by Bryher;
FIVE
Now what of summer? We went to the Alps, to Zermatt or Pontresina, long before these places were fashionable and explored them on our own legs. We got up at dawn, started up the hills with rucksacks on our shoulders and nails in our boots (it was before the days of Vibram soles) and came back at milking time with the goats. The Switzerland of my childhood has disappeared. This is a pity, it was such a gay world for a child. There are not many walkers today. It is a cheap way of seeing a country and tourist agencies discourage it, the young go to ski resorts with their lifts while motorcars have made roads too dangerous for us to use. We ought to have organized a group throughout Europe to protect our interests and to see that there were paths as well as autostrade. The essence of rambling is its freedom: to take a train to a national park and regain a station at some fixed hour makes it unnatural at once. Yet the real way to know a landscape is to cross it on foot; how is this possible when cars dash madly along even byroads and the air is full of petrol fumes and dust?
It is no wonder that I am adventurous. What a life my father had had! After his father’s death when he was seven, my grandmother had taken him with his two sisters to Caen in Normandy. There he had made friends with two French boys rather older than himself who took him out hunting and fishing. He acquired not only the language but a Continental view of life. He looked perhaps more European than English with eyes that I saw as the green of a wave but that others said were blue and the short, pointed beard that was usual at the period. He was a fencer, swimmer and climber and as a boy had gone in for other sports. It was his dream, oh, how often he talked to me about it, eventually to retire from business and live in France. It was fitting that he died there. He was English in all his principles but French in his love.
Some years later the family returned to Birmingham where he entered King Edward’s school. “If I had gone to a public school,” he used to say when I was older, “I should never have got so far in business,” adding sometimes, “The younger one starts the better.” He left home at fourteen after a slight disagreement with my grandmother over smoking in the drawing room. (He smoked one cigar after lunch and one after dinner, never more nor less, just as he drank one glass of wine at midday and two in the evenings. Apart from the traditional bottle of brandy for medicinal purposes that was almost never opened, we seldom had spirits in the house and then only for guests.) Characteristically he had stayed at school until he had passed his examinations and then articled himself to a chartered accountant. This man, William Smedley, was a Victorian eccentric in his own right. He was convinced that Bacon had written Shakespeare’s plays and showed me the first Elizabethan book that I ever handled, a Latin grammar whose owner had scrawled pictures of his schoolboy comrades in puffed sleeves and ruffs over the pages.
At least the Victorians were free from the modern fallacy that childhood must be artificially prolonged. When a relative died and left my father a small sum of money (I suppose that he was about sixteen) he was able to dispose of it as he pleased. Mr. Smedley happened to want some funds to finance a new project at the time so my father offered to lend him the necessary sum on condition that he could come to the office an hour later in the mornings (in those days they often opened at seven thirty) and have four months of holiday a year. The bargain was faithfully kept.
So my father went to Switzerland and climbed. He is said to have made a first ascent on the Italian side of Monte Rosa, he was carried away by an avalanche, he outwalked a well-known guide for a bet. These activities did not prevent him from passing his final examinations with the highest possible marks. As a reward, he went to India to try some peak in the Everest region. (I suspect that he hoped to get to Everest itself.) It must have been about 1882. The party was trapped on a ledge near the Tibetan border and his toes were frostbitten. He did not lose them but it stopped further high-altitude climbs. He walked several miles a day to the end of his life and, apart from France, was at his happiest in the Alps.
I never climbed with him, I was too young but although my short legs could not match his long, trained strides and I must have held him back continually, he usually took me with him up the hills. To me he was Pastor Robinson, full of the facts that I loved and a guide to high valleys and easy peaks. How much more I learned from him than if I had been at school. Did I notice how small the fields were? That was because instead of the eldest son inheriting the farm as he would have done in England, it was divided equally among the children abroad. There were the laws of the mountains, “Be careful, Miggy, never kick a pebble off the path, you might kill some goat,” and tests of endurance, “I’ve told you not to chatter going uphill, no, we can’t rest until we have done two zigzags more.” Once I blacked out from sheer exhaustion but I soon recovered and it was an invaluable training for later life. Besides, it was fun, I slung a green canister over my shoulder that contained my lunch and could also be used for flowers, occasionally I let my hat slip on its elastic to the back of my neck. Yet it is the scents that I remember most, the wooden smell of the Alpine rhododendrons, the extreme freshness of the highest grass. And the water! The moraine beside it was not as gray or clear; it turned suddenly to silver in the hollow tree trunks that led it from a hillside to the fountain near some barn.
