by Tessa Boase
‘I am very lonely’, wrote Grace from La Souco, an ant-infested villa near Monte Carlo with leaking taps and broken light switches, ‘& would much rather be in Sussex with Walter, Blotto & Sam’ (the dog and cat). ‘Goodness I am bored.’ While Vanessa and Duncan were setting up their easels and painting the view, Grace was fiddling about with the gardener’s primus stove to heat soup and boil eggs because the house had run out of gas. Her attempts to get to know the gardener and his wife–Grace had a ‘great capacity for friendship’, according to her son, ‘all types and all walks of life’–were noted with faint disdain by Vanessa. ‘Grace, who gets in touch with everyone, has been talking in some peculiar language to the old people below and makes them give her oranges and grapefruit and anything she wants’, she wrote to Jane Bussy, whose house they were staying in. ‘I have impressed it upon her that they all belong to you and not to the old couple.’ Grace noted in her diary that, ‘Mrs Bell said I was not to talk to her [the gardener’s wife], poor old dear, but I shall take no notice, I am glad of her to talk to. Still no letters from England. Rained hard all day.’
There were brighter moments, too–Prince Andrew’s birth; everyone complimenting her chicken risotto; a wonderful spree in Ventimiglia with Angelica, now 42, bringing back ‘a very smart twin set which would cost me about six pounds in England’. (How Grace loved to dress up after all that depressing wartime utility wear.) Like her 18-year-old self, she still had a nicely observant eye for detail: ‘The coach driver raced round the corners, spitting out of the window’, and ‘We have a leg of lamb for lunch, with as much meat on as Marlene Dietrich’s leg.’ But no longer did Mrs Bell have the power to reduce her to misery with a stern look. Grace was bored, but she was no longer intimidated.
Her mistress was infuriatingly vague on when they might return. After several enquiries from Grace, Vanessa took the unusual measure of entering her housekeeper’s bedroom late in March to announce slightly sheepishly that they ‘might stay on longer’. Was the boot now on the other foot? It appears that Vanessa was a little nervous of Grace’s authority, and had entered her private space to reassert herself. ‘Mrs Bell informs me she has changed her mind about returning to England’, wrote Grace. ‘Extraordinary woman never says the same thing twice. I don’t know what to do.’
Vanessa Bell died at home the following spring, in 1961. She was tended throughout the night by her housekeeper, who spooned warm broth into her mouth and kept vigil. ‘So brave’, wrote Grace as the bronchitis worsened. ‘When the doctor asked her how she was, she said much better, her breathing is terrible.’ She made up the bed for the night and changed her mistress’s nightshirt. Vanessa passed away at midnight–still ‘Mrs Bell’ to Grace and reserved to the last, though pathetically dependent. ‘I shall miss her terribly’, she wrote. They had been partners for forty years–half a lifetime, longer than many marriages; and at such close but very separate quarters. They’d shared moments of raw grief and pure terror; of doting joy over grandchildren and proud satisfaction over vegetable plots. Both loved juicy steak, zinnias, sunshine, small babies. Neither could function without cleanliness and order in the home.
They were like two halves of the same coin–though not once had mistress and housekeeper been photographed together. Her relationship with Grace was in the end the most consistent thing in Vanessa Bell’s life, providing more stability than her marriage to Clive Bell or her companionship with Duncan Grant, who could never love her in the way she wanted. Strange as it now seemed, these two women, on different sides of the class divide, had made a silent pact with each other–and on that last trip to France there had been the sense of a circle closing.
While others mourned the great artist, mother and muse in words and letters, the housekeeper had the job of clearing out her mistress’s room. ‘Had a bonfire & burnt Mrs Bells’ mattress & lots of her clothes, & pillows. Cleaned out her room & got it ready for Mr Bell.’ At Vanessa’s interment on 12 April there was just Duncan, Angelica, Quentin and Grace at the graveyard in Firle. Grace was taken aback by the austerity of the ritual: ‘There was no one there’, she wrote in her diary; ‘no Clergyman, no flowers except what I and Angelica took, & no service, we did not go into the church, the undertakers just put the coffin into the grave, we looked into it & then left.’ This, to her mind, was not a proper leave-taking.
