The children accompanied them on seaside holidays to Deal, Sheerness, Whitstable or Dymchurch, but river holidays, lasting a week, or sometimes just a weekend, were strictly for adults. Edith adored boating, and she used the promise of an impending trip as an incentive to meet her deadlines. In one couplet, she promised:
And I will earn, working like mad,
The Medway, with the Psammead.6
Another begins:
How can I work? The stupid task
That heartless publishers may ask
Is all too hard for me to do,
Dear Medway, since to you, to you,
My thought flies, falling like an arrow,
Amid your meadowsweet and yarrow.7
Noel Griffith often made up a foursome with Edith, Hubert, and Alice on boating holidays. He told Doris Langley Moore that he realized how unconventional the Blands’ marriage was when he accompanied them to Whitstable. Rather than wearing bathing suits, Alice and Edith would tuck their shifts up and dive straight into the sea. When Alice emerged from the sea, Hubert commented approvingly on her figure and invited him to do the same. He regarded Hubert as “very hot-blooded . . . abnormally sexual, too much so for the tastes of his wife.”8
Edith’s relationship with Griffith is difficult to decipher. In the account he gave Doris Langley Moore, he described her as “a mixture of sensuality and intellectuality” and suggested, albeit coyly, that her response to Hubert’s flagrant infidelity was to take lovers of her own. He indicated that he was one of them. They were certainly very close, and Edith named Noël Bastable after him. Griffith was a regular member of Edith’s Medway boating parties. He described how they would hire a double-sculling boat, then “start at Maidstone after buying stores.” They would row to East Peckham, near Yalding, and spend a shilling each on a room in some riverside pub. Languid days were filled with rowing, walking, and swimming. They collected their lunch from some riverside hostelry and ate it at some beauty spot that took their fancy along the way. He remembered “lots of good laughter and lots of good talk,” the talk “being very much of the socialist state of the future.”9
Edith wove memories of these treasured days into her stories and poems. She put a Lord Yalding and a Yalding Castle into The Enchanted Castle, and a Lady Yalding into Man and Maid. In Five Children and It, Uncle Richard takes the children “on the beautiful Medway in a boat.” In Salome and the Head (1909), Edith described how: “They had lunch together in that flat meadow away to the left by Oak Weir, among the roots of the great trees that reach down to the backwater where the water-lilies are.”10 A similar lunch is included in The Incredible Honeymoon:
At Oak Weir they put the boat through the lock, and under the giant trees they unpacked the luncheon-basket they had brought from the Midlothian—how far away and how incredibly out of the picture such a place now seemed!—and sat among the twisted tree roots, and ate and drank and were merry like children on a holiday.11
During their real holidays, as dusk fell, Edith would play her guitar, often strumming a song of her own composition. Her “Medway Song” opens with a nod to her friend Laurence’s older brother, A. E. Housman:
MEDWAY SONG
(Air: Carnaval de Venise)
Let Housman sing of Severn shore,
Of Thames let Arnold sing,
But we will sing no river more
Save this where crowbars ring.
Let others sing of Henley,
Of fashion and renown,
But we will sing the thirteen locks
That lead to Tonbridge town!
Then sing the Kentish river,
The Kentish fields and flowers,
We waste no dreams on other streams
Who call the Medway ours.
When on the level golden meads
The evening sunshine lies,
The little voles among the reeds
Look out with wondering eyes.
The patient anglers linger
The placid stream beside,
Where still with towering tarry prow
The stately barges glide.
Then sing the Kentish river,
The Kentish fields and flowers,
We waste no dreams on other streams
Who call the Medway ours.
On Medway banks the May droops white,
The wild rose blossoms fair,
O’er meadow-sweet and loosestrife bright,
For water nymphs to wear.
And mid the blowing rushes
Pan pipes a joyous song,
And woodland things peep from the shade
As soft we glide along.
Then sing the Kentish river,
The Kentish fields and flowers,
We waste no dreams on other streams
Who call the Medway ours.
