by Tessa Boase
Pity Miss Martin–young, anxious, ineffectual–having to assert herself over an attic full of excitable probationers. Nan came to the conclusion, from her vantage point up in her sitting room (perhaps looking down on trysts in the Italian garden), that ‘nearly half the nurses were mischievous and at any rate superfluous’.
But this was nothing compared to the terrible relations between Miss Martin and the housekeeper. Nan described it as nothing less than a ‘blood feud’. Matron and Hannah Mackenzie were slogging it out for ascendancy, ‘neither losing any opportunity to slit each other’s throat–Matron clumsily, Hannah with the utmost skill, lashing the men-folk into a state of outraged chivalry on her behalf’. We don’t have Hannah’s side of the story, so we must imagine the scenario. Their ‘outraged chivalry’ suggests that Hannah presented herself as victimised, unfairly treated, insulted. Matron was probably presented as sabotaging Hannah’s role; denying her authority; even denying her most natural maternal instincts.
Should the soldiers not enjoy cut flowers by their beds? Didn’t the poor wee laddie from Kirkcaldy get left with not a drop of water one morning? Didn’t Mrs Mackenzie have a right to know when Nurse Martin took her luncheon, so that she could keep her eye on those nurses? With Dr Beauchamp now ‘tied to her little finger’, Hannah ‘steadily fanned his dislike of Miss Martin’. I can hear her voice as she fills a bone-china teacup for the doctor: ‘And now Miss Martin is preventing me–yes, actually preventing me Dr Beauchamp–from doing the rounds of Ward A and Ward B with the boys’ letters. Aye, aye, I know, I know. Would you credit it?’
Throughout that winter, J. M. Barrie was used by Nan to soothe the staff spats at Wrest Park Hospital. He was a good, sympathetic listener, more interested in the servant classes than those they served (in 1917 he was to write a war play about three charladies, intended to ‘make the Society ladies…toss their little manes’).10 He gained the reputation of being a ‘sensitive arbiter’ between the different factions at Wrest. Outwardly, Barrie did not take sides. But he was a man in thrall to powerful women, fixated on his mother, renowned for his dramatisations of the innate superiority of women compared to the weakness, even silliness of men.
The playwright was photographed with the cook Hetty Geyton and her girls in the kitchen, apron on, as if ready to pluck a dozen pheasants. ‘What a ripper,’ as Nan might have said, recording the moment with her Kodak. Did he also regularly cross the flagstone corridor to Hannah Mackenzie’s snug seat of power? ‘Oh, Mr Barrie! Well now! What a surprise! And me just finishing my sewing and everything all anyhow…Sit thee down, sit thee down, I’ll ring for tea.’ I can hear her soothing voice with its mournful cadences, barely rising and falling, as she imparts the latest goings-on. And Barrie, hand to drooping Edwardian moustache, nodding sympathetically, one foot on the fender, crumbs of Dundee cake on his tweed jacket.
VIII
A Sedately Married Man
Hannah had a secret. Cecil Argles, Wrest Park’s land agent, had fallen in love with her. It might have been wheedled out of her by Barrie’s sympathetic manner during one of these imaginary (yet I think plausible) confessional sessions. Perhaps the man in question came to her door once too often in Barrie’s presence; perhaps Hannah’s embarrassed fluster gave the game away. But really the whole nonsense was an innocent thing at first, and no one could say that she and Mr Argles were not hard at work.
It all started with the accounts books. Hannah Mackenzie was appointed as an efficient, parsimonious, capable housekeeper in the best Scottish tradition–but household accounts were one thing; hospital accounts quite another. Her new role required her to fill out list upon list of minutely graded incomings, outgoings and averages to satisfy not just her mistress but War Office records. Official ledgers from war hospitals of the time are crammed with columns for ‘Average Number of Beds available during year’, ‘Average Number of Inpatients resident daily’ and ‘Patients’ average residence’; moving on to the minutiae of day-to-day expenses such as ‘Surgery and Dispensary’, ‘Salaries and Wages’, ‘Average cost of Maintenance per Patient per day’–and so on. No wonder Hannah felt faint contemplating these double-page ledgers and the enormous amounts of money involved. No wonder she sought help from Wrest Park’s wise and capable land agent.
