Footprints in Paris

by Gillian Tindall

  According to Blanche, years later, he was so shy on that first holiday in Maidstone that he spent most of the time fiddling with his bicycle and barely looked at her. No doubt his extreme self-consciousness was due to the fact that he had been told forthrightly by Albert Alfred what he was supposed to do.

  Blanche too knew what she was supposed to do. She could expect no dowry beyond a little family jewellery. She was almost thirty-one, nine months older than Bertie himself. This was her big chance: no other would come.

  Neither Laura nor Mab had such an opportunity. Both remained single.

  * * *

  The not so very young couple were married the following May in St Ann’s Anglican church in the centre of Dublin, which had been the Jacob church in Ely Place days. Blanche wore an expensive and beautiful lace dress given to her by the Cootes. It was the Jacob family’s last appearance in fashionable Dublin society.

  Half a dozen years earlier, by one of those symmetric coincidences that seem to carry a message that remains opaque, the railway line that ran into Dublin from the south suffered the same grotesque accident that Bertie had seen at the Gare Montparnasse. On Valentine’s Day 1900 an engine coming from Dundrum and Milltown ran too fast down the last, curving stretch from Canal Dock. At the small but elegantly Palladian terminus at the bottom of Harcourt Street, it crashed through the buffers and through a wall a yard thick to hang crazily over the street. The fireman jumped clear but the driver’s right arm was crushed between engine and tender and had to be amputated to get him out.

  The Jacob girls, still living then not far off in Ely Place and unaware that it was their father’s last year of life, joined the crowds that passed by the scene to stare and wonder. Only years later, in assorted lifetime exile in England, did that memorable crash come to symbolise for them the destruction of the whole elegant Anglo-Irish world of which they had been a part. By then, the disappearance of that world seemed as if it had always been a fact, a death foretold. Blanche, more perceptive perhaps than some of her staunchly Unionist family, wrote long after: ‘Looking back dispassionately on the people among whom my youth was spent, I can see that even in their hey-day they were doomed to extinction … Their end came violently, and they left Ireland with their houses burning behind them, but though it might have come more gradually and more kindly … it would have come inevitably.’ By then, consciously distancing herself from the Ireland of the Easter Rising and the Troubles, she had largely lost her Dublin intonation, and had become what she herself ironically described as ‘a fairly satisfactory example of the conventional British matron’.

  Bertie and Blanche had their honeymoon in Ireland, starting in County Cork. Bertie’s sundry expenses on the wedding day include ‘Cycles booked 2s., porter 6d., Tickets Mallow £1.19s.2d., Tea baskets 2s.’ – and, rather alarmingly, ‘Smelling salts 1s.’ Did he have in mind that the physical realities of the wedding night might be so alarming to Blanche that she would need reviving? Or did Blanche herself ask for salts?

  Their first child was born in a London mansion flat rather less than a year later, delivered by May’s husband. It was during the three-year interval that separated this birth from the subsequent one that they undertook a trip to Paris. I do not know where they stayed. Perhaps at the Hôtel Voltaire, but more likely I think, for this occasion, at somewhere grander such as the Hôtel du Louvre, a massive Right Bank establishment much favoured by English visitors. From this comfortable base, I am sure that Bertie firmly escorted Blanche round all his favourite places. This was to be her life’s fate, married to a genuine lover of art and architecture, and on the whole she stood up to it nobly. She had learnt by then that Bertie was never content just to spend five or ten minutes in a church absorbing the atmosphere. Baedeker in hand, his instinct was to master the whole place. ‘He always wants to see everything,’ she was to complain in later years to their children. ‘Oh Bertie dear – must we go on there now?’ became in time one of her standard phrases, and, later again in life, ‘Oh Bertie dear … my feet.’ Small in stature and not particularly strong, she always appeared more vivacious than he, organising more social life for him than he really wanted, but she was in the end worn out by him as she had humorously predicted. She died almost twenty years before he did.2

  It is not clear whether the couple visited the Lemoignes while they were in Paris. Bertie may well have wanted to show off his bride and his status as a grown man, but on the other hand he did not have a happy memory of his year with them and Monsieur Lemoigne had probably faded back into being a business connection. Or had he? There are suggestions, faint as foot-marks on a wet pavement, that with Matilde at any rate some sort of contact was maintained.

