A Vicarage Family: A Biography of Myself

by Noel Streatfeild

  ‘Not now – I mean we did but we know all the usual dances.’

  ‘I think a few polishing classes this autumn would be a good idea, Sylvia. I will pay for them and I will also pay for a dress, something nearly grown-up. Next year I shall give you a real ball dress, Isobel.’

  Isobel and her mother replied gratefully but they also exchanged a look. It was hard to say who dreaded next year the most.

  20

  The Punt Summer

  That summer the holiday was a landmark, for it was a family occasion. It was at Christchurch in Hampshire and there Granny and Grandfather had rented a house, and so had all their children who lived in England or were home on leave. Each family lived its own life but there were many joint family occasions: giant bathing parties; giant picnics; giant expeditions to church; giant funerals on Sunday afternoons, and giant hymn-singing on Sunday evenings. Family groups were photographed at the house Granny and Grandfather had rented. The sort of family group that was popular in those days taken round a tea table.

  But for the children what made that holiday at Christchurch was not meeting all the cousins and the uncles and aunts, though that was fun, it was the punt. They had all been able to swim since they were babies otherwise their father would not have allowed them near the river, but never before had they had anything to do with a boat. On a holiday when he was a boy the children’s father and his brothers had been lent a rowing boat, and he had never forgotten the joy of owning a boat, which must have been why, for that perfect August holiday, he had written in advance and hired a punt.

  It was an ark of a boat which must at one time have been used as a ferry. It was large enough to take all the children, and a passenger or two. It was propelled by a punt pole in shallow water, but if it drifted down river where the water was deep there were paddles. It was so immensely heavy and solidly built that, had the children lost control of it and allowed it to drift out to sea, and had there been a gale it would not have turned over.

  Though the children’s father had no idea of it when he rented the punt, it proved to have another value outside the pleasure it gave. At a time when the family might have split into two halves, with Victoria floating between them, the punt, enjoyed by them all, kept the family together. That August Isobel was sixteen, and John would be seventeen in November so they were included in certain of the grown-up doings. Because Isobel and John were counted as partly grown-up, Louise and Dick, though Louise had just had her thirteenth birthday and Dick would be eleven in October, were classed with younger cousins as ‘the little ones’. This meant Victoria belonged nowhere. Because of the punt, this widening gap in the family circle was not often noticed.

  What glorious days were spent on the river Avon! Picnic lunches were taken and after the daily bathe the family were afloat often for hours, Isobel sketching, John master of the punt pole. Victoria, when it was not her turn to punt, felt a dreaming peacefulness which she had never before known – the ecstasy of being away where no one could get at you, of being with John and of moving with the river.

  What did Louise and Dick feel that summer? Dick, with his arm round Spot who for the pleasure of being with the family endured rather than enjoyed boating, and showed his feelings by barking at every passing craft. Louise chatting away and calling out remarks to other boaters. Did they give up their rambles alone together to assert their right to places in the punt, or did they truly enjoy themselves?

  Sometimes, when the little ones had been hauled off to join their cousins and Isobel was sketching on land, John and Victoria would go out alone in the punt. It was on one such occasion that John said:

  ‘I know you don’t think so but I think being confirmed has done you good.’

  Victoria had been dreaming so the remark caught her by surprise.

  ‘Do you? Why?’

  ‘I haven’t heard you say “it’s mean” once these holidays.’

  Victoria was shy of talking of her spiritual life, even to John.

  ‘I simply hated it on the day but I suppose it does help and all that. But actually there hasn’t been much that has been mean since we came here. I mean it’s been fairly perfect.’

  John looked at her thoughtfully.

  ‘Well, whatever’s happened has done you good. You’re looking pretty.’

  Victoria grinned at him.

  ‘Me! As if I ever could!’

  ‘You are. It spoils you when your mouth turns down, it suits you to smile.’

  ‘But it doesn’t make me pretty like Isobel and Louise are.’