You see no freight on Medway boats
Of fashions fine and rare,
But happy men in shabby coats,
And girls with wind-kissed hair.
The world’s a pain forgotten,
And very far away,
The stream that flows, the boat that goes—
These are our world to-day.
Then sing the Kentish river,
The Kentish fields and flowers,
We waste no dreams on other streams
Who call the Medway ours.
William Archer noted that Edith had “a real love for English nature and a keen eye for it.”12 Nowhere is this more evident than in her descriptions of the lovely Kent countryside lying either side of the lazy River Medway. In The Wouldbegoods, she wrote:
We went along the towing path; it is shady with willows, aspens, elders, oaks, and other trees. On the banks are flowers—yarrow, meadow-sweet, willow herb, loose-strife, and lady’s bed-straw.13
Long passages in The Incredible Honeymoon describe the beauty of her beloved Medway, and in Salome and the Head she wrote:
The Medway just above the Anchor (at Yalding, Kent) is a river of dreams. The grey and green of willows and alders mirror themselves in the still water in images hardly less solid-seeming than their living realities. There is pink loosestrife there, and meadow-sweet creamy and fragrant, forget-me-nots wet and blue, and a tangle of green weeds and leaves and stems that only botanists know the names of.14
The real Anchor was a quaint fourteenth-century pub that stood just over the river from the medieval Twyford Bridge and weir. Australian-born poet and nature writer Walter James Turner described it in The Englishman’s Country (1945) as a “beautiful inn with its nooks and corners answering no particular scheme of architecture.” Its origin, he explained, was as a bargeman’s inn, but it became “a favourite anchorage for anglers, who have miles of water, swift or slow to yield them sport.”15
Edith stayed in several of the pubs and inns that punctuated the riverbank. She wrote in Salome and the Head:
If you go to Yalding you may stay at the George, and be comfortable in a little village that owns a haunted churchyard, a fine church, and one of the most beautiful bridges in Europe. Or you may stay at the Anchor, and be comfortable on the very lip of the river.
Her protagonist, Templar, chooses to stay at the Anchor, and Edith describes its proprietor as a “just man.” She may have been referring to John William Freeman, who explained at a hearing to decide on the license in 1909 that he needed to engage rooms at cottages nearby to accommodate extra visitors during the summer season.16 Edith stayed there many times, and she included a description of breakfast there in Salome and the Head:
At the Anchor you breakfast either in a little room whose door opens directly on that part of the garden which is adorned by two round flower-beds edged with the thickest, greenest box you ever saw—this is next door to breakfasting in the garden itself—or you do breakfast in the garden. Once upon a time you used to breakfast in a hornbeam arbour, but now that is given over to bargees. The landlord of the Anchor is a just man, and apportions the beauty of his grounds fairly among his clients.
Her couple from The Incredible Honeymoon, Edward and Katherine, stand “on the landing-stage of the Anchor, looking down on a sort of Sargasso Sea of small craft that stretched along below the edge of the Anchor garden.”18 They take to the water on the very next page, and Edith uses this as an opportunity to condemn the hideously utilitarian architecture that was encroaching on this beloved landscape, a theme she returned to again and again:
A few strokes took them out of sight of the Anchor, its homely, flowered garden, its thatched house, its hornbeam arbor; they passed, too, the ugly, bare house that some utilitarian misdemeanant has built next to it, then nothing but depths of willow copse, green and grey, and the grassy curves of the towing-path where the loosestrife grows, and the willow herb, the yellow yarrow, and the delicate plumes of the meadow-sweet.19
The George in Yalding, a riverside inn that dated back to 1642, provided an alternative to the Anchor. In Salome and the Head, Templar enjoys a drink there:
But he walked up to Yalding and leaned on the bridge and looked down into the mysterious shadowy depths that by daylight are green-water-meadows; saw two white owls fly out from the church tower; heard the church clock strike nine; had a drink at the George and a pleasant word with the George’s good landlord; and went back over the broad, deserted green space, tree-bordered, which Yalding calls the Leas, to that other bridge which is almost as beautiful as Yalding’s, and so to bed in a little bungalow close to the water, and there fell asleep with the sound of the weir soothing him like a lullaby.20
