A Vicarage Family: A Biography of Myself

by Noel Streatfeild

  ‘My wife and I will put our heads together to decide what is most desperately needed in the new vicarage, and such things will be bought out of your present to us. But don’t expect to see us living in a luxuriously fitted home. Ostentation is always unbecoming but particularly so in a vicarage. So your gift will be spent frugally on simple, necessary things.’

  John looked in an amused way at his aunt. It was his guess she had been shopping mentally since she knew the figure of the cheque. How was she enjoying this talk of frugal spending? But there was nothing on the children’s mother’s face to tell him. Her eyes were on her husband, while her face wore an ‘aren’t-people-kind’ expression suitable to the occasion.

  The vicar went on.

  ‘Life in my new parish will for a time be hard. Not that I dread a hard time. I welcome it, for it will be a test of my faith and courage. I cannot, of course, allow brawling in God’s house and for this I have, as many of you men know, made preparations.’

  Victoria nudged John and whispered:

  ‘What’s he mean?’

  John answered through the side of his mouth.

  ‘I’ll tell you afterwards.’

  ‘But there will be a hard time for me ahead and to face this, my dear people, I ask for your prayers. Pray that I may be unflinching in fighting for what I believe to be right. The devil is always about to tempt us, and one of his most effective weapons is to suggest that giving in over small points is not a great matter, and that the ensuing popularity will be worth a little compromising.’

  He paused to emphasize his next words.

  ‘This is never true. So I must be constantly on watch, for all of us would rather be liked than disliked. Probably this is particularly true for me coming to the Parish Church, Eastbourne, from the warmth and affection you have always given me so generously, for I shall be disliked by many and reviled by not a few.’ His voice broke. ‘So pray for me, my dear people, as all my life I shall pray for you.’

  The organist had been instructed that the party would finish with the singing of For he’s a jolly good fellow. ‘But you know the vicar,’ he had said. ‘What he talks about maybe won’t be suitable for “He’s a jolly good fellow”. So I’ll have some of the choirboys sitting towards the front and a hymn handy.’ Clearly For he’s a jolly good fellow couldn’t follow the speech the vicar had made so, as the children’s father sat down, the organist struck a chord or two to prepare the audience then, when they were standing, played a favourite hymn:

  ‘Holy Father, in Thy mercy

  Hear our anxious prayer.

  Keep our loved ones, now far absent

  ’Neath Thy care.’

  The audience sang heartily even though there were tears in many eyes. It struck nobody, except John, that the words ‘now far absent’ were not really applicable to a move to Eastbourne, which was less than fifty miles away. For in those days, when motor cars were few and it was considered advanced and rather dashing to own one, Eastbourne was far away for it was outside driving distance and no through train connected the two towns. In any case journeys were not undertaken lightly. In most families they only happened once or twice a year. There were ‘parish’ outings but they were by horse conveyances so a journey to Eastbourne was impossible.

  Many of the older parishioners in the hall had been born in the town and had never left it even for a day. For wages were low and, though a pound went five times as far as it does today, it could not be stretched to cover journeys, nor indeed would many of the humbler people have wished to travel. ‘East, west, home’s best,’ was their motto. So ‘far absent’ was just as suitable a hymn to sing to say goodbye to the vicar before he left for Eastbourne as it would have been if he was going as a missionary to China.

  The children were sent home first with Miss Herbert, while their parents stayed for a last handshake. Miss Herbert hurried Louise and Dick up to bed. The servants had gone to the party so Isobel went to the kitchen to boil a kettle on the range for cocoa.

  ‘What was all that about brawling in God’s house?’ Victoria asked John.

  They were in the schoolroom, which had a high very wide window seat. John sat on it swinging his legs.

  ‘You know Uncle Jim’s fairly high church?’

  ‘Of course, and Mummy’s low.’

  John gave Nebuchadnezzar a little kick so that he rocked.