  John studied her more carefully.

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure. Not as pretty as Louise but then she takes after Aunt Sylvia’s family while you are all Strangeway, but you could turn out just as pretty as Isobel – if not prettier.’

  Victoria thought he must be joking.

  ‘But everybody knows I’m the plain one.’

  ‘Did – but, as I say, you’re changing. Of course you still look a mess but you wouldn’t if you washed more often and really gave your hair that hundred strokes every night you’re supposed to give it.’

  ‘If I brushed it two hundred times it would still be greenish coloured.’

  John leant down from the punt pole and took hold of one of her plaits.

  ‘I don’t see any green. Actually, when it’s just been washed, it’s goldish. I noticed last week after the Herbert had washed you.’

  ‘Glory! Me with golden hair!’ Then, after a pause: ‘If I’m not too sleepy, I’ll start the hundred strokes tonight. I should think the Herbert will drop dead with surprise.’

  On another expedition Victoria heard of the rift that was growing between John and his father.

  ‘I thought I did all right when he was home. I fished for hours. I learnt to play golf. I talked O. T.C. and shooting eight until I was blue in the face and, as he thinks it soft, I hardly opened a book when he was about, but I can’t have pleased him, for ever since he got back he’s been on at me.’

  ‘What about? He must be pleased you do so well at school and are going to get a scholarship at Oxford.’

  ‘He’s not worried about the scholarship because I’m going up whether I get it or not. But what is on his mind is the months between my leaving school and Oxford.’

  Victoria knew that John had plans but not exactly what they were.

  ‘What is it you want to do?’

  John leant on the pole, holding the punt stationary, his face alight with his inward vision.

  ‘I’ll leave at the end of next summer term. That’ll give me a year. Imagine it, Vicky, a whole year to “stand and stare”. A whole year to find out about me, something you don’t get time to do at school. A year to think.’

  ‘But what will you do?’

  ‘What I want to do is to travel, and I hope, write poetry.’

  ‘Not act?’

  ‘Not then, I’ll wait until I come down for good for that.’

  ‘Then what does Uncle Mark want you to do?’

  Impatiently John moved and jerked the punt forward.

  ‘He wants me to go to India. In fact he says I am going to India.’

  Victoria’s knowledge of India was the teak, brass and ivory objects in Grandfather’s house, the curious bracelets covered in little flowers the uncles brought home and the pictures she had seen of elephants. She thought a year in India would be superb.

  ‘It would be fun to see it, wouldn’t it?’ she suggested cautiously.

  John shook his head as if to shake something off it.

  ‘No, it wouldn’t, juggins. And I have seen it.’

  ‘You left when you were six. You can’t remember much.’

  John’s mouth was sullen.

  ‘Oh yes, I can. I remember watching the gardener kill a snake. Ugh! And I remember when I was out with my ayah seeing a dead dog crawling with maggots. I was sick for days. My ayah died of cholera. I wasn’t supposed to know, but I saw her before they took her away. Do you know, Vicky, it was so disgusting I dream
about it still.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d like India if you saw it now; after all, you were only a little boy.’

  ‘I wouldn’t, I’d loathe every minute. I’d be looking over my shoulder the whole time expecting to see something terrible. I know it’s not supposed to be manly to be sensitive, but it’s the way I’m made. Do you know, Vicky, if I knew I had to be a doctor with all the horrors they look at, I’d throw myself in the river.’

  Victoria thought he was being melodramatic though she knew his horror of anything unsightly was true enough.

  ‘How are you going to get out of going to India?’

  ‘I haven’t an idea. I just know that somehow I will. I must have that year, Vicky. I need it.’

  ‘What will you do if Uncle Mark says if you won’t go to India he won’t give you any money?’

  John smiled.

  ‘I’ll become a hermit and live in a shack on a mountain. “And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings –”’

  Vicky chimed in softly:

  ‘“There midnight’s all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings.”’

