Letters to a Sister
Page 26
‘And of course,’ said Emily, ‘you had a rather queer family, your uncle, Danny, being a cannibal in Cork.’
‘In the Congo. I expect we are rather queer.’ Sukey looked complacent. ‘I’m sure Pa is. You knew his father came from a back street in Skibbereen.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, wouldn’t you? A front street in Skibbereen is dull enough, but a back street—you couldn’t even see the traffic from my grandfather’s bakery. So he came away, and never looked back. But it’s made Pa rather queer, knowing about Skibbereen and how awful it was, and always frightened it might pull him back, or us. So he never lets us go there. Tim and I went over secretly last year, and really it was quite fun. But not to stay long in…. Cork is very religious, and it’s full of crazies. My great aunt that’s a nun in Malta is as queer as a coot. But of course she’s a right to be, at her age.’
‘Do not adultery commit; advantage rarely comes of it.’32
Sukey on going to bed with men: ‘Ma says it’s common, and Pa says he’d wallop me. Ma says she expects they take a pretty poor view of it in Skibbereen, and she says Pa has Skibbereen in his blood, though he hates it. She says it’s all under his skin, fretting him—and scaring him, and that’s why he won’t let Tim and me go to Ireland. Perhaps it’s under my skin too, because I’m not much sold on this bedding business. Are you? Ma says she thinks you’d be too proud for it. Besides, you go to church. Well, I don’t know. It’s funny about men, they don’t seem to be so proud in that way. Tim isn’t; is Henry?’
‘No, Henry’s not proud,’ [said] Emily [and] thought, ‘Going to bed is cosy and comforting, you can forget everything else, it wraps you round in forgetting like music and drink, and religion can too. Religion, music, love, drink—they could wrap you round in dreams, you can hide in them, till everything seems a dream.’
‘I’m going into San Marco for Vespers,’ … [said Sukey].
‘Then you’re too proud to sleep with people.’
‘Is it proud? It’s just that I don’t believe I should enjoy it. I like going to bed by myself.’
‘Some do and some don’t. Men seem to, more. They’re not so proud, I don’t think!’
‘Well, I’ve never actually done it myself. But people do seem to like it. Particularly men do. It’s funny…. Peg says, try anything once, so I suppose I shall…. Men don’t seem to be proud in that way. They’ll sometimes even pay to go to bed with someone. Pay money. I wouldn’t do that, would you? I mean, I’d rather have the money. If I had enough money, I wouldn’t want to waste time going to bed at all.’
Sir Barty Bun-Flanagan. Sir Barty was beautiful. He had a fine, pale, tanned [sic] face, a strong chin, a firm, full-lipped mouth, shrewd blue eyes looking narrowly from under hooded lids, smooth, thick brown hair going grey. He looked a masterful man, intelligent, kind, but wilful.
Lady Anne Bun-Flanagan: ‘Bursting buxom! High heels make your ankles thick, push out your behind and your chest, give you that silly swan shape like a comic Edwardian landlady. Common.’
Sukey: ‘But I’d sooner be swan-shaped and common, with a landlady’s bust and thick ankles and have the Women’s Pages in the press call me smart and well shod, than have flat shoes and thin ankles and a straight behind and have them call me a frump.’
‘I suppose you think I look a frump.’
‘Oh no, Ma. You look so distinguished, even in tight frocks. I shall never look distinguished. All I can do is to try and not look odd. Even if my heels do stick in gratings. Byron wouldn’t have liked me to look a frump, or odd. He’d rather I looked swan-shaped and bulgy and got stuck in gratings. So would Luigi and Dino, I’m sure.’
‘Don’t be silly, dear. Byron’s more than enough without bringing in the gondoliers.’
Sukey sighed. ‘Well, what with you looking so distinguished and Pa as handsome as Caligula or Hermes, and Emily so pretty and white and round, you surely don’t mind my getting me a few nice men.’
