Just below Hog Platt was hospitable Hillside, where Colonel Phillips and Mrs Phillips were always glad to see us and always had a peach or an apricot handy. Here the atmosphere – quite different from Squire Beard’s – was all of young ladies who must have been very young indeed then but seemed very old and dashing to us. The eldest sister had married Squire Beard and was the mother of our friend Dulcia and stepmother of all the long-legged horsemen, but Mary and Lilla were at home and were endlessly kind to us and took us into their long garden which ran uphill towards the windmill. They had a far better summer house than ours. It was much higher up and had a long brick staircase to its top storey and when you got there it was a kind of gazebo, perched against a high red brick wall overlooking Hog Piatt. What fun it was to sit there and watch one’s village friends going along the footpath below. There were brothers that came and went, but they were too grown-up and far off to enter into our scheme and it was the girls who let us be friends with them and took us into the kitchen garden and let us pick apricots off the long wall.
But perhaps today with Nanny waiting for me it was safer not to loiter, so I left Hillside unvisited and went on past the tiny, picturesque, and doubtless hopelessly condemned cottages that stood on the other side of the road. They were flush with the brick pavement and one dropped down a couple of steps to go into the little front room and could almost see into the upper room as one stood in the street. Probably they were not very fit to live in, but we had old friends who had lived and managed to bring up families there and it was a sad day when the cottages were deserted. At first bills were posted on the doors and boys threw stones at the windows, then they became ruinous and were pulled down. Now their stones are forgotten and their site is part of the big garden which has grown from the old garden of The Elms and takes up the whole island. Then as I had done my duty to myself and kept Nanny waiting, I ran past the boarding-house and went in at our own front door, just in time for tea in the dining-room.
The dining-room at North End House was incredibly small for the number of people that it held, and my grandmother’s greeting of ‘welcome’ was daily repeated in its open-armed hospitality. It must have been the parlour of the old brown-staircase house and where its window used to look over the green an open arch gave on to the brick steps leading to the hall. Over this arch hung a heavy velvet curtain embroidered by Mrs Morris with a figure of St Catherine designed by Mr Morris.
Its long south window looked into the grass plot where the ilex grew on a little hillock, its two stems growing apart so that we could squeeze between them. In autumn passion flowers blossomed round the window and just outside a bell hung under a little wooden shelter against the weatherboard wall of the blue-staircase house, to call us in from the garden for meals, though really it was hardly necessary when there was such a very deeply booming gong in the hall. The dining-room wall was hung on the three other sides with hangings embroidered by Mrs Morris, from her husband’s designs; a coarse woollen material, very dark blue, with clumps of flowers at regular intervals. The hangings on each side of the fire-place, facing the window, masked recesses where china and silver were kept. Here one could hide; and whenever one was sent to get anything from the shelves one murmured to oneself, ‘She drew the arras aside.’ My grandmother had a very high-backed chair, covered with some blue Morris material, which stood with its back to the window and so enveloped her little form that she was almost invisible to any one entering the room. I never heard her discuss domestic matters or housekeeping, but Rottingdean meals were very delicious. One remembers the lobsters that came fresh from the Fish Woman’s cart an hour after the lobster pots had been taken up, creamy and delicate as no town lobster is, for your lobster is something of a vintage breed and does not travel well. The nursery was always allowed to have the lobster’s whiskers – antennae – feelers – I don’t know their right name, and they made a fine show stuck in the ribbons of one’s summer hat. Later on, when we were allowed to join the grown-up lunch, we were promoted to a claw and were blissfully happy with the silver lobster-pick, rummaging down to the very tip for edible morsels. Prawns of gigantic size we also had, in whose head Nanny could find two little things remotely resembling figures of people, called Adam and Eve. And shrimps of course which we had caught ourselves, and winkles – but these were considered low and Nanny did not encourage them.
It was a tradition which has been handed on in the family that the wife should carve, and my little grandmother was almost hidden by the Sunday joint. Her carving knife with green ivory handle was worn by age almost as fine as the rapier with which the chef in charge of the cold table cuts the ham, and the sirloin of beef or the ‘sainted mutton’ fell to pieces at once under her skilful hand. She had ways at table inherited from her youth in the north of England, belonging really to an earlier generation, and always ate cheese on the point of a silver knife with extreme delicacy. One of her favourite dishes for supper when the family were alone was a marrow bone. It would come to table standing up on a large piece of toast, swathed in a white table-napkin. At the sight of it my grandmother would carefully unfold her own napkin to its fullest extent and pin it to the neck of her gown with a handsome paste brooch. Thus equipped, she would dip into the marrow with a long silver implement – it cannot have been the lobster pick, so I think it must have been the chutnee spoon, that attenuated caricature of an ordinary spoon – and help us all liberally to that delicious, but almost too satisfying, dish. Another habit of her youth was to lay her slice of cake between two pieces of bread-and-butter and eat them together like a sandwich which was known in North country parlance as ‘matrimony’.