Sometimes my mother claimed me and, while my father climbed to a hut that was just a dot below a glacier, we looked for gentians and picked bilberries. If I could manage to keep still long enough, we might see a marmot, perched, a perfect sentinel, in front of a rock. One perfect afternoon, a little goatherd led us up to a cliff of edelweiss. It looked so different growing in a cushion over the steep lip of a gorge from the solitary, stunted specimens that walkers find today. It was a world where all was color. The yellow globeflowers in the Zermatt meadows reached to my waist and I thought the bog cotton in the mountain pools was like some tiny shepherd’s crook.
The Rhône valley seemed a golden place. It was always a hot summer afternoon when the train moved slowly through it on the way to Visp. The shutters on the chalets were painted in wavy bands of red and black, there were baskets of apricots in the orchards, avenues of poplars and, first to one side and then the other, the turbulent river rushing towards the lake. It was a scene that became a foundation stone of childhood because it was there, the July that I was eight years and ten months old, that I first read Beric the Briton.
I owed more to Henty when I was young than to anyone except my father and mother. He taught me history. I can still place dates and epochs by remembering the titles of his books. Yet he was not precisely a simple writer; looking over his books today, I am surprised to find so much powder and so very little jam. He knew, of course, what we wanted. Solid fare and plenty of facts. He was just to the other side and how far afield we ranged with him. To Carthage and Venice as well as to Mexico and Rhodes. He was also far from taking the conventional view of his fellow Victorians. He introduced me to Peterborough and to “Cochrane the Dauntless,” a seaman I knew that I would rather have followed than either Nelson or Drake. People complain that his characters are alike but surely they have to be? We cannot expect a man to be a Kafka or Proust if he is writing for boys.
I read books by other writers, Ainsworth, Ballantyne and Kingston Gordon Stables and Manville Fenn. I enjoyed them all, particularly Fenn’s Dick O’ the Fens and Ballantyne’s The Young Fur Traders (I did not like his Coral Island), but I was never absorbed by them as I was by Henty. I have since tried to analyze what made his work so alive to me. I think that it was because he wrote from a background of personal experience, he had been in the Crimean War and as war correspondent on various campaigns, and that he was entirely on our side. I think children seek violence today because their legitimate literature usually preaches to them against their normal instinct for adventure. His views were strict, his heroes had to undergo a period of preparation, they had to learn foreign languages (most valuable advice) and harden themselves physically but afterwards they had their opportunities and rewards. People may
laugh but much of whatever I may have accomplished during my life has come from never sitting still and expecting a sugarplum to fall into my lap without my having worked for it.
Of course these things were not clear to me that summer afternoon. I felt myself running near Beric in the wood because, curiously enough, I never felt inside his heroes but always beside them, I sorrowed over the burning of the rolls when the Roman villa was sacked and when I got to the great scene in the arena it was as if destiny had had me in mind when the book was written. Had I not scrawled Rufus Was a Gladiator on the strength of half a page of Baedeker the previous winter? It is sad that such unself-conscious absorption in stories is usually lost by the time that we are twelve.
The Rhône valley was one of the most beautiful places in Europe. Now the poplar avenues have been cut down to widen the roads and the apricot orchards have disappeared to make way for filling stations and factories. The population of Switzerland has increased by almost a million in the last twenty-five years and I have never been one to deny the necessity of industrialization. The people in the towns have to develop along modern lines but there could have been a pooling of interests; Nature has its rights as well as Man. It needed only a little, possibly national, care and one edge of the valley could have been left unspoiled.
