by Bryher;
I cannot remember that anybody laughed at me, asked me if I were not too tiny to sit at so large a table or whether I would not rather be at home playing with toys in all my visits to France. Such incidents were far too common in Sussex where there was a much sharper division between the drawing room and the nursery. A French family traveled together as a matter of course and my father having been educated there, I am sure that he thought of me as another smaller adult. Waiters and chambermaids treated me, in common with other French children, as a responsible member of society. It was understood that I would not run about a restaurant, upset sauces or shout and because this was taken for granted, I behaved reasonably and quietly throughout the leisurely meals. Later on, I had not the courage to force a younger generation to repeat the training but for myself I am grateful. It spared me much of the exterior worries of growing up. I was not afraid of dining out because I was used to it.
The Champs Élysées belonged to 1902. My first trip in 1900 ended at the station among a crowd of men in blue blouses and leather belts whom I had already learned to call facteurs and not porters. Much in my later life was to depend upon this experience. Now I was initiate, the sea was my birthright but Paris had given me some knowledge of the “Continent.” Destiny was to lead me in a different direction and to another country but it was in France that I first learned to be a European.
One bitterly cold January evening people began to talk above my head in whispers. I was always curious, the wreck had proved to me that it was not only in stories that disasters happened and I listened cautiously while pretending to play. Suddenly Ruth came into the drawing room with her bonnet perched upon her thick, coiled hair, my outdoor clothes over her arm and her special “we have no time for nonsense” expression on her face. She bundled me into my coat and gaiters and I followed her into the road where the lamplighter had already lit a row of gas lamps. We never went out at dusk when it was about to be bedtime and I was puzzled. What was the crowd doing round the little post office in the next street? Ruth picked me up and pushed her way towards a handwritten notice stuck up in the window. “There is no change in the Queen’s condition,” somebody said and a woman began to sob. It must have been about the hour of the Queen’s actual death but communications were slow in those days and I doubt if many in Worthing heard the news that night. What would happen if the Queen died, I wanted to know, as we walked slowly home? Ruth said everybody would be very sad.
“Look, Miggy,” my father said at breakfast the next morning, holding up a newspaper with a big black border, “you won’t often see this again however long you live.” Miggy, shortened from Midget, was his usual name for me. I stared at the impressive headlines and wondered what was to follow. It was frightening and exciting at the same time. Ruth, of course, talked about Queen Victoria’s funeral for days. She told me how the horses had had to be unharnessed and sailors set instead to draw the hearse, with many “mark my words, the world is going to change,” though it seemed to be going on exactly as it had before. I had still never seen a motorcar nor heard a telephone. There were always women walking up and down a green patch near us after they had been to the shops; it was believed that the grass absorbed the dust from the hems of their trailing skirts. Apart from the new reign a general topic of conversation was about the quarantine newly imposed upon dogs brought in from abroad. How I hated a government that could separate a family from its pets and such a prejudice acquired in childhood seldom disappears.
I was frightened of one thing only, it was measles. If I wanted to sit on a breakwater, shout at another child or buy a penny ball at the corner shop where they sold sweets and toys it was always forbidden “because you might catch something, darling.” It was both a mysterious plague and a punishment for enjoying one’s self; it meant imprisonment in an extremely dull bed, worse still, “if you get a rash your books would have to be burned.” I was a short, round puppy-like creature of inexhaustible energy, I do not remember feeling tired once during childhood and to be put into my cot even half an hour sooner than usual seemed unendurable. Yet here was an irrational plague able to strike at will the humble and the mighty, no sacrifices placated it, its origin was unknown.
“Please may she come and play with me?” A small bead was poked through the privet hedge one summer day but diplomatically the figure addressed my parents. I looked up, it must be the little girl from next door, a family had taken the house for the summer. There was a whispered consultation, instead of the intruder being told to leave, I was taken into the house, put into a clean pinafore and then, to my intense surprise, left with the stranger.
Everything seemed upside down with the reversal of the customary rules but thanks to my books, the standard code of play was reasonably familiar. I could not understand all that my companion said (she used a lot of slang that she had picked up from her brothers) but I found out that her name was Sylvia, and that though she was two months younger, both of us were six. Why hadn’t I spoken to her earlier? She had been making faces at me for a week.
There were others in her family but they were all older. One brother was ten. He was very rough. Did I know what it was like to have my arm twisted? She didn’t howl but she knew I would. Indignantly I demanded an immediate trial but there was no brother about. It was the first time that I had been alone in an unfamiliar house and I looked curiously about me, the nursery was littered with stamps and tools as well as toys. It seemed curious to talk to someone of my own size but I was readily adaptable. Sylvia knew much more than I did about the things of the world but she could not say her alphabet. I asked her at once to show me her books but they were babyish things, full of pictures, of a type that I had outgrown before I was five.
We played together for about two months, usually rather roughly. Ruth complained, of course, that Sylvia wrecked my manners and in an ecstasy of joy I watched my mother scold her when she dipped a finger into the treacle jar and then licked it. Once she shouted “Beast,” this was very daring, at our cook. Our worst escapade was dropping my white muslin dresses into a tub of water just as they had come back, nicely starched, from the laundry. We also had a glorious fight.
