Caroline England

by Noel Streatfeild

  Agnes was warped by inhibitions and suppressions brought on by being bottled up sexually and mentally, a state made worse by her mother’s lashing tongue. Nevertheless, she was still the woman who had taught Selina that a home was a shrine. Obviously shrines must be places of contentment, or at least appear so. She would have chosen to be the centre of a contented home, respected and adored. Instead, she became a ruler. She was everything Selina had not been. Hard, ruthlessly efficient. Respect of a sort she did win, but she was never even liked, let alone adored. She knew exactly how a house should look, and how every task in a house should be done. She was able at once to spot carelessness or laziness and show the offender where she had failed and why. In the same way, she knew just how children should look. She was prepared when she came to catch Nurse unawares with the children in a mess. She never did. Nurse’s ideas about how little ladies should look, and a baby be kept, corresponded with hers exactly. She made raids on the schoolroom with more success. Caroline, round-shouldered, sprawling across the table. Caroline with ink on her fingers. Caroline crushing her dress. After a week or two, no matter how often she came to the schoolroom, she found everything in order. Wonderful what a little firmness will do, she told herself happily. She had, of course, noticed how her visits had flustered that rather foolish-looking Miss Long, but she never suspected that out of sympathy for her governess, Caroline would keep her back straight and ink off her fingers.

  “Don’t let’s use ink, Longy, I always get it on my fingers. Let’s use a pencil just in case Aunt Agnes comes.”

  “Oh my dear, I do not think we ought. I mean, you must learn not to ink your fingers.” Caroline gave her a funny smile.

  “It isn’t me that cares. It’s you. Let me just do my sums in pencil. When I think a lot I always forget about ink.”

  Letitia felt doubtful. Was she not having a secret agreement with Caroline against her aunt? All the same, dear Caroline did seem to find it difficult not to get inky. So had many of her girls if it came to that. Schoolroom pens seemed to get inky up the holder. It would not do any harm if she used a pencil now and then.

  “Very well, dear, but if you do, you must concentrate on straightening your back.” She caught a twinkle in Caroline’s eyes. “No, not only to please your aunt, but for your own sake. A straight back does make such a difference to the appearance of a lady.”

  Caroline straightened her back.

  “I don’t think I’ll make a very nice-looking lady, do you Longy?”

  Letitia smiled at her affectionately.

  “We shall see, dear. I hope to be very proud when you go to your first ball.”

  Caroline picked up her pencil.

  “My first ball! I wonder if I shall ever have one. I seem to be a child a very long time.”

  Letitia opened an exercise book and put it in front of Caroline.

  “The happiest time in your life, you know. Come along. Do your sum. If one man had four cows, and another man had three cows, and each cow ate—”

  Caroline took the exercise book and struggled with the cows. The answers kept coming to feeding half a cow, which obviously could not be right. If one man had four cows, and— Her mind wandered. Was it the happiest time in your life when you were a child? She was sure that was a grown-up lie. It was not nice being a child. She looked across at Letitia.

  “I hope it isn’t the happiest time in my life.” Letitia looked puzzled, so she added: “Being a child I mean. I’m not liking it at all.”

  Letitia was distressed. She did not think Caroline was happy, but it was uncomfortable to hear her say so. All young girls were happy in her philosophy.

  “What nonsense, dear,” she said brightly. “Have you worked out how much grazing land each cow required?”

  Caroline was not happy. She suffered from the impotence of childhood. She felt she ought not to put up with those things she hated, and yet she did put up with them because her reason told her it was futile to protest. Because she felt these things, she imagined that Louisa and Elizabeth felt them too, and in this she was utterly wrong. Louisa and Elizabeth had never known any other than the rule of Nurse. They had never had periods of freedom from her in which to expand. Having been of a nursery age when their mother died, they had not looked upon her as of the same importance as Nurse. She had been only the person they dressed up to see after tea. They had no reason to suppose that her death had closed in on them the walls of the nursery and schoolroom. From an early age Frederick had appeared at the Manor once a week to give them Bible lessons, which prevented them from enduring the fears of divine wrath which Caroline had suffered. Instead, they looked upon the matter as a tussle between Nurse and the rector, with themselves as the prize. They visualised them elves sheltered behind Frederick’s guardian angels from Nurse’s angry God. For Heaven, and what might live in it, was a long way off. Their Trinity was composed of Nurse, Miss Long and Minnie. A real three in one, since the one spoke for all and the other two for the one. Under this Trinity they succeeded in being happy. They had their dolls to which they gave all the love they had over from each other. They had their gardens. They won, by fawning on Nurse, small treats now and then. They had, too, their own little periods of power. It did not take either long to learn how quickly Minnie could be made to cry. “Oh don’t do that, Miss Louisa dear, Nurse’ll be sure to blame it on me.” Nor to find out just how easy it was to frighten Letitia. A defiant: “Well I shall tell Nurse you said she was wrong.”

  “Oh, Elizabeth dear, I did not. I only said—”

  “She did say Nurse was wrong, didn’t she Louisa?” After these interludes the children would giggle together over their gardens. “Did you see Minnie crying? She hoped we didn’t see, but I did.”

