Three Houses Read online

  Three Houses

  Angela Thirkell

  To my

  FATHER

  and

  MOTHER

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction Richardson’s Grotto

  Part One The Grange

  Part Two Next to The Greyhound

  Part Three North End House

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Richardson’s Grotto

  In the summer of 1751 Samuel Richardson invited a party of friends to his country house at North End to hear a reading of the manuscript of Sir Charles Grandison in the grotto. His guests were Mr Mulso, Mr Edward Mulso, Mr Highmore, Miss Mulso afterwards Mrs Chapone, Miss Prescott afterwards Mrs Mulso, Mr Duncombe a clergyman, and Miss Highmore, who afterwards married Mr Duncombe. Mr Highmore had been engaged on a portrait of Mr Richardson, and Miss Highmore who was also something of an artist made a drawing of the company seated in the grotto. It is a bare plastered room with a stone floor, a few steps below the level of the garden, looking out on to a pleasant vista of gravel path and waving poplars. Mr Richardson in a brown turban and wrapper is seated with his legs crossed (an attitude which the young artist found it a little difficult to reproduce in a convincing way), reading aloud. The gentlemen are sitting in various elegant and unstudied attitudes, a hand thrust into the waistcoat or waving approval. The ladies in black gowns and white kerchiefs, with black shady hats over their white caps, cluster round a table on the right. Miss Highmore herself is occupied with what looks like a book and a pencil, as if in the act of transferring Mr Richardson’s venerated features to paper.

  Miss Highmore, writing later to Miss Mulso, said, ‘I should think that you did my rude sketch too much honour by preserving it and taking it with you, were it not for the respectable persons attempted to be represented.’ Luckily the future Mrs Chapone valued the rude sketch, and when in 1804 Mrs Anna Laetitia Barbauld made her selections from Richardson’s correspondence in six volumes, Richard Phillips, the publisher, had it reproduced in colour as a frontispiece to the second volume.

  North End Lane was far out of London then, the best part of a mile beyond the gates of Holland House and well on the road to Richmond and Twickenham, but the female admirers and their swains came undauntedly in their heavy coaches to taste the delights of tea-drinking and literary conversation with the kindly old man, so susceptible to their flattery. Johnson, we know, wrote of him as ‘an author who has enlarged the knowledge of human nature and taught the passions to move at the command of virtue’; but it is difficult now to think of Richardson in these terms and we see him rather as Henry Esmond Warrington saw him at Tunbridge Wells, ‘the immortal, little, kind, honest man with the round paunch’, a bevy of admiring ladies surrounding him.

  Richardson died in 1761 and his world departed. But the house with the grotto remained, the mulberry tree in the garden grew and spread, and more than a hundred years after his death a poet and a painter, walking on a Sunday afternoon by fields and lanes from Kensington, saw it and were strongly attracted by it as it stood tenantless. The poet was William Allingham, now better known through the black-and-white illustration that Rossetti made for his poem, ‘The Maids of Elfenmere’. The painter was Edward Burne-Jones. My grandfather was then looking for a house where he could live and paint, and The Grange, in spite of early nineteenth-century alterations and a layer of stucco over the old red-brick front, was full of charm and possessed one large room on the first floor which could be made into a studio. So in 1867 he and my grandmother went to live there and for thirty years the house was filled with hopes, work, love, and the constant intercourse of many friends.

  The original twin houses were built by Justice Smith in 1713–14. About 1836 they came to be known as The Grange, the name which the north house has kept. Richardson took the north house on lease in 1739 and Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, and Sir Charles Grandison were all written there. The Grange passed through various hands and in 1863 the houses were inhabited by the fourth Marquis of Londonderry who threw them into one, making several structural alterations. In 1867 when my grandparents went to live there the two houses were again separated, but the north house had lost some of its original character and its handsome square staircase had been replaced by a long flight of stairs opposite the front door against the party wall. It is not known exactly when the front was stuccoed over but it was probably in the early years of the nineteenth century. At the same time the dignified sash windows at the front of the house were reduced in number and clumsily altered. The south house is still in its original state and is by far the more handsome as it is the larger of the two. North End Lane was a shabby enough thoroughfare at its northern end, but as one walked down it the little houses and shops soon came to an end and there were prosperous, comely, red-brick houses of Queen Anne’s time, each standing in its own garden with fields behind. Today these fields and gardens are covered with mean houses or ugly pretentious flats and genteelism has re-named the district West Kensington, but the words, ‘The Grange, North End Lane, Fulham’, take me back to the eighteen-nineties and summers of miraculous length and warmth when it was always Sunday and one played for endless hours in a sunny garden.

