Impossible Life of Mary Benson, The

by Bolt, Rodney

  THE DUCHESS IS DISTURBED AFTER DINNER

  Adeline, Duchess of Bedford was taking coffee alone after the evening meal, at her house on Berkeley Square, when Woburn, the butler who ran her household with paralysing dignity entered, shutting the door noiselessly. Soundlessly, he approached to exactly the correct distance and said: ‘The Zeppelins have arrived, your Grace,’ as if they were guests for her soirée, come rather early. As a Zeppelin raid had not long before caused some considerable damage to the flat of her sister, Lady Henry Somerset, the Duchess in great agitation told Woburn to telephone to see if Lady Henry was safe. ‘Very good, your Grace,’ said the imperturbable butler, gliding out and closing the door noiselessly behind him. He came back, again shut the door, and advanced to exactly the spot where he had stood before. ‘Her ladyship’s flat has been blown to bits, your Grace,’ said he, ‘but her ladyship wasn’t at home.’

  At fifty-two, Arthur was beyond consideration for enlistment. Before the outbreak of hostilities, he had commented: ‘I personally am against war in any guise, I think it an anachronism in civilised nations, like duelling.’ After war was declared, his view changed, but he felt too old, too ill to be of use; imprisoned by his personality, and superfluous. ‘I was made to be of use in peace,’ he wrote. ‘I am useless in war. . . I feel today an embarrassed loiterer on the fringe of life.’ He criticized Archbishop Davidson for his gloom at the war, indeed felt ‘really rather ashamed of him’ for his reticence in firing up spirits, though he was also scathing of the braying jingoism of the newspapers, and scornful of a Church that prayed for victory. God either could not or would not avert war: ‘If he cannot, it must be only aggravating to be prayed to – if he will not, why ask him?. . . If I were almighty and meant to send war, the prayers of individuals would be no more than the chirping of sparrows.’ He took a personal dislike to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, when he met him one afternoon at the Athenaeum, thinking him ‘a horrid little fellow. . . like some sort of maggot. His head is big, he stoops. He has thin nervous limp sort of hands. He looks like a drug-taker, or at least as if there were something wrong to be ashamed of.’ For the rest, Arthur’s life went on much the same after 1914 as it had done before, a gentle round of writing and lectures – although he did compose a further two rousing verses for ‘Land of Hope and Glory’.

  Hugh became convinced that Armageddon was at hand, after reports at the end of August 1914 of angels appearing before the battle at Mons, and when the death of Pope Pius X occurred almost simultaneously with an eclipse of the sun. ‘It is extremely like Armageddon,’ he said to Fred, ‘and why shouldn’t the Kaiser be Antichrist?’ He maintained firmly that the ‘great and terrible day of the Lord’ was at hand. Nevertheless, he offered to serve as chaplain to Catholics on the Western Front, but was turned down. Hugh died, unexpectedly, in October 1914, shortly before his forty-third birthday. He had been overtaxing himself with preaching engagements, and felt constantly exhausted, confiding to Arthur that he had rather taken to whisky, ‘not for drinky but for drunky’. Earlier in the month he had developed severe chest pains, which doctors diagnosed as ‘false angina’. Hugh’s comment was that although false, it was extremely plausible, and he continued with his usual workload. Ben had known such a situation before, during Edward’s last weeks. She tried to persuade Hugh to slow down, but knew of old the hopelessness of ever influencing her wayward youngest son. ‘I tell Hugh exactly what I think,’ she said to Arthur. ‘I warn him that he will have a crash, and will be obliged to give up the greater part of his work – but he won’t or can’t listen; and I am not going to bore him by becoming a mere anxious mother. People must live their lives in their own way, and this is what he chooses – he says he will take the risks.’ During a Mission at Salford, in Manchester, Hugh’s chest pains worsened, and he developed pneumonia. He was taken to Bishop’s House, but even with pneumonia insisted on going to see a performance of the cinematograph, which amused and exhausted him. His condition grew worse and Arthur was called. ‘I don’t feel like dying at all,’ Hugh said to his brother when he arrived. Hugh was buried at Hare Street House – not, as he had requested, in a vault with a light-wood coffin that could be broken open from the inside, and with a duplicate key to the vault beside it, just in case he had been buried alive in error – but (once requisite Home Office permission had been obtained) near a rose-plot in the garden.

