Impossible Life of Mary Benson, The

by Bolt, Rodney

  Martin died suddenly, of ‘brain fever’, later known as meningitis, a condition which many doctors believed was provoked by excessive mental strain. Over the Christmas holidays at Lis Escop, he had been unusually quiet and withdrawn. There was a languor about him, and he did not feel up to reading. He confided in Mary that night after night he was having vivid and alarming dreams. Standing at the front door, saying goodbye to Beth and the family as he left for the new term at Winchester, he had unexpectedly – and uncharacteristically – burst into impassioned tears. There had been no other warning that anything was amiss. On the first Sunday after he was back at school, while Martin was taking tea with a master and his wife, it was noticed that he could not speak. He was taken from the room, and it was discovered he could not write, either. He lost control of his bowels. A telegram was sent to Edward, who arrived the next day. Martin rallied briefly, and by the Wednesday was chatting brightly. That Sunday he relapsed into delirium. Mary was sent for. She managed to talk quietly with him for a while, then his focus seemed to wander, and he ‘gazed with a beautiful expression at a part of the room where nothing visible stood: plainly saw something and exclaimed, “How lovely.” ’ These were the last words he spoke. On the next day he signalled with his fingers that he wanted bread and wine, and his father gave him Holy Communion. Again Martin gazed, wide-eyed and pointing, at a spot where no one else could see anything. Mary whispered hymns into his ear, and said: ‘Do not be afraid, darling; you are in the Valley of the Shadow of Death; but do not be afraid; don’t fear, darling. God is with you.’ Martin died in the night.

  Mary’s behaviour was saintly. The faith that Tan had delivered still infused her. She comforted Edward, saying that she had never cared for anything but Martin’s happiness, and that now it was come. ‘Oh, my Martin, how happy you are now, my darling,’ she had murmured, the moment after he was gone. For once, Mary was the strong one, walking the straight road, without falter. Only God had the right to Martin, she told Edward, and his going was gain, pure gain. ‘I cannot reach to this,’ Edward confided to his diary. Mary wrote immediately to Beth, a letter that acknowledged the old nurse’s maternal role in her own life as well as that of her children. ‘Dearest Friend and Mother Beth’, she began, going on to assure her that Martin was now ‘in wonderful joy, far happier than we could ever have made him’, and asking her to comfort the children at home with the thought that their brother was ‘in perfect peace for ever, free from fear, free from pain, from anxiety for evermore’, ending her letter: ‘Your own child, your fellow-mother, M.B.’. The children at Lis Escop were told of Martin’s death by their governess and the Kenwyn curate. Edward wrote to Arthur at Eton, and six-year-old Hugh sent a letter, too, in blue pencil between big lines, reading: ‘My dear Arthur, Martain [sic] is dead. Nellie sends you her love. Martin is gone to hefen. Maggie sends you her love. I am so happy that Martin is gone to Jesus Christ. I hope we shall all go to HIM very soon. He is Saint Martin now. Your loving brother, Hugh.’

  Edward was stricken. For months he appeared pale and ravaged by grief. In his overpowering way, he had given his firstborn a love such as he afforded no other living creature. Yet his forcing of Martin’s abilities, Edward came to believe, his kindling of the boy’s intellectual prowess as if he had been an adult, had played a role in over-straining and over-stimulating his brain, provoking the fever. ‘It has changed all my views of God’s work as it is to be done both in this world and the next,’ he wrote in his diary soon after Martin’s death. His views on how his children should be educated changed utterly. As a moralist, he was as strict and as nit-picking as ever; as an educationalist, he developed ‘a horror of any sort of pressure’, giving his surviving offspring a much freer rein, allowing them to take their own particular ways, giving freedom to childlike impulse over adult control. Hugh, in particular, was indulged (by the whole family) to the point of wildness.

  Edward visited Martin’s grave in Winchester every year on the anniversary of his death. He never fully comprehended why his son had been taken from him, writing in his diary a full decade later that this was the ‘inexplicable grief’ of his life, and composing a poem in his sorrow.

  VERSES WRITTEN BY EDWARD BENSON IN MEMORY OF HIS ELDEST BOY, ON OBSERVING HOUSE MARTINS NESTING

  The Martin

  The Martins are back to cornice and eaves

  Fresh from the glassy sea.

  The Martin of Martins my soul bereaves

  Flying no more to me.

  One of them clung to the window-side,

  And twittered a note to me.