  “Did you see Longy’s hand was shaking? She is an old silly.”

  The life of the nursery and schoolroom had, for all its hard punishments, the advantage of being secure and unchanging. The one disturbing element in it was Caroline. Neither Louisa nor Elizabeth could see even a dim vision of what she was trying to teach them. Of course it was true Nurse did beat them, but what were they to do about it? She still beat Caroline now and then, although she was a big girl who was mostly in the schoolroom. If it came to that, what did Caroline do about it? They could not see that Caroline did not want them to fight, but only to see the nursery as it was. To realise that everybody was not like that. To help them to understand, out came scattered memories of Naomi, of Prudence and, after a while when it did not hurt so much to talk about her, her mother. She tried to make them see that although they had to endure Nurse they must hate her. It was a losing battle; favour in their philosophy had to be bought. Did not Minnie spend her evenings making Nurse lace? Did not Longy bring Nurse back little presents when she went to the shops? When they went down after tea, did not Nurse say: “I’m afraid we are five minutes early Ma’am, but the little girls were so eager to go down to their auntie.” They never were eager and Nurse knew it, but it pleased Aunt Agnes that people, even children, wanted to see her, and Nurse knew that too. Only Caroline would not conform to custom. It made them nervous and secretive wither.

  “What are you hiding behind your back, Louisa?”

  Louisa looked at the ground, her eyes shifting from left to right. Anything to avoid Caroline’s angry, scornful look.

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s a fib. Show me.”

  Unwillingly Louisa held out a little bunch of flowers from her garden.

  “Only flowers. I suppose I can pick my own flowers.” Caroline’s lips curled.

  “For Nurse I suppose?”

  “If they are,” Elizabeth broke in, “what’s it got to do with you?”

  Caroline looked at the flowers as if they smelt disgusting.

  “Nothing, except that you are my sisters, and I hate being ashamed of you.”

  Scenes like that happening day after day. There were
scenes, too, when they bullied Letitia.

  “How can you be so mean?” Caroline blazed, the moment she got her sisters alone. “You know how fussed she gets.”

  Louisa and Elizabeth giggled.

  “She’s such a fool,” Elizabeth explained. “She never says you must or anything sensible. She always says ‘please.’”

  Louisa giggled more than ever.

  “If I was a governess and the children didn’t do what I told them, I’d soon take a ruler to them.”

  Caroline’s words poured out so fast they got jumbled together.

  “But why make people do things by beating and smacking them? Why not make people do things like Mr. Sykes makes you learn your Bible? He isn’t always knocking you about, and you aren’t naughty with him like you are with poor Longy.”

  Louisa pursed her lips and quoted Nurse:

  “Mr. Sykes is a man of God. Naturally we behave.”

  “It’s nothing to do with him being a man of God,” Caroline argued. “You’re naughty with Longy, because you know it worries her if you are. If you were naughty with Mr. Sykes, he just wouldn’t teach you any more, and that would be the end of that.”

  Sometimes Caroline tried to improve things from the other angle. She would attempt to stiffen the backbone of Letitia.

  “Longy, darling, why do you let the others treat you like that? If you would only not show you minded, they wouldn’t go on doing it.”

  Letitia flushed.

  “I am afraid I am rather foolish dear.”

  “I can’t think why you are afraid of Nurse. If I was a governess I wouldn’t know the nurse, and I certainly would not care what she thought.”

  Letitia looked at her wistfully. Perhaps if she had Caroline’s background she would not care what the Queen herself thought.

  “It is not that I care dear, but I do not want the little girls giving the impression that she is criticised in the schoolroom.”

  Caroline looked at her despairingly.

  “Oh, Longy!”

  When she found Minnie in tears she would try to put some courage into her, but she knew it was a losing battle before she started.

  “Don’t cry Minnie. Just tell Nurse it wasn’t your fault. Explain, Louisa absolutely refused to put her dolls away.”

  Minnie looked at her round-eyed.

  “And what good would that do, Miss Caroline? Just put me out with Miss Louisa, that would. And it wouldn’t stop Nurse blaming it on me, and it would get her a slapping. Not but what she deserves it, but I never could be the one to telltales.”

  Caroline resented Agnes’s presence in the house with childish violence. Actually that Agnes disliked her was in the main her own dislike behaving like a boomerang! Part of Agnes’s vision of herself was that she was a mother to the motherless and she meant to behave as one. She had got an unfortunate picture of Caroline’s character after her first interview with Nurse. “Stubborn,” she was told. “Not an easy child at all, Miss Caroline isn’t. And if I might say so, it’s not all the child’s fault. Her mother made too much fuss of her. Her father does too. Children very easily get above themselves.” Even without Nurse’s opinion, which caused Agnes to see that she never got above herself in her presence, it would have been hard, tactful work for anyone in Agnes’s position to make a friend of Caroline. The child had seen so much of her mother in the years before she died, and had come not only to love her, but in a way to reverence her so that all she had used was sanctified. Even the most tactful person, stepping into such shoes, would have been bound to commit a few solecisms Agnes, determined to hold every right that belonged to the mistress of the Manor, committed before Caroline’s eyes one crime after another. She would sit in the very corner of the sofa where Selina had sat. Selina had owned a little leather case of scissors. Agnes found them in a drawer and, sublimely unconscious of offence, used them for her embroidery. She was stupid over her suggestions.