  ‘Well, I don’t know an awful lot about them, but there are people called Kensitites who are what is known as evangelical. They think people like Uncle Jim are almost Roman Catholics. So one of the things they do is to make a row in the church when someone who goes in for what they call ritual is made the vicar of a low church. Eastbourne is very low.’

  ‘So’s Mummy.’

  ‘Not like the Kensitites. They won’t have any sort of show, like bowing to the altar. Anyway Uncle Jim thinks they will try and cause a rumpus when he is inducted.’

  All the children knew there was to be an induction service, but a rumpus! Victoria, in her sheltered life, had never been near such a thing.

  ‘Bags I sitting on the outside of the pew so I can bash somebody over the head if they shout at Daddy.’

  ‘It’s no good bagging anything. Uncle Jim is bringing some of the members of his men’s society here over. They are coming by train as throwers-out. If there is a rumpus it will be all over almost before it begins.’

  Victoria heard the chink of cups coming up the stairs.

  ‘There’s Isobel, don’t tell her about the Kensities, even thinking about them might make her wheeze.’

  Cocoa over, in the girls’ room Isobel said:

  ‘I suppose Daddy is almost a saint, only you can’t be a saint while you are alive.’

  Victoria pulled her frock over her head.

  ‘Of course he is. I wonder if God knows how difficult it is being a saint’s family.’

  7

  Arrival

  The grandparents’ house was in every way different from home. The children thought this odd because they knew their father had thought his home so perfect he wanted their home to be modelled on it.

  Grandfather’s ancestors had come to England from Normandy a century after the conquest of Britain. The king, or his agents, had presented the Norman settler with a strip of land in Kent. This land proved to have iron under it, so the family prospered. But though they became landowners they had never struggled after position, being contented to be country squires. By degrees, what must have been in the beginning the simplest form of home, became a gentleman’s country house and, finally, a castle – a rather peculiar castle of many dates, but still, a castle. Each generation succeeded in marrying the daughter of another country squire, who brought with her a reasonable dowry.

  At the beginning of the nineteenth century Grandfather’s father, the youngest son of the family at the castle, decided to build a house of his own. It must have been a prosperous period, probably he had a rich mother, for evidently there was enough money for each child to have his portion. He chose a stretch of country on which to build which was about twenty miles from the castle.

  The house he built was typical of its period, with mock tessellated towers, a library with stained glass windows, and a kitchen wing so far from the dining room that all food must reach it lukewarm. There was a huge walled kitchen and fruit garden. Fantailed pigeons in a loft and peacocks strutting on the lawn. And in a remote part of the grounds, there was a grotto for storing ice. It was in this house that Grandfather had been born.

  Granny belonged to the aristocracy. There was no title in her immediate family but the head of it, though a far away relation, was a duke. She had been brought up in a massive house about fifteen miles from Grandfather’s home. The family had lived simply for those days, but nevertheless with a house full of servants, a garden full of gardeners and stables full of horses and conveyances.

  At that time everybody knew what was called ‘their place’ and, as a rule, stuck to it. The great aristocratic families only knew eac
h other and the royal family. People such as Granny’s parents, who were on the fringe of this world, knew each other and, on occasion, when their paths crossed, were accepted by the great families.

  The landed gentry knew each other and, in a limited way, the better off of their tenants, but never ‘trade’. Everybody else in the country – who were below the salt from the landed gentry’s point of view – again presumably had their own set of standards as to who belonged where.

  It was definitely a snobbish age but once you were brought up on its principles it was hard to break away from them. King Edward VII had always known the fabulously rich captains of industry who, by the beginning of the century, were established as a new class, but that did not mean that the upper classes followed suit.

  Granny had said, when asking about the parents of the pupils who went to the school with the girls: ‘I know today it is quite the custom to ask the doctor into your house, but of course never the dentist. They are trade and should go to the back door.’ And she had no idea what an appallingly snobbish statement that was.

