgay was rather alarming. She had a calm, crystal, cold manner; she was thin, reserved, rather sallow, and had a clear, quiet, precise way of saying scathing and deadly things to those whom she disliked. Once when Elizabeth was grown up and married and happened to be staying with us, Mrs. Tudgay said to her: “You’re an expense to his Lordship.” Once when she engaged an under-housemaid she said: “She shall be called—nothing—and get £15 a year.” But for children she had no terrors. She was devoted to us, bore anything, did anything, and guarded our effects and belongings with the vigilance of a sleepless hound. She had formerly been maid to the Duchess of San Marino in Italy, and she had a fund of stories about Italy, a scrap-book full of Italian pictures and photographs, and a silver cross containing a relic of the True Cross given her by Pope Pius IX. We very often spent the evening in the housekeeper’s room, and played Long Whist with Mrs. Tudgay, D., Mr. Deacon, and John’s servant, Mr. Thompson.

When, in the morning, we were exhausted from playing forts and Spankaboo in the garden, we used to leap through Mrs. Tudgay’s window into the housekeeper’s room, which was on the ground floor and looked out on to the garden, and demand refreshment, and Mrs. Tudgay used to bring two wine glasses of ginger wine and some biscuits.

Sometimes we used to go for picnics with Mrs. Tudgay, D., Hilly, and the other servants. We started out in the morning and took luncheon with us, which was eaten at one of the many keepers’ houses on the coast, some of which had a room kept for expeditions, and then spent the afternoon paddling on the rocks and picking shells and anemones. We never bathed, as there was not a single beach on my father’s estate where it was possible. It was far too rocky. Mrs. Tudgay had a small and ineffectual Pomeranian black dog called Albo, who used to be taken on these expeditions. Looking back on these, I wonder at the quantity of food D. and Mrs. Tudgay used to allow us to eat. Hugo and I thought nothing of eating a whole lobster apiece, besides cold beef and apple tart.

Sometimes we all went expeditions with my mother. Then there used to be sketching, and certainly more moderation in the way of food.

Membland was close to the sea. My father made a ten-mile drive along the cliffs so that you could drive from the house one way, make a complete circle, and come back following the seacoast all the way to the river Yealm, on one side of which was the village of Newton Ferrers and on the other the village of Noss Mayo. Both villages straggled down the slopes of a steep hill. Noss Mayo had many white-washed and straw-thatched cottages and some new cottages of Devonshire stone built by my father, with slate roofs, but not ugly or aggressive. Down the slopes of Noss there were fields and orchards, and here and there a straw-thatched cottage. They were both fishing villages, the Yealm lying beneath them, a muddy stretch at low tide and a brimming river at high tide. Newton had an old grey Devonshire church with a tower at the west end. At Noss my father built a church exactly the same in pattern of Devonshire stone. You could not have wished for a prettier village than Noss, and it had, as my mother used to say: “a little foreign look about it.”

At different points of this long road round the cliffs, which in the summer were a blaze of yellow gorse, there were various keepers’ cottages, as I have said. From one you looked straight on to the sea from the top of the cliff. Another was hidden low down among orchards and not far from the old ruined church of Revelstoke. A third, called Battery Cottage, was built near the emplacement of an old battery and looked out on to the Mewstone towards Plymouth Sound and Ram Head. The making of this road and the building of the church were two great events. Pieces of the cliff had to be blasted with dynamite, which was under the direction of a cheery workman called Mr. Yapsley, during the road-making, and the building of the church which was in the hands of Mr. Crosbie, the Clerk of the Works, whom we were devoted to, entailed a host of interesting side-issues. One of these was the carving which was done by Mr. Harry Hems of Exeter. He carved the bench-ends, and on one of them was a sea battle in which a member of the Bulteel family, whom we took to be Uncle Johnny, was seen hurling a stone from a mast’s crows’ nest in a sailing ship, on to a serpent which writhed in the waves. Hugo and I both sat for cherubs’ heads, which were carved in stone on the reredos. There were some stained-glass windows and a hand-blown organ on which John used to play on Sundays when it was ready.

The church was consecrated by the Bishop of Exeter, Bishop Temple.

Hugo and I learned to ride first on a docile beast called Emma, who, when she became too lethargic, was relegated to a little cart which used to be driven by all of us, and then on a Dartmoor pony called the Giant, and finally on a pony called Emma Jane.

The coachman’s name was Bilky. He was a perfect Devonshire character. His admiration for my brothers was unbounded. He used to talk of them one after the other, afraid if he had praised one, he had not praised the others enough. My brother Everard, whom we always called the “Imp,” he said was as strong as a lion and as nimble as a bee. “They have rightly, sir, named you the Himp,” one of the servants said to him one day.