  However much the suppressed atmosphere of the Lemoigne home had irritated and wearied Bertie, they were not an uncultured family. Monsieur Lemoigne’s occupation and their Left Bank habitat exposed them to a general awareness of literature and painting at an epoch when Paris was becoming the art capital of the world. Painting, in any case, had long been a Latin Quarter occupation: the Beaux Arts institution was in the Rue Bonaparte near the family premises. The otherwise dreary Madame Lemoigne apparently knew someone who made copies of sculptures for the Louvre, for she had once taken Bertie to see his workshop. She had other artistic acquaintances, including one who had painted ceilings and frescoes in the Hôtel de Ville. (Does that explain Paul and Bertie’s uncharacteristic presence there at a ball?) On one of the snowiest Sundays in the bitter winter of 1895, Bertie was taken by the Lemoignes ‘to an exhibition of pictures by French ladies’. He was not impressed, and may have annoyed his hosts by making this fact apparent. ‘It was … a very poor affair, indeed there were very few pictures worth looking at and some were simple atrocities of the noble art. Certainly I don’t think much of the female talent of France if that is a fair representation of it.’

  (‘Oh Bertie, really,’ as Blanche would later have said, and, in an aside to any third party who happened to be there, ‘Don’t take any notice, my dear. He’s always so critical.’)

  Were the pictures really so bad? Or was it that Bertie, barely nineteen and a stickler for accurate draughts manship in his own work, was failing to recognise the possibilities, however tentative and amateur, that the Impressionist movement had opened up for French eyes?

  Six years later he seems to have been more receptive. For in the mean time Matilde, by then in her early twenties, was taking some artistic steps. Had she been an English girl of the period, as yet unmarried, she might have absorbed her time and energies with golf, tennis, bicycling or amateur dramatics. Being a child of the Latin Quarter, she turned to brush and canvas, frequenting one of the many private studios that received young men and women for lessons and practice. Towards the end of the century the life-drawing classes in these establishments became integrated, and the Ecole des Beaux Arts, till then a bastion of riotous male studentry, started admitting women. In January 1902 Bertie appended a postscript to one of Baillière, Tindall & Cox’s otherwise formal business letters to Lemoigne: ‘Mes compliments à Mademoizelle Matilde sur son succès au Salon. J’ai fait écrire au secretaire de l’Exposition, mais je n’ai pas encore de réponse. J’éspère qu’elle viendra chez nous pendant l’exposition.’ (‘My congratulations to Mademoiselle Matilde for her success at the Salon. I have had someone write to the secretary of the Exhibition, but haven’t yet had a reply. I hope she will visit us while the exhibition is on.’)

  Matilde, it seems, had done well, so well that a picture or pictures by her had been selected for an exhibition in London. A whole possible future life, even if a relatively obscure one, was apparently opening up for this particular jeune fille bien élevée, a world beyond the cramped flat in the Rue de l’Abbaye, the closely chaperoned outings, an arranged marriage with a bored cousin – if she was lucky. I cannot tell how far her luck went, since she disappears from the patchy record. But conjecture, by a different link, suggests for her a possible continuing role in this story.

 
When the First World War broke on an armed but essentially unprepared Europe, it was a popular cause. Very few people, in their worst dreams, foresaw the scale of the slaughter that was to come. Like many other young men of every class, Howard Tindall soon vounteered for the Army. He was thirty, unmarried, and as the youngest partner in the family firm he could arguably be spared ‘for the duration’. By the spring of 1915 he was an officer in the Royal Berkshire Regiment, and soon after that was sent to France.