Then there were special foods for cold Sunday supper which always included hard boiled eggs with their inside removed, mashed up with butter and seasoning, and replaced, and cheese straws tied up in little bundles like faggots. At Christmas there was a turkey with gilded claws sent from Cheshire by Lady Leighton Warren. This lady was a devoted friend of my grandparents and found for my grandfather many of the country flower names which he turned to pictures in his Rower Book. Once she sent to North End House a little sea-horse, white enamelled body, gold mane, green enamelled tail, and a saddle girth of rubies, because she said it must be like the White Horse at Rottingdean, though to any one who had seen this unassuming public-house the likeness was not obvious.
In the summer holidays heaped plates of figs and peaches and nectarines were always on the sideboard, bursting and oozing with their own richness, and a child could easily appropriate one, or two, or three without the theft being noticed. A little later the sweetbriar-tasting Ribstone Pippins took their place; and later, almonds and raisins.
When we left the dining-room for the drawing-room we had to pass through the hall. It was always worth lingering here to see if any rose-water would drip from the big glass barrel which stood in a niche by the steps and then to look at the big clock which rather erratically told the days of the month and had a painted sun and moon that tottered across a starry hemisphere. Plaster casts of Delia Robbia singing boys, skilfully coloured by Nora Hallé, were hanging on the wall opposite the window and there was the horrifying joy of lifting up the trap through which coal was shot down for the furnace below. It was another of the minor curiosities of the house that though there was an excellent hot-water service to heat the pipes in the studio, it had never occurred to any one to use the hot water for any other purpose, and there was only one cold water-tap (to which we shall come later) in the whole of the blue-staircase house. Near the clock the Watts portrait of my grandfather as a young man looked down on us from the wall. He was about thirty-seven then, with straight nose, blue eyes, a high forehead, and a rather long forked beard and hair of a light-brown colour touched with golden tints. The modelling of the upper part of the face which is free from beard and moustache is singularly delicate and beautiful. When we knew my grandfather his beard and hair were grizzled and he wore his beard clipped to a point, but the sensitive modelling of the face was, if an
ything, accentuated.
From the hall two steps led up into the blue-staircase house and the head of the kitchen stairs. In our early days Mr and Mrs Mounter lived in the kitchen and I cannot discover that Mr Mounter ever did anything at all, but he had a pair of immensely long black moustaches and had been a soldier. There was a tradition in the family that Mr Mounter had once been in the desert somewhere, marching on something, and there was no water and at last they came to a Muddy Pool and all the other soldiers lay on their stomachs and drank; but Mr Mounter only took a little water in his mouth and swished it round and spat it out again, and all the other soldiers died in torment and he lived to this very day. I think this story was chiefly used to discourage us from trying to drink out of the village pond, after which green and slimy draught we should undoubtedly have shared the fate of Mr Mounter’s soldier friends. My brother, being of tender years and eminently kissable, was one day lured into the kitchen by Mrs Mounter and given cakes and thoroughly hugged, after which he came upstairs yelling and when told to stop could only repeat, ‘I don’ want be kissed by person in kitchen; I don’ want be kissed by person in kitchen.’ This piece of snobbishness was only surpassed by my horrid self when, at a tea-party for village children, being told to hand round cakes, I said in a fat sulky voice, ‘I’m not a servant,’ which so horrified my grandmother that she was unequal to any kind of blame.
It was on the whole safer then to avoid the kitchen and pass along the passage to the drawing-room. When I think of the drawing-room at North End House I think of a very little girl wrestling with a stiff door handle till the lock rattles, one of those brass handles that are meanly and miserably small so that they give you nothing to hold and you can turn them in any direction without having any effect and it is enough to make you give up in despair if you are small enough, but some one will nearly always come from inside and open the door for you. Sometimes it is summer and the windows are wide open on to the village green and the grey church opposite is bathed in afternoon light. Sometimes it is winter, the heavy curtains between the two halves of the drawing-room are closely drawn, and in the inner room a fire is gleaming on the ruddled hearth. There is holly behind the pictures and there are rumours of a play about St George to be acted after tea. But if we are to look at the room, this quiet sunny afternoon at the end of summer will be our best time. My father and grandfather will be smoking in the Mermaid and my mother and grandmother are reading, and if I disturb no one I shall be allowed to wander about and look at things.
Just behind the drawing-room door is the little upright piano which after many years found its way to South Kensington Museum to spend the rest of its life there. Even in those days its musical life was near its end and it would only make a sad cracked tinkling, but it had been designed by my grandfather to show how a cottage piano needn’t necessarily be a lump of hideousness. It was a simple, unpretentious shape, made of plain wood stained brown, and on it my grandfather had painted a picture of girls playing in a garden and Death, veiled and crowned, scythe in hand, knocking at the garden door. The piano he had designed and painted for Frances Horner was richer and more beautiful, but this early work had a more touching if less assured beauty of its own. The design of musical instruments was of great interest to him and he had carried out several other large pianos constructed on the lines of the harpsichord, that is to say, a case in harmonious relation with the lines of the strings, tapering away towards the end, instead of the rounded monstrosity of the ordinary drawing-room grand, and legs that were elegant and serviceable instead of merely elephantine. Broadwood made these pianos for him and my parents had one of them for many years, with an oak case stained green and green ivory keys instead of black. It is now in the Royal College of Music, its own music nearly dead, but a mute testimony to the fact that a piano needn’t be a blight upon a beautiful room. This piano and a harpsichord by Broadwood and Tschudi stood for years in the same room and they had the same distinction of line and the beauty that comes from complete harmony between soul and body – the chords that make the music and the case that holds them. Another of his experiments was the case of a clavichord which Arnold Dolmetsch made to his design. He painted the outside a deep red like Chinese lacquer and on it in white letters a poem in Latin which my father wrote, and in a laurel wreath the words CLAVIS CORDIUM, a pun on Clavichord. It was made for my mother, so there was a picture of St Margaret leading her dragon. Inside, under the strings, he painted a girl gathering flowers.