Genealogy
Bibliography
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Novels
Poetry
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Anthology
History and Travel
Letters
1 To stay with R.M.’s elder sister Margaret, who had recently retired from working as a Deaconess in the East End of London. After their mother died in 1925 she had established a family home at Petersfield.
2 Rev. Francis Underhill, cousin of Evelyn Underhill.
3 Muriel Jaeger, The Question Mark (1926).
4 R.M.’s flat at this time.
5 This was an idea of Jean Macaulay’s to facilitate charitable giving, inspired by Fr Waggett’s preaching on ‘the Haves and the Have-Nots’. It later developed into her League of Stewards, see below p. 73n.
6 A Majorcan ‘croissant’ pastry shaped like a Bath bun.
7 An Australian Test Team was then in England.
8 Abp Randall Davidson.
9 R.M.’s sister Eleanor (a missionary in India) was home on leave, and was attending an Annual Meeting of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.
10 The General Strike was due to begin at midnight on 4 May.
11 Sir William Beveridge.
12 The General Strike.
13 H. B. Usher, who during the General Strike worked in a temporary information and intelligence section at the T.U.C. headquarters.
14 R.M. had moved to another flat.
15 A broadcast debate on ‘The Menace of Leisured Women’.
16There was to be a broadcast programme entitled ‘An Experiment in Telepathy’, in which selected ‘agents’ at the office of the Society for Psychical Research were to concentrate on a series of objects shown to them. Listeners were invited to record on paper their impressions, ‘if any’, of each of the objects shown.
17 Rev. J. K. Mozley, D.D. (1883-1946).
18 The Battles of Coronel and the Falkland Islands.
19 Rt Rev. E. W. Barnes, Bp of Birmingham, had defined his position as a Modernist, and his hostility to the doctrine of Transubstantiation, in an open letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, published on 20 October 1927. Abp Davidson rebuked him in a reply published four days later.
20 The State of Tennessee had passed an ‘anti-evolution’ law in 1925, by which any teaching inconsistent with the Genesis account of man’s creation (taken literally) was forbidden. The American Civil Liberties Union offered to defend any teacher who would ‘personally test the constitutionality of the statute’. John T. Scopes, a science teacher, ‘formally violated the law’, and was then tried and convicted. The case received world-wide publicity.
21 Canon G. R. Bullock-Webster (d. 1934) had led a protest against Bp Barnes’ preaching in St Paul’s Cathedral on 16 October.
22 Rt Rev. A. F. Winnington-Ingram.
23 A nickname for the sermons on anthropology and sacramental theology recently preached by Bp Barnes.
24 ‘The Latest Heresy Hunt’ (Evening Standard, 26 October, 1927). Dean Inge advocated a progressive attitude in religious education, and disparaged a recent newspaper article by a Jesuit.
25 An editorial in the Church Times (28 October) criticised Dean Inge for ‘sneers… positively outrageous in their bad taste’.
26 On 26 October Bp Barnes had addressed a second open letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury.
27 ‘Do we Agree?’, a broadcast debate between G. B. Shaw and G. K. Chesterton.
28 Margaret Macaulay had been staying at the Diocesan Retreat House at St David’s, Pembrokeshire.
29 The novels of A. S. M. Hutchinson abound in long meandering sentences, and his syntax is often unorthodox.
30 S. C. Carpenter, The Anglican Tradition (1928).
31 The 1928 revision of the Book of Common Prayer.
32 W. Joynson-Hicks, The Prayer Book Crisis (1928).
33 This was in a sermon in Westminster Abbey on 3 June.
34 Contributors so far had been Bp E. A. Knox, Arnold Bennett, and G. K. Chesterton.
35 G. K. Chesterton.
36 Robert Lynd said (Daily News, 27 June, 1928) that he believed in Immortality, ‘but not by any process of reasoning’. He took it for granted because he ‘had never met an argument on the other side that undermined it’.
37 Julian Huxley wrote (Daily News, 5 June): ‘I can think of our personalities being lost, blended, taken up into some general reservoir of mind and spirit’. Sir Arthur Keith gave his opinion on 7 June: ‘For me life is a web and is immortal’.
