When Francis was a small boy and played soldiers with his elder brother, he was a private while George was a sergeant, and “it was part of my duty to stand sentry at the far end of the kitchen-garden until released by a bugle-call from the lawn. I have a vague remembrance of presenting my fixed bayonet at my father to ward off a kiss which seemed to me inconsistent with my military duties.”
Charles loved good tunes but had difficulty remembering them. Francis only ever heard him hum one, the beautiful slow Welsh hymn “All Through the Night,” which he had probably first heard as a small child when his mother took him to services at the Unitarian chapel in Shrewsbury. He remembered another little tune from another world, a song that a Tahitian girl had sung to him when he landed there on HMS Beagle in 1835. He wrote in his diary at the time that “Numbers of children were playing on the beach, and had lighted bonfires which illuminated the placid sea and surrounding trees; others in circles were singing Tahitian verses. We seated ourselves on the sand and joined the circle. The songs were impromptu and I believe relating to our arrival. One little girl sang a line which the rest took up in parts, forming a very pretty chorus. The air was singular and their voices melodious. The whole scene made us unequivocally aware that we were seated on the shores of an island in the South Sea.”
Charles used the pictures in his scientific books to entertain his children. Etty remembered an old book of animals which they called the “monkey book.” “He had a particular little story which must never be hurried belonging to most of the pictures.” Francis recalled the colour plates in Andrew Smith’s Illustrations of the Zoology of South Africa. Smith was an Army doctor and explorer with whom Charles had struck up a friendship when he met him in South Africa in 1836, on the last leg of the Beagle voyage. Charles made an exciting game of looking through the coloured plates “by the supposition that the birds belonged alternately to himself and the child who was his playfellow.” Francis remembered vividly, “after a series of dull thrush-like birds had been calmly shared between my father and myself, the agony of seeing a magnificent green and purple one fall to his lot. I am sure he tried to cheat himself, but this was not always possible.”
The magnificent bird was Lamprotornis Burchellii, most of whose upper surfaces were, in Smith’s meticulous description, “dark duck-green with a splendid metallic lustre; the sides of the head pansy-purple, many of the feathers tipped with brilliant shining purplish red passing into flame red.” The two middle feathers of the long barred tail were “bronzed purple, deadened by a gloss of green.” Smith wrote: “If it be essential, in order to carry out the plan of the Creator, that certain birds should be provided with longer and more weighty tails than others . . . it will also be necessary that provision should be made to ensure them against injury or inconvenience from such [an] arrangement.” The wing feathers of the Lamprotornis were greatly developed in order to help it fly with its lengthy tail. Whatever Charles told his children about this bird would not have included “the plan of the Creator.”
CHAPTER FIVE
THE GALLOPING TUNE
Brothers and sisters—Out of doors—Uncle Ras and Joseph Hooker—
Reading—The Governess—Annie’s writing case
AS THE YOUNGER CHILDREN GREW, they joined Willy and Annie in their play, and life in the household grew more hectic. In many wealthy homes at the time, the children were not allowed to play in the rooms used by the grown-ups and were kept in the nursery for much of the day. But at Down, according to Annie’s cousin Snow Wedgwood, “the only place where you might be sure of not meeting a child was the nursery.” Francis remembered having their evening meal there while Charles and Emma dined in peace. “We came down after our tea, rushing along the dark passage and descending the stairs with that rhythmic series of bangs peculiar to children . . . I have also a faint recollection of black-coated uncles sitting by the fire and not unnaturally objecting to our making short-cuts across their legs. It was no doubt a pity that we were not reproved for our want of consideration for the elderly, and that, generally speaking, our manners were neglected. One of our grown-up cousins was reported to have called our midday dinner ‘a violent luncheon, ’ and I do not doubt that she was right.”
The furniture and decoration in the family’s living rooms felt the wear of the young family’s life. Charles wrote once to Emma: “The children are growing so quite out of all rule in the drawing room, jumping on everything and butting like young bulls at every chair and sofa, that I am going to have the dining room fire lighted tomorrow and keep them out of the drawing room. I declare a month of such wear would spoil every thing.” Louisa Nash remembered talking once with Emma about bringing up children. Emma said, “When we were young, Charles and I talked over together what we should do. The house was newly and expensively furnished. Shall we make the furniture a bugbear to the children, or shall we let them use it in their plays?” They agreed that they would not worry about things getting shabby. “So chairs and other furniture used to get piled up for railways and coaches, just as the fancy took them.” And then she added, “I believe we have all been much the happier in consequence.”
Etty remembered how the drawing-room furniture was pushed to one side, and a troop of little children danced and leapt round the room while Emma played “the galloping tune” which she had composed herself and was “very well suited for its purpose.” Etty was fond of dressing up, especially when a Wedgwood cousin was with them. “Our plan was to ask my mother for the key of her jewel box, a simple wooden box in which her jewels, pearls and all, rattled about loose, with no cotton-wool to protect them. The key, too, worked badly, and we had to shake and bang the box violently to get in. Then we locked her bedroom doors to prevent the maids coming in and laughing at us, took out of the wardrobe her long skirts and pinned them round our waists. Out of her lace drawer, we fitted up our bodies with lace fallals, put on the jewels, and then peacocked about the room trailing the silks and satins on the floor. A favourite costume was a silver-grey moire-antique. When we had done, we hung up the gowns, put back the lace, and locked up the jewels, and returned the key, but she never looked to see whether the two little girls had lost or damaged any of the jewels.”