One accounts sheet survives from this era (May 1915), pasted into the scrapbook: a neat page in fussy, rather feminine writing and signed with a flourish ‘Cecil G. Argles’. It is the sort of exemplary accounts page that brings joy to a housekeeper’s heart and order to a chaotic regime. This page and others like it were composed in Hannah Mackenzie’s basement office at her large leather-topped desk, the two heads close together in collaboration. There was much else to talk over, too, as they discovered. Cecil Argles also came from a large family. He was born the eldest of ten children to Mary Anne and George, later Canon of York Minster. As with Hannah’s family, there were three boys to seven girls.
Argles occupied a position of immense power and responsibility. He was employed by Lord Lucas in 1905 and remained in the post throughout the tenure of the American Ambassador, overseeing farms and income not only in Bedfordshire but also at Bron’s other estates in Essex, Wiltshire, Leicestershire and Lancashire. He is remembered by his nephew Charles as being ‘a somewhat awesome figure’ who terrified young nieces with his teasing. In letters he comes across as efficient, sharp-minded and meticulous, yet with that easy manner born of a public-school education.
At the outbreak of war he was aged 42 and married to Muriel, four years his senior. They had one son, Gerry, aged 13. Their daughter Enid had died, aged seven, three years previously. At dusk on midsummer’s day, 1914, while driving the heavy estate Daimler back to Wrest Park, Cecil Argles hit a cyclist coming towards him as he overtook a motorcycle. He was driving at 17mph; the cyclist didn’t have lights. Harry Chamberlain died that night in hospital–he was a local tax officer, son of an ex-Detective Inspector, a 33-year-old married man with two young children. The inquest entirely absolved Argles, but the trauma and guilt was to scar him for life.
A small, depressed household, then, the numbers made up by four young servants (lady’s maid, parlourmaid, cook and housemaid), all living in the substantial Wrest Park Lodge at the gates of the estate. Before its reincarnation as Wrest Park Hospital, Argles ran the show. But since the Honourable Nan Herbert took control, things had changed. Nan was refreshingly straightforward, but she was also highly controlling, didactic and independent. She had a loathing of committees and wanted to manage everything herself, to her own meticulous standards. This led to an exemplary hospital, but it did not always make for easy relations with senior staff.
Argles wanted very much to be involved in Wrest Park Hospital, and not just as land agent. But what could he do? With Nan at the helm–mannish, cigarette smoking, authoritarian–he was effectively emasculated. The two reached a compromise, or understanding, in which Argles would oversee the wounded soldiers’ arrival by train and organise their swift transfer to the fleets of ambulances bound either for Woburn Abbey or Wrest Park. Like Nan, he had a flair for organisation.
Midland Railway, Derby, to Cecil G. Argles, Esq., Wrest Park, Ampthill
17 December 1914
Dear Sir,
I find that the ambulance train arrived at Ampthill at 2.22 p.m. and left at 3.35 p.m. The arrangements made were quite satisfactory and I congratulate you upon the smart clearance of the train. We may now look upon the arrangement as permanent.
Yours faithfully–General Superintendent
What drew Cecil Argles and Hannah Mackenzie together? Initially, I suspect, it was a shared antipathy towards their mistress. They would meet for a satisfying little moan, with the coal fire hissing in Hannah’s grate, the oil lamp on the table and that dreadfully harsh winter of 1914 blurring the windows with snow. Hannah was a decade younger than Argles. She was irreverent and witty, with a gift for mimicry. Her stories, so her great-nephew remembered, were told with brilliant deadpan timing. She wa
s a warm woman, falling into Argles’s upright and respectable life at the right time. Hannah made the estate manager laugh again, perhaps in a way he hadn’t for years.
They were obvious allies: two deputies, both being driven slowly mad by the fanatically high standards Nan Herbert set for herself and for the hospital. They weren’t the only people to recognise this: J. M. Barrie wrote to Bron in 1916 that Nan ‘is so fearfully conscientious about Wrest that her heart gets no rest if everything is not absolutely perfect’.11
Nan was bemused by Hannah’s popularity with the surgeons and watchful of her. She was also lightly but regularly negative about Argles in her diary. Tellingly, there is not one photograph of Bron’s land agent in the Wrest Park scrapbooks where all other staff, domestic and nursing, are meticulously chronicled. The relationship between Nan and her right-hand man was complicated. Argles answered to Lord Lucas; Nan answered to herself. But in the absence of Bron, Cecil Argles was often the only other educated, intelligent man she had reliably to hand. There was friction between them but there was also trust, cooperation and a certain gruff intimacy–for one evening Argles confessed something he might more sensibly have kept secret.