XIV
Work, Work, Work
Charleston after Vanessa Bell was a different place, and Grace established a different relationship with her new master. Duncan Grant, 76, had not shared Vanessa’s hermit-like tendencies, and their relationship had often been heavy going and guilt-laden. Now the house hummed to his gregarious nature. A breezy irreverence and sense of equality was enjoyed between Grace and her new master (though he always remained ‘Mr Grant’). They took to watching the boxing together in the Higgenses’ little sitting room. ‘I cannot regard Grace as anything but a family appendage’,17 Duncan wrote to Bunny Garnett. She was emphatically not, to his mind, a servant. Although the regime relaxed somewhat, since Duncan didn’t much care about cleanliness, the constant flow of house guests vastly increased her workload. Grace was by now desperate to retire.
The younger generation took the place over once again: Angelica’s teenage daughters, their friends and boyfriends used it at will. Quentin, his wife Olivier and their three young children descended from Newcastle upon Tyne every summer holiday. For all of them, Grace and her rock buns spelt instant comfort. Clive Bell, 80, was too frail to do more than gaze wistfully at these miniskirted young girls, but he continued to arrive and depart with his garrulous companion, the artist Barbara Bagenal, until his death in 1964. Charleston still suffered from an erratic water supply, insufficient heating and freezing pipes in winter–at which time Duncan Grant would be ferried off to louche outposts in Morocco by one of his young male muses, leaving the Higgenses to their own devices. ‘Terribly cold’, wrote Grace in her diary, December 1961. ‘No water in the house. Afraid everything is frozen. Impossible to get warm with our electric fire.’ ‘I think you would like this place’, came a postcard from Duncan; ‘Every sort of flower in the garden…the sun is really hot.’ His status as an artist and his energy for painting continued undimmed–Grace was flattered by his ‘marvellous’ portrait of her, ‘full of life, much too grand for me’–but his mind was growing erratic.
How much more of her life should Grace give to this household? Quentin’s daughter Viriginia Nicholson believed that Charleston’s housekeeper must have loved her job, since by the 1950s it was ‘a seller’s market, servants were forever walking out. Grace chose to stay; she made her life there.’ She probably couldn’t explain even to herself why she stayed for so long. Grace didn’t expect her son’s generation to understand the pull exerted over her by her employers for half a century. Such unwavering loyalty belonged to another era, and she had been schooled in her values by a generation more remote still. When her own father was gravely ill during her final trip to Provence in 1960, Grace had agonised in her diary over whether or not she should return home to Norfolk. In the end she decided not to, because ‘he had always told me to stay with Mrs Bell’.
But Mrs Bell was now no longer there, and by 1968 she had had enough, judging by diary entries from her life as a 65-year-old:
21 February 1968: Mr Grant said Amaryllis wants to bring three friends down next weekend. I am so tired, & my back aches.
22 February: Aired downstairs room, and made up bed for Amaryllis. Told Mr Grant, why not get Henrietta [Angelica’s second daughter, aged 23] to come as housekeeper, he said he did not want her. I am too old to keep working & would like to leave, so that I could sit down & rest.
23 February: Amaryllis & her friends did not arrive until ten thirty in the evening, the Dinner was spoiled.
24 February: Amaryllis brought another friend name Boots for the weekend with his sheep dog. Extraordinary young man.
25 February: Mr & Mrs Spender left afterwards for London. Mrs Spender is the daughter
of Maxim Gorky. She is very charming & considerate & left me a large tip.
26 February: Amaryllis & friend left for London after lunch, they did not rise until lunchtime, very untidy couple.
1 March: Scrubbed through lower passage.
2 March: Scrubbed bathrooms lavatorys & hall, kitchen this morning.
6 March: Washed my hair. Quite white.
She was a relic from another era: an upper servant, a housekeeper, now having to ‘do the rough’–the work of charladies–in a barely recognisable modern world. Grace’s son John claimed she turned a blind eye to what went on upstairs at Charleston: ‘It was something she became acclimatised to; that was the way of life.’ But Diana remembered Grace’s tight-lipped reaction when she’d make up two beds and find only one slept in: ‘The permissiveness of some of the guests–that was not good.’ In January 1961 Grace had bought a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover to send to her aged mother Bessie (Penguin’s second edition, produced after winning the Obscene Publications trial). ‘Disgusting book’, she wrote in her diary, heavily underscored.