As for the little brown piano in the back drawing-room at North End House, we never dared touch it without permission. Sometimes, before its voice was too old, my grandmother would sing to it. Italian songs from the collection called Gemme d’Antichità, or English songs from Chappell’s Popular Music of the Olden Time, or songs whose provenance we never knew, among them a song whose only words, repeated again and again were:
Why did my master sell me,
All on my wedding day?
My grandmother was devoted to music, though without special training, and used to amuse herself by finding pieces – often most unexpected – of classical music to fit poetry that she loved. She had a manuscript book of these songs, a few of which I remember. One was Rossetti’s ‘Song of the Bower’ sung to a Schubert waltz (the one that became so hauntingly familiar in Lilac Time), and another, Keats’s ‘Drear Nighted December’ surprisingly and effectively mingled with the trio from the slow movement of Beethoven’s Sixth Sonata. Schubert’s songs she knew nearly by heart and both she and my grandfather were devoted to Gluck, largely I think through Giulia Ravogli whose Orfeo had ravished them both.
Round the drawing-room, but rather high for a child’s vision, hung paintings for the Sangraal tapestry which Morris carried out. They were only a few among the hundreds of designs that he made. There are notebooks filled with sketches of a hand or a head or a piece of armour in many different positions, and even so there were also pictures upon pictures until the real picture, seen in an hour of insight, was forced to take its own shape on canvas. The Call to the Quest was there, the Arming of the Knights, the failure of the knights whom sloth or love kept from sight of the Grail, and the vision of the Sangraal which only Galahad might see while Bors and Percival kneel patiently at a distance. The story of the Sangraal was with him all his life and countless were the drawings and paintings he made for it. His only incursion into the theatrical world was the designing of scenery, dresses, and armour for Irving’s King Arthur. Some of the beautiful pieces of armour which were made from his drawings were kept as studio properties.
In the larger part of the drawing-room was my grandmother’s toy cupboard. Originally begun as a toy cupboard for our visits, it had gradually fallen into her far worthier hands and she kept it and added to it with the collector’s passion. When the oak cupboard was unlocked what an enchanting sight was there. It was like a page from Nutcracker and Mouse King, or a story from Ole Luk Oie. Tiny houses, gardens, hedges, and people. Russian families of painted wood, shutting up one inside the other from grandfather to baby. Merry-go-rounds that made a little tinkling noise as one turned the handle. Tiny shops and stalls with suitable apples, pears, carrots, turnips, and cauliflowers. Flocks and herds that knew no other grazing lands than the table-cloth. Fishes of mother-of-pearl from Chinese seas. Sicilian carts drawn by bedizened oxen. Saucepans and jugs and coffee-pots carved from wood, no bigger than a baby’s finger nail – and whatever more of littleness you can imagine. Her friends used to add to the collection and any one who came to Rottingdean bringing some tiny tree, or flower, or figure, was doubly welcome.
On each side of the fire-place was a frantically uncomfortable pre-Raphaelite sofa, too short for any one but my little grandmother and inconceivably hard. Above them hung pictures of the archangels, Gabriel with the lily, Raphael who cares for children, Uriel, Azrael, Chemuel. But when it came to Lucifer there was only a black opening in the walls of heaven near where Michael stood, with tongues of flame licking up the pit. It made one st
and rather quiet for a moment and then one turned and climbed up on to the window seat.
V
The window seat in the drawing-room was a perfect place. With the hard oblong cushions one could build a fort, or make an omnibus, and my brother and I could sit perched up one at each end reading, just far enough apart not to be able to kick each other. But chiefly, built out a little from the house as it was, it afforded unrivalled opportunities for observing village life. Through the side window my grandmother had kept her watch for us as we drove up to the house and from the large middle window she smiled her welcome. Let us look through the side window, the one that faces south. There is not much to see just now as we look down the village street unless it is the form of Mr Thomas of the Royal Oak waddling up on some errand. Mr Thomas’s legs were so short in relation to his stout body that he was called Trunky Thomas by the primitive population and by us when Nanny wasn’t listening. Or old Mr Ridsdale might be strolling down the road, looking like a patriarch with his white beard, velvet coat, and peculiar soft hat, shoulders a little bowed and hands clasped behind him, accompanied by his little grandson Oliver Baldwin who rejoiced the village by falling unconsciously into an exact reproduction of his grandfather’s gait as golden hair walked by white hair.
Three Houses Page 8
