Beatrix Potter
Page 45
Beatrix was familiar with the perils of bureaucratic regulations. She had regularly come up on the wrong side both of the housing inspector and of Mr Bolton, the local public health inspector. Several cottages at Tilberthwaite were occupied by many more people than health regulations allowed, but Beatrix was unwilling to turn the tenants out, especially in hard times. Bolton’s job required him to inspect all the farm cottages and certify them for occupancy. There is a credible story that Bolton once brought with him a copy of one of her little books when he came to inspect a Tilberthwaite cottage and asked Beatrix to sign it for him. She initially refused, saying she never autographed her books, whereupon the inspector let her know that she could not expect any further ‘cooperation’ from him in the future. At that, Beatrix is said to have snatched back the book, signed it, and handed it back, warning: ‘if you tell anyone about this I will not let you come on any of my properties again.’ The certificate for occupancy was promptly issued. Such were the private negotiations required of the Trust’s ‘amateur land agent’ which Beatrix confided to William at day’s end, but rarely revealed in her letters.55
19
Passages
As she moved into her eighth decade, Beatrix and William were enjoying life together as they had not been able to do in many years. After twenty-three years of marriage, the Heelises had settled into a companionable domesticity. Still in good health, they took pleasure from the certain routine of the seasons and the work of their days. Ageing seemed to bother Beatrix very little, and she was busier than ever. ‘You ask how I like growing old,’ she wrote to her cousin Caroline in February 1937. ‘I have felt curiously better & younger this last 12 months!… Also do you not feel it is rather pleasing to be so much wiser than quantities of young idiots?… I begin to assert myself at 70… It is a pity that the wisdom and experience of old age is largely wasted.’ Unfortunately, the wider world around them was increasingly unsettled and unpredictable. Beatrix was wary of the military build-up in Germany and disdainful of England’s participation in the League of Nations, but for the moment she intended to enjoy the certain and celebrate the familiar.1
The year had begun with an unusual domestic crisis. The Heelises had been invited to celebrate her cousin Edith Gaddum’s silver wedding anniversary at a party at Brockhole, the Gaddums’ estate on the shore of Windermere. But William faced a challenge when it came to gathering the appropriate evening attire. Beatrix recounted his dilemma to her sister-in-law with humorous indulgence. ‘We knew his [evening clothes] would not button; and when the matter became serious, it was remembered that they were sent to a jumble sale many years ago! George’s are large enough. The figure does not seem to be quite correct in front, G. being even more portly than W, but I am careful not to criticize as Wm. is quite sufficiently perturbed. I bought him 2 different patterns of ties yesterday; and now he has no collar that satisfies him.’2
Beatrix had different problems: ‘My long, handsome ancient silk gown will hook!! and trains have returned into fashion.’ But her hair, or rather her lack of it, was the difficulty. Beatrix’s rheumatic fever had left her not only with painful joints, a condition she called ‘rheumatics’, but with a bare patch on the top of her head. ‘I have no hair and no wig,’ she complained to Grace, ‘do you think I can go in a tam o’shanter!?’ Only half-jokingly she briefly considered her father’s old barrister’s wig, stuck away in a box, but then remembered it had ‘little tails’. In the end, she decided to ‘rig up a lace cap’. Their efforts rendered them presentable, and the happy gathering was all the more memorable because Edith Gaddum died the following year.3
While William enjoyed country dancing all year round, as well as his various sports, Beatrix had few social outlets in the winter. Both Beatrix and William worked over the complicated farm valuations that were due each year, but she relied on William entirely to prepare the farming accounts. She kept busy with the District Nursing Association annual reports, and planned the annual jumble sales to raise money. The Queen’s Nurse, Celia Edwards, had been busier than ever, with an expanding territory to cover, the burdensome regulations of the newly enacted Midwifery Act, and babies born inconveniently in snowbound cottages in outlying Coniston. Beatrix and Edwards had become valued friends and so when Edwards decided to retire after fourteen years of service, Beatrix was pleased that she decided to take temporary lodgings close by in Hawkshead. ‘We shall all look forward to seeing you as a friend — if not as a nurse,’ Beatrix wrote. ‘I remain with much love.’ A new Queen’s Nurse, Mrs Heaton, took up residence at Beatrix’s cottage at Hanniken and made her visits in William’s old Wolseley Hornet.4