George’s earliest memory of childhood was of drumming with his spoon and fork on the nursery table because dinner was late, while a barrel organ played in the lane outside. He remembered his father’s study as “a sort of sacred place not to be invaded in the morning with-out some really urgent cause, such as the absolute necessity for a piece of string or a foot-rule. We always were received with the utmost kindness, and it was only in the extreme case of three or four interruptions in half an hour that we were cautioned: ‘You really mustn’t come again.’ The cutting of fingers was one of the urgent causes for which we went there to fetch sticking plaster. I always felt this a very serious affair and Henrietta, when in that predicament, used to wait until he had gone out for his walk and then purloin the plaster. The reason why this was so serious a matter was twofold; first that his sympathy was so strong with us when we hurt ourselves, and next that he had a morbid horror of the sight or even the word of blood.”
George’s recollection of the house before 1858
Charles’s microscope stool was mounted on castors. George remembered how he would often take it from the study, sitting on it with Etty and punting them round the drawing room with a walking stick. He wrote: “However hard my father was at work, we certainly never restrained ourselves in our romps about the house, and I should certainly have thought that the howls and screams must have been a great annoyance; but we were never stopped. There was one fearfully noisy game which invaded the whole house, called ‘roundabouts,’ and we generally played at this when there was a house full of cousins. It was a modified hide and seek and necessitated yells from all the players to tell where the demon of the game was.”
When George’s daughter Gwen came to the house in the 1890s, the nursery was still a place of quiet. She wrote in her memoir of
her childhood, Period Piece, that the room “had a white painted floor; it had green venetian blinds, too, and a great old mulberry tree grew right up against the windows outside. The shadows of the leaves used to shift about on the white floor, and you could hear the plop of the ripe mulberries as they fell to the ground, and the blackbirds sang there in the early mornings. They lived permanently in the tree in the fruit season. I used to get out of bed to listen to them before anyone else was awake.”
Annie spent as much time as she could playing in rough clothes with her brothers and sisters out of doors. They had the run of the sixteen acres. Around the house were the flower garden and lawn, the two yew trees with a child’s swing hung between them, the mulberry tree, the deep well for the household’s drinking water, and the orchard with apple trees, pears trained on the walls, quinces and plums. The kitchen garden was lined with gooseberry bushes, and there were cows, pigs, horses, chickens and geese in the cow yard, stables and enclosures for livestock. Farmyard cats kept down the mice. Etty “cared for all the animals about the place, seeing the cows milked, rushing past the heels of one hornless yellow cow who it was supposed would kick us if she could, grooming the donkey with worn out brushes and combs, and taming the chickens so that they would eat out of my hand.” She took possession of a small garden shed just beyond the mulberry tree and made it her “little home with flower pots for seats and broken bits of crockery for china. Here my cats sometimes kept their kittens and I would sit for long hours watching them.”
Charles once remarked that “Children have an uncommon pleasure in hiding themselves and skulking about in shrubbery when other people are about.” Thinking of our animal ancestry, he commented: “This is analogous to young pigs hiding themselves, and [is the] hereditary remains of savages’ state.”
William Brooks, the cowman and gardener, lived in a cottage close to the cow yard with his wife Keziah, who was the best smocker in the village. Their youngest daughter Emily was Annie’s age and they were playmates. Joseph Comfort, the second gardener, helped with the cows and pigs and drove the family’s two carriages. Another under-gardener, Henry Lettington, was a great friend to Francis. “It was he who taught me to make whistles in the spring and helped me with my tame rabbits. He also showed me how to make brick traps for small birds, and a more elaborate trap made of hazel twigs.”
Gwen remembered being taken to gather nosegays for the house, “down the long pebbled walk between the tall syringa and lilac bushes all wet with dew, to the kitchen garden, where the roses were imprisoned behind high box borders, near the empty greenhouses, where my grandfather had once worked. We took the wooden trug full of flowers, which smelt sweeter than any other flowers in the world, back to the house, and arranged them in water on a green iron table, in the Old Study.” Long after she had forgotten all her human loves, she wrote, “I shall still remember the smell of a gooseberry leaf, or the feel of the wet grass on my bare feet, or the pebbles in the path.”
Willy and Annie played with the children of Sir John Lubbock, the Whig banker, mathematician and astronomer who was squire of the parish and lived at High Elms, the grand house on the other side of the village. Sir John supported a number of “progressive” causes, and was a council member of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. One day when Annie was six, the Lubbocks gave a party for their neighbours’ children. Thirty came, the Darwins among them. Lady Lubbock noted in her diary: “Jugglers and tumblers performed in the garden. Then they danced; Mr Taylor on the Piano Forte and a post horn was the Music.”
