by Iris Origo
When my grandfather was told this story, he was much annoyed. “Really,” he said, “I don’t know whether the idea of poor Ellen standing at that window or of Mrs. O’Grady seeing her there makes me more uncomfortable. No wonder our guests can’t sleep in such a crowd!” The room was re-papered, and naturally none of us children was told the story. But when, after my first night there, I shyly said to my grandmother that it seemed “a very sad room”, she at once briskly moved me back to the nursery wing, where each day succeeded the other in a safe and carefree routine, well rooted in the world of every-day.
* * *
I have before me a photograph, taken in 1904, which shows my grandparents as they were then, and as I still clearly remember them: waiting for our arrival at the foot of the double stairway of grey stone leading up from the gravel sweep of the drive to the front door—Gran wearing a feather boa and a hat perched high on her head, and Gabba2 a well-worn knickerbocker suit of greenish-grey Irish tweed, smoking his after-breakfast pipe, with his spaniel sitting on the balustrade beside him. It was thus that we would find them when—tired and grimy after the long night-crossing of the Irish Channel, the train journey to Kilkenny and the leisurely fifteen-mile drive in an Irish car through the gentle landscape of green fields and low stone walls—we at last caught sight of the familiar house, and Gran and Gabba standing before it. Whenever in childhood I thought of them, it was there that I saw them, recalling, too, the faint aroma of his pipe and of her lavender water. But in fact they had been married for many years before they came to live at Desart.
The younger son of an impoverished Irish peer, it had been made clear to Hamilton Cuffe from childhood (as to my American grandfather in his youth) that he would have to make his own way in the world, and at the age of twelve, after a brief period as a naval cadet on the training-ship Britannia, he was already seeing service in December 1861 in a wooden frigate, the Orlando, bound for Halifax. The account of his three years in the Navy—set down only to please his grandchildren, since he himself did not really consider it worth telling—gives a remarkable picture of the hardships and responsibilities which little boys were then expected to bear. The frigate was leaking so badly that it was a miracle that she ever reached her destination; the food consisted only of salt beef, pork, an occasional shark at sea and ship’s biscuits, the latter so full of weevils that the boys used to cook them before eating ‘so that these somewhat disagreeable insects might at least be dead before we consumed them’, and the hours allotted to sleep were so few that the boys, still hardly more than children, lived in constant terror of falling asleep on watch. From Halifax they proceeded to the Bermudas, where Ham Cuffe was promoted, being then just thirteen, to the rank of midshipman and was placed in command of one of the ship’s boats. These boats often spent a part of the day on shore duty and it was the midshipman’s task to see that all hands, drunk or sober, got back to the ship safely, ‘in spite of the temptation to the men to slip away on shore, for the purpose of enlisting in the blockade-runners of the American Civil War’. (These were smugglers who supplied the Confederate troops with arms and food and rum, and from whom a competent sailor could command very high pay.) To maintain order over a crew of fifteen large men, often drunk and insubordinate, was more than a slight ordeal for a boy of thirteen, and was only rendered possible by the backing of a stern and merciless authority on board. My grandfather recollected, indeed, with real horror, an occasion on which one of the midshipmen had been struck on shore by a drunken sailor. “The man was brought before the Captain and flogged, all hands being piped to witness the torture. I do not think,” he added with characteristic reticence, “that any purpose would be served by describing it in detail, but it was really a very terrible thing to see.”
After two years, however, partly owing to poor health and partly to the fact that he was not really drawn to a sailor’s life, he returned ashore and went to Cambridge to take his degree. The rest of his reminiscences are chiefly of interest, I think, to later generations for their glimpses of the society to which he belonged—one in which money (at any rate for a young bachelor) was of very little account but in which privilege rested wholly on birth and breeding. At Cambridge (where his college was Trinity) there were then four classes of undergraduates—the Noblemen (peers, or the eldest sons of peers, who wore a very full silken gown), the Fellow Commoners (distinguished in Hat Fellow Commoners, younger sons of peers, who might wear a high hat) and Ordinary Fellow Commoners (who wore a mortar-board of velvet) and finally the ordinary undergraduates or ‘pensioners’. Noblemen and Fellow Commoners not only dined at the High Table with the dons and had special seats in chapel, but were permitted to take their degrees after only seven terms at the University instead of the usual nine—perhaps from a vague idea that they would be needed sooner for public service.