  John smiled at her.

  ‘You’re coming on. If we can find a chaperone you shall come and visit me in my shack.’

  Either because of the beautiful holiday or because at last she was learning to concentrate, Victoria really did do better that autumn term, nothing startling but enough to give her a moderate report, which pleased her father. Her mother, however, was not so satisfied.

  ‘I do hope they won’t crush any talent Vicky has,’ she said. ‘She’s quite clever at writing plays, but look what it says here about composition: “Victoria uses too much imagination”.’

  ‘Well,’ said the children’s father, ‘though it’s admirable in its place, imagination needs keeping in check.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ the children’s mother agreed. ‘But if Vicky should turn out to be an author she’ll need all she’s got.’

  The children’s father laughed, seeing in his mind’s eye his harum-scarum daughter with her flying plaits.

  ‘The only writing Vicky is likely to do is plays for my parish, and I don’t think her gift for that shows any sign of being crushed.’

  The dress Granny had promised was made for Isobel. It had an almost long skirt and was a pretty soft blue.

  ‘Isn’t it gorgeous!’ said Vicky when she saw it. ‘You’ll look wonderful, Isobel.’

  But Isobel’s artist’s eye saw the dress as it was.

  ‘I should say it was very suitable for the vicar’s daughter. And I bet that’s what John will think when he has to come to dances with me.’

  So that Christmas Isobel, when she was well, attended dances which did not finish until midnight, and Louise and Dick went to children’s parties.

  ‘You know what I’m like, Isobel?’ Victoria said. ‘I’m a shuttlecock – sometimes I’m hit into the children’s parties and sometimes I’m hit into your flapper dances.’

  Isobel was in bed that day with asthma. She gave a wheezy laugh.

  ‘You don’t care so don’t pretend you do. Anyway next Christmas you’ll have the flapper parties all to yourself while I’ll have to go to proper grown-up ones, and I dread them.’

  Victoria lolled against the end of Isobel’s bed.

  ‘Do you suppose other girls are as bad at growing up as we are? Or is it the sort of life we lead in a vicarage which makes us slow?’

  Isobel thought that over.

  ‘I don’t look my age outside, but I think I am growing up inside. I shall like being grown up, if only I could paint all the time; it’s the thought of going to dances I hate, for I don’t like dancing much and I don’t know anyone to dance with. But you’re different. You’re changing every day and I think you will look quite grown-up by the time you are.’

  ‘But I’m not growing up inside,’ Victoria confessed. ‘And I think looking grown-up outside and feeling a child inside will make a muddle of me.’

  21

  Isobel Comes Out

  Louise, with an arm round Spot, sat on the floor of Isobel’s bedroom. Victoria stood in the doorway between the two rooms. Isobel sat at her dressing table staring at herself in the looking glass. The hairdresser had just gone, leaving behind her a head that looked strangely unlike Isobel’s. Her back hair was piled up over a frame, and at the sides, with the aid of tongs, little curls had been set to brush her cheeks. Fixed on to her hair was a spray of tiny white roses.

  ‘Don’t you look lovely,’ sighed Louise. ‘I wish I was old and a hairdresser came to do my hair and Daddy gave me roses to wear in it.’

  ‘I can see it looks nice,’ Isobel agreed, ‘but it doesn’t make me look like me. I think people shouldn’t be so prinked up, they aren’t themselves any more. I mean, think what a shock for the officers I dance with, if they see me tomorrow in my painting overall and my hair done by me.’

  ‘They won’t see you. They have to go back to their ships,’ said Victoria.

  A part of the fleet was visiting Eastbourne that summer on their way to manoeuvres and a ball was being given for the officers. On hearing the news, the children’s mother, with more worldly sense than anyone knew she had, decided that Isobel should make her debut at it.

  ‘The tickets are rather expensive,’ she told the children’s father, ‘but it will be money well spent, because all the officers will be unattached, so there will be plenty of young men for Isobel to dance with.’