During all these years we had extraordinarily few illnesses. Hugo once had whooping-cough at London, and I was put in the same room so as to have it at the same time, and although I was longing to catch it, as Hugo was rioting in presents and delicacies as well as whoops, my constitution was obstinately impervious to infection.

We often had colds, entailing doses of spirits of nitre, linseed poultices, and sometimes even a mustard poultice, but I never remember anything more serious. Every now and then Hilly thought it necessary to dose us with castor-oil, and the struggles that took place when Hilly used to arrive with a large spoon, saying, as every Nanny I have ever known says: “Now, take it!” were indescribable. I recollect five people being necessary one day to hold me down before the castor-oil could be got down my throat. We had a charming comfortable country doctor called Doctor Atkins, who used to drive over in a dog-cart, muffled in wraps, and produce a stethoscope out of his hat. He was so genial and comfortable that one began to feel better directly he felt one’s pulse.

When we first went to Membland the post used to be brought by a postman who walked every day on foot from Ivy Bridge, ten miles off. He had a watch the size of a turnip, and the stamps at that time were the dark red ones with the Queen’s head on them. Later the post came in a cart from Plympton, and finally from Plymouth.

In the autumn, visitors used to begin to arrive for the covert shooting, which was good and picturesque, the pheasants flying high in the steep woods on the banks of the Yealm, and during the autumn months the nearing approach of Christmas cast an aura of excitement over life. The first question was: Would there be a Christmas tree? During all the early years there was one regularly.

After the November interval in London, which I have already described, the serious business of getting the tree ready began. It was a large tree, and stood in a square green box.

The first I remember was placed in the drawing-room, the next in the dining-room, the next in the billiard-room, and after that they were always in the covered-in tennis court, which had been built in the meanwhile. The decoration of the tree was under the management of D. The excitement when the tree was brought into the house or the tennis court for the first time was terrific, and Mr. Ellis, the house-carpenter, who always wore carpet shoes, climbed up a ladder and affixed the silver fairy to the top of the tree. Then reels of wire were brought out, scissors, boxes of crackers, boxes of coloured candles, glass-balls, clips for candles, and a quantity of little toys.

Hugo and I were not allowed to do much. Nearly everything we did was said to be wrong. The presents were, of course, kept a secret and were done up in parcels, and not brought into the room until the afternoon of Christmas Eve.

The Christmas tree was lit on Christmas Eve after tea. The ritual was always the same. Hugo and I ran backwards and forwards with the servants’ presents. The maids were given theirs first,—they consisted of stuff for a gown done up in a parcel,—then Mrs. Tudgay, D., and the upper servants. One year Mrs. Tudgay had a work-basket.

Then the guests were given their presents, and we gave our presents and received our own. The presents we gave were things we had made ourselves: kettle-holders, leather slippers worked in silk for my father, and the girls sometimes made a woollen waistcoat or a comforter. Chérie always had a nice present for my mother, which we were allowed to see beforehand, and she always used to say: “N’y touchez pas, la fraîcheur en fait la beauté.”

Our presents were what we had put down beforehand in a list of “Christmas Wants”—a horse and cart, a painting-box, or a stylograph pen.

The house used to be full at Christmas. My father’s brothers, Uncle Tom and Uncle Bob, used to be there. Madame Neruda I remember as a Christmas visitor. Godfrey Webb wrote the following lines about Christmas at Membland:

CHRISTMAS AT MEMBLAND

“Who says that happiness is far to seek?

Here have I passed a happy Christmas week.

Christmas at Membland—all was bright and gay,

Without one shadow till this final day,

When Mrs. Baring said, ‘Before you go

You must write something in the book, you know.’

I must write something—that’s all very well,

But what to write about I cannot tell.

Where shall I look for help?—it must be found,

If I survey this Christmas party round.

There’s Ned himself, our most delightful host,

Or Mrs. Baring, she could help me most,

The Uncles too, if I their time might rob.

Shall I ask Tom? or try my luck with Bob?

Madame Neruda, ah, would she begin,

We’d write the story of a violin,

And tell how first the inspiration came

Which took the world by storm and gave her fame.

There’s Harry Bourke, with him I can’t go wrong,

Could I but write the words he’d sing the song.

So sung, my verse would haply win a smile

From his bright beauty of the sister Isle,

Who comes prepared her country’s pride to save,

For every Saxon is at once her slave;

But no, I must not for assistance look,

So, Mrs. Baring, you must keep your book

For cleverer pens and I no more will trouble you,

But just remain your baffled bard.”

G. W. (1879).