The Lubbocks’ eldest son John was seven years older than Annie, and a schoolboy at Eton. In the holidays he would ride round the neighbourhood with his gun, shooting squirrels, rabbits and wrynecks. He was also a keen collector; he netted small water creatures in the village pond and searched for fossils in quarries nearby. Charles was glad to help him with his natural history; they walked together and John came often to the house for lessons in dissecting and describing his specimens. Annie and Etty became used to seeing John’s horse tethered in the stable yard; he found Charles’s friendly advice and encouragement over the microscope easier to respond to than his austere father’s impatience when he could not grasp abstruse mathematical ideas.
Annie was given a small garden of her own to grow flowers and vegetables in as she wanted. Girls were encouraged to take a special interest in flowers, as they would always be the ladies’ responsibility when they grew up. Young ladies were supposed to leave the heavy tasks to a labourer, but a child could borrow small tools and dig and heave as she wanted. John Lubbock grew lettuces in his plot at High Elms. His mother may have mentioned to Annie a verse she copied into her commonplace book.
It cometh forth in April showers,
Lies snug when storms prevail;
It feeds on fruits; it sleeps on flowers;
I would I were a snail!
When Annie was nine, John, who was later to become a leading statesman and populariser of science, gave the first of a lifetime of public lectures on natural history, speaking in Downe village hall about the habits of the wireworm. This was “useful knowledge” for the Darwin children and all gardeners in the neighbourhood, as the small yellow grubs were, with slugs, the most voracious of all pests, devouring carnations, pinks, irises, lobelias, dahlias and almost all vegetables. The creatures were also a small problem for natural theology. A reading book for parish schools commented: “No doubt the wireworm fulfils some important and useful part in the economy of nature, but we have not been able to find any aspect in which it can be said to be otherwise than injurious to the farmer.” The only solution was to destroy it by burning.
Beyond the Darwins’ garden were the hay-meadow and the Sand-walk copse. “Of all places at Down,” Gwen wrote in Period Piece, “the Sand walk seemed most to belong to my grandfather. It was a path running round a little wood which he had planted himself; and it always seemed to be a very long way from the house.You went right to the furthest end of the kitchen garden, and then through a wooden door in the high hedge, which quite cut you off from human society. Here a fenced path ran along between two great lonely meadows, till you came to the wood. The path ran straight down the outside of the wood—the Light Side—till it came to a summer house at the far end; it was very lonely there; to this day you cannot see a single building anywhere, only woods and valleys.” Gwen remembered that faint chalk drawings of dragoons could be made out on the wooden walls of the summer house. They had been drawn by her father, George, and Francis when they were small children.
For Gwen, the Light Side of the Sand-walk copse was “ominous and solitary enough, but at the summer house the path turned back and made a loop down the Dark Side, a mossy path, all among the trees; and that was truly terrifying.” There were two or three great old trees beside the path which were “alright if some grown-up person were there, but much too impressive if one were alone. The Hollow Ash was mysterious enough; but the enormous beech, which we called the Elephant Tree, was quite awful. It had something like the head of a monstrous beast growing out of the trunk, where a branch had been cut off. I tried to think it merely grotesque and rather funny, in the daytime; but if I were alone near it, or sometimes in bed at night, the face grew and grew until it became the mask of a brutish ogre, huge, evil and prehistoric; a face which chased me down long dark passages and never quite caught me.”
All Charles’s children remembered their father on the Sand-walk. He had laid it out as his “thinking path” and he used to walk round it five times every day at noon. The undergrowth and old clay-pits were also the children’s favourite playground, and they would often spend the morning there. As their father paced slowly along the path, he was usually deep in thought, but he also liked to see what they were doing and “sympathised in any fun that was going on.” Francis remembered that “he walked with a swinging walk using a walking stick heavily shod with iron which he struck loudly against the ground.” The rhythmic click “became a familiar sound that
spoke of his presence near us,” and it haunted the Sand-walk for them long after his death.
Emma was courageous, even rash, in what she let her children do on their own outside the garden, and Charles did not interfere. They “wandered about the lonely woods and lanes in a way that was not very safe.” “We used also to run down the steep ploughed fields, our feet grown with adhering clay to huge balls swinging like pendulums and scattering showers of mud on all sides. Then we would come cheerfully home, entering by the back door and taking off our boots as we sat on the kitchen stairs in semi-darkness and surrounded by pleasant culinary smells . . . When we used to take long winter tramps along our flinty winding lanes, this unbooting on the back stairs was a prelude to eating oranges in the dining room, a feast that took the place of five o’clock tea—not then invented.”
Charles would sometimes take Willy or Annie or one of the younger children on his walks out into the countryside in the dusk of the early morning. Francis remembered “a vague sense of the red of the winter sunrise, and . . . the pleasant companionship, and a certain honour and glory in it.” George remembered his father saying that sometimes in the woods in the early dawn, “he would walk very slowly, just quietly putting down his foot and then waiting before the next step—a habit he said which he had practised in the tropical forests of Brazil. In this way, he used to see many interesting things in animal life; once he watched a vixen playing with her cubs at only a few feet distance, for some time.”
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