  MONSIGNOR ROBERT HUGH BENSON’S PLAN FOR A NOVEL ON THE EUROPEAN WAR

  I

  Priest coming out of Mass: Post Office: sees it is war

  II

  Barracks: he comes out, in uniform: reminiscences: meets a student: then a Jesuit priest

  III

  The march: sees churches: knows very little. Smoke of shells: aeroplane

  IV

  Under fire: his failure with a dying man: Jesuit dies

  V

  Belgian village: horrors: priest shot

  VI

  English cheer him up: he sees them fight

  VII

  His wound and capture: tells them he is a priest: trial: condemnation

  VIII

  Simply sent off under guard in train: escapes: help of Bavarians

  IX

  Gets back to his regiment: sent to a line of communications: peace and quiet: his mother’s house

  X

  Garrison: pious Colonel. He says Mass: and he is shot: a priest-soldier hears his confession Uhlans’ patrol

  Maggie survived her younger brother by just over a year, dying of heart failure in May 1916, a few weeks before turning fifty-one. ‘There is nothing to mourn for,’ Arthur admitted. ‘It was a heavenly deliverance.’ Yet for the few days before Maggie died, the cloud seemed to lift from her mind. Fred had been visiting her almost weekly for some months. They had always been close and his liveliness and lightness of touch seemed to revive her. In the fortnight before she died, Maggie smiled, quoted Browning, was full of old stories and humorous talk. She asked to see Ben, and even Lucy, and on the last evening of her life chatted with them, repeated family jokes and reminisced affectionately, saying as they left: ‘Well, I have had a happy day.’ This miraculous last-minute clarity helped relieve Ben of an enormous sense of defeat and guilt. She was sure Fred had a hand in the transformation, and wrote him ecstatic letters expressing her gratitude and sense of release. Ben thought of Maggie’s ‘Freedom, and Life, and Joy’ in those final days, and that meant ‘all those nine years wiped away, or perhaps more truly and better still, understood. How one’s heart revels and is satisfied. . . O BLESS YOU. A mother may bless her son, I suppose, just for the pure joy of what he is. I’ll take the risk, anyhow.’ Maggie was buried beside her sister Nellie, at Addington.

  Fred, at forty-seven, was, like Arthur, too old for enlistment. At Tremans, he irritated Arthur with his inside gossip about the war ‘from mysterious unnamed people, in high official positions, who only confide in Fred’. Ben was amused by his name-dropping, hints of privileged information, and then hasty retraction, as if he had made a gaffe. Yet Fred did make a direct contribution to the war effort. He was assigned by the Ministry of Information to write a report on German activity in Turkey, and the Foreign Office asked him to investigate the morale of the Italians, and to ascertain whether or not the Pope really was neutral, or secretly favoured Germany and Austria. With a pass to travel without hindrance in neutral Italy, Fred headed to the Villa Cercola, and wrote his report from Capri. Back in London, he noted that the civilian population ‘were beginning to find the unaccustomed routine quite intolerably dull, and they discovered that (wholly apart from the great issues, from the horrors and sorrows and splendours) the war was, above all things, the most frightful bore’.