  Grandfather, in spite of coming from a slightly lower level, when a young man had become a visitor in Granny’s house, and by degrees was accepted as a suitor for her. He was at that time reading for the ministry and when three years later he was ordained curate he and Granny, whose name was Dymphna, were married.

  What it had been like for Granny in the small house a curate could afford the children’s mother could never imagine, but soon Grandfather was ordained priest and was offered a handsome rectory in a country parish which was in the gift of one of Granny’s grand relations.

  ‘Grandfather,’ her mother had told Isobel, ‘was never the sort of clergyman that Daddy is. For Grandfather was always more what was called a squire-son than a parson. But he was a good, devout man and gifted in many ways – especially at painting – but I don’t think he ever thought it was his duty to work day and night as Daddy does.’

  Actually this summing up of Grandfather was wide of the mark. This Isobel knew because, as a small child, she had often stayed for months together with the grandparents. For Amberley, where her father had his first parish, was too damp for her to live there during the winter. She and her grandfather had understood each other, sharing as they did their love of painting. She remembered, before permanent asthma made an invalid of him, an amusing bohemian man who should never have been a parson. Without doubt he loved his wife, but equally he must frequently have found her trying. For Granny was pious morning, noon and night.

  Granny’s life was lived by what she called ‘The Book’, by which she meant the Bible. She could and did recite pages of it by heart. Her sons, except the children’s father, treated her knowledge of the Bible as a joke and would lead her on to play a game. ‘Now, Mother, I Chronicles XIII 10?’ Granny: ‘Let me think. “And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzza …”.’ ‘Quite right, Mother. Now Jeremiah III 12?’ Granny – ‘“Go and proclaim these words towards the north, and say, …”’

  But though her sons might get amusement out of their mother’s piousness, they were not with her all the time – whereas Grandfather presumably was. As an escape, he used his asthma. ‘I must get to the sun,’ he would say. And off he would go with his easel to France or Italy – returning a few months later cheerful and bronzed, with a portfolio of water colours to show where he had been.

  Isobel told Victoria that it was not only when he was abroad that he painted. When she was about six years old she could remember being taken by her grandparents to the seaside. There was a run of mackerel while they were there so Grandmother, not wishing to waste what she called God’s gifts, turned every available pair of hands on to pickling and potting the fish. Grandfather watched what was happening. ‘Come away with me, Isobel,’ he said. ‘We have something much better to do.’ Then they sat down together to paint the fish. ‘This is far more important than all that storing and fussing they are doing in the kitchen.’

  It was years later that Victoria learnt from Isobel what a difference it might have made to her life if Grandfather had not become an invalid. ‘You see, Vicky, he would have made Daddy send me to a real art school. But he died just as I grew up so I never went to one. Daddy always said: “You can’t go to that sort of place, darling. In art schools they have life classes!”’

  Grandfather was still a parish priest when the children’s father was first ordained and his son became his curate. But by the time the children were born Grandfather’s own father had died, and, as he was the eldest son, he had inherited the property. After this he gave up active church work, except for taking an occasional service, and had settled down to the life of a country gentleman in the large tessellated home his father had built.

  Even there Granny did not have the comfort she had known in her own home, for there was nowhere near enough money to keep the place up. There were a cook, kitchen maid and scullery maid in the kitchen and, for the house, a parlourmaid, an upper housemaid, an under housemaid and a between maid, plus Nanny, who stayed on after the children’s father, brothers and sisters grew up, to look after the linen. There were large grounds but only three gardeners, a boy, and an odd job man who lived in one of the lodges. So to Granny, used to a proper staff, it was very much making-do.

  The children, when they were very small, had stayed in the big house and had loved it, but by the time Isobel was seven Grandfather had given up the uneven struggle to keep that house going and had built himself what was called The Little House on a corner of his property. He had put the big house up to let.