  ‘But we shan’t know them to introduce them to her,’ the children’s father had protested.

  But the children’s mother had been making enquiries.

  ‘No, but several of our friends will know them because they are giving dinner parties for them beforehand, and I have been promised introductions for Isobel.’

  Granny was written to, and in due course a box arrived from a London shop. Inside it was Isobel’s first ball dress.

  The ball dress was now lying on her bed with, beside it, white kid gloves and an evening cloak – this last provided by her godmother, Aunt Penelope.

  ‘I wish the Herbert would come,’ said Louise. ‘I do want to see you with your dress on.’

  Victoria swung to and fro, holding the door handles.

  ‘I expect she’s having to sew Mummy into hers. She said it split the last time she and Daddy went out to dinner.’

  ‘You won’t forget anything, will you, Isobel?’ Louise pleaded. ‘What the most beautiful frocks were like and what you had to eat for supper.’

  Isobel got out of her chair and took off her dressing gown. In spite of her grandly done hair she looked absurdly young in her ribbon-threaded camisole and slim petticoat.

  ‘I hope skirts aren’t so tight when I come out,’ said Victoria. ‘I like being able to kick if I want to.’

  Miss Herbert came in.

  ‘Ready, Isobel? Your hair looks very nice, dear.’ She glanced at Louise and Victoria. ‘You two had better go downstairs, there isn’t room for you in here.’

  Victoria was going to answer but Isobel spoke first.

  ‘Please don’t send them away, Miss Herbert, the first ball is a family thing.’

  ‘Oh, very well.’ Miss Herbert carefully picked up the dress and draping it on her arms lifted it over Isobel’s head.

  It was made of white satin – a sheathlike garment with a draped bodice. Room to move was made possible in the hobble skirt by a triangle of pleated lace let in at the foot. There was lace, too, on the shoulders and edging the bodice. Across the bodice there was a spray of white roses. It was not a grand dress by the standards of the time, but it was pretty. Victoria and Louise were bursting with admiration.

  ‘You look like Cinderella,’ said Victoria. ‘You ought to be riding in a coach drawn by white ponies.’

  Louise got up.

  ‘I shall go and fetch Annie and Hester. I promised them I’d tell them directly you wer
e dressed.’

  By the time Annie and Hester came into the bedroom, Isobel had on her long white kid gloves. They walked round her examining her from all sides as if she were a horse.

  ‘You couldn’t look sweeter, Miss Isobel, could she, Miss Herbert?’ said Hester. ‘Not if she was Princess Mary herself.’

  Annie could always be trusted to keep the family’s feet on the ground. She wagged a finger at Isobel.

  ‘“The rich and the poor, Their nakedness display, The poor because they must, The rich because they may.”’

  After the taxi with their father, mother and Isobel had driven away – for because it was Isobel’s very first ball her father had actually found time to attend – Victoria and Louise wandered aimlessly into the drawing room. It felt dull to be at home in everyday clothes while Isobel in satin would be waltzing in the arms of a sailor.

  ‘What shall we do?’ Louise asked. ‘Do you feel like Spillikins?’

  Victoria shook her head.

  ‘It’s no good playing against you because you always win.’

  The door opened a crack and Annie’s head poked round it.

  ‘Is “she” in her room?’

  ‘She,’ said Louise, ‘is the cat’s mother. Did you mean Miss Herbert?’

  Annie was having none of that.

  ‘I’ll cat’s mother you.’ She looked at Victoria. ‘I’ve got a bit of treacle and that saved up. How would it be if we made some toffee?’

  To her surprise Victoria had to turn her head away, for her eyes filled with tears. She knew that underneath she was minding this first breakaway into the grown-up world, but it had taken Annie’s unexpected gesture of kindness to bring it to the front of her mind. In bed that night she puzzled over this. Until that evening it had been unfairness or meanness that she had known she would never forget, but here was something new.