The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit

by Eleanor Fitzsimons

  Edith loved the story of how Margaret Roper had kept her father’s head in the original house, pickled in spices. There are echoes of this macabre tale in Salome and the Head. She believed the house was haunted and told Andrew Lang she had evidence of a ghost in the garden. He responded:

  The ghost in the garden is usually the ghost in the house. Possibly if you tried a planchette he might communicate. At all events nothing is lost by experiment.19

  Apparently one of Edith’s ghosts played the spinet, but always in the next room, while another had a disconcerting habit of standing behind her and sighing softly as she worked.

  One of the first people to visit Well Hall was American writer and utopian feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. While visiting London she attended a meeting of the Fabian Society and described them as “that group of intelligent, scientific, practical and efficient English Socialists.” She was struck by the odd costume adopted by several members, “knee-breeches, soft shirts, woolen [sic] hose and sandals.” Of Edith she wrote: “Mrs Hubert Bland asks to be introduced and asks me to dinner.” This signaled “the beginning of a most pleasant friendship with a delightful family.”20 In The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she described her “delightful visit” to Well Hall:

  The earlier mansion, built for Margaret Roper by her father, Sir Thomas Moore [sic], had been burned, and replaced by this one which they said “was only Georgian.” Behind the house, just across a little vine-walled bridge, was a large rectangular lawn, surrounded by thick-grown trees and shrubs, outside which lay the moat that once guarded the older building. Here, in absolute privacy, those lovely children could run barefoot, play tennis and badminton, wear any sort of costume; it was a parlor out of doors. We all joined in merry games, acted little plays and fairy-tales, and took plentiful photographs.21

  Since Edith had developed an interest in photography, she may well have taken these “plentiful photographs.” Prominent in several is Martha, the bulldog she immortalized in her Bastable stories. Martha also appears in “Fortunatus Rex & Co.” from Nine Unlikely Tales. An old lady who wishes to protect her orchard demands that the king provide her with “a fierce bull-dog to fly at the throat of any one who should come over the wall”:

  So he got her a stout bull-dog whose name was Martha, and brought it himself in a jewelled leash.

  “Martha will fly at any one who is not of kingly blood,” said he. “Of course she wouldn’t dream of biting a royal person; but, then, on the other hand, royal people don’t rob orchards.”22

  As 1899 came to a close, Edith gave birth to a child, but it was stillborn or died shortly after delivery, and they buried the tiny corpse in their new garden. At the end of The Red House, Chloe and Len welcome “a very, very small usurper,” a “pussy-kitten,” into their new home, who makes her entrance as “a fat, pink fist thrust out from beneath the pink eider-down.” There was a real baby at Well Hall too. On October 6, 1899, Alice gave birth to a healthy baby boy. They celebrated his birthday on October 21 and named him John Oliver Wentworth Bland, but he was nicknamed the Lamb. Once again Hubert was the father, and Edith agreed to raise him as her own.

  John was considerably younger than the other Bland children. Paul, who was nineteen by then, worked at the London Stock Exchange. Iris, aged eighteen and a talented artist like her mother, was studying at the Slade School of Art. Fabian and Rosamund, who were fourteen and thirteen, were both at school. Edith dedicated Five Children and It, which was published in 1902:

  TO JOHN BLAND

  My Lamb, you are so very small

  You have not learned to read at all.

  Yet never a printed book withstands

  The urgence of your dimpled hands.

  So, though this book is for yourself,

  Let mother keep it on the shelf

  Till you can read. O days that pass,

  That day will come too soon, alas!