Though not rich enough to afford hunters of his own, my grandfather had no lack of friends to mount him, and his weekends appear to have been spent in the smallest and barest rooms of some of the greatest English country houses, in which luxury and glamour contrasted with extreme discomfort. At Belvoir, for instance, a private band played every night after dinner, beginning with a quadrille in which every member of the party, even the most elderly, was expected to take part, before the young people were allowed to indulge in a polka or a valse. Here Ham Cuffe’s bedroom was in a very small turret at the top of the house, with windows all round letting in the icy air, and so small that he could only shave or brush his hair by kneeling on the floor. Moreover, on one occasion, when the Duke of Rutland’s large party included royalty and some distinguished guests, the humbler members of the party, according to my grandfather’s account, were ordered by the Duke ‘to shoot somewhere each day where we should not disturb the royal party. Since there were ten degrees of frost and we were sent to places where there was nothing whatever to shoot, we would rather have stayed at home, but the Duke was not a man to be crossed.’
At Chatsworth there were no bells at all, the assumption being ‘that any male guest would bring his own servant with him, who would wait outside his bedroom’, so that this young guest, who had never had a servant, was obliged to engage one just for a week. At Harewood, too, where he often stayed—until its doors were closed to him by his host’s disapproval of him as a fiancé for his second daughter—there was a similar mixture of grandeur and austerity, the comfortable rooms and meals downstairs offering a remarkable contrast to the bare necessities in the bachelors’ wing, and, to an even more marked degree, in the nursery quarters upstairs, where the children of the family lived, like mediaeval Jews, in a grim and poverty-stricken ghetto, secluded, ugly and bitterly cold.
When, after taking his degree, Hamilton Cuffe returned to London, to eat his dinners and make his way at the Bar, his social life continued in much the same manner, its diversions being ‘archery and cricket in the summer, shooting and hunting in the winter’. ‘I was introduced to society,’ he wrote, ‘by the simple process of my mother’s leaving cards for me on her friends and relations … An impecunious young man had his definite place in society, but might not presume upon it. All that he required was a suit of dress clothes and its appurtenances, and enough money to take a cab on a particularly wet night … To have suggested taking a young woman out for the evening, however near her relationship, would have been considered an outrage, and to invite one’s hostess, an impertinence.’
All this was very pleasant and carefree, until—long before it was ‘suitable’ to do so—he fell in love. One of the houses in which he then sometimes stayed was the great, formal pseudo-Palladian house in Yorkshire belonging to Henry, Earl of Harewood, and presided over by his second wife—a handsome young Yorkshire-woman who had married him at the age of only nineteen and who had already added five more children (yet two others were to come later) to the six he had received from his first wife. These children played, however, a remarkably small part in the visible life of the great household; indeed there was a legend that, on mee
ting two of his younger children in a pram in Hyde Park, wheeled by a pretty nursery-maid, Lord Harewood had stopped to ask whose children those babies were: “Yours, m’Lord.” Lady Harewood’s duties as a hostess and her passion for the hunting-field left her little time to pay much attention to her large brood, who ran wild over the grounds, priding themselves on being ‘bears by crest and bears by nature’, and who turned for such mothering as they required to the second of their elder sisters, Margaret, since the first, Constance, an exquisite Dresden-china beauty, was already ‘out’ and planning to take flight from Harewood as soon as possible. It was ‘Peg’, warm-hearted and high-spirited, who shared some of their escapades and bound up their cuts and sprains, and it was on her—still in the schoolroom, as plump and bright-eyed as a young thrush and socially nonexistent—that, on a cold winter’s day in 1870, Ham Cuffe’s choice fell. The whole tribe of children had, for once, joined the grown-up party to skate upon the lake, and Peg, as usual, had fastened on the skates of all ‘the little ones’ and was trying to warm her hands to buckle on her own, when her distant cousin, the quiet, pleasant young man who, in virtue of his cousinhood, had once or twice been allowed to climb up to the cold schoolroom to teach her to play chess, knelt down on the ice and put them on for her. No-one had ever done such a thing for her before. On the tide of her blushing gratitude and his protective tenderness, they fell in love—for life. In the year after their golden wedding, which was also that of Gran’s death, my grandfather wrote to me: ‘After fifty-six years of love and fifty-one of marriage, our love in all its forms was identical with that of our youth, when, after long years of waiting, we left for our honeymoon.’