  Bertie, rising forty and the father of two children, came into a different category. With Mr Cox retired, Howard overseas and Albert Alfred in his mid-seventies, Bertie was now the indispensable linchpin of Baillière, Tindall & Cox. Fortunately, a number of the books the firm produced were used by the Army medical establishment, so in 1916, when conscription came in, Bertie was exempted from active service. He joined a reserve force, however, called the Old Boys Corps (read ‘old boys from public schools’) and spent occasional weekends, rather enjoyably, at camp, digging trenches in East Anglia or guarding government buildings in London. In Hertfordshire, where he, Blanche and the children were now living in a brand-new home with a large garden, the local great house became a convalescent home for wounded officers. Blanche bicycled off there regularly to work shifts as a VAD, a volunteer nurse organised under a government scheme. She tended (her daughter later recalled) ‘young men on crutches, or with empty sleeves or jumping and twittering with shell shock’. Meanwhile her younger sister Mab and her sister-in-law Maud were both nursing in France. By that time the very name ‘France’, which for a hundred years had signified a place of escape, culture, enlightenment and daring if possibly scandalous ideas, had acquired the timbre of doom.

  As for May, she and her surgeon husband had bought a weekend retreat near Bertie and Blanche. Why they had chosen the same country district was not clear, since May did not really get on with Blanche once she could no longer patronise her as a naïve Irish bride new to London ways. Big, handsome, clever May, her father’s daughter and a fine singer, had had no children. She thus failed to achieve her own bizarrely limited but stated ambition of ‘one daughter, to look after me in my old age’. Turned forty, she had become touchy and difficult, and the family watchword was ‘For goodness’ sake, don’t upset May.’ No offers to do anything as taxing as nursing, or any other war work, came from her. For a life that earlier seemed full of promise, hers was peculiarly devoid of achievement, fulfilment or apparent happiness, though her compact and dapper husband was everyone’s favourite uncle. He also earned a great deal of money. His fee for removing an appendix, an oddly fashionable operation at that time, was a hundred guineas (£105), a huge sum. He is reputed always to have handed the extra five pounds straight to May.

  Howard came home several times on leave and stayed with Bertie and Blanche. Blanche always remembered that he was ‘so kind to the children’. Reserved by nature, or through his upbringing under Albert Alfred’s dominion, he did not say much about life at the Front, or about the massacres of the Somme, which he survived. By summer 1917 he was Brigade Signalling Officer. A couple of snapshots, taken in July against a deceptively peaceful background of hop fields between Poperinge and Ypres, show a pleasant, reliable-looking soldier, moustached and more heavily built than his elder brother. He appears more than his age (he had just turned thirty-three) and his expression is rather sad. At the end of that same month, on the very first day of the murderous Third Battle of Ypres, which has gone down in collective memory as Passchendaele, he was killed.

  In mid-August Bertie sent a letter to their sister Maud, who was working in a French hospital. The double sheet of paper is bordered with black, and so is the small envelope. Maud evidently kept it all her life.

  ‘My darling Maud,

  ‘I have not written before because I knew you would be deluged with letters.

  ‘… It is a dreadful loss for all of us and more particularly for you, dear girl, right away from everyone as you are, that it must be still harder for you to bear. I have thought of you so much during the last fortnight with the whole weight of your grief and misery on your shoulders and no one to share it with … May, and I believe you too, had made up your minds that the dear boy would never come through it but I was always optimistic and consequently I felt it as a real knock down blow. I have been carrying on these last 2½ years at the office as best I could, doing things in the way he liked so that he would find all in order when he came back and it has all been in vain.’

  Bertie may have been right in perceiving that his younger brother had been the true inheritor of the family business, more suited to it than he, Bertie, really was.3

  ‘I find it so hard to go on, knowing now that I shall never have his assistance that I had counted so much upon, but must carry on alone. A few minutes before I went off to camp on the Friday before Bankholiday I had a few lines from him practically admitting that he was going up to his death, and so simply and bravely put that you can imagine my anxiety all the time I was at camp hearing the great guns pounding away night after night and all day long … He was killed the day after he wrote that note …

  ‘My heart goes out to you in this dreadful time, how I wish you were amongst us here instead of amidst strangers.

  ‘Ever your loving brother, Bertie.’