  “There’s a Martin beyond or wind or tide

  Whom you know better than we.

  ‘His nest is hid in a clustered rose

  On the Prince’s own roof-tree,

  When the Prince incomes, when the Prince outgoes,

  The Prince looks up to see.

  ‘Calls him hither or sends him there,

  To the Friends of the Holy Three,

  With a word of love, or a touch of care.

  Why was he sent to thee?’

  Martin I know. And when he went home

  He carried my heart from me.

  Half I remain. Ere Martinmas come

  Go with this message from me.

  Say, ‘Thou Prince, he is wholly Thine!

  Sent once on a message to me.

  Yet suffer me soon, at morning shine,

  To see him on Thy roof-tree.’

  At Lis Escop, the ‘close little corporation’ of children drew even more tightly together. They developed a coded language, formed secret societies – some eccentric, such as the club called ‘Mr Paido’, for which one of the rites was walking barefoot in the garden; others more formal, such as ‘The Chapter’, which had its own seal and letters patent, as well as graded salaries for officials, from half-a-crown for the Warden, Arthur, down to a penny for the Henchman, Hugh. (They all subscribed to the funds of The Chapter, although Mary, being an honorary member, subscribed the most.) One of Edward’s first acts as Bishop was to establish a High School for Girls in Truro, sending Nellie and Maggie there as soon as they were old enough, and the Easter after Martin died, Fred went away to prep school; but on holidays and after school the Benson children withdrew into each other’s company at Lis Escop.

  Edward liked having his children about him. ‘My dearest love to the dearests,’ he wrote to Mary on one of his trips to London. ‘I think I ought always to have one with me here. They could go into a state of coma when I went out, and thus would not find it dull.’ In another letter, looking forward to his return to Lis Escop, he wrote: ‘I had rather teach Hugh Greek, or walk with the girls than anything else.’ Yet the children remained ill at ease with their father, with his swings of mood, his perfectionist obsession with detail, the enormity of his powers of rebuke and criticism. They adored Mary, who brimmed with fun when they were around her; who (in Arthur’s words) ‘opened, one by one, the doors of life’ to them, and who seemed so close to her own childhood that she ‘knew by instinct what we were thinking and caring about’.

  ‘I did not grow up,’ Mary wrote in one of her diaries, looking back on a girlhood that had come to a sudden, early end when her cousin proposed to her. The little girl thus arrested and contained burst out, in adult company (once she had moved through a barrier of shyness), in brilliant, darting conversation and social effervescence. She could be wickedly witty, enlivening even the most humdrum social events. With her own children, the child still within herself emerged in a ‘particular precision of sympathy’ and delight in their world. ‘She was younger and wiser than anyone else, limpid and bubbling,’ said Fred. She had their eye for ‘treats’ – for the odd conduct of ducks on the pond, for the hilarity of the butcher’s quirks of speech, for the overwhelming beauty of a butterfly’s wing. Their troubles, their joys, the best of them and the worst of them ‘went like homing pigeons’ to their mother. There was something ‘conveyed in the very atmosphere of her’ that let them know that ‘s
he was ready, toeing the mark, so to speak, to run to us when the pistol fired’. When Mary talked with Edward about discipline, she ended up feeling ‘just as bad if not worse’ than the children, but she could scold when the need arose – there was little sentiment about her. Yet her love was swift and eager, and her forgiveness complete. When Fred, as an errant thirteen-year-old, had been hauled by his father through a ‘dreadful interview’, his mother gave him a prayer book, saying, ‘I shall write in it “Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his ways?”’ Being called a young man at the age of thirteen was quite enough to make Fred realize what an exceedingly tiresome child he had been.

  Mary might by now be nearing forty, but she would enthusiastically join in the children’s games (tearing a sinew playing ‘Three Knights A-riding’). And games there were in plenty at Lis Escop. Most were made up by the children themselves and many were boisterous, such as ‘Pirates’, a contest of chasing, trophies and tackling that ranged from summerhouse to kitchen garden, from laurel hedge to the beehives. Now that Nellie and Maggie were growing older, they should really have given up vigorous knockabouts with their brothers, and like other young ladies of their class been content with gentle walks and demure carriage drives, especially given the thick, scratchy layers of clothing that enfolded them. (Not that tight collars, high waistcoats and jackets buttoned almost to the neck much bothered the boys, nor – for that matter – did layers of petticoat and bombazine, and the cane and horsehair padding of the ‘dress improver’ that kept them afloat, deter Mary from running about and taking the odd tumble.) But the girls joined in with glee, be it Pirates or Three Knights A-riding, hide-and-seek or cricket – Nellie, in particular, was a devastating underarm bowler, once vanquishing the entire Redruth High School girls’ team with ‘lobs that cut daisies from their stalks’.

