Night Thoughts of a Country Landlady

by Edith Olivier

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  Contents

  Edith Olivier

  Dedication

  PREFACE

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Edith Olivier

  Night Thoughts of a Country Landlady

  Edith Olivier (1872–1948) was born in the Rectory at Wilton, Wiltshire, in the late 1870s. Her father was Rector there and later Canon of Salisbury. She came from an old Huguenot family which had been living in England for several generations, and was one of a family of ten children. She was educated at home until she won a scholarship to St Hugh’s College, Oxford. Her first novel, The Love Child, was published in 1927 and there followed four works of fiction: As Far as Jane’s Grandmother’s (1928), The Triumphant Footman (1930), Dwarf’s Blood (1930) and The Seraphim Room (1932). Her works of non-fiction were The Eccentric Life of Alexander Cruden (1934), Mary Magdalen (1934), Country Moods and Tenses (1941), Four Victorian Ladies of Wiltshire (1945), Night Thoughts of a Country Landlady (1945), her autobiography, Without Knowing Mr. Walkley (1938) and, posthumously published, Wiltshire (1951).

  Dedication

  TO THE

  STRANGERS

  WITHIN MY GATES

  PREFACE

  Like most living creatures, Miss Emma Nightingale possessed two distinct personalities. In her case, they were the Emma-by-day, and the Emma-by-night. The night creature was certainly less savage than are some of what are snobbishly termed the “ lower animals”. Nobody would confuse her with the lion roaring after his prey; with the cat wauling unreservedly for a mate; or with the owl filing the air with doleful hootings while he floats round the barn after mice. No. Miss Nightingale went early to bed; and, once there, she lay quietly, unaware that she was, in some curious way, quite another person from the familiar figure known to her neighbours as they met daily in the village street.

  Most people suffer a “dream change” of some sort, though they generally enter it before they are actually in the world of dreams. At nightfall, the most civilised and conventional people revert to the animal, nestling into bed to revel in the sheer physical pleasures of soft pillows, clean sheets, and hot-water bottles. Love and lust are both more potent at night, as the Hebrew poet knew when he wrote, “I sleep but my heart waketh”. And the spirit too wakes into a new quickness, as the body grows drowsy. Many people, in the small hours of the morning, scribble passionate lyrics of supreme beauty; only to find, next morning, that daylight has washed the beauty away, leaving only ashes. The poignant tragedy of our little lives overwhelms us during wakeful hours of the night. We become King Lear, or the Duchess of Malfi; and by morning we realise there is nothing dramatic about our small worries. They boil down to a chronic inability to balance the debit and the credit sides of our personal accounts.

  Then again, how brilliantly amusing one is at night; and we often laugh loudly at our own jokes, so long as there is no one near to make us tell what we are laughing at. No doubt, both sense and spirit are more alert at night, this is how it came to be that Miss Nightingale’s war-time reminiscences naturally take shape as “night thoughts”.

  She was one of those cultivated and “county” old ladies to be met with in most villages—supremely interested in local affairs, generous to the poor, stern to the evil doer, pardoning to the penitent. She was a leading spirit in all local activities—Church Council, Conservative Association, Women’s Institute, Girls’ Friendly, and Brownies. She also “lived her own life’’, as they say, for she did not consider herself to be altogether of the village. She had moved in wider circles. Her father had been a well-known writer in his day, and his friends had been distinguished people. George Du Maurier was Emma’s godfather, and, on her drawing-room wall, there still hung a pen and ink sketch of her as a little girl signed by the famous Punch artist. During the summer Mss Nightingale still entertained at week-ends, in the little house put at her disposal by the Squire, those of the friends of her youth who were alive. She was not well off, but she had never thought of taking in “Paying Guests’’, and only a European War could have driven her to such a revolution.

  Cut adrift from her old regular ways, and ardently seeking means for putting into practice the high-hearted patriotism in which she had been nurtured, Miss Nightingale now filled the house with strangers, and in the night she mused on their strange ways. She was accustomed to writing at night, for her parents had taught her to write a careful journal. When she went to bed, she always put down in as few words as possible the actual events of the past day. She made no comments. Who would read this, she never thought. The existence of her diary was well known to her friends, for it often came in useful when there was a disagreement in committee, as to which evening in the previous February, the Girls’ Friendly had begun their Lenten working-parties. Except for such utilitarian purposes, the growing pile of books was never disturbed. Miss Emma did not find her old journals interesting; and she had taken the precaution of tying a large label round the bundle which reposed on the floor of her wardrobe. It ran thus:

  TO BE DESTROYED UNREAD WHEN I AM DEAD

  Yet when the war drove her to fill her house with strange guests, it also drove her to fill her diary with strange thoughts. For the first time in her life, she did not merely enter the names of her guests. She wrote down who they were, why they had come to her house, what they were doing, and how they behaved themselves; for these seemed to be the most extraordinary things about them. In the past such details would have been superfluous, for she knew all about her visitors. Everything was taken for granted. No stranger came to stay. And now the remarkable thing about her guests, and indeed about her whole life, was that it, and they, were strange. In this, Miss Nightingale’s experience was shared by village people all over the country. This broadened hospitality, and these unaccustomed contacts, completely changed for the time the character of English country life.

