He is the soul of goodness