In 1905 Edith sent a note to H. G. Wells, who was due to join them: “I can’t remember whether you were told that our inn at Yalding is the George—it would be dreadful if you were to seek us vainly at the Bull or the Anchor.”21
She was staying at the Rose and Crown on Banbridges Road in East Peckenham when she wrote to her mother: “the river is always beautiful, and soothes me as nothing else does.”22 Iris was with her and had just completed her first term at the Slade School of Fine Art. The Rose and Crown became the bargees* pub in “Coals of Fire,” a story from In Homespun.23 In The Railway Children (1906), she wrote:
There is a nice old-fashioned room at the Rose and Crown where Bargees and their wives sit of an evening drinking their supper beer, and toasting their supper cheese at a glowing basketful of coals that sticks out into the room under a great hooded chimney and is warmer and prettier and more comforting than any other fireplace I ever saw.24
Boating holidays were glorious, but they were arduous too. “On the Medway life is real, life is earnest,” she explained in The Incredible Honeymoon. “You mostly pull a hundred yards, anchor and fish; or if you do go farther from harbour you open your own locks, with your own crowbar.”25 They spent much of their time opening and closing locks; “the Medway strings them quite thickly on her silver thread,” Edith observed. She identified them by name in The Incredible Honeymoon:
Thus the two passed through Stoneham Lock and the next and the next, and then came to the Round Lock, which is like a round pond whose water creeps in among the roots of grass and forget-me-not and spearmint and wild strawberry. And so at last to Oak Weir Lock, where the turtledoves call from the willow wood on the island where the big trees are, and the wide, sunny meadows where the sheep browse all day till the shepherd calls them home in the evening—the shepherd with his dog at his heels and his iron crook, polished with long use and stately as a crozier in a bishop’s hand.26
She was drawing on backbreaking experience when she described the strength and skill required to open each one. “The locks on the Medway are primitive in their construction and heavy to work,” she explained:
There are no winches or wheels or artful mechanical contrivances of weights and levers and cables. There are sluices, and from the sluice-gates posts rise, little iron-bound holes in them, holes in which the urgent nose of the crowbar exactly fits. The boatman leans indolently against the tarred, unshaped tree trunk whose ax-wrought end is the top of the lock gate; the tree trunk swings back above the close sweet-clover mat that edges the lock; the lock gates close—slow, leisurely, and dignified. Then the boatman stands on the narrow plank hung by chains to each lock gate, and with his crowbar chunks up the sluice, with a pleasant ringing sound of iron on iron, securing the raised sluice with a shining iron pin that hangs by a little chain of its own against the front of the lock gate, like an ornament for a gentleman’s fob. If you get your hand under the pin and the sluice happens to sink, you hurt your hand.27
Yet the rewards were rich once you sailed through:
Slowly the lock fills with gentle swirls of foam-white water, slowly the water rises, and the boat with it, the long gates unclose to let you out—slow, leisurely, dignified—and your boat sweeps out along the upper tide, smoothly gliding like a boat in a dream.28
With a poet’s sensibility, Edith let her prose soar to lyrical heights as she described the untamed beauty that lay beyond each lock gate:
The quiet river, wandering by wood and meadow, bordered by its fringe of blossoms and flowering grasses, the smooth backwaters where leaning trees touched hands across the glassy mirror, and water-lilies gleamed white and starry, the dappled shadows, the arch of blue sky, the gay sunshine, and the peace of the summer noon all wrought in one fine spell to banish from their thoughts all fear and dismay, all doubts and hesitations.29
She must be describing herself when she writes of Katherine in The Incredible Honeymoon:
She was very much interested in the opening of the lock gates and deplored the necessity which kept her in the boat, hanging on to the edge of the lock with a boat-hook while he wielded the crowbar.30
Edith was an exceptionally strong swimmer. When Hubert dropped the crowbar while attempting to open the sluice-gates of Yalding lock, without hesitation she swam down to retrieve it.