Nan was half tickled, half shocked by what he told her. She’d had no idea, no idea at all. Was she also the smallest bit jealous? How did it feel to learn that stuffy old Argles had a raging crush on her housekeeper, of all people, a woman who, at 32, was classed as an old maid (though Nan, at 34, probably thought of herself differently)? Why had Bron’s land agent chosen Hannah? In due course it went–discreetly, to save him embarrassment–into her diary. ‘A…(a sedately married man), in helping Hannah with the hospital accounts, had fallen violently in love, and declared that she was the only thing in life that kept him from going mad!’
IX
Wrest In Beds
It was a time of madness. There was no way of making sense of the abundant horrors of this war from within the gilded environment of Wrest Park–both for the soldiers and for those who helped them recover. Men suffering from shell shock and chlorine-gas poisoning were stretchered to beds facing one of the greatest formal gardens of England. Above them, on the ceilings, they gazed at titillating scenes of embracing, semi-naked girls floating in clouds. Between their beds were French rococo marble fireplaces and pier-glasses with sinuous gilded frames. Doors opened at the turn of an octagonal ivory door handle, a beautiful little object to clasp in one’s hand.
The other face of Wrest dealt with scenes such as this:
17 July 1916: ‘12.15 emergency operation; Dr Kirkwood took off a man’s arm. Dr Garner from Ampthill as anaesthetist. Have never seen anything like it’, wrote Nan, now fully trained and assisting in the operating theatre as Sister: ‘–up to the elbow the arm was rotten and blue (gas gangrene). Cleaned up theatre by 2.30.’
There was no time off. Here is surgeon Mr Ewart’s timetable for Saturday, 12 August 1916:
1. Walker–Hernia
2. Cleghorn–Paresis of Foot
3. Paul–Ampt. of Toe
4. Leonard–Removal of Plate from Femur
5. Clancey–Shrap. in Knee
6. Hodges–Jaw, wire to remove
7. Pattison–Axilla to stitch
8. Williams–Injury to Perineum
The ‘List of Outings’ timetable for the same day has fifty men going to Tingrith Manor at 2.30 p.m. ‘for tea and games, also cricket match’.
From Wrest the men were sent on to local convalescent homes, where once a month they would be inspected by a captain who would mark out which were fit to return to the trenches. A little leather autograph book survives in the Imperial War Office archives; it belonged to Edith Mary Taylor, a nurse at Wrest Park Hospital in 1916. It is filled with the small, painstaking script of ‘the boys’: men who had infinite time on their hands to compose their records of the war. Some are gung-ho in tone; many are not.
Far from the muddy/Dugouts I wont to be, Back to Old England/Where bullets wont strick me.
The man that wants to go/Back shure he is telling a lie.
John McKay of the 6th Battalion Oxrs Bucks, wounded by a bullet in the foot at Ypres, 20 March 1916.
Private Thomas William Carlton of the 9th Battalion Yorkshire Regiment, a Sunderland boy, cannot even spell his enemy’s name:
We got to Ypres to our sorrow/And it was simply murder Because we had to stand both night and day/Up to the knees in water…Now our Battalion was very lucky/Although we lost a lot of men But apart from that we did our best/To keep those fearful jermans back…
There is a Private Angus Mackenzie from the 8th Ptt 2nd Infantry Brigade, 1st Canadian Division, called up to help ‘the Motherland’. Most of his comrades were now dead:
Hundreds of that brave band/Have gone from a foreign stand Straight to that Happy Land/The Home of the Blest But thank the Almighty/There are some now in Blighty And this one at Wrest.12
They made a big fuss of Christmas at Wrest Park Hospital. It was as if the bottled-up maternal urges of the entire household were uncorked in one ear-splitting pop. Extraordinary to imagine, each of the 130 hospital beds had its own Christmas stocking. Consequently the day began at 3 a.m.,
when a pandemonium of penny whistles and toy trumpets broke forth, especially from Nurse Mac’s little room where she had the three empyemas [fluid on the lungs]–Billows, Rogers and Parker, the latter a very small mild man who was said to have bayoneted fourteen Germans.