  The Little House, which was the one to which the children were going, had a large drawing room with a conservatory off it. A spacious hall, which could be used as a sitting room, a big dining room and, behind a green baize door, large kitchens and pantries. Upstairs there were six bedrooms and a smoking room. There was also a back stair, which was believed to lead to several servants’ bedrooms, but no one as far as the children knew had ever seen them.

  Over forty years later during the Second World War the house was converted into flats. Dick kept for himself and his family that part which had belonged to the servants, and interested cousins flocked to see his temporary home. This was because, though they had frequently stayed in the house when they were children, none of them had been behind the green baize door, which was next to the smoking room and led to the servants’ bedrooms.

  At the time when Grandfather had built The Little House, for a gentleman to live without stables was unthinkable, so naturally there were stables behind the lodge at the gates, and a lodge was something else no gentleman lived without.

  Naturally also there was a quite large vegetable garden for Westerham, the small town nearby, was a mile away so, in so far as was possible, vegetables were grown at home to save taking out old Sultan, the horse. Naturally, too, there had to be a flower garden; who would think of living without that? And lawns and a tennis court were to Grandfather the ordinary adjuncts of decent living. Then of course he had kept a field for his own use, for there was Sultan for Granny’s victoria and a donkey to pull the lawnmower.

  But The Little House was vastly cheaper to run than the big house. There were three servants and Nanny instead of seven. There was only one gardener-coachman-handyman and a boy instead of three and a handyman. There was only one lodge to keep up instead of two, and as the gardener-coachman-handyman called Burridge, who lived there, had a wife and a swarm of children, there was always cheap labour about when it was wanted, also there were plenty to carry out the lodge keeper’s normal job of opening the gate whenever a carriage went in or out.

  The big house, as the children’s mother remembered it, had been full of beautiful things, but when the move took place to The Little House many pieces of furniture disappeared. The children’s mother supposed, in rather an aggrieved way, that those things had been sold, which upset her for the children’s father was the eldest son, this meant he would inherit almost everything some day. As she learned later
, the beautiful things had only been stored, to make room in The Little House for all the gifts that over the years Grandfather and Granny had been given by their children.

  Most disastrous presents many of these were, for several of the uncles were in the Indian Civil Service and every leave they brought home trophies: a gong held between two carved elephants; brass tables; teak chairs; temple bells, and any amount of brass ornaments standing against Sheraton tables, under pictures by Constable and Gainsborough or between Sèvres and Meissen china.

  But packed away in a cupboard were such treasures as a bedspread which had the family coat of arms and crest. This had been embroidered in the castle by the servants in the early eighteenth century; cushions, with beautiful hand embroidery, inherited from the same date; some charming china and miniatures and many delicious knick-knacks. But nothing given by what Granny called ‘my boys’, and the children ‘the uncles’, was ever put away.

  The household was run by Aunt Sophie. Up to the First World War, in well-to-do homes, it was taken for granted that one daughter, usually the youngest, would remain in the home to look after her parents in their declining years. As many parents, with nothing to do, started their declining years before they were fifty, the daughter who stayed at home had not only a hard life while her parents lived, but when they died her reward was all too frequently to be left practically penniless.

  Grandfather and Granny had begun declining early. Grandfather, who had suffered from hay fever all his life (as did the children’s father and Victoria) had taken a cure. This cure though it got rid of the hay fever, gave him asthma – the other family scourge. He did not have it, as Isobel did, in attacks, but had a permanent wheeze – so where ever he went he sounded as though he was carrying a basket of kittens.

  Perhaps by nature Grandfather was lethargic and had to force himself to do a day’s work, but certainly, when he was settled in The Little House, he moved about so seldom the children were quite surprised if they did not find him in his usual chair in the hall. He would have bursts of energy when he would go to London to ride on an Underground train, which he said relieved his asthma, or to visit a friend who shared his passion for heraldry, but every year his inclination to move about became less and less.