  In April 1915, Arthur received an extraordinary offer from one of his woman correspondents. He had for years been answering letters from a Madame de Nottbeck – née Astor – who had both inherited a fortune and married a rich man. Madame de Nottbeck wished to give Arthur the sum of £40,000, w
ithout any conditions, to do with absolutely what he liked. She did not even desire to meet him. It was a considerable amount of money – Arthur calculated that in all his twenty years at Eton, he had earned, writing included, just £20,000; in the cash-for-honours scandal that embroiled Lloyd George in the 1920s, the recognized tariff for a knighthood was £10,000, with £30,000 for a baronetcy, and £50,000 for a peerage. After much hesitation, and further correspondence with Madame de Nottbeck, Arthur accepted the money. It was to be the first of a number of gifts, making him an exceptionally rich man. Arthur immediately made generous offers to friends. He had already made many gifts to Magdalene College – for fellowships and building work – and these he increased immensely. When the Master of Magdalene died at the end of October, Arthur was invited to fill the role he had often held in proxy in earlier years. In the two days after the announcement was made, Arthur received over four hundred letters and telegrams of congratulation. He swept down to Tremans, via the Athenaeum where Archbishop Davidson, among others, greeted him as ‘Master’. Ben was delighted at the news, and solemnly kissed his hand. The household treated him with great dignity – though Fred feigned ignorance of university affairs. Yet, by the end of the year, Arthur was again feeling twinges of depression. Over the following months their severity increased, coming at him ‘like a breath from Hell’. In the summer of 1917, he suffered a total collapse. Dr Todd arrived to take him to a nursing home near Ascot, where Arthur remained until long after the war was over.

  Lucy responded to the national crisis with her usual pragmatism, throwing herself into work for children orphaned by the war. Ben, when war was declared, saw it more transcendentally, as an indication that ‘Greed and Selfish Desire and Desire for Possession and Position are the things that are Wrong with us,’ and opining that no amount of talking about peace could ‘prevent this hideous outcome, which is from Within’. She remained mostly cocooned at Tremans, where – Arthur noted – a ‘touch of the tranquillity of age’ descended on her, and she lived more in and for the day, hardly looking ahead, and thus spared much of the misery of what was happening in the wider world. But then, Arthur went on, ‘all her life long the march of external events and political forces had meant less to her than the little circle so brightly illuminated by her own bright mind.’ That circle was becoming more proscribed. Few except family came to Tremans now, and Ben seldom went to London.

  Ben had grown old. For years, gout and rheumatism had gnawed at her. She had long quipped that a walk with her was ‘a totter with a tortoise’. The gout ‘with its Hydra nature’ crept through her and seemed ‘to spare no organ but the TONGUE – That is in quite good working order’. When her eyes began to fail – a ‘mistiness which slides across’ – she echoed Dickens’s formidable Mrs Squeers with a flippant ‘IS THIS THE HEND?’ More seriously, she wrote: ‘I am endeavouring to see how to turn disabilities into powers. That must be the task of advancing years, and ought to be true right up to the Gates of Death – and that it is difficult is part of the going, something to set one’s teeth in.’ What really bothered Ben was ‘a certain shortage of hearing’. As she grew more deeply deaf, she fell silent. Low tones, especially of male conversation, escaped her. She did not join in for fear of appearing stupid. At moments like these, denied the conversation that had ever been her sustenance, she felt ‘the Rest of Life stretches before me a Desert Track from which Death will be a thankful emergence’. Yet the old spark was still there. In the spring of 1917 the seventy-six-year-old Ben, on a visit to Lambeth Palace, was given the task of diverting the Liberal statesman Viscount Morley, three years her senior. She wrote to tell Arthur:

  MARY BENSON, AGED SEVENTY-THREE

  Lord Morley dined here – older and crocker – and having close behind him 2 or 3 months of Flue – and being deafer than I – We had a time! and it not being thought good for him to go to Chapel I was invited to lure him to sit out with me instead and you should have seen my shameful feminine appeal to him – though one foot in the grave for both of us we hopped together on the other, and I got him to talk about Ireland, and to indulge in reminiscences personal and other.

  But such visits to Lambeth were rare. Back at Tremans – deaf, deprived of the nourishment of conversation, and as Lucy busied herself with her good works and her surviving children got on with their lives – Ben slipped into silence.

  DEATH OF MRS BENSON

  Widow of the Archbishop

  We regret to announce the death of Mrs Benson, widow of the late Archbishop Benson. Mrs Benson died peacefully in her sleep during the night of 15th June 1918. It is 22 years since the Archbishop died at Hawarden. Mrs Benson’s surviving sons, Mr A. C. Benson, Master of Magdalene, and Mr E. F. Benson, are well known by their writings. Mrs Benson was buried yesterday beside the graves of her deceased daughters at Addington Palace. Among mourners at her funeral were Adeline, Duchess of Bedford, the composer Miss Ethel Smyth, and Miss Lucy Tait, a family friend.