Oh Helvetia, Helvetia, what have you done with your inheritance?
I must be one of the last people to have driven in a diligence or “post” carriage. We crossed from Thusis in the Engadine to Visp and the journey took about three days. I loved the horn that rang out as we clattered up to each stopping place and I was once allowed to sit on the coachman’s high box seat and watch the straw hats bobbing up and down that the horses wore to keep away the flies. The balconies on the chalets recalled my long-discarded Noah’s Ark and I wished that I could run up the outside steps to my bedroom instead of using the prim staircase inside a hotel. The children wore the dresses of their cantons as a matter of course; the striped skirts were faded and the bodices rumpled because they were their everyday clothes. They went barefoot in the meadows, otherwise they wore (as I did) heavy, nailed boots. Women waved to us, their rakes over their shoulders, peasants pulled their mules to the side of the road, the high pack saddles piled with bags, I can still feel the quality of that early morning air or taste the small, sweet greengages that were then at their prime but alas, so many other details are lost. Yet what could anyone ask more than to drive on and on in the sunshine and never sleep more than two nights running in any particular place?
Whatever we may think, the influences of childhood are the strongest elements in our lives. We may rebel against them; even so, they are the forces that have created our revolt. I wrote my own myth unconsciously in those hot, peaceful days among the petal-shaped lakes that became so much more familiar to me than an English meadow. The Greeks knew a lot about the spirit and it was not by chance that Artemis had a band of nine-year-old girls among her followers. Some of us belong to the soil and should remain where we are rooted but others are born wanderers and would rather ramble roundabout to heaven than be carried there easily in a chariot. Up in the high valleys, among the dark red mountain pinks, I was wild and free. Not lightly, but with a not to be restrained and unchildlike passion, I had to give myself, the heart to Artemis, the body to exploration.
SIX
Fate was kind. I did few formal lessons in my childhood with the result that my mind developed freely and was ravenous for knowledge. There was always a governess but after my first Fräulein most of them were English, we liked each other and I have remained in contact with several till this day.
We are only discovering now the profound influence that England had on Europe during the nineteenth century and much of this was due to her export of governesses and nannies. They controlled children at the most susceptible period of their lives and I suspect that many of the revolutionary movements of that time can be traced originally to the ideals of justice that these strict Englishwomen implanted in their charges, A governess was also an integral part of middle-class life when I was a child and I feel that we have lost a great deal from a psychological point of view from her disappearance. The older child belongs to the classroom but the younger ones may find such a teacher less anxious about them than their parents and a convenient bridge between the lost nursery and the often baffling outside world. I valued my governess for the selfish reason that she talked to my mother and thus left me free for my own important affairs: a run with the terrier in the part of the garden where nobody could see us or a snatched forbidden moment with a book. I am afraid that my pranks as well sometimes reduced her to tears. I learned a certain amount of French and German grammar but arithmetic remained a blank. I had only to see a number on a page to forget what I was supposed to do with it. My mother insisted that I have piano lessons. I had no ear, I loathed these hours with an extreme violence and I was infinitely grateful when I was allowed to give them up, being at the same point as where I had started, five years previously. I discovered subsequently that I was a “color hearer”; that is, I saw and heard words as colors. It is common, although with most people it is confined to a few words such as the months or days of the week. It was general with me and has been recorded of many writers and painters but seldom of musicians. The modern explanation is that it is due to a slight confusion of the nerves of hearing and sight. I have always been extremely sensitive to words. I “hear” them in several layers as, I suppose, other people hear music and I can feel the discord if there is one syllable too many in a sentence.
We are not always born to our own land and I have known much about exile in my life. My father bought a small house at Eastbourne in 1903, it was almost on the Downs, and we lived there in the intervals of our frequent journeys abroad. I hated the town at sight. It was not built up then as it is today but it had all the disadvantages of a city without any of its rewards. I had to wear a hat and gloves if I went to the pillar box, the frequent east winds blowing the length of the front made me seasick and after the plain, bright colors of the South, I disliked the chalk that turned everything into pastel shades.