38 The publishers of Radclyffe Hall’s book The Well of Loneliness had been prosecuted on the grounds that it was obscene.
39 Sir Chartres Biron.
40 This enclosure was not preserved with the letter.
41 Norman Birkett, K.C.
42 Sir Julian Huxley comments that he disapproved of the censoring of The Well of Loneliness, though this does not mean he approved of the book itself.
43 Sir Penrose Fry, Bt (formerly Rev. T. Penrose Fry) comments that he and his wife knew and liked Radclyffe Hall (d. 1943), but he cannot recall having expressed either approval or disapproval of The Well of Loneliness.
44 The magistrate’s judgment in this case, given on 16 November, was that the book was an obscene libel, and that it would tend to corrupt those into whose hands it should fall. He made an order for copies of the book to be destroyed.
45 Probably to the Heretics Society.
46 ‘Why I dislike Cats, Clothes and Visits’, Daily Mail, 2 November, 1928.
47Jean Macaulay was very keen on the idea of using a magic lantern in church services.
48 Probably H. D. A. Major’s pamphlet, Modern Problems of the Church (1928).
49 ‘Songs of Seven’ by Jean Ingelow (1820-97).
50 R.M.’s article, ‘A Church I should Like’, was published in the first issue (May 1929) of the St Paul’s Review, The London Diocesan Quarterly, which was edited by Rev. A. S. Duncan-Jones.
51 The Evening Standard.
52 ‘Where are the Fires of Yester Year’, Evening Standard, 25 March, 1929, R.M. maintained, somewhat wistfully, that the views of the Christian Church on Eternal Punishment had of late become less ‘robust’.
53 Margaret Macaulay’s house.
54 R.M.’s general practitioner.
55 Because Jean’s birth (in 1882) had taken place less than twelve months after her own, R. M. liked to call her ‘Twin* in birthday letters.
56 Margaret Macaulay always wore her Deaconess habit, even after she retired.
57 Margaret Macaulay was not allowed to enter Mexico because at this time a violent conflict between Church and State was proceeding, and the authorities would not believe she was not a Roman Catholic nun.
58 Dorothy Brooke, née Lamb, wife of Sir John Brooke (d. 1937), later Lady Nicholson.
59 ‘Further Adventures in Search of a Treasure Temple’, a broadcast talk given by Dr Thomas Gann on 31 May, 1930.
60 Mary (‘Maisie’) Fletcher (née Cropper), wife of Sir Walter Fletcher (d. 1933).
61 Eleanor Acland (née Cropper, d. 1933), wife of Sir Francis Acland, Bt.
62 Later Sir Richard Acland, Bt.
63 R.M. had moved to another flat.
64 The Evening Standard was then running a series of ‘Quandaries’, one each day, with comments from readers on the previous day’s problem.
65 The ‘Quandary’ for 27 May, 1932 was as follows: ‘A doctor has one minute ago assisted at the birth of a severely deformed baby. In addition to the deformities the child has paralysis of both arms and legs and the shape of its head shows that, mentally, it can never be better than the worst type of imbecile. It may live for a few hours, or for a few years. The father has previously been warned that the child is likely to be abnormal and has expressed the hope that it will not survive, especially as the mother has two other young children, and recently the family’s circumstances have been much straitened. The mother is still under chloroform. The nurse is discreet. What should the doctor do?’
66 The Sunday Entertainments Bill had been debated in the House of Commons on 27 May.
67 See ‘The Weirdest House in Britain’, Sunday Express, 29 May, 1932.
68 This refers to Rev. Hugh Johnston, Curate at St Martin-in-the-Fields from 1923 to 1931, who was allowed by the Vicar, Canon Sheppard, to open what was called the ‘Quest Room’. Anyone could come, without giving a name, and ask any question. ‘Ask Mr Johnston’ became a Macaulay family joke.