  RICHARDSON’S HOUSE, THE GRANGE, NORTH END

  Part One

  The Grange

  I suppose every one has a mental picture of the days of the week, some seeing them as a circle, some as an endless line, and others again, for all I know, as cubes and triangles. Mine is a wavy line proceeding to infinity, dipping to Wednesday which is the colour of old silver dark with polishing and rising again to a pale gold Sunday. This day has a feeling in my picture of warmth and light breezes and sunshine and afternoons that stretch to eternity and mornings full of far-off bells. How varying are the evocations of bells. They have almost as much power to startle a memory to life as the odours which annihilate the years between us and our childhood. Wherever I am in the world, a grey warm Sunday with the sound of bells coming damped through quiet unceasing rain will mean Oxford to me. In the underworld, twelve thousand miles away, that sound of bells in steady rain has translated me for a moment to Oxford in early summer and the scented drip from haw thorn and laburnum. And even now to hear bells in London on a June morning makes me lose the many intervening years and go back to a pale gold Sunday when the sun shone on an endless leisured day.

  Long ago – say thirty-five years ago – a little girl used to wake on Sunday morning feeling that a whole life of happiness lay before her in the day. She had a low bed in her mother’s room and her mother had a four-post bed with thick curtains patterned with birds. If it was not too early and her mother was awake she was allowed to get into the big bed and have conversations till the dressing gong rang and the smell of sausages began to rise from the kitchen. Sunday sausages: what a world of emotion in the words. Sacred Sunday Sausages, I had almost said. There can be no other dish which so obviously fits the day, especially with bread fried in the same pan. Some are fat and burst in the middle; others have a little twist at the end which we called the nightcap; but all are divine.

  What a pleasant leisurely meal was Sunday breakfast. There was no motor to be propitiated and all one’s friends were in town and could be visited later in the day, so breakfast could go slowly from sausages to scones and butter and honey, and then to strawberries and cherries. The little girl’s mother would read aloud afterwards while we all sat at the table and pushing aside cups and plates drew pictures out of whatever book was being read. During a reading of Burnt Njal one of the children drew an imaginary portrait
of Skarphedinn and he was used to mark the places in all our Sunday morning books till ‘Skarphedinn’ became synonymous with ‘bookmarker’ in the family.

  So breakfast took its leisurely course till eleven o’clock or so when we had to go upstairs and be cleaned and dressed for Sunday lunch with our grandparents. Perhaps the golden haze is needed when we come to Sunday clothes, for they were a little inhuman compared with the freedom of today. My brother may have been let off comparatively lightly with blue blouse and knickerbockers, a holland smock, brown shoes and socks, and a sailor hat whose elastic was always too tight or too loose; but for me there was the ordeal of Starch. Buttonholes starched so stiffly together that one couldn’t force the buttons into them; starched petticoats which were rather fun to put on because they crackled so as you pulled the folds apart, but had complications of starched tapes at the neck which needed Nanny’s relentless fingers; white piqué frocks with full sleeves standing up like crinolines and all the hooks ironed flat so that Nanny had to lever them open with the nursery nail-scissors; white pinafores with frills round the neck; white cotton gloves, well stiffened, into which one’s hot hands were with difficulty thrust; black shoes and long stockings and then the straw hat with a wreath of flowers and the inevitable elastic. How it hurt when it was half an inch too short and how inelegant it looked when Nanny had tied a knot in the middle to shorten it.