  She populated Five Children and It with her own children. Cyril took Paul’s middle name; Iris became Anthea, the Greek word for “blossom”; Fabian was Robert; and Rosamund became Jane, who, like the girl who inspired her, was known affectionately by the family nickname Pussy. In Five Children and It, the Lamb is called Hilary, but he is really John, “the original little tiresome beloved Lamb,” and “they called him that because ‘Baa’ was the first thing he ever said.”23

  The real-life Lamb was a precocious child with an abiding interest in science. It was said that he read books on biology and cell life from the age of five.24 A chemist in Eltham, who had started out as a junior apprentice in a shop on Well Hall Parade, remembered weighing a young Bland child in the shop’s wicker scales. This can only have been John. This man described the Bland family as “distinguished but very friendly and ordinary.” He found the children polite, intelligent, friendly, and bright, and he was struck by how Edith treated them all equally.25

  On October 25, 1899, when John was less than three weeks old, Edith received news that her half-sister Saretta had died at the age of fifty-five. She dedicated “In Memory of Saretta Deakin,” a moving elegy, to Saretta’s daughter Dorothea. Edith too had a health scare that year. Confined to bed with what she assumed was lumbago, she was horrified when her doctor diagnosed stomach cancer and insisted on an operation. While this was being arranged, she left her bed to entertain visitors, among them Laurence Housman, who knew of her diagnosis and testified that she “carried us through the evening with colours flying, apparently in the happiest spirits possible.”26 Happily, it transpired that she had been misdiagnosed. She confided in Housman that the whole affair made her realize she had no fear of death, a discovery that satisfied her enormously.

  Shaken by the experience and the loss of her half-sister, she headed for Dymchurch, were her spirits were always restored. Several years later, after her Bastable and Psammead stories had been published, she received a series of heartwarming letters from another writer who took inspiration from the coastal Kent landscape. In “Dymchurch Flit,” which he included in his fantasy Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), Rudyard Kipling would write of Old Hobden’s wife, one of the “Marsh folk,” who hails from “Dymchurch under the Wall.”27 Edith admired Kipling enormously. Oswald Barron and she had dedicated The Butler in Bohemia to him. When she reviewed A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad (1896) for the National Observer, she remarked of his poems: “one or two have yielded a little to the wide and wonderful influence of Mr. Kipling.”28 In November 1896 she had invited Kipling to contribute to a magazine for children she was planning to edit.* It came to nothing. She filled her Bastable stories with references to Kipling. In The Story of the Treasure Seekers, Oswald declares of the detective stories of Émile Gaboriau: “Of course they’re not like Kipling but they’re jolly good stories.” When the children meet a poet who “didn’t talk a bit like a real lady, but more like a jolly sort of grown-up boy in a dress and hat,” she declares: “I am very pleased to meet people who know their Jungle Book.” Their father tells them that this woman “wrote better poetry than any other lady alive now.”29 Edith enjoyed inserting herself into her books. She is Mrs. Bax in The New Treasure Seekers (1904), who has short hair and gold spectacles and smokes cigarettes surreptitiously.

  In The Story of the Treasure Seekers, at the end of a chapter titled “The Divining Rod,” Oswald declares:

  But that is another story. I think that is such a useful way to know when you can’t think how to end up a chapter. I learnt it from another writer named Kipling. I’ve mentioned him before, I believe, but he deserves it!30

  In The Wouldbegoods he describes Kipling as “a true author and no rotter.” When the children play The Jungle Book, he insists: “I shall be Mowgli. The rest of you can be what you like—Mowgli’s father and mother, or any of the beasts.”

  Edith must have been delighted when Kipling expressed his admiration for her children’s stories. In March 1903 he wrote to her from South Africa, where he was living at the time:

  Dear Mrs Nesbit-Bland,

>   Your letter of the 15th Feb comes out to me here but not the Red House [her novel]. I will go into Cape Town and get it from the bookseller.

  It has been on the tip of my pen to write to you again and again—on the “Would-be-goods” several times because I laughed over them riotously; but more particularly about the Psammead yarns.

  My kiddies are five and seven (they can’t read thank goodness!) and they took an interest in the psammead stories—a profound and practical interest. Their virgin minds never knew one magazine from another till it dawned upon Elsie that “a thing called the Strand,” “with a blue cover and a cab” was where the Psammead tales lived. Since which as the advertisements say I knew no peace. I have been sent for Strands in the middle of the month, I have had to explain their non-arrival; and I have had to read them when they came. They were a dear delight to the nursery and they were discussed and rediscussed in all possible lights. You see we have a sandpit in our garden and there was always a chance of a Psammead.