Each spring there were also applications from various Girl Guide groups to use her fields for the holiday camps that began at Easter. Her fields, especially at Hawkshead, continued to be popular with the Guides and the Boy Scouts, and few summer weeks went unsubscribed. Nora Burt, her favourite Guide leader from the Chorlton Guides, was in nurses’ training and no longer came to camp, but Beatrix took an interest in her career, as she had in her Nicholson nieces, and they exchanged frequent and, for Beatrix, rather intimate letters. ‘It is a real pleasure to me’, she wrote to one of the Guide leaders, ‘to see young people enjoying the land that I love so well; though I cannot manage to enjoy every square yard of it myself… I feel as though the beauty of my own woods and fields might have been a bit wasted if it had not been useful to appreciative campers and holiday makers.’5
At 70, Beatrix had given up, if indeed she had ever seriously tried, keeping either a tidy house or her muddles of papers in order. William had his law office at Hawkshead, so the large table in the centre of the hearth room at Castle Cottage was primarily her working desk — though it was used for all sorts of other purposes as well. It was perpetually strewn with letters, maps, land ordinances, books, newspapers, sheep catalogues, flower seeds, clippings, jottings of all kinds and things waiting to be sorted. If a visitor called, a place was created by pushing the piles to another spot. Quite often supper was served on a cleared end. After dinner William and Beatrix enjoyed playing two-handed piquet or a game of cribbage. William was a heavy smoker all his life. His tins of tobacco, cigarette papers and ashtrays, along with the coveted cigarette cards saved for the favourite Hyde Parker nieces and other young collectors, were also near at hand. When electricity came to Sawrey in 1936 Beatrix would have none of it. ‘I’ll put it in the shippon’s [cattle shed],’ she told a disappointed Tom Storey, who would have been pleased to have it at Hill Top, ‘the cows may like it.’6
With the exception of the ritual trip to Ancrum to see Mary Potter, Bertram’s widow, the Heelises were too busy with farm and estate work to travel much. William was a poor driver, very cautious, and very slow. He frequently stalled on the hills, obliging his passengers to get out and put stones behind the rear wheels while he tried to put the car in gear. William drove back to Appleby occasionally to see to the needs of his elderly sisters, who remained at Battlebarrow. Grace and James Nicholson also travelled less. Esther was working in New Zealand, and only their niece Nancy stopped occasionally on a holiday from her posts as Norland nurse for young children. But other younger second cousins had taken their place as regular summer visitors.
Stephanie Hyde Parker Duke, her husband, Lieutenant Commander Duke, and their two daughters, Rosemary and Jean, had been coming regularly for several years to spend time in July and August at Castle Cottage. The girls went fishing with William in Moss Eccles Tarn and looked forward to being out in the countryside. Beatrix frequently took them along when she went out to Monk Coniston to check on her farms. Walter, her mother’s former coachman, now employed as Beatrix’s chauffeur, drove one of her mother’s large old cars, affectionately dubbed ‘Noah’s Ark’. It was not unusual for Beatrix to pick up a sick sheep or two, and put it in the back seat along with the girls to take to the vet or to drop at another farm. The roof leaked and if it rained they had to put up an umbrella inside. ‘Noah’s Ark’ and Walter were well mat
ched in age and disability. Walter, far more comfortable with real horses than with mechanical gears, frequently had difficulty getting the large car and its cargo up the steep Lakeland hills. In such cases, he would lean forward as if urging horses on, forgetting entirely what gear he was in. Beatrix would shout from behind the glass, ‘Change gear, Walter, change gear!’ and the old car would lurch forward, ‘and the sheep would baa’, and the little girls would ‘laugh and laugh’.7
Stephanie, to whom Beatrix had dedicated The Tale of Jeremy Fisher in 1906, remained a favourite cousin. By 1936 her annual entourage at Sawrey had expanded to include her Pekinese dog. Beatrix had no use for such pampered creatures, but upon hearing how energetically the little dog had climbed up the steep paths on Helvellyn, she changed her mind, and asked Stephanie to get her one. After a brutal winter, with some of her sheep at Troutbeck Park buried in snowdrifts for eighteen days and so many of her old friends and neighbours in the village gone, she found both pleasure and comfort in the small female peke who arrived just in time for spring. ‘We have a queer little animal here,’ she wrote to Marian Perry, ‘a small female Pekingese, a very “heathen Chinese” for mischief and naughtiness, but engaging and affectionate. The colleys don’t like her; she is impertinent.’ By summer she had bought another one, this time called Chuleh, so that Tzusee would not suffer being an only child. ‘Here we have found mild but harmless amusement from 2 little Pekingese ladies, I always despised foreign dogs; but these are both spirited and affectionate, and less trouble than terriers, as they get sufficient play and exercise in the garden.’8