  At last we were ready and set out with our father and mother for North End Lane, Fulham. All that neighbourhood is genteel now and the street is called North End Road, West Kensington, but while this golden Sunday lasts we need not think of changes. We went up Young Street from Kensington Square, past the old shops at the corner, past John Barker’s little drapery establishment, and got into a red horse bus opposite the church. Six on each side inside and fourteen outside – how small it sounds now. The table of fares, hand-painted, with its convention of a wiggly line connecting stopping-places and fares did not hold more than a dozen names. On we went, past the old brick houses standing back on both sides of the road then, past the leafage of Holland Park, past more terraces of old houses and over the railway bridge. No buses went down North End Lane and we walked along past early eighteenth-century houses, each in its own garden of elms and cedars and mulberries. The air was warm, the sun shone on the blossoming trees hanging over the brick walls, and so we came to The Grange.

  The Grange stood a little back from the road behind a brick wall with an iron gate in it. A short flagged path led to the low front door. It had a glazed upper half and green silk curtains to prevent people looking in, but people of the right size could always look through the letter-box. The low square hall must once have been a front parlour, but it had been thrown into the passage and made a pleasant room to play in, heated in winter by a large green earthenware stove called Pither. At its further end were the stairs and a long passage leading to the drawing-room and the door to the kitchen quarters.

  On Sunday my grandparents kept open house. Two or three extra places were laid at lunch for any friends who might drop in, but whoever came, I sat next to my grandfather. I was allowed to blow into the froth of his beer ‘to make a bird’s nest’, or to have all the delicious outside from the mashed potatoes when they had been browned in the oven. If, disregarding truth, I said that at home my toast was always buttered on both sides, my statement was gravely accepted and the toast buttered accordingly. There can have been few granddaughters who were so systematically spoilt as I was and it is a legend that the only serious difference of opinion which ever arose between Gladstone and Burne-Jones was as to which of them spoilt an adored grandchild the more.

  After lunch my grandfather often settled down to a game of draughts, which was a good moment for my brother and myself to escape and do a little exploring upstairs. My grandparents surprisingly clung to the Victorian convention of a drugget, and though a thick-piled Morris carpet was on the stairs I do not remember ever seeing it without its cover. At the top of the staircase was a long landing with rooms opening off it, but just in front of us three broad shallow steps went up to the studio. Their banisters curled outwards at the bottom and a child could squeeze comfortably behind them and be in a little house. At the top of these steps a window on the right looked out over the large garden next door. Here too was kept a kind of gigantic tin bath on wheels, painted red, filled with water in case of fire.

  It was a lucky day if we were able to slip into the studio which was as a rule absolutely forbidden. Sinister people called ‘models’ lived there who had trays taken up to them at lunch and tea-time. There was a strange smell of oil and turpentine. It was very easy to lose things. My necklace or pencil, once rashly pushed through the grating in the floor where the hot-water pipes lived, was irrecoverable. Even more rashly one might push one’s belongings through one of those mysterious S-shaped holes by which the studio seats and stands were picked up and carried about. This done, they would rattle about till doomsday, like the silver eggspoon which my brother put down the hole of the rocking-horse’s pommel, and nothing would get them out. Then there were gloomy corners fenced off by canvases where at any moment one might bring an easel clattering down on one’s head or upset a little china pipkin full of some precious mixture. As long as I can remember there was a studio man who stoked the furnace, did odd jobs, and kept the brushes and palettes clean. The first studio man we knew was called William, because his name was so impossibly Albert. He had been in South Africa and I remember crying with rage when he confessed, under severe cross-examination, that the Kaffir children were more like my brother’s shoes which were dull black than like mine which were patent leather. He was replaced in time by Pendry, a strange dwarfish creature who could play the Jew’s harp with exquisite skill and imitate Punch, and convulsed the nursery by pretending to fall down with fright at the dragons on a Chinese rug.