I had been given a small tricycle, ancestor of the modern scooter. Authority had forbidden it on the sea front but I was allowed to ride it up and down our quiet road. Sylvia naturally wanted it so we bargained that as she was the guest she should ride it first as far as the beach and I would ride it back. Ruth was on holiday, her substitute was thinking of other things. My companion set off gaily, I trotted beside her. All went well until at the appointed moment she refused to dismount. She even called out mockingly that having got the tricycle she was going to keep it. I was prepared to share but not to cede, I snatched the handle bar, she slapped me. I hit her as hard as I could, she had to jump off in order to slog me back. The butcher’s boy stopped and shouted encouragement, quite a crowd collected. Sylvia tried a number of her brother’s tricks but through sheer luck although she was bigger than I was, I managed to knock her over. It was a moment of pure and exquisite pleasure that I have always remembered. Unfortunately my mother arrived at that precise moment. We were both smacked, led off howling, and the tricycle was confiscated for a week. Considering the circumstances, I felt this to be unjust.
Sylvia could have had half of anything that I owned but she had little imagination in play and her idea of a good game was to snatch. Look for your misanthrope among the middle members of a big family; contrary to what people say, an only child has inestimable advantages and is the one to be interested in people in later life. The others get disillusioned in the nursery. There are psychological reasons; a single child has time to develop and unless we can go through a fiercely individualistic stage we never truly understand co-operation. Teachers prefer the regimented pupils, they are afraid of any departure from the familiar, but do such children make the best citizens?
It is hard for us to realize in middle life how strong the primary emotions of childhood are. We temporize and smile
in some delusion that this is being mature. Fifty-eight years afterwards I went past the corner where I had won my first fight and it was as if it had happened yesterday. The stones and landscape were the same except that they had built a house on the lot where the ladies had trailed their skirts on the uncut grass. The fact that I had fought in defense of my rights seemed infinitely more important than the anguish and terror of two wars. Those seemed far away. It was the smell of the seaweed, the being willing to share but having a consciousness of right and wrong that emerged in a clarity of feeling I had not felt for decades. I am certain from personal experience that life is simply the working out in practice of our first seven years.
I cannot remember being lonely in my childhood, I did not know what the word meant. I hardly missed Sylvia when the summer ended and her family returned to London, there were so many other exciting things to do. My official introduction to history came through nursery lessons and Little Arthur’s History of England. I preferred my desert islands but the stories fascinated me, particularly the ones about Alfred winning a book through learning to read and, for some strange reason, King John losing his jewels in the Wash. Many years later, I discovered that its author had written a vivid fragment about her own childhood. It is printed in a biography of her, Maria, Lady Callcott, by Rosamund Brunel Gotch. It is amazing that she should have survived the experiences that she describes to become a sane and tolerant woman in an intolerant age and she should not be forgotten. Her father was a naval captain and her mother the daughter of an American Loyalist who had returned to England. Maria herself belongs to that intrepid band of Englishwomen who have gone exploring throughout our history. She sailed both to India and Chile, where she knew Cochrane, she taught in Brazil and traveled in Italy and France. Her life reflects the currents of the time, she was roughly contemporary with the Swiss Family Robinson, and she is much nearer to modern thought in her opinions than the Victorians who followed her. Some of her travel books are more for students of the period than for the general reader but her account of her schooldays is one of the most interesting accounts of a child’s struggle for survival that I have ever read.
There was so complete a wall between being six and three quarters and being seven that I forgot for a long time what infancy had been like. Babies think in patches with long intervals between them but suddenly existence became continuous. It was helped by a major change. Toys and books were packed and sent to a shadowy place called “storage.” The house was to be sold, Vick had died, I should pick no more primroses in the Goring woods. We went instead to London in the middle of September on our way to spend several years abroad.
TWO
If the years between birth and seven formed the skeleton, the subsequent time until I was fifteen furnished flesh and blood. It was so great a change as to make stories of rebirth entirely credible later on. Nothing can equal a sense of foreign lands acquired in childhood; if this were a common experience it might do much to prevent war. It must be early; it should come at the precise instant when body and mind are both ready for exploration. The least profitable time is at adolescence when the schools advise it for their own convenience, because that is the moment when the stability of a familiar environment is required. A second language or unfamiliar customs then only impose an unnecessary strain. No, the right time to travel is between the ages of six and thirteen and I was fortunate to go abroad at a moment when I was most sensitive to fresh impressions.