Holidays were not always taken on the river. On at least one occasion, Edith stayed near the coastal village of Rottingdean on the Sussex South Downs, near where Rudyard Kipling lived. She gave chapter four of The Incredible Honeymoon the title “The South Downs” and placed Edward Basingstoke in this lovely corner of England:
He climbed the cliff above Cuckmere and sat in the sunshine there, where the gulls flashed white wings and screamed like babies; he watched the tide, milk-white with the fallen chalk of England’s edge, come sousing in over the brown, seaweed-covered rocks; he felt the crisp warmth of the dry turf under his hand, and smelt the sweet smell of the thyme and the furze and the sea, and it was all good.31
While she was in Sussex, Edith joined in with companionable cross-country hikes and took jaunts along country lanes in a hired dogcart. When she bumped into Scottish balladeer John Davidson, a regular at John Lane’s tea parties, they organized a cricket match, and he made her laugh by removing his toupee and hanging it from the stumps. The incorrigible Max Beerbohm suggested he wore it not from vanity, but because he believed no one would employ him if he were bald.32 She befriended another young cricketer, one with considerably more talent. Dr. Edwin Percy Habberton Lulham was a medical doctor and a fast bowler for Sussex and England. While tending to their medical needs, he took striking photographs of the Sussex traveler community. He was an accomplished lecturer, and he also wrote poetry as Habberton Lulham. He presented Edith with an inscribed copy of his Songs from the Downs and Dunes (1908).*
Hugh Bellingham-Smith, an accomplished artist and graduate of the Slade, was another young man who joined Edith’s party for a day or two. It was his little brother, Eric, who had shared lessons with Paul and Iris and sparred with Paul in the drawing room of 8 Dorville
Road. Their parents were prominent members of the Fabian Society who lived in Lee. Edith told Ada Breakell that Henry Bellingham-Smith was “interested in social questions and dried fruit—married—very much.” Frances Bellingham-Smith was, she reported, “very youthful and gushing.”33 Later in life Hugh earned a reputation as an accomplished if unremarkable landscape painter. He is believed to have painted a full-length portrait of Edith for the Blackheath Art Club, but there is no trace of it. He also illustrated several books of her verse, among them All the Year Round and In the Springtime. He moved to Paris in 1890 to study at the Académie Julian, and they lost touch.
Edith also traveled north to visit Saretta, who lived in the Derbyshire Peak district with her family. They lived for a time just outside the village of Hayfield in a cottage named Paradise, nestled in the valley of the River Sett. Local legend had it that English cleric and theologian John Wesley named this cottage while he was preaching there during the 1740s because he admired the view so much.
Saretta introduced Edith to the Woodcock family who lived at Aspenshaw Hall, a rambling old house that was filled with dogs, roaring fires, and relaxed attitudes. Fanny Woodcock told Doris Langley Moore that her family was “dazzled, amazed and amused by their visitor, who would stretch out with the dogs on the hearthrug.” She described how her “hair was cut short and her uncorseted figure was clothed in a flowing wool gown.” Edith never played up to her status as a celebrated author, nor did she hint at any difficulties in her family life. Instead, Fanny Woodcock remembered that “her manner was as gay and careless as a child’s” and described her as:
An exceptionally handsome, tall, slender, young woman with a figure at once strong, graceful and supple; eyes dark but bright and very watchful, beautiful eyebrows and a fine, broad forehead half-covered by a fringe of naturally curly brown hair; a narrow, delicate nose which faintly and most attractively misses regularity; a firmly modelled mouth, rather thin, but sweet in its expression—the upper lip and the chin somewhat shorter than is common. All the forms of the face are definite to the point of sharpness, and this, with the alertness of her glance, and the quick movements of her head, suggests to almost everyone who sees her the epithet “bird-like.”34
The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit Page 18