The Sexual Offences Act of 1967 had made for greater tolerance, and perhaps Duncan had become a touch casual. On 25 March, a day that ‘a black man from Brighton came to tea’, something inside her snapped. It wasn’t the young men per se, but the endless traffic of unexpected visitors: the bed making, the catering. Grace braced herself and bravely told Mr Grant that she would be retiring at the end of the year. ‘He is upset, said I should go for a holiday, but where can we go?’ When could they go, with house guests from May through to September? ‘I’m so tired, I wish I could go away & never come back’, she wrote on 2 September, a day Amaryllis knocked a large bottle of black ink over sheets, pillow case and carpet. ‘Work, work, work, & meals, so many people, Oh I wish my house was near a road so I could live in it.’
Grace’s Norfolk house had proved to be a white elephant. They had spent every summer holiday overseeing renovations, but neither she nor Walter had ever learnt to drive, which made the plan of retiring to the empty Fens an unfeasible one. They returned from a restorative fortnight in Devon in late September to be shown round her old friend Ruby Weller’s retirement cottage, ‘full of nice furniture given her by her children & Lady Keynes’. Charleston had now fallen into disrepair, with rising damp and rainwater staining the vibrant frescoes of another, earlier era. Frescoes, by Grace’s judgement, painted some fifty years ago. By the winter of 1970 she could take no more.
XV
The Angel Of Charleston
The Higgenses settled into their new ‘chalet’ in nearby Ringmer with surprising alacrity. It had cost them £6,950 (around £70,000 in today’s money), and Grace had paid for it in cash–in part from the sale of her Norfolk house, in part from savings. Grace had played the stock market for many years, using Clive Bell’s regular financial advice, and been rather successful at it. She clearly had a housekeeper’s head for figures. There had been an ‘insane’ leaving party for her, remembered Virginia Nicholson, ‘at a peculiar restaurant in Lewes run by one of Duncan’s disreputable male friends’. A socially awkward group of around forty had got rather drunk, Grace included. She was free at last! Why, then, did she feel so anguished? ‘Somehow I dread going to live in my new house’, she confided to her diary. ‘I hate the idea of leaving Charleston.’ It had been her home for thirty-seven years. Duncan Grant, now an incontinent 86-year-old, had pleaded with her not to leave–‘poor old dear’, wrote Grace; ‘he is so helpless’. Quentin Bell had even suggested that she rent out her new house until a replacement couple could be found to look after Duncan–advice that had incensed John Higgens. Did they think they owned his mother? On 1 March 1971–a fortnight after ‘Decimal Day’–two lorries had loaded up a lifetime’s possessions from the attic.
When Quentin’s wife Olivier Bell visited Grace in her new home she was taken aback by how modern it all was. ‘Spick and span all over,’ her daughter Virginia recalled her saying. ‘But full of these wonderful pictures she’d been given over the years. It seemed incongruous to my mother–but not to Grace. Olivier had assumed, because of Charleston being lovely and old, and everyone loving old and characterful houses, that Grace would have chosen a rustic cottage.’ How little they really knew Grace, whom Olivier had always liked very much but viewed (so she told me) as ‘part of the furniture’.
