Three Houses Read online

  In those halcyon days of the Civil Service my father, who was in the Education Department, as it was then called, used to get back in time for tea. When he left the house in the morning he used to tell us that he was going to earn the bread and ask us what kind of bread we would like, white or brown. According to our answer he would bring us back a white roll or a Hovis loaf at tea-time. If things had gone very well he earned enough to afford to buy shortbread, but this was not so often. His bedroom was at the top of the house, an attic room that ran from back to front. It was a treat for me to climb the steep stairs that twisted round the great newel post which stood the whole height of the house from the basement to the top landing and visit him while he shaved. In this attic he wrote his life of William Morris, in the morning before going to work, or in the evening when we were asleep. As soon as we were tucked up in bed he used to come to the night-nursery and tell us the story of the Wooden Horse of Troy and the Wanderings of Ulysses. These story-tellings went on until, as we got older, our bedtime was too near the grown-ups’ dinner for them to be squeezed in.

  Sometimes I slept in my mother’s room, where there were doves who were allowed to fly about the room. A couple of asses if ever I saw any! The gentleman dove spent all his time bowing and cooing to himself in the looking-glass on the dressing table, while the lady dove, neglecting the nest we had so neatly stuffed with artificial moss and hay, laid all her eggs from the perch on to the floor where such as did not smash at once were trodden underfoot by Mr Dove when he came home in his hobnailed boots. Their passion for hairpins and bits of string may have been a primevalstirring towards making a nest, but it never got any farther.

  One occupation I can thoroughly recommend if your heartless parents send you to bed while it is still light. You lick your finger and rub it up and down on the Morris wallpaper. Presently the paper begins to come off in rolls and you can do this till you have removed so much of the pattern that your mother notices it. Then you have to stop. Another excellent way of diversifying the monotony is to cry till your mother comes. I became an adept at working up a wholly fictitious grief till I was really sobbing. If Nanny was upstairs she came banging across the landing and told me to be quiet, but I was able to judge when she had gone down to the kitchen for her supper and then my wails increased in volume till my mother came tearing up from the drawing-room below to see what the matter was. By this means I had a quarter of an hour of her agreeable company and then, much refreshed, went to sleep. Her bedroom was only divided from the Greyhound by a party wall. On Saturday nights I could hear the singing next door quite clearly. The only song I remember was of a moral nature:

  Time is money and money is time,

  And don’t you be forgetting it.

  Always get as much money as you can,

  And don’t forget the time for getting it.

  We were very lucky in having parents who could tell us stories. My father not only told us all about Greece and Rome, but he sometimes had a serial story of adventure going on at the same time. It had a medieval spaciousness and vagueness and once begun could go on for ever, or stop without in anyway affecting the plot. My mother also had a story without an end about a brother and sister. This she used to tell us after lunch while she was resting on the drawing-room sofa. Drawing-room life goes on far above the heads of people who are playing on the floor, so that when Millais came to tea and we were sent for to shake hands, I merely reported next day that I had seen the new doctor. People would come and play something very dull called Bach on my mother’s harpsichord, and when Mr Dolmetsch came to tune it and told me to sing a scale I didn’t know what a scale was; but it seemed quite an easy thing to sing.