  AN EXCERPT FROM E. F. (FRED) BENSON’S GHOST STORY, ‘PIRATES’,

  in which Peter Graham pays a visit to his childhood home of ‘Lescop’ in Truro, and recalls an incident with his mother and sister, Sybil

  There was the shop where he had taken his canary to be stuffed (beautiful it looked!): and there was the shop of the ‘undertaker and cabinet maker,’ still with the same name over the door, where on a memorable birthday, on which his amiable family had given him, by request, the tokens of their good-will in cash, he had ordered a cabinet with five drawers and two trays, varnished and smelling of newly cut wood, for his collection of shells. . . At the end of the street was the bridge over the Fal just below which they used so often to take a boat for a picnic on the river. There was a jolly family party setting off just now from the quay, three boys he noticed, and a couple of girls, and a woman of young middle-age. Quickly they dropped downstream and went forth, and with a half sigh he said to himself, ‘Just our number with Mama.’. . . And then Peter gave a gasp of sheer amazement, for he remembered with clear-cut distinctness how on the morning of that memorable birthday, he and Sybil started earlier than the rest from Lescop, he on the adorable errand of ordering his cabinet, she for a dolorous visit to Mr Tuck [the dentist]. The others followed half an hour later for a picnic on the Fal to celebrate the great fact that his age now required two figures (though one was a nought) for expression. ‘It’ll be ninety years, darling,’ his mother had said, ‘before you want a third one, so be careful of yourself.’

  The Cornish countryside drew the children out of doors – to bathe in the Fal and for picnics at Perran Bay, for walks through meadows of deep grass, among willowherb and loosestrife, following rivers thicketed with reeds, past swamps full of bog myrtle, over low wolds criss-crossed by stone walls and ancient hedgerows. Ferns, marvelled Fred, ‘the sort of things not known before to exist in other localities than greenhouses and tables laid for dinner-parties’, grew carelessly in the crevices in the lane below the churchyard. Arthur, Fred and Maggie, especially, became fascinated by the natural world. Maggie and Fred went searching for otters, peeked into nests for birds’ eggs, built up gardens of native plants and stocked a fish tank from local ponds. Arthur collected moths and butterflies. Nellie objected to killing them, but Fred and Maggie acted as eager anaesthetists each time Arthur returned, perspiring and laden with little boxes, from his expeditions. The contents of the children’s ‘Museum’ now overflowed into all their bedrooms. In addition to her penchant for wildlife, Maggie had a passion for pets. Watch, the border collie brought down from Lincoln, was joined by three more of his kin, together with an adoring nanny goat, a pair of canaries called Thersis and Mummy (later re-christened Buttercup), and a great dynasty of guinea pigs that included Atahualpa, Ixlitchochitl, Mr and Mrs Fenwick, and Edith Mitchinson (named after a girl at school).

  MAGGIE, AGED SEVENTEEN, WITH SOME OF HER PETS

  Indoors, the family played word games – at breakfast they were only passed bread if they phrased the request in an improvised rhyming couplet. A poetry game, curiously called ‘American Nouns’, involved plucking a written question from a hat, and then another bearing a single word (sometimes one as taxing as ‘unconstitutional’), and answering the question in rhyme and good metre, incorporating the word. Mary’s contributions to American Nouns were considered generally to be somewhat indifferent, her high point being the occasion when she had to answer the question ‘Does the moon draw the sea?’ using the word ‘artist’, and produced a poem ending:

  Ask me no more but let me be;

  My temper’s of the tartest:

  For if the moon doth draw the sea,

  Why, then she is an artist.

  The Saturday Magazine, inaugurated one holiday back at Lincoln (and neither confined to Saturdays nor particularly regular in its appearance), was now produced more frequently. Each contributor was required to write at least four pages of prose or one of poetry, on the faintly ruled blue paper Edward used for his sermons. Arthur came up with an essay in the style of The Spectator, about how he threw a cake of yellow soap at a serenading cat; Nellie with an imaginary interview with Maclean the coachman on the subject of sore backs; Maggie with a dialogue between two of her guinea pigs; Fred with a poem on the Devil. Little Hugh (by reason of his age allowed to get away with only two pages) made up tales so relentlessly bloody that his readership was reduced to shocked laughter. Their mother’s fondness for cheese became the object of wicked satire, and even Papa – in the distance and safety afforded by the written word – appeared in scenarios where he was worsted by his children’s superior wit.