Of course Grace was going to choose the ease of a centrally heated home with yellow fitted carpets throughout, a Formica kitchen, gas hob and tea at the touch of a Morphy Richards button. These were her dues, her reward after Charleston. With her snappy little mongrel Dandy at her heels, Grace quickly slotted into community life in Ringmer, revelling in being able to walk to the shops, spend time with her granddaughters Jackie and Suzanne without racing back to prepare Mr Grant’s dinner, and control her own destiny. (She never could get used to shopping for herself, writing ‘every mortal thing’ she bought down in her diary.) Walter pottered happily in his patch of garden, free from ‘that lot’ at last.18
For most career servants, this was the moment at which you might lose your identity. Stepping outside the protection of the big house, you were no longer defined by what you did or where you once lived. Unless you were kept on in an estate cottage and were nominally involved in the running of the house (as so many ‘treasures’ were), you were ejected into an indifferent universe. In 1971, being a former servant was not necessarily something you wanted to boast about. Yet wholly unexpectedly, Grace was to find herself courted in retirement as something of a curiosity. Her memories had acquired a market value. First came a documentary-maker a year before she left Charleston, a man who thanked her for ‘all the scones and cups of tea’ while he made his film about Virginia Woolf, which included a clip of the housekeeper reminiscing in the kitchen. ‘I know you will look and sound superbly’, he wrote.19 The scene was dropped at the final edit and Grace was ‘secretly a little pleased’,20 as the sudden attention was rather discomfiting.
Then came another film crew to make Duncan Grant at Charleston: it needed three takes for Grace to get her memories right as she stirred a pudding at the kitchen table, faltering over names and dates as the cameras rolled. Her voice is soft and careful, her accent mimicking that of her employers. ‘Ay don’t usually hev much time for modelling,’ she told the film-maker.21 Her everyday Norfolk vowels wouldn’t do in front of company.
A few years later the writer and publisher Nigel Nicolson contacted her while editing the letters of Virginia Woolf. ‘What a remarkable record!’ he wrote in reply to what must have been a long letter from Grace. ‘And what an important slice of English history you witnessed during all those years.’22 Important? This is not how it might have seemed to Grace at the time, as she carried cans of hot water up creaking stairs to guests’ bedrooms and scrubbed out the lavatory on their departure. But it gave a woman a sense of self-worth, actually to be sought out as a witness to ‘history’. In 1979 she was interviewed again for a book on Vanessa and Duncan, then in 1980 for Vanessa Bell’s biography. Grace was of increasing interest–if only as a conduit to the Bloomsbury Group.
There is no doubt that she’d enjoyed the frisson of glamour that came from being part of Bloomsbury, and this was probably one of the reasons she chose to stay for so long. The work was hard, but it could be interesting. Not many housekeepers were on such familiar terms with E. M. Forster that they wanted to call their dog ‘Morgan’ (gently discouraged by Mrs Bell); or had watched Sir Frederick Ashton ‘leaping about Charleston Lawn with red Roses threaded in his hair’; or served George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell her Queen of Puddings (sponge cake soaked in egg and milk, topped with jam and meringue). Yet there were other reasons for her steadfastness that outsiders couldn’t begin to guess at.
By the time of Grace’s retirement, Walter, John and Diana Higgens were united against the Charleston regime and had made their views known to her. John struggled to understand her loyalty when ‘they expected so much of her, for so little. I thought she
should give it up.’ His father Walter ‘didn’t like to show unwilling against the family, but he did think that they used to take my mother for granted, and she shouldn’t have done all what she did do, and not for so long. She at times was treated like a skivvy.’
The truth was that after fifty years of service, Grace was unable to separate her narrative from the Bells’. Her connection with this family predated her marriage to Walter by fifteen years; her photograph albums were filled with pictures of Bloomsbury children and grandchildren, who continued to visit and write to her in retirement like a favourite aunt. This had been not so much a job as a vocation. There was a sense–unpalatable to John, Walter and Diana–that her employers were more ‘family’ to Grace than her own people. Every letter sent to her by the Bells and Mr Grant she kept as having an emotional value. Most contain instructions; others reveal a touching mutual affection. ‘I thought of you as I eat a wonderful steak(!)’, Vanessa wrote from Iseo in Italy, 1952; ‘just right. Thick & juicy.’ Later, from Venice, she sent impressionistic word sketches to her housekeeper from her bedroom window: ‘three boys, practically naked, rowing a boat about the Canal at 7pm’.
After Vanessa’s death Grace had received a letter from Angelica, together with a cheque
for more than what I originally told you because I feel sure that is what Nessa would have wished, if she had realised how little money can buy these days…The actual amount has nothing to do with her fondness for you & her reliance on you, which as you know was unmeasurable–but she would have been happy to think it might be spent on something that would make life easier for you.