There were trick matches and cigarettes, more fancy-dress costumes sent up from London, ‘orgies of eating’ and a convalescents’ band ‘braying loudly’ on the great staircase. Photographs show the wards crazily festooned with ivy. Costumes are West End quality: J. M. Barrie must have had a hand in securing these. The Herberts’ friend Maurice Baring arrived and was hailed as both ‘butt and idol’ of the boys; Bron was simply their ‘hero’. There are pictures of nurses and soldiers, and nurses and surgeons, but none of the domestic staff has made it into the Christmas pages of the scrapbook. Was it Hannah and her girls or Miss Martin and her nurses who wrapped the presents and hung the baubles?
All tried to forget the frightening episode of the week before. Early on 16 December, German warships had shelled Hartlepool, Scarborough and Whitby, killing and injuring hundreds of civilians including children on their way to school. Then, with deliberate timing, a Zeppelin dropped a bomb on Dover on Christmas Eve–the first ever air raid on British soil. ‘This is not warfare’, thundered a leader in the weekly Independent, ‘this is murder.’13 That year, and for every year after until the war’s end, the famous line was cut from productions of Peter Pan: ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure.’
X
The Supreme Moment
Nan finally got Bron to herself for a long chat in her sitting room on the attic floor. There was so much to be gone through. While she focused on the minute detail (‘Statement of problems of carrying on hospital’, reads one missive from Nan to her brother) he thought in sweeping, broad-brush strokes (‘Don’t please worry yourself over it all. This sounds ungrateful, but you know what I mean’, he writes back). At times Nan must have felt they were living on different planets, but such was her intense devotion to Bron, she did not complain.
His infectious high spirits were, in any case, a tonic. They restored Nan’s pre-war sense of humour–and she had a wonderfully juicy piece of gossip to impart, regarding her housekeeper and his land agent. ‘Never shall I forget Bron sinking back helpless with laughter, when I told him this, and gasping between paroxysms, ‘A of all people, A!’
Why was Argles’s love for Hannah such an object of hilarity for Bron? Was it the preposterousness of the public-school-educated manager falling for a working-class servant from Inverness? Was it that Hannah was way out of Argles’s league in looks, youth and charisma? Or was it that pompous, pen-pushing, church-going Argles, with his name vaguely redolent of gargling and gargoyles, had the temerity to enter into a grande passion–and claim it to be the real thing?
Ce
cil Argles was captain of the Wrest Fire Brigade. A photograph shows a small, portly man with protruding ears, slight double chin and a kindly face in shadow beneath the Victorian brass Merryweather helmet. There is something almost feminine about Argles as he stands, small hands hanging passively from what now seems a faintly ridiculous outfit, while the other firemen uncoil the hose and bustle about. The fire engine is a splendid Victorian contraption with gleaming brass work: no doubt he was neurotic about its upkeep.
And then there is Bron, with his inherited wealth, his ’petulant mouth and great wondering eyes…like some wild thing tamed and habituated to a garden’,14 according to a friend. Bron the hero, careering around with his wooden leg (he was hit by shrapnel while reporting on the Boer War for The Times in his early twenties), ‘just as fine a sportsman as before’. Bron’s reaction seems to imply, however obliquely, that adventures of the heart are reserved for the Brons of this world, and not for the likes of Cecil Argles.
Nan’s response to Hannah’s apparent love affair is also interesting. ‘It was, I suppose’, she writes in her diary, ‘the supreme moment of her life.’ I imagine Nan covertly watching her housekeeper queening it; observing with some amusement Hannah Mackenzie supremely in control of this ‘sedately married man’ who has fallen under her spell. Yet there is also the slightly sneering, patronising assumption that a servant has to take what crumbs of romance might fall her way. The implication is that if this was a ‘supreme moment’, it was rather a poor one in the eyes of Nan (veteran of the Balkan Crisis, friend of political activist Emilio Bacardi, traveller, heiress, adventurer…and spinster). Her housekeeper hadn’t caught a man before, and was probably unlikely to in the future. It was her last and best chance.