  Beyond the big studio was an inner room, down a few steps, a place of great danger to us, for here lived the lay-figure, its arms and legs at preposterous angles, its papier-mâché head perched rakishly on its long neck. By daylight we jeered at it and it was known as ‘Silly’, but we had some dread of its possible powers by night. From this room a door led to my grandmother’s sitting-room, but it was never used. It was in this sitting-room, papered with the Pomegranate pattern on a dark blue ground, that I had my only remembered sight of William Morris of whom, although he was such an old friend and so often at the house, we children saw but little. It is entirely unworthy of notice except for the peculiar circumstances which imprinted it on my memory. I was trying to read a book which I had laid on the carpet, while my body and legs were on the sofa and my elbows on the floor. This attitude of extreme discomfort appears to have been necessary to make me notice the old man (or so I thought him), with the aggressive mop of white hair who was talking, between fits of coughing, to my grandmother.

  Having succeeded in visiting the studio unseen, it was just as well to slip away again before our absence was noticed, so we decided to give the kitchen the pleasure of our company and ran downstairs and along the back part of the hall. Here under the stairs lived another red fire-bath – I really don’t know what else to call it – and yards of neatly coiled canvas hose which I am sure no one would have known how to use if there had been any danger. On the other side of the hall was the service hatch to the kitchen, but looking through it we found that the inhabitants were still sitting at dinner, so we judged it better to keep away for the present. At this point there was a choice of pleasures. We could go into the drawing-room and so through the French windows to the garden, or take the long passage with the skylight. This route had the advantage of avoiding the grown-ups who would probably want to stop one doing what one wanted, or make one do something one didn’t want to do, so we went quickly down the passage past the filter. The long narrow store-cupboard on the left was unfortunately kept locked, or we might have put in some good work among the currants and lump sugar. The garden, full of sunshine, gleamed alluringly through the ope
n door at the end of the passage, and out we ran.

  As soon as we were out of the house we might have been in the country. Gardens surrounded us on all sides and only a few years earlier there had been fields behind the little orchard which bounded the further end. Ugly brick houses had been built since then, but they were hidden by the long white rough-cast studio which stood between the orchard and the road. It was called the Garden Studio, and here my grandfather worked on his larger canvases. It was a little alarming to us: the red-tiled entrance and steps which led down to the furnace-room where we were never allowed to go and anything, one felt, might live; the iron grills in the floor to let in the warm air for winter days; the tall narrow slit in the outer wall through which finished pictures were passed. Sometimes these pictures went to exhibitions, but more often straight to the friend or patron (in the very best sense of the word) who had commissioned them and was content to wait for years if need be for the perfect expression of the artist’s mind. In this studio there was a very high set of steps with a higher and lower platform on which the artist worked at the upper portions of his picture. I remember sitting on these steps, my head wrapped in a many-coloured piece of silk and bound with a coronet, while my grandfather made studies of crown and drapery for one of the mourning queens in the great unfinished picture of Arthur in Avalon which is now in the Tate Gallery. Here too he was working at the time of his death on the picture – also unfinished – of the Car of Love, now at South Kensington, where Love, standing in a great brazen chariot, is drawn through the thundering streets of some imagined city by a throng of his worshippers, some happy, some stabbed with pain, but all his slaves.

  Because there is a certain likeness between the little girl who wore the coronet and some of her grandfather’s pictures, she has often been asked whether she sat for him. As far as I remember he never used me as a model except on that one occasion when I wore the crown and veil. Nor in any case could he have drawn me often, as I was not yet eight years old when he died. Neither did my mother who was pure ‘Burne-Jones type’ sit for him much. The curious thing is – and it ought to open a fresh field of enquiry into heredity – that the type which my grandfather evolved for himself was transmitted to some of his descendants. In his earlier pictures there is a reflection of my grandmother in large-eyed women of normal, or almost low stature, as against the excessively long-limbed women of his later style. But the hair of these early women is not hers, it is the hair of Rossetti’s women, the masses of thick wavy hair which we knew in ‘Aunt Janey’, the beautiful Mrs William Morris. When I remember her, Aunt Janey’s hair was nearly white, but there were still the same masses of it, waving from head to tip. To any one who knew her, Rossetti’s pictures – with the exception of his later exaggerated types – were absolutely true. The large deep-set eyes, the full lips, the curved throat, the overshadowing hair, were all there. Even in her old age she looked like a queen as she moved about the house in long white draperies, her hands in a white muff, crowned by her glorious hair.