  Though in her heart Blanche was less conventional and probably less genuinely religious than Bertie, the letter she sent Maud conforms more than Bertie’s to the received party line about dying for one’s country and the Christian belief in a better life: ‘I picture him now with “Bubbles” and all those other friends who have passed on. Indeed a band of Happy Warriors who have made good in the highest and noblest sense …’ But she writes further down the page, ‘It is so impossible to see good in all the frightful things that are happening that our only hope is in God.’ Bertie too wrote that one could not understand ‘the purpose of it all and how and when good will come out of all this evil’. This terrible suspicion, that all the destruction of precious lives might in fact be quite futile, was by that stage in the War racking middle England.

  In France, too, the mood was bitter. There the heaviest losses were not among the officer class, as they were in England, but among the conscripted peasantry. In remote rural areas, whose men were perceived by the military authorities as expendable cannon fodder, whole villages were stripped of their rising generation. It is always said that the long tradition of stonemasons travelling from the Limousin, to build and rebuild Paris, was broken by that war – ‘They’d killed the lot of them. None left.’

  Three weeks after Howard’s death, Blanche’s brother Donald, he of the transatlantic accent and the fancy suits, who had already been seriously wounded the year before, was also killed, in the suicidal Canadian attempt to take Vimy Ridge. No letters survive to tell how the family coped with this double blow. Long after, Blanche said in the memoir written for her children that Donald had been ready ‘to die for his country’ – ‘His life had been a chequered one and he did not fear losing it, and when I recall him it is always as one who had loved and suffered much.’ Blanche always felt that Donald’s life had been blighted at seventeen when, after their father’s death, he was sent off alone to Canada. It was a source of regret and guilt to her that at the time she had not argued against this.

  But Howard’s life, up to the War, had been full of promise. After his death, Bertie discovered that his discreet brother had for some time been courting a ‘nice, suitable girl’ met through the Lambeth Mission, and that they had planned to marry. The Great War did not just destroy individual lives but whole dimensions of future family life, leaving in their place silence, a meaningless emptiness. Did the girl find another mate? I wonder. Or did she join that huge, amorphous, inter-war band of ‘superfluous women’ for whom there were simply not enough men to go round?

  May’s husband wrote – and later published himself, with other verses, in a ‘slim volume’ – a poem for Howard beginning:

  Noble heroes round his gr
ave are lying

  On the fatal fields of Flanders slain …

  More specifically, what remained of Howard ended up in Hooge Crater Cemetery, which did not yet exist at the time he met his death. Subsequent back-and-forth fighting on the Ypres Salient, which achieved next to nothing at such terrible cost, obliterated all the early, hasty battlefield burials, but shortly after the War’s end Bertie received a letter from a young Lieutenant-Colonel in Howard’s regiment:

  ‘Dear Sir, I am sorry that I do not know to whom I am writing, except that you are the next of kin of the late Lieu. H.S. Tindall … who was a fellow officer of mine and fell quite close to me on July 31st 1917. Shortly after the action we put up three crosses at the spot in the battlefield where Tindall, my own brother A.H. Hudson and another officer named Tarrant were killed …’

  He went on to say that the crosses were demolished by later shelling and that he had just (early 1919) had them reinstated – he enclosed a sketch. He mentioned having got an army padre to come and read a few words, and that ‘I was very glad while putting up a cross for my brother also to put one up for Tindall.’

  The lack of any mention of an initial burial suggests that the three men had taken the full force of an explosion which also submerged them in the notorious quagmire that was Passchendaele. It was probably thanks to Lieutenant-Colonel Hudson’s action that the remnants of these three bodies were eventually retrieved and identified. They were taken to Hooge Crater, which had become a ‘concentration cemetery’ for bodies collected from all over the area. Here, in a landscape of military order and gardened peace that is the antithesis to the realities of War, are commemorated almost six thousand other brothers, sons, husbands and nephews. Very many of them have as an inscription on their uniform stone simply ‘A soldier of the Great War. Known unto God.’ (Or ‘Two soldiers of the Great War’, or four or five or six or even more, so violent had been the battering of this terrain.) Among these known only to God it is possible that some vestige of Donald Jacob also lies, for the remains of many Canadian soldiers ended up in that cemetery. His name appears, among innumerable others, on the mass memorial at Loos. Howard Tindall, at least, has his own headstone. The ‘other officer’, Tarrant, is next to him. There is no sign of Hudson.