69 Since Margaret Macaulay became a Deaconess she had been known as ‘Sister Margaret’.
70 The murder trial of Mrs Elvira Barney.
71 They Were Defeated.
72 At the opening of the 19th Conference of Modern Churchmen at Bristol on 5 September.
73 After Germany’s withdrawal from the Disarmament Conference at Geneva, the British Foreign Secretary (Sir John Simon) had suggested a compromise between the continuing disarmament of Germany and her equality with the other nations.
74 Stephen Gwynn, The Life of Mary Kingsley (1932).
75 The Minor Pleasures of Life.
76 Bertha L. Browne (1863-1963), who taught History at Oxford High School when R.M. was there.
77 Jean Macaulay was then working as a District Nurse at Deal.
78 The Peace Ballot organized by the League of Nations Union and other societies.
79 See The Spectator, 23 November, 1934.
80 R.M.’s godfather, R. H. Macaulay.
81 See The Spectator, 18 January, 1935. This was one of R.M.’s articles headed ‘Marginal Comments’ which she had been contributing to The Spectator since the beginning of the year.
82 Sir Thomas More (1478-153 5), Lord Chancellor of England, canonized in 1935.
83 John Fisher (d. 1535), Bp of Rochester, canonized in 1936.
84 The school at Varazze to which R.M. went as a child.
85 ‘Look down!’
86 R.M. means her ‘Marginal Comments’ article of 18 January.
87 See ‘Marginal Comments’, The Spectator, 22 February, 1935.
88 Jeronimo Lobo (1593-1678).
89 ‘Wrings the heart’.
90 ‘Our Poor Relations’ Intelligence’, Evening Standard, 11 September, 1935.
91 Robert Lynd.
92 ‘Good Opinion’, New Statesman, 14 September, 1935.
93 ‘Sex and Aesthetics’, by Harry Roberts.
94 A statement of France’s attitude towards the Italo-Abyssinian dispute had been made by M. Laval on 13 September.
95 The Roman road from Chichester to London.
96 Italy had invaded Abyssinia on 3 October.
97 St Peter’s, Clerkenwell Rd.
98 See The Listener, 2 October, 1935.
99 ‘Belfast Revisited’, see The Listener, 16 October.
100 In Personal Pleasures (1935).
101 G. K. Chesterton was replying to Dr G. G. Coulton and H. Binns in connection with his June broadcast on ‘The Liberty that Matters’ (in a B.B.C. series on Freedom). See The Listener, 2 October, 1935.
102 Postcard.
103 ‘An Unrehearsed Debate: That Women are bored with Emancipation’, broadcast on 2 November, 1935. The proposer was E. Arnot Robertson; the opposer, R.M.
104 Capt. A. S. Cunningham-Reid.
105 A. P. Herbert was standing as Independent candidate for Oxford University.
106 After the announcement of the Hoare-Laval Pact, Sir Samuel Hoare went to Switzerland for a skating holiday, and on I December had a slight accident and broke his nose.
107 The ancient ceremony of ‘trial by peers’ was enacted in the House of Lords on 12 December, 1935, when Lord de Clifford was tried for manslaughter caused by reckless driving, and acquitted.
108 Lord de Clifford had stated that he went over to his offside to avoid an oncoming car. Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett submitted that there was no evidence of negligence: ‘Lord de Clifford had taken what seemed to be the only course…’
109 The Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, had just arrived in England.
110 Canon H. R. L. (‘Dick’) Sheppard.
111 Jean Macaulay had started a society called the League of Stewards, ‘to encourage the spirit of stewardship’, and she and R. M. hoped to win Canon Sheppard’s support for it.
112 R.M. means the film The Shape of Things to Come.
113 An enquiry into a leakage of Budget secrets (involving J. H. Thomas, Secretary of State for the Colonies) was then in progress.
114 Then Italian Ambassador in London.
115 On 3 June, 1936 King Edward VII1 visited the Duchy of Cornwall estates in Devonshire and Cornwall.
116 The forthcoming meeting of the Council of the League of Nations.