It is hardly surprising, however, that at first the romance was not smiled upon. Ham Cuffe, however pleasant and industrious, was only a younger son, with no money and no prospects—not at all the husband whom Lord Harewood (when he thought about his children at all, which was seldom) had in mind for one of his daughters—and Margaret herself was only just seventeen. There was one love-letter, slipped into the pages of a copy of Byron’s poems, and one other meeting, at a ball at Bridgewater House to which, owing to a timely illness of her elder sister’s, Margaret was sent at the last moment in Constance’s dress (the programme, with her name written on it seven times, was kept by my grandfather until his death). Then, Lord Harewood issued an edict: they must not meet again. For the first two years, even letters were officially forbidden, but a few were in fact exchanged through Margaret’s sister and a kind cousin—and Margaret’s own family can hardly have been unaware of her feelings (however little importance they attached to them) since, after that first season, she refused to go out in London again.
All his life my grandfather kept the letters of their long time of waiting—letters which were sometimes a child’s and sometimes a grown woman’s, sometimes merely accounts of her dull country life, or descriptions of her father’s indifference (‘You know he does not like me and I think he never will’), her stepmother’s coldness and her brother’s demands, and sometimes, too, accounts of the constant pressure put upon her to give him up, until she began to wonder if indeed it was fair to him to ask him to go on waiting. ‘Even if we are married’, she wrote, ‘you will always have the hardest share of the burden to carry. Poverty is so much harder for a man than a woman, they feel all the little discomforts so much more than we do’ (here one seems to see the shade of Papa in the background) ‘and I can’t bear to think of you enduring all this for me.’ But as to her own feelings there is never a shadow of doubt, even though each letter is also marked by a touching humility which is perhaps one of the signs of ‘true love’, and which certainly reveals a young girl very uncertain of herself, and very unlike the brisk, affectionate, decisive woman who was the ‘Gran’ we knew, and who would, perhaps, never have become so but for the love and support of her ‘Ham’. But she was then still only eighteen and—after all the years of being snubbed by her father and step-mother and of unthanked fagging for her brothers—she found it quite impossible to believe that anyone, ‘least of all a young man as brilliant and kind as Hamilton Cuffe’, should really want and value her. ‘It seems so very strange to me’, she wrote, ‘that anyone can love me in the way you do. It is such a new sensation that I am worth caring for or fit for anything but just to be useful.’ Yet year after year, she went on writing—unselfish, courageous, tender, loving—and, in the last years, very very weary of waiting. These were letters he could never bear to destroy. I have them still.
Then, at last, the situation slightly changed; there was an improvement in Ham Cuffe’s position and prospects, for his father had died and only one brother stood between him and the peerage, while he himself was said to be doing very well at the Bar. The young couple were allowed to meet again, though only once, in a cousin’s house; there was an interview between Ham and Lord Harewood, and on the following day Margaret wrote in surprise that her father ‘though he would say nothing to me, seemed quite impressed by the fact that you care for me and are working hard’. Letters between them were now countenanced, but no further meetings. ‘I watched you from the window going away that day until I could see you no longer, but it felt like a bad dream, as if I were quite numb and powerless to move or do anything but watch you.’ Yet she admitted that it was ‘less bad’ than their former parting at Bridgewater House, and that some hope now lay ahead. For another year the situation dragged on, with the young couple as firm in their determination as ever, but obliged to content themselves with letters and an occasional ‘accidental’ meeting at the theatre or in the Park. But gradually, by the sheer passage of time, the family’s opposition was worn down and, when Margaret’s grandmother, Lady Clanricarde (perhaps with this purpose in mind) left a small legacy to her favourite granddaughter, Lord Harewood was again approached. This time a telegram—its faded ink lies before me now—went off from Lady Harewood to Ham’s chambers in the Temple: ‘Henry says yes.’ A few weeks later, in July 1876, they were married at St Margaret’s Westminster, and settled down, as was suitable to their small income, in a very little house in Pelham Crescent.