Soon the little dogs and their antics became a feature of her letters: ‘Tzusee and Chuleh are going round and round under table and chairs like a hurricane, the puppy chasing the older one.’ The two little dogs were thoroughly indulged by both Beatrix and William. Given complete freedom of the house, they even slept on the bed at night. Beatrix discovered their virtues as ‘foot warmers’ during dark cold winter nights. Although William sometimes made a show of being tough, they became his devoted shooting companions after impressing him with their fearlessness and their ability to catch rats, even some in the Castle Cottage pantry, and quite remarkably, an occasional rabbit.9
As the Great Depression deepened in the United States, fewer Americans visited Lakeland and fewer old friends found their way to Near Sawrey. Beatrix missed them. As compensation she wrote more frequently, describing the progress of farming, her sheep and cattle, the harvests and the changes in the countryside as she observed them on her rounds for the National Trust. She especially missed Marian Perry and her niece Betty Harris, now married with a family of her own, with whom she also kept up a correspondence. Like many older people, Beatrix enjoyed recalling those people in her life who had given her special pleasure.10
For twenty years, Beatrix had been corresponding with Ivy Steel, the young girl who had once delivered millinery from their mother’s shop to the Paget family in Bolton Gardens. Ivy was now married, living in New York, and had a 12-year-old daughter, June, to whom Beatrix also enjoyed writing picture letters. Ivy worked hard at being a good mother, and at Beatrix’s suggestion enjoyed taking June to the Bronx Public Library. Beatrix was curious about Ivy and had it in her mind that she would enjoy seeing her and her little girl. She knew that the family had gone through hard times in the Depression and that Ivy had wanted to visit relatives in Scotland. When Beatrix generously offered transatlantic passage for mother and daughter in the summer of 1936 so that they, and their Aunt Jessie, who had been the Paget lady’s maid and was still in London, might visit her in Sawrey, Ivy happily accepted.11
One day in early August, Beatrix sent Walter and the car to Windermere station to pick up her American visitors. Beatrix had not seen Jessie in seven or eight years. They all met at Castle Cottage, and then Beatrix took them to Hill Top where they were to stay. The visit proved a great success and Beatrix thoroughly enjoyed herself. ‘I was very relieved to find I liked “Ivy” as much as when she was a young girl — and I was interested in her girl,’ Beatrix reported to Betty Harris Stevens. ‘It was the first time I had ever heard the native accent of Bronx. I am tempted to say I hope I may never hear that accent again. She was a dear child. When one got over the accent she compared favourably with the average English child of the same class; obedient, intelligent, and natural manners without forwardness. But the accent was a caution; on her father’s side descended from Glasgow Scotch which is even worse.’ After their visit Beatrix wrote to Ivy, ‘You will be so much more real and dear in future, since I have really seen you and liked you. It has been a real pleasure to me to find you both so loveable.’12
There was another, quite unexpected, visitor from Beatrix’s past to Sawrey that summer whom she described in a letter as ‘a middle aged active man, a clergyman in Kent’. It turned out to be none other than Noel Moore, the little boy for whom she had written the Peter Rabbit picture letter in 1897. ‘He called here,’ she wrote, ‘and said “You will not remember me?” I said “I seem to remember your face.” ’ Much influenced by his mother’s strong religious convictions, Noel had taken degrees at Cambridge, studied for the priesthood at Bishop’s College, and been ordained in the Anglo-Catholic tradition in 1915. He had served at a parish in the docklands of London’s East End, and later at another on the outskirts of London. Beatrix still corresponded with his mother, Annie Moore, and she must have suggested that Noel call on Beatrix while on holiday.13
But new friends and new challenges kept Beatrix more involved in the future than the past. Between 1934 and 1936 she purchased several significant properties in beautiful Eskdale and in Little Langdale, one of most remote and untouched of the fell valleys. These were areas north and, in the case of Eskdale, significantly west of Monk Coniston. She bought them not only to preserve traditional fell farms and their Herdwick stock, but to prevent town development and particularly the destruction of wild scenery. These farms added over 2,300 acres and nearly a thousand sheep to her holdings, as well as valuable woods and rights of way.14
Unlike her purchase of Monk Coniston, Beatrix bought these farms with the intention of managing them personally. But equally important, her move into Eskdale and Little Langdale signalled to the National Trust that Beatrix Heelis’s interests in land and fell farm preservation had enlarged beyond one or two self-contained geographic areas. The timing of her purchases was also important, as Samuel Hamer, her trusted ally, retired as Trust secretary at the end of 1934. Beatrix viewed this change in Trust leadership with considerable scepticism. Her purchase of these five farms was, therefore, also meant to underscore her increased independence from the Trust.