  I wish I could tell you what a joy it gave them and how they revelled in the fun of it. A kiddie laughing at a joke is one of the sweetest sights under Heaven and our nursery used to double up and rock with mirth. They were very indignant when the series came to an end. They profoundly disapproved of Little Red Indians story. Why, I cannot say. It is a matter beyond me. They like best the magic gold and the attempt to buy horses and carriages, and next to that the growing up of the Baby.

  In another year I shall give ’em the Would-be-goods again. They’ve had bits of it but it doesn’t appeal, like the Psammead, to their years. If it isn’t impertinence to say so I’ve been watching your work and seeing it settle and clarify and grow tender (this sounds like a review but it isn’t). With great comfort and appreciation.

  Very sincerely yours,

  Rudyard Kipling31

  He wrote from Sussex the following year, to enthuse about The Phoenix and the Carpet:

  Dear Madam,

  I take the present of yr book about Carpets in a kind spirit though it has not done me much good personally and the trouble and Fuss in the past on account of forgetfulness when I was ordered to buy serial Strands at the Station which is all of three (3) miles uphill you should have known to have appreciated. My orders were that any time I went that way to bring back a Strand and you know owing I presume to Sir G. Newnes’s stinginess the Publication only comes out once a month but that didn’t matter to them worth a cuss on account of their Innocence and I had to explain that too. Besides they couldn’t read. . . . they got the Governess to read to them and me afterwards (not more than three times) and their mother just all the time . . . it came to fighting over looking at the pictures and splitting the Strand down Sir George Newnes’s back cover . . . so when the book came all in one piece . . . I no sooner had got it than both the two of them found out by watching the Post I suppose and they have Jumped it and took it off already and God knows I am sorry for the Governess first and me after and their mother too because it will all have to be read over again. They done just precisely the same about the Psammead whose title should not have been Five Children and It because everyone calls him by his Christian name . . . a name is just as important to a Book as a Baby and it is born more frequent. . . . The consequence is they are highly delighted in the School Room though they say they knew it all before and they want a lot more of the same sort quick. I am to tell you this and—I am to send you their love.

  I am yrs respectfully,

  Rudyard Kipling32

  They never met, and her view of him soured in 1906 when she convinced herself that he had plagiarized The Story of the Amulet in his Puck of Pook’s Hill. She complained indignantly to H. G. Wells, who had set his novel Kipps in and around Dymchurch, and asked for his opinion on the matter. Ironically, they too would fall out a short time later. It seems she based her accusation against Kipling on his inclusion in Puck of Pook’s Hill of a sharp-tongued fairy and two time-traveling children. His timing seemed suspicious too. While The Story of the Amulet was serialized in The Strand Magazine from May 1905, Puck of Pook’s Hill started seven months later, in January 1906, but experts suggest that Kipling was a slow writer and began Puck of Pook’s Hill as early as September 1904.

  Although he had praised Kipling in a lecture he delivered to the Fabian Society, Hubert took Edith’s side. In “The Decadence of Rudyard Kipling,” which appeared in the Manchester Chronicle in 1910, he wrote of “the obvious, the lamentable, the almost inexplicable decline of his [Kipling’s] literary power.” He admitted that he had read little of Puck of Pook’s Hill, but insisted that he had read its sequel, Rewards and Fairies, with “puzzled dismay.” He was particularly disparaging about Kipling’s child characters and described them as “two little sawdust-stuffed dolls, one in knickerbockers and the other in skirts.”33

  * The name derives from deme, an Old English word for “judge” or “arbiter,” and in medieval times it was the administrative seat of Romney Marsh. As the head magistrate was called the “Leveller of the Marsh Scotts,” a tax known as a “Scot-tax” was levied on residents to fund the upkeep of the seawall. People who lived just beyond the boundaries and therefore not liable for this tax were said to have got away “Scot-free.”