  During a recent “Salvage Week” in our district, Miss Nightingale arrived one afternoon in my house, bent down beneath the burden of between fifty and sixty large cloth-bound exercise books. They were tied together, with, still attached, the forbidding Notice as to their undisturbed destruction.

  She handed me the parcel.

  “Here is some very good salvage,” she said.

  I knew what the books contained.

  “Can you part with them?” I asked. “Aren’t they valuable for reference?”

  “Not now, I think. Everything is changing so much that we never need to refer to the past. It doesn’t apply.”

  I was seized by a sudden tenderness for this bundle of notebooks. I knew how much it contained of Mss Nightingale’s life.

  “I believe that in the future, we shall often have to look back to see what we did in the past,” I said, “ and your diary has generally been our only book of reference.”

  “It doesn’t apply now,” she repeated in a sad voice. “The last three years are the only ones that count, and even with thos
e, the Council Clerk gets so many new instructions (over six hundred in six months, he says) that the notes in my diary about what we did two months ago, are now completely out of date. It has no value except as salvage.”

  I saw by her face that it had cost Miss Nightingale a great deal to sacrifice her diary, and I felt that a little respite might make it easier for her.

  “The last three years,” I said musingly. “ We might find it very useful to be able to refer to those. I suppose you wouldn’t allow me to look through them before they are finally destroyed?”

  I could see that this suggestion was a relief to Miss Nightingale. She was fond of me, and had confidence in my judgment.

  “Read what you like, and make what use you like, of what you read. I am not dead yet,” she continued grimly, “so that Notice hasn’t come into effect. But you will see that I am right. My old diaries are not going to be of use to anybody now.”

  She retained a purely utilitarian attitude towards her diaries, and I guessed that, as far as that was concerned, she was probably right in her estimate.

  I watched Miss Nightingale go down the garden path and through the little gate, and she seemed to be changed. She had lost something from her brisk youthful walk. She had left a part of herself in my house with her diaries.

  I sprang to my feet to say one last word. The last three or four volumes of the diary had been on my lap, and my sudden movement sent them settling to the ground. Even the noise of their falling did not attract her attention. She would not look back. I watched her go.

  I never saw her again. The next morning, the whole village was shocked by the news that Miss Nightingale had died suddenly in the night. Perhaps I was less surprised than anyone. I had been troubled all the evening by that last glimpse of her when she left her diaries behind in my house. It seemed that she had consciously made an end.

  I decided to interpret her last words to me, as making me, in some measure, her literary executor. I carefully read all the volumes through, remembering that she had trusted me to deal with them as I thought best; and now I felt that she had said the true word about her diary.

  “It doesn’t apply. The last three years are the only ones that count.”

  She was entirely right, in so far as she had looked on her diary as nothing but a summarised Minute Book of all the organisations to which she belonged. It had had its use. We had often proved this; but now it was extremely dull and she had been wise in thinking that it had better be destroyed.

  But with the beginning of the war this diary of hers had completely changed its character. In it, she had described her journey from Derbyshire on one of the last days of August 1939, as “a Watershed”. It was to cut the landscape of her life in two, and now I saw that it had also cut in two the character of her diaries. If I were to call the later volumes “post-impressionist’’, I might arouse false expectations. Miss Nightingale’s writing in itself could never have that character. But I use the word as it is defined in the Oxford Dictionary. It is there said to apply to work “in which the representation of form is subordinated to the subjective view of the artist”. This is the change which came over Miss Nightingale’s diaries during the last three years. Her subjective views appear for the first time.

  I believe that in their new form the diaries do “ apply”. They give a picture of one aspect of rural life which during the war came into being in many country places—I mean the effect upon them of the influx of strangers in their midst. So disturbing a change did not fit into the stiff and formal mode of Miss Nightingale’s previous diaries. Yet she was impelled to note it down. But instead of the curt notes recording merely each day’s engagements, she now described in some detail what had actually happened. She wrote what she thought about what she did. This writing is like Miss Nightingale’s private talk with her friends. Sometimes she was rather a racy conversationalist, and now her records of the coming of the lodgers, and the way in which the village entertained them, reproduced some of the spice of her personality.

  I have compiled this book from what she actually wrote in her final volumes, which are certainly far more interesting than the others. The early ones prove her to have been an active and conscientious worker by day. Now she appears as an equally active observer by night. Till now she had never exhibited in writing this side of her character, though her friends knew it. All the sentences I have printed here are hers, though I have rearranged them in order to bring them into chapters. Because of this, as well as for their richer material, the diaries have now lost the dryly journalière style to which we were well accustomed at our committee meetings.