  Before they went to The Grange, my grandparents had lived at 41 Kensington Square, and we still had friends there. At No. 40 lived my mother’s godmother Lady Simon. Every year on the third of June she used to send a huge double birthday cake for my mother and brother whose birthday was on the same day. Occasionally I was taken in state to see her. She was a rather alarming old lady with a very frank tongue, and though she was never anything but kind to me, I was, for no particular reason, afraid to go upstairs. I planted myself firmly on the doormat, saying in a tearful voice, ‘No thanky you – no thanky you,’ till my mother had to give way and take me home. Farther along was Edward Clifford who so astonishingly united a deep and active feeling of religion, a passion for duchesses, and a marvellous gift of water-colour painting. His daily work was for the Church Army to which he gave time and devotion, shrinking from nothing in the early days when roughs made organised attacks on its meetings. But at home he was surrounded by lovely pictures and china and carpets and always had his drawing-room full of flowers from some great lady’s garden. To us children he was kindness itself. It was one of our treats to visit him in his drawing-room and see his albums. He did what we should all like to do, mean to do, but somehow don’t do: kept everything that amused or interested him, whether a joke from Punch, a bit of poetry from the Westminster Gazette, a coloured reproduction from a publisher’s advertisement, an engraving of a bird or landscape, and pasted them all into huge albums. Among the miscellaneous cuttings were the most exquisite water-colour drawings done by him at one or other of the country houses where he stayed. My first art purchase was one of those drawings with which I fell madly in love – a field and trees almost black in the fading light, a house barely adumbrated with a glimmer in one window, above them a sky of palest green deepening to darkest blue above and one star shining. He let the little girl buy this at a nominal price with her savings and then gave her another – a fiery red afterglow reflected in pools of water. On another occasion when the little girl came to see him he asked what she would like for a present. Her swift and unhesitating answer was ‘A knob.’ Later on Mr Clifford gave her a lump of chased silver with a hole in it, the head I should think of an old cane, and she was perfectly satisfied with her knob.

  Another of the charms of his drawing-room was prisms of all shapes and sizes which dangled in one of the long windows. Sometimes we were allowed to wrench one off and take it with us and then we walked happily home, passing it from hand to hand, seeing the familiar objects fringed with red and yellow and violet. There was always preserved pineapple at Mr Clifford’s house, and while we ate it we strolled round looking at pictures. He had a peculiar gift for copying Burne-Jones’ paintings so that my grandfather himself could hardly tell the difference. Two in particular I remember in his drawing-room, Merlin and Nimue, and Green Summer, both indistinguishable from the originals. He lived with a very tall friend whom we knew simply as ‘the giant’. Clifford is dead now, with his funny affected voice, his strange mixture of romantic snobbism and religion, his kindness and capacity for friendship. I do not know who has the old house, but the giant’s sister lived, not so many years ago, in a house on the south side of the Square, opposite.

  Almost next to Mr Clifford lived Vernon Lushington, a very early friend of my grandfather’s. When the old Greyhound was cruelly pulled down and rebuilt as a commonplace gin palace, the two headless stone greyhounds were bought by the Lushingtons and put one on each side of their front door. The little Maid of Honour cottages just across the road from the Lushingtons have been pulled down after sinking to sad depths of dirt and neglect, and I suppose the old house with its snowy pear-tree will soon be sacrificed for the convenience of one of the big shops. Women have much to answer for. When I look at the idle jostling crowd of females (of which I am myself a part), which makes Kensington High Street impassable between eleven and five, I feel that my charming sex is perhaps at the back of all the destruction of Old Kensington. Lovely houses and gardens have had to go so that women may come up from Ealing and Hammersmith and Fulham and across from Notting Hill and Bayswater to ‘look at the shops’.

  On the west side of the square a white house with bright window-boxes was the home of Mrs Patrick Campbell. My parents and grandparents loved and admired her, and to us she was ‘Auntie Stella’. My father
had made a special translation of Pelléas et Mélisande for her. We were all much in and out of each other’s houses then. She would descend upon Young Street with a swish of silk and a froth and fluff of lace demanding nursery tea, or suddenly require a bed in a darkened room as it was impossible for her to rest in her own house. Sometimes I was sent for to keep her company in the curtained room. She dressed her little Stella, who was not much older than I, like a fairy princess, and I used to inherit pinafores made of the finest silk woven with gold and frocks of shimmering stuffs.

  Going to her house was always an adventure because you never knew who was there or what might happen. Auntie Stella might receive me in bed with curtains drawn, lamentably moaning that she was an old woman and would never be nice to look at again. Or she might be trailing about the house in a longtailed lace wrapper alternately scolding and caressing whoever came within reach, lavishing affection on Pinky Ponky Poo, her adored dog, companion for many years. One might find Mr Yeats upstairs and M. Henri Bernstein downstairs while, neglecting them both, Auntie Stella might insist on taking me for a drive in a hansom and reciting Mélisande in French – she was going to act with Sarah Bernhardt – begging her most incompetent companion to criticise her French accent.