  “What did you and your mother do when you came down in the evenings?”

  Caroline remembered the scrap-book, drawings and paintings of wild flowers, some baskets made of fir-cones. Surely this interloper was not going to suggest that she should do the things her mother had done? Her voice was so off-hand that it was rude.

  “Oh, nothing. We just sewed.” Agnes stiffened.

  “Caroline, I will not be addressed in that tone. If you cannot speak to me politely you can remain upstairs. Now sit down in that chair, and do not speak until you feel you can answer my questions properly.”

  Caroline in her teens had never heard the word tolerance. Common politeness from herself to those she disliked seemed like weakness. She was insufferable to Agnes. Agnes could not remember how prickly adolescence made you. She accepted her mother’s view that her sister-in-law Selina had been a fool and genuinely thought the whole household ought to feel that now she was in charge things had taken a turn for the better. She would, in the first months that she lived in the Manor, have seized an olive-branch if Caroline had offered it. It offended her pride that she should be such an obvious failure with her eldest niece. But no olive-branch was offered. Caroline was determined to hate, and she got her hatred back in double measure. In June of 1882 Agnes wrote her mother a letter in which she said:

  “I am afraid Caroline has been sadly spoilt. I fear that unfortunate start with Naomi has left its mark. A case of touching pitch and being defiled I suppose! She has a most evil disposition and although I am unremitting in my efforts, I make little headway with her. I think James makes a grave mistake in making such a companion of her. I know, Mama dear, that you have always said that gentlemen spoil children, and I find this to be only too correct.”

  James saw as much of Caroline as the women of his house allowed. As she grew older she became an even better companion. Caroline, so difficult for everyone else to handle, was tact itself with her father. She kept the conversation strictly to those subjects that interested him. Never once did she embarrass him with her opinion of the way his children were brought up. This, not because she lacked courage, but because she knew it for a waste of time. Aunt Agnes was his sister. Nurse had been chosen by Grandmama. Papa would never dare to send them away.

  James tried to do his duty by his other daughters. He tried to interest them, as he had Caroline, in the family history and the Manor, but he got discouraged. They kept up a polite: “Yes Papa,” “No Papa,” but he could feel they were bored. Caroline, by Louisa’s age, had been able to trace the exact outline of what was left of the old north wall. She would run about after him engrossed in deciding whereabouts that Henry who had married Jane Southey fell from his horse. Was it near the house? Had he been carried in on a shutter? She could describe to him the saucy Anne christening the Manor the ‘Triple Alliance,’ and was sufficiently Torrys-minded, even at that age, to feel that nicknames did not become an ancestral home of the antiquity of hers. She would get almost a visionary look as she tried to see the old house as it had been. She would delight him by telling him in a shocked voice of how George set the place on fire.

  “And all from carrying a candle about, which is a very stupid thing to do. And nobody knows what it was caught fire, but I think it was the curtains.”

  These other two, Louisa and Elizabeth, never seemed remotely interested. He was shy with them. “Odd little things,” he thought. “Always whispering to each other.”

  Ellison was a fragile baby. A nervous little creature,with a digestion upset by a trifle. Thomas had not sufficient praise for the way Nurse reared him. His wet nurse had been taken ill when he was only a few months old and he had to be weaned. Only Nurse and Thomas knew how nearly he died at that time. Even when he reached the toddling stage, every mouthful he ate had to be watched. The slightest disturbance in the routine of his life made him sick. Partly because, by unremitting care, she had kept him alive, and partly because he had to be treated so delicately, Ellison was the
one child who held Nurse’s heart. For him her usual methods were impracticable. He must never be afraid, never scolded if it could be avoided; certainly never smacked. The result was she worshipped the child, and he gave her something she had never received before from a nurseling: love. Ellison grew up a very pretty boy. He had a thin little face, enormous blue eyes and masses of almost white curls. He looked like an angel off a Christmas card. James regarded his appearance with concern. ‘Looked more like a girl than a boy. Pity Thomas thought him delicate; a child like that would need knocking into shape early. Left in the nursery, that pack of women would make a milk sop of him.’ He was shocked when he came upstairs, to notice how often the child would be playing with a doll. He would try and turn him to a more sporting outlook by picking him up and tossing him to the ceiling; encouraging him the while with hunting cries. The only result of these efforts was that Ellison turned green and shrieked with terror.

  The summer before Ellison’s fourth birthday, James decided it was time to make a proper Torrys of the boy. He found a lad in the next village to give him boxing lessons once a week, and he bought him a pony.

  All the family gathered on the terrace to see Ellison put on his pony for the first time. His father lifted him up. The child struggled.

  “Nanny, Nanny,” he screamed, and held out imploring arms to be lifted down.

  James was shocked.

  “That’s enough of that son. Go upstairs Nurse. He will be better alone with me.”

  Nurse was nearly in tears, for she saw the well-known greenish tint round Ellison’s mouth.