  EDITH OLIVIER

  Chapter I

  MISS NIGHTINGALE IN DERBYSHIRE

  For over a year, we lived under the imminent threat of war, and a year is a long time—long enough to make a habit out of expecting something that never happens. The expectation has so far been so much more real than the event. It is like the Day of Judgment. Those people who believe most sincerely in that (and I am one) would yet be astounded if one morning they were awakened by the Last Trump, instead of by the well known and rather irritating barn door cock; or if they looked out of the window to see, instead of the postman on his bicycle, or the milk cart unloading bottles at every door, a light in the top of the sky, overhead an army of angels, and the Great Scene of the Opening of the Books being enacted. Many of us have always believed that this will happen one day; but no one can deny that when it does happen, it will cause some surprise.

  With this kind of sceptical belief we continued to think of a war with Germany, throughout the late summer of 1939. All the time, we spoke of it as a possibility: and all the time in our hearts we thought of it as an impossibility. War is so antipathetic to most English people, that it was almost equally antipathetic to believe that any country could desire it. Especially as it seemed that no one in the world would gain anything by it. We had heard the cry of “wolf” before, even a year before at Munich; and then Mr. Chamberlain and his umbrella had protected us from the Beast who seemed preparing to spring.

  In August I spent a long-anticipated holiday in Derbyshire. I love sight-seeing, and the great houses which I visited had all the historic splendour of my dreams. But about them, there seemed to be something ominous in the air, as if a snowstorm should suddenly sweep across a harvest field. The sheaves would still be standing in their hyles; the greater part of the heavens would still have the brilliant blue of an August day, yet a cloud would have hastened by, portending the coming of another season. It is difficult to explain, for the anxiety was not definite enough to spoil those brilliant days. They were not “ Les beaux jours quand nous étions si malheureux,” but rather les beaux jours quand nous apercevions de loin le malheur qui attendait. After all, that might sometimes be rather a cosy feeling.

  The historic houses of Derbyshire—Hardwick, Chatsworth— Haddon—seem to be, in St. Paul’s words, “ not made with hands”. All great architecture is like that—having an existence apart from its concrete shape, as it did exist in the architect’s mind before the building arose. But these famous houses exist too in virtue of certain people—mostly women— who have lived in them. To Bess of Hardwick we do indeed owe the construction of the wonderful house linked with her name, but even she was no architect. She was a vital, wilful woman, for whom houses were letters written in the only alphabet designed on a scale large enough to express her personality. Even so, she did not write the words with her own hand. She dictated them. Her many houses stand like decrees or ukases issued by an empress.

  Dominating manlike woman as she was, Bess of Hardwick did really live in the masterpiece which, in its outward form, expresses her so vividly. Its great galleries speak of the day when queens and duchesses lived in state. Those grand houses were the essential settings for a grandeur which their owners never doffed. Small rooms could not have contained it. Wearing it, they moved through the “ daily round” which must make the life of every human being, in all ages and in every state of
life. In those splendid days this “daily round” was framed on such a scale that in order to maintain it duly, it called for hoops and ruffs and great jewels, as well as for an accompanying retinue. If Hardwick seems unhomelike today, that is because it was built for people who couldn’t have lived in anything smaller; so it cannot be quite a home for men and women who live simply, as the greatest noblemen live to-day.

  It demands the duke’s train of equerries, and the duchess’s group of young ladies practising embroidery under her eye.

  Needlework is in many ways the most homely of the Arts; and nowhere can there exist a greater wealth of needlework still in its original place on the walls of a house, than can be seen at Hardwick. Much of it was worked by its famous owner and her still more famous prisoner; but, as they sewed, the Countess and Mary Queen of Scots were surrounded by their households. The households were sewing too. This is why the Great Gallery speaks so clearly of those women of the past. We can almost hear their voices—the capable arrogant Countess, the tragic heart-winning Queen; but the language they speak is foreign to us to-day.

  Foreign too, in a way, is the amazing staircase, which seems not to have been built, but to have evolved its own pride and beauty, forcing the stone into life to create it, and then forcing that same stone into immobility to preserve it. Foreign again is the Great Gallery, which in my eyes is the only rival of the Wilton Double Cube, in its claim to be the finest room in England. Each is unique, and in a completely different style. Running round Hardwick Gallery is that wonderful Tudor frieze, alive with actual portraits of the Derbyshire Yeomanry in Queen Elizabeth’s day. The figures are in relief and their clothes are brightly painted. Below them hang the famous Hardwick tapestries—not only one set, but several superimposed one over the other. There were too many in the house for them all to be exhibited at once, so they were hung to be shown in succession during the different seasons of the year.