The picture of their early married life used to fascinate me in my childhood, when already it seemed to belong to a world almost as remote as it would to my children now. The house was, as I have said, very small, but my grandmother’s trousseau did not match it: it consisted of twelve dozen of everything—chemises and nightgowns and stockings and flannel petticoats—made of such good material that forty years later, in my childhood, she was wearing them still. She brought with her, too, a dressing-case fitted with gold and tortoise-shell and her share of the family jewels, suitable only for a great hostess, and the silver plate and cutlery was so abundant that the only helpful piece of advice that her great-aunt, the Duchess of Buccleuch, could find to give her—“since I hear, my dear, that you will not be very well off”—was to have all of it gilt to save cleaning! All these objects were, of course, swiftly sent to the bank, but the wedding-gown, of stiff white satin, was reshaped and dyed (first pale pink, she told us, then red, then purple) and worn as her best evening gown for nearly as long as the underclothes beneath it.
Throughout their married life, money was of very little account, but privilege was taken for granted. The comfort of Westbrook or the fine furniture of 72nd Street were things that the Desarts would never have dreamed of possessing or even desiring, but, for all their personal modesty and quiet unassuming manners, it never occurred to them to doubt that certain égards were due to them. My grandfather’s dress-suit might be a little shabby and Gran’s gown was dyed, but they took it for granted that, for a party at Buckingham Palace, they should have the ‘entrée’ (permission to enter by a side-door, thus avoiding the long queue of carriages before the main entrance), that if there was a party at Devonshire House they would be among the guests, and that, in the modest pension in Switzerland or on the Italian Lakes, where they took their holidays abroad, the head-waiter should automatically assign to them the best table.
“Great friend of mine, Mario,” my grandfather would say benignly, as he sat down, “always looks after me.”
Such parties and holidays, however, were few in number in the early years of their marriage: first came many years of frugal living and hard work. The promise of my grandfather’s early career in the law was relinquished when, in 1878, Disraeli offered him the post of Assistant Solicitor to the Treasury, a post providing a fixed income and consequent security for his wife and two little girls, my aunt Joan (later on, Lady Joan Verney) and my mother, Sybil. It was then that the whole family moved to the tall little house, as tall and narrow as a sentry-box, in Rutland Gardens (a small side-street off Knightsbridge), which became their London house: a basement kitchen, two rooms on each floor, and, uniting them, the steep stairs up which the maids carried, not only every morsel of food, but the heavy Victorian tea-trays and dishes, and the tall cans of hot water for the children’s baths. There was indeed one bathroom, with a coffin-like bath encased in dark mahogany, beside my grandmother’s bedroom; but the children or guests used tin hip-baths—and indeed to many Victorians their bath was a highly personal possession, almost like their clothes. One of my great-uncles, for one, refused all his life to use any hotel bathroom, saying that it was a nasty, dirty habit to wash in a public tub.
That his house was ugly troubled my grandfather not at all. “I look out of it, not at it,” he would say, and indeed the view was pleasant enough, since the windows gave out upon a great plane-tree, and the secluded street, being no thoroughfare, had almost a country stillness, only broken by an occasional cab or barrel-organ or the cry of “Lavender, sweet lavender!” As for interior decoration, Gran kept the drawing-room fresh with the brightest and crackliest of chintzes, and hung the walls with water-colours of Desart and family portraits; but her husband placed no objects of his own in his study, in the course of some fifty years, but a complete set of the Navy Record Society and a very ugly pipe-rack.