  Alliances and rivalries tugged the young Bensons this way and that, but there were seldom any severe internecine battles. Fred and Maggie were often together on jaunts into the countryside. The two girls formed a natural alignment, though when Maggie founded an Anti-Slang Society at school (with badges for all carrying the motto ‘Manners Maketh Man’), Nellie established a Slang Society, in which members had to vow to say such words as ‘awfully’ many times a day. Maggie was fond of Societies. Diffident, with a soft, almost breathless voice and unable to roll her rs, she liked people to do things together and had inherited her father’s heart-melting smile, which greatly facilitated such schemes. Nellie, though bookish, was inquisitive, more individual in outlook, and out of all the children now the least cowed by Papa. Arthur was growing into a tall, powerfully built, but wispily blond, good-looking young man. Fred was fine-featured and pretty. Having left his passion for the chorister behind in Lincoln, he immediately lost what he referred to as his ‘sloppy heart’ to the curate at Kenwyn, the Revd John Reeve. The curate was an engaging young man with ‘a mane of yellow hair which he tossed back as he laughed peals of uproarious appreciation of any joke at all’, who himself (Arthur noted) ‘flung his heart about in handfuls’. He would drop in on Lis Escop on Sunday afternoons and, in a spare room, with his arm round Fred’s neck, would read him the sermon he was about to preach at evening service. The Reverend Reeve told Mary that ‘that boy was not far from the kingdom of God’.

  Little Hugh, who like Martin before him had a stammer, was fast becoming his
father’s favourite, the son to take Martin’s place, on whom Edward’s hopes were now centred. Hugh was also ‘darlingest of all to Beth’s big heart’, and able to disarm opposition from anyone else in the family by reducing them to helpless laughter. A large-headed goblin of a child, he was slight in stature, but (Edward noted in his diary) ‘the picture of ruddy force, light and strong’. Hugh loved dressing up, had a taste for the grand guignol, for blood and violence. During one ‘frightful craze for inventing murderous instruments’, he came up with a guillotine and various guns made with lead pipes and brass screws, extracting a promise from Mary that if he could create a weapon that lived up to his aim of ‘Certain Death if fired’, he might shoot it at anybody or anything he liked. He leapt out from behind sideboards with bloodcurdling yells, frightening guests; he wrote insults in a large round hand on pieces of paper which he hurled at the object of his scorn, he tussled with Fred and even with calm Maggie; he insisted on his own way, and generally got it. Only Arthur, who thought him ‘petulant, wilful, full of originality, fitful, independent’, seemed able to exercise any control over Hugh at all.

  FRAGMENT OF A POEM BY MASTER HUGH BENSON, AGED EIGHT, ON A SWARM OF GNATS

  And when they see their comrades laid

  In thousands round the garden glade,

  They know they were not really made

  To live for evermore.

  Mary helped give Hugh his lessons, and ran the large household – with greater application and efficiency than she had at Wellington. Her resolve to do her duty to her husband held; she suppressed her rebelliousness. She took her place at his side, supported him in his work, and played hostess to countless visitors, and though none was quite as grand as back in the Wellington days, Mary proved far more adept in her role. In contrast to his fairly marginal position in Lincoln, Edward, at Truro, was ‘the hero of the whole affair. . . because it was his work and his responsibility, and everything had as a matter of course to be accommodated to his convenience’; but (in Arthur’s words) Mary was ‘the person who made this all possible, who so attached the servants to herself that they were content to manage anything if only she were pleased, who gave my father at any time the advice, suggestion, help, sympathy and support he needed – for he consulted her about many things, and submitted all difficult and delicate matters to her criticism.’ Not only Edward, but her children, friends and sometimes even bare acquaintances opened their hearts to Mary. There was something in the way that she listened without appearing to wish to restrict independence, or exert influence; in the way (in complete antithesis to Edward) that she was ‘extraordinarily indifferent and indulgent about small superficial things’; in her ability to convey a complete and separate sympathy and understanding to the person she was talking with, and to give them the feeling that nothing in the world interested her more at that moment than their well-being – qualities that brought the troubles and problems of all those around Mary to her sitting room.