  Fred kept Tremans on for a year after Ben’s death. Lucy could not bear to remain there, and bought a smaller house in the neighbourhood, living there and at Lambeth with her sister and Archbishop Davidson. Arthur was still in the nursing home, and Fred had no desire to live alone in the country. Around the time that he was thinking of giving up the remainder of the lease on Tremans, Henry James’s old home – Lamb House in Rye – became available (James had died in 1916). Fred secured a tenancy, which he shared with Arthur when Arthur eventually recovered, and before he died in 1925, coming down there from Magdalene for his holidays. Lamb House and Rye came to be at the heart of Fred’s ‘Mapp and Lucia’ novels, which met with greater success than anything he had ever written, ensuring a place for E. F. Benson on bookshelves for decades to come.

  It fell to Fred alone to pack up Tremans. Room by room he presided over the fate of objects that had been gathered into the stream of Benson family life for over half a century – Ben’s old bed, the now-collapsed ottoman, the altarpiece sideboard from Wellington and the organ from the chapel at Addington, the bronzed dessert service from Lincoln, engravings that had hung at Lambeth Palace, Maggie’s statue of Rameses the Great. Somewhere, over the years, the blancmange-like beaded velvet pincushion made for Queen Victoria had disappeared. There were packets of letters from old Mrs Sidgwick to Minnie, in browned envelopes with early Victorian stamps, childhood scribblings from Truro, one of little Martin’s first copybooks. There were Ben’s diaries, Edward’s sermons, files on the Lincoln Judgement and unused invitations to Speech Day at Wellington College. There were poems and scrapbooks, quickly jotted postcards and long expressions of love – as well as Maggie’s vile letters to Ben, which Fred burnt along with other ‘dangerous stuff that had better perish’.

  For days Fred sifted, reminisced, made hard decisions. He selected treasured items to keep, dispatched much to the auctioneers, made gifts to servants, chose pieces to go to Cambridge, to await Arthur’s recovery.

  Piece by piece the Bensons were drained out of Tremans, till the old house stood empty and silent, its contents crated and removed, dispersed to anonymous new owners, sent on to Rye, or consigned to the bonfire.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am most grateful to the Authors’ Foundation for an Elizabeth Longford Grant, which was of considerable help in meeting travel costs incurred while researching this book.

  The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, kindly granted me access to the Benson Family Papers, and permission to quote from Mary Benson’s diaries and letters. I am especially grateful to Colin Harris and the staff in the Special Collections department for their help and support. I should also like to acknowledge, with thanks, access granted by the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge, to E. W. Benson’s diaries, and the Master and Fellows of Magdalene College, Cambridge, for allowing me to consult and quote from A. C. Benson’s diaries.

  The discerning eye and sound judgement of my editor, Ravi Mirchandani, enhanced this book considerably, and I am thankful, too, for the encouragem
ent and good faith of my agent, David Miller. Thanks, also, to Sarah Norman and all at Atlantic, who so enthusiastically took the book on board. Katie Derham and John Vincent were generous in their hospitality, and a special thanks goes to Hans Nicolaï, Jo Beall and Linetta de Castle, all of whom offered warmth and conviviality to a distracted guest. As ever, heartfelt thanks goes to Britta Boehler, Chris Chambers, Andrew May, Gerard van Vuuren and all those friends who have offered succour, advice, and help with research.

  NOTES

  Ben. Benson Family Papers, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford

  ACB A. C. Benson Diaries, Pepys Library, Magdalene College, University of Cambridge

  Introduction

  p.xiii ‘unpermissibly gifted family’ Smyth, Ethel, The Memoirs of Ethyl Smyth, p.144

  p.xiii ‘English literature will be flooded’ Benson, A. C., Life and Letters of Maggie Benson, p.344

  Prologue

  p.xvii a ‘thunderous whirlpool’ Ben. MS Benson Adds 14; letter Lambeth 1904