There were some compensations. My family believed in exercise and like a little Tudor page I rode, fenced and walked for miles every day. There were lessons every morning but more often than not either my father or mother came in after an hour or two and ordered me to “get out into the air.” It was a reaction against Victorian stuffiness and the beginning of a new health-conscious age. It was natural that I wanted to fence, my father had been a swordsman since his boyhood but I was so small when I first insisted upon lessons that my mask and jacket had to be specially made for me. My master was an ex-army instructor who had no patience with protective measures. A mask, yes, but “you are given a sword to protect yourself” and if I made a wrong movement he flicked a bit of skin from my bare knuckles. It hurt and I seldom repeated the fault. He had no use for style so that when I moved eventually to a salle d’armes in London my teacher exclaimed after a first bout, “Mais ça, c’est de la boxe.” I found the French fleuret too formal and switched to the dueling sword, the épée, dreaming of challenges. Fencing gave me both a feeling of confidence and the knowledge, when I studied Elizabethan afterwards, of what it felt like to have a weapon at one’s side. A smith is said to have made William Morris a suit of armor when he was seven and whether people like his poetry or not, he knew how men wearing armor moved. Imagination may have wings but it also needs experience as a teacher.
Alas, what we lose through ignorance when we are young! I must have been one of the last people ever to watch a demonstration of old English quarterstaff. My first instructor used to practice it occasionally with one of his pupils. I do not know where he had learned it. Perhaps in his village? It was noisy, it was exciting, the sticks whirled and were parried in a light crackle of wood and there I stood, deserted of Clio for the moment, enjoying what I saw without a thought of the morrow, when for the asking he would have shown me the moves and the holds. It
was a last not faint but thundering echo of feudal England like the maypole that I had passed that year on a village green and I had no more sense at the time than to thank him and run thoughtlessly home.
Up to about 1910 the ability to handle a horse was as much a part of education as learning to read and write. It was purely a practical matter with no suggestion of aristocracy about it. How was a tradesman to reach his customers, for instance, if they were beyond walking distance unless he drove or rode? I was put on a pony as a matter of course when I was eight. My first steed was gray, it had just come out of a circus and danced if it heard music. It was also so small that we once enticed it into the house after a lump of sugar.
I liked galloping across the Downs, especially in summer when they were covered with wide, almost flat wild roses and the gold pea-shaped gorse. The flowers of southern England rolled across the mind like the transparencies on sale at the village shop; a hollow full of viper’s bugloss that looked as if a giant blue shovel had been at work on the hill, straggling clumps of mignonette that marked the track where we could not gallop, clumps of columbines where I learned to jump. I never had a pony of my own. My father said that I should gain more experience at a riding school but I knew that this was an excuse. A car, it was always breaking down, stood in what should have been our stables. Generally I was allowed to have Primrose, she was a race horse who had broken down in training and cantered, I thought, like the wind.
I lived through the switch from hooves to engines during these years yet, oddly enough, I do not remember resenting it. Change was in the air. I never rode after I was fifteen. I had not the slightest wish to drive a car and although I once took a few lessons to please my father, I was immediately turned out of the class as potentially dangerous and it took a lot of self-control not to say to him triumphantly, “I told you so.” I love footpaths and detest roads. But flying! I took my first lessons at a small airfield near Lausanne in August, 1939. They were among the happiest hours of my life. “Flying is like riding,” my instructor said as we rose into the sky, “the hands must be light.” I felt the plane, I landed her myself, it was a cheval de bois, a switchback, yes, but I got her safely down and they said that I might make a good pilot in spite of being forty-five; then war broke out and took my happiness away. The bureaucrats of 1946 denied me a second chance on the grounds of age. Perhaps it was as well. I sometimes get the feeling in the air that divers are supposed to feel at certain depths. It is a quite irrational exultation and I might have gone up and up, only aware of the sky, until there was no more petrol left in the tanks.