Beatrix’s expansion as a landowner, and her success in buying up farm property utilizing William’s advance knowledge of the market, caused some local resentment, but by 1936 her expertise as a farm manager was also widely respected. That autumn, Delmar Banner, a portraitist and painter of mountain landscapes who had been renting places in the Lake District for some years, took the sensible course of enquiring about any small parcels in Little Langdale that might be suitable for building a home and studio for himself and his artist wife, Josefina. Unlike other ‘offcomers’ who wanted to buy land in the Lake District, Banner wanted to be off the road and up high in the fells with a view out over the valley, a request that Beatrix as a fellow artist understood.15
Beatrix had been introduced to Banner sometime in 1935. An artist and intellectual of independent means, Banner was also a devout and rigorous Anglican lay minister. He had studied history at Oxford and painting at Regent Street Polytechnic. He came from a family of distinguished musicians and clergymen who had settled in Liverpool. In 1930 he married Josefina de Vasconcellos, the only child of a talented Brazilian diplomat and an over-protective English Quaker mother. Josefina had been working as a sculptor since the early 1920s and her reputation had been growing steadily. As a wedding present, Josefina gave Delmar the complete set of Beatrix Potter’s little books, which he had not known a
s a child. They found particular delight in The Tale of Pigling Bland, and because Josefina had the habit of snorting when she laughed too hard, Delmar dubbed her ‘Pig-wig’.16
Beatrix had seen some of Banner’s landscapes, perhaps at Hawkshead, and had offered some advice as to how to improve them. She thought him talented and liked his work. In early September 1936 she wrote, ‘I was a little alarmed to find how seriously you had taken my criticism. But they are wonderfully better — breadth, atmosphere; without sacrifice of colour and drawing.’ She expressed particular interest in one of his landscapes of Coniston, asking if he might hold on to it for her, explaining, ‘A day will come when my old legs refuse to climb stiles and wet lanes, so painted views will have to suffice.’17
Beatrix advised the Banners not to buy a remote fell farm since they had no experience in farming, and also expressed her dismay that land values in Langdale were being inflated by the ‘misdirected zeal’ of ‘well meaning outsiders’, referring to the National Trust. ‘I have the deepest respect and admiration for the National Trust as an institution,’ she told them, ‘but the present officials are not very satisfying at buying properties. Unsatisfactory. I don’t want them meddling in Little Langdale.’18
Delmar invited Beatrix to lunch after the big Eskdale Sheep Show in late September, where Beatrix was judging as well as exhibiting Herdwicks. She declined, as she customarily had lunch with the shepherds, and she also cautioned him, ‘You mustn’t talk to me about anything till after the judging is over on Friday.’ But it was Josefina, not Delmar, who came to greet her after the show, introduced by Clive Bulman, a fellow farmer and judge.19
Josefina had been around Eskdale long enough to make her own inroads into fell culture, learning the country dances and shepherds’ calls. On this particular day she was serving huge plates of food at the shippon to the farmers who had risen before dawn to bring their stock over the valley to exhibit or sell. Josefina was a tall, slender woman with striking rather than beautiful features. She had thick, curly dark hair, unusual green eyes, and large, strong hands. She was wearing a dark blue boiler suit and clogs when Bulman brought her over to meet Mrs Heelis. Beatrix’s attire for judging at sheep shows was quite formal compared to her usual farm garb. She had on her best Herdwick tweed coat and skirt, a wool scarf, a felt hat held on her head by an elastic strap under the chin, and clogs on her feet. According to Josefina’s recollection, the little round woman with rosy cheeks and sparkling blue eyes sized her up, took in her dirty overalls and clogs, and issued a rare invitation to come to Castle Cottage in two weeks time.20