Our new life began with a short visit to London. It was such a warm October that I was allowed to sit on the balcony with an illustrated book that I had been given for my birthday, Tales from Shakespeare retold for children by E. Nesbit. I knew the stories by heart within a week although, like an Elizabethan prentice, I did not always like the more famous ones. I had little use for Hamlet, with a magnificent excuse to fight he wasted pages trying to get out of it. I preferred Pericles especially when he found the salt-stained armor on the beach. A Midsummer Night’s Dream disappointed me, the important character was Oberon’s boy and there was not a line at the end to explain what eventually happened to him. The Tempest began well but the exciting part, the voyage in the open boat, was over in a couple of lines. Why did they treat Caliban so harshly and who forced Prospero to give up his books in a Mrs. Molesworth surrender to the nursery principle that too much reading was selfish? No, among them all, the play that I liked best was Cymbeline. It passed all the tests of an adventure story, there was a cave, a battle, and plenty of movement in the palace garden. I imagined this to be a place with box hedges and gay, brown, scented wallflowers growing out of stone walls such as I had seen at Pevensey Castle. The princes were like Robinson boys and I would have followed the Roman general wherever he had bidden me. Why there was so much fuss about Iachimo in the coffer I could not understand but grownups were strange, and it was no odder than playing in the garden without a sunbonnet but having to wear one if we went into the fields.
I looked down that day into a melancholy Bayswater square full of old trees. The russet-spotted leaves had not yet been raked into heaps. It was desolate and quiet. Suddenly to my surprise the bleak railings turned into gently moving reeds, there was water flowing over the gravel path and Imogen herself was standing with her back to me among the rushes. It seemed perfectly natural. I was making up my mind to speak to her when my mother called me. I turned to answer her and when I looked down at the garden again the figure had vanished. Hallucination in childhood is common enough. It is only interesting that I should have seen a Celtic Imogen whose name even then seemed the color of a dark leaf rather than Arden’s Rosalind.
I am glad that I knew of Shakespeare so early although it was a simple approach. The classics are for childhood and old age, middle life belongs to contemporary experience.
‘Tis far off,
And rather like a dream than an assurance
That my remembrance warrants,
as Miranda said. The stories sank to a sea level of consciousness. I often do not read a play for years but whenever I return to it the associations of childhood stick to the names like burrs, I smell the buttons of white asters that filled the autumn garden at the turn of the century and the bitter scent of the slowly burning leaves.
Shortly afterwards my first governess arrived, a stern and elderly Hanoverian lady who had just returned from India where she had been teaching a detestable child called Willie. He was everything that I was not, obedient, affectionate, and if he were sometimes naughty it was to be able to confess afterwards that he had unwillingly distressed her. There was the afternoon that he had eaten a mango. It was not “wilful disobedience,” the poor boy had forgotten that he must not touch that fruit. I could not understand the temptation because I had never tasted mangoes; if I had, I should stop talking to her about strawberries and cream. She had heard him sobbing that night and they had spent two happy hours weeping together. It would be much better—she looked at me grimly—if I would try to follow Willie’s example.
Fräulein (I never knew her name) did not like walking but a brisk trot in the afternoon was half of Authority’s idea of goodness. She compromised by taking me to the Indian section of the Victoria and Albert Museum and telling me stories of ayahs, cobras and plagues. She did not appear, alas, to have had any real acquaintance with elephants. In a London where ladies wore black or dove-gray clothes, she appeared, aged sixty, in long white dresses touching the floor with either an amber necklace and a yellow sash or, on Sundays, pink with coral. It was too much for the cabmen who caught glimpses of the colors under her coat, my mother’s friends were startled but politely silent. I liked her eccentricity but not her discipline because she insisted that only Prussians understood virtue, “If you were a German child you would have to get up at six every morning, wash in cold water and waste no time poring over silly books.” She also had a habit of looking up at breakfast and murmuring for no apparent reason, “I am a lady by birth” until my mother was forced to remark in desperation that if this were tr
ue, she would not have to tell us about it so often. Lessons went fairly easily because I really wanted to know more French and double my reading possibilities but I felt no affection for her, she could not control me and on several occasions my mother had to be fetched to administer a well-deserved scolding.
Our next move was to Hastings before setting off for a winter abroad. The first thing that I noticed on the front was an object on wheels shaped like a coachman’s box, standing between boards that said “Five Shillings a Trip.” My sense of adventure must come to me from my mother. After my father had sternly forbidden any experiments, she put me into my thickest coat and to my humiliation wound a thick, white shawl round my mouth. We slipped out after lunch while my father was reading his paper, my mother boarded the monster, I was lifted up beside her and she gave the driver a gold half sovereign. Other people joined us, we must have been about five passengers in all. At first nothing happened except some sputtering noises. Then there was a jerk, we almost fell off our seats, a horse reared, people stared. We drove smartly along the road and it was gratifying to notice a lot of ladies with their pugs, scurrying up side streets. “How fast are we going?” a gentleman asked.
“Twenty miles an hour.”
People gasped! They shook their heads in disbelief. More horses stood on their hind legs, boys shouted unseemly remarks. We reached the end of the sea front and turned solemnly round, all too soon. It was unfortunate that my father, having finished his newspaper, had come to join us on our walk and met us proudly getting out of the car. He was extremely angry with my mother who said merely that she had liked it so much that she was ready to do it over again and at once. We had no premonition that within four years my father would be making excuses to me about there being no stable for a pony because we had to have a garage, this was a completely new word, for a similar motorcar of our own.