  There was constant intercourse between Young Street and North End Road. If we were not taken to The Grange my grandfather was sure to come round after tea when it was too dark to paint. When he came I always asked him to draw pictures, for which purpose a book of blank drawing paper of the very best kind was kept at Young Street. In it he drew pictures for me, each with an enchanting title. Many of the names were invented and written down before he could make the drawings, so that we shall never know now what the Fen Ganger was like, or Heath Horrors, or the Mist Walker.

  My first demand, when I was nineteen months old, had been for a picture of my tiger, a preposterous stuffed beast to which I was devotedly attached. It had no merit from an artist’s point of view, but my grandfather loved me so much that he did anything I asked. Accordingly he sat down with grave intent face and drew the animal with all the skill he could, putting it into a romantic landscape with a rising sun. But I was not allowed to choose a subject again, only to say which of the entrancing titles I would like him to use. The tiger was followed by a farm with a duck pond, and a great barge full of babies sailing over a neatly rippled sea. Then came a series of schools for children and animals, culminating in a Seminary for More Advanced Dragon Babies with doors leading to the Hisstry and Jogruffy schools. A page called The North Sea shows the track of some great unknown beast going down to a cold stormy sea where a darkened sun rests on the horizon under lowering clouds. The Burning Mountain is a rugged hill crowned with a fierce upward rush of flame. Smaller fires are licking out of clefts in the hillside, a little city lies at the foot, and far away on the heaving sea a ship is being tossed to and fro. Volcanoes, especially Vesuvius, were a favourite subject, and he gave me two little early nineteenth-century volumes on Pompeii and Herculaneum, ‘the cities of the burning plain’. Flames he always loved to draw. With a few lines of his pencil he gave the rapid rhythmic onrush of a fire, looking as if it had been arrested in its course and turned to beaten metal.

  A lovely drawing of The Tree that Weeps has a little tree with crooked branches shedding tears from every leaf. The tears run into streams shaped like the branches of the tree, and these meet in a swift flowing river shaped like the trunk, so that the tree is imaged in its own tears. These pictures were mostly drawn after tea on winter evenings. My grandfather sat at the dining-room table with the book in front of him while the little girl made her choice among the ravishing titles that he had written on the blank pages. Best of all I remember the Mirk Strider, whom he drew at my wish one evening. I sat close up to him, watching the horror grow. With the very soft pencil that he used for this drawing he adumbrated a shadowy figure of unearthly size, clawing hands outstretched in front, hair flying backwards in the wind of its onward course, taking hills and valleys in its seven-leagued stride, a starless night overshadowing whatever evil it was bent upon.

  Even if I could not remember my grandfather at all, I should have proof enough of his adoring love for me in the photographs that were taken by Mr Stiles, our Kensington photographer, when I was two and a half years old. Mr Stiles lived on the north side of the High Street, in a little backwater long since destroyed. To reach it you went under an archway next to Coles the carriage builder in whose shop a life-size model of a dapple grey horse dazzled the young beholder’s eye. His studio, a top-floor room with a skylight, was on the left; and here we were all three brought in every stage, from fat babyhood to the awkward age. From among the many photographs of those early years I pick out three. In the first my grandfather is holding me on his knees. I am standing with a fat, rather sulky face turned away from his, which is lightly pressed against mine with a look of deep, patient adoration. In the second he is drawing something for me on a large sheet of cardboard. He is sitting on a wooden studio seat, bowed, with intent eyes, over his work. I, sitting beside him, close up against him, am following the picture with absorbed interest, my hand placed over his to guide the pencil. In the third he is still making a picture for me, but I have lost interest and am impertinently pulling his beard.