  * The house was demolished in 1931, and the grounds form Well Hall Pleasaunce—a tranquil garden in a bustling urban setting.

  * When Sir Gregory Page bought the property in 1733, he pulled down the old Roper mansion and built Well Hall outside the moat. Later it was occupied by a man named Arnold, watchmaker to George III. It was leased to a Major Nicholls in 1818, and it operated as a preparatory school from 1880 to 1890.

  * The magazine was rejected by the publisher Edith had in mind. A successful children’s magazine was launched some time later by Scottish journalist and educator Arthur Mee, but she never contributed to it.

  CHAPTER 14

  “MY SON; MY LITTLE SON, THE HOUSE IS VERY QUIET”

  At eleven o’clock on the morning of Thursday, October 18, 1900, while Fabian Bland, aged fifteen, was digging in the garden, the family doctor arrived at Well Hall accompanied by his anaesthetist. It seems Edith had forgotten they were expected, since she had to be roused from her bed. She summoned Fabian and instructed him to wash and change his clothes. As he had been suffering from a series of debilitating colds for some time, the decision had been taken to remove his adenoids, a procedure considered routine at the time and performed in the patient’s home under general anesthetic. It seems entirely possible that no one thought to remind Fabian to fast beforehand. This may explain why he never came to after the operation.

  When the medics were finished, they left Fabian sleeping and instructed the family to wake him after a time. Although Edith, Hubert, and Alice tried desperately, they could not rouse him. Demented with grief, Edith swathed his lifeless body in blankets and hot water bottles in an attempt to warm him back to life. Eventually she allowed the coroner to be called, and while she waited she placed sixteen lit candles around his body to mark the sixteenth birthday he would never reach.1 Fabian’s death certificate attributes his death to “Syncope following administration of chloroform properly administered for performance of necessary operation.” This finding is generally used to explain a temporary loss of consciousness that results from insufficient blood flow to the brain. In Fabian’s case this loss of consciousness was permanent.

  The tragedy ripped the family asunder. Three decades later, Paul could recall how his mother was “absolutely distracted” with grief. Rosamund, who was thirteen at the time, told Doris Langley Moore that she discovered Edith was not her mother that day because she shouted at Hubert: “Why couldn’t it have been Rosamund!” Helen Macklin, who was visiting and stayed on to comfort Edith, offered a contradictory version of events. She admitted that Edith had told her Rosamund was not her child that night, and that she seemed unsettled by her presence, but she swore that Rosamund suspected nothing for some time to come. Rosamund’s future husband, Clifford Dyce Sh
arp, supported this version since he believed that his wife only discovered that Alice was her mother in 1906.

  Iris learned of the tragedy when Hubert met her off the train from London. Although Hubert’s relationship with Fabian had been fraught, probably because they were both strong-willed and irrepressible, he was devastated by the loss of his son. In Letters to a Daughter, he wrote:

  This autumn weather, this dismal lingering death of summer, oppresses my soul, and one should be in high fettle to talk intelligently of love. Now I am not that to-day as I look out of the library window and see those big funereal cedars lords of all, the whole garden subdued to their sombre humour. Day and night the piteous leaves of all the other trees are falling, falling like slow rain-drops; and at twilight they sound upon the garden paths as the footsteps of ghosts might sound—creepy, creepy.

  When he picked a rose, its pink petals “turned livid as the lips of a corpse; it exhaled, not perfume, but an odour of death.” Even the birds are affected by his enveloping sorrow:

  The birds flutter about aimlessly, they seem to feel there is nothing left for them to do in a world full of sadness, no nests to be builded, no broods to be reared; and they haven’t the heart to sing. . . . Oh, the deathly chill of an empty and tidy nursery.2

  Edith too found solace in writing. She addressed Fabian directly in “The Criminal”:

  My son; my little son, the house is very quiet, because all the other children grew up long ago, and went out into the world. The lamp has just been lighted, but the blinds are not drawn down now. Outside the winter dusk is deepening the shadows in the garden where, in the days when the sun shone, you used to shout and play.3