  EDWARD BURNE-JONES AND THE AUTHOR AGED

  TWO AND A HALF

  The garden of 27 Young Street was large enough for us to play in through the long summer afternoons. The Greyhound next door had unfortunately parted with its garden before I can remember, and had high ugly stables over it. As a child one naturally did not recognise the ugliness, and it was very interesting to hear the horses walking up the slope to their first-floor bedrooms, or see a long, mild, bored face looking out on a Sunday morning from a barred window. Against the stable wall a small triangular piece of ground was enclosed, with a high wall jutting out into our garden. No one knew what it was for. Occasionally a ball or a shuttlecock hit too high would bounce on the edge. If it fell inside one never saw it again. A great horse-chestnut overshadowed the tool shed at the far end of the garden. Here my father’s bicycle was kept, slung by an ingenious arrangement of ropes and pulleys from the roof. The old bicycle with the high front wheel had been discarded before my time, but I can just remember my father lurching from side to side along the gravel path, acquiring the technique of the new machine.

  The wall at the end of the garden was too high to climb, but the wall between us and Felday House was our constant playground. Our kind neighbour Mrs Bowman had two little ladders made so that my brother and I could easily get over into her garden. It was my joy to get on to the wall by means of our ladder at the far end and walk all the way down, crouching under the branches of the old mulberry tree and probably getting a spattering of juice on my holland pinafore, till I reached the dizzy heights above the pantry area. The Bowmans’ house had been built out at the back by Philip Webb, so that one came to their area before one got to ours. Mrs Bowman was terrified that I might slip and break myself to pieces on the stone flags, so she spoke to my father, who made a little gallows of firewood and set it up on the wall as a sign that I was not to go any farther. So I came back again and got down off the wall and got my brother to help me in a delightful piece of work. We mixed earth from the flower bed with water and applied it liberally with a trowel to any places where the old mortar was crumbling away between the bricks. Of course it fell off at once and we got very dirty, but we felt we had done a useful deed.

  Every treat we had seemed to include enormous quantities of dirt. When we went into Kensington Square we ran our hands along the railings till they were black and grimed our faces and smocks by pushing in among the sooty shrubs. An afternoon in the garden meant being washed in several waters. The occasional visit to the leads over the night nursery was an orgy of smuts. How thankful Nanny must have been when the day came for the trunks to be brought down from the boxroom at the head of the stairs and we all went off in a station omnibus to Victoria for our sum
mer visit to our grandparents at Rottingdean.

  RICHARDSON’S HOUSE, THE GRANGE, NORTH END

  Part Three

  North End House

  I

  Many years before we children were born my grandparents had been looking for a house at the sea-side where my grandfather could have the Brighton air which to him was magically restoring. My grandmother, walking across the downs, had come to Rottingdean and seen a white house on the village green. This was their home for many years, and my grandmother lived there till her death.

  The original house was a three-storey cottage, only one room thick, but there was a neighbouring house standing at right angles to it a little back from the green, and the two houses were later made into one by an architect friend. The whole was a most ingenious and rather confusing dwelling. The little court or garden between the second house and the road was built over, and formed the link between the two houses. The result of this was that to get from one part of the house to the other you had either to go through a room in the connecting part or, if you did not wish to trespass upon dining-room or studio, go right up the blue staircase, through the nursery, and down the brown staircase. As the second house stood on a slightly higher level than the first there was the additional complication of little flights of three or four steps between the two houses on every floor. It all made a kind of rabbit warren most enchanting to a child.

  It was called North End House, partly after North End Road where my grandparents lived in London, and partly because it was within measurable distance of the north end of the village street which ran up from the beach past our house and the village green, and finally turned to the right up the hill before it straightened itself out and went on up the valley to Woodendene and Lewes. The house, shiningly white all over, was divided from the road by a low white paling in front of a euonymus hedge. I can’t think what the south coast would do without euonymus and tamarisk, those dismal eternal shrubs. The dull, feathery tamarisk, always coated with dust from the white roads that are cut through the chalky downs, and the sparkling euonymus, every leaf varnished to dark, or to hard yellowy green, absorbing all the softer rays of light and giving back nothing but fierce glitter. Both are impervious to salt winds and winter frosts, and when the foam is blown up from the sea by south-west gales they never shrivel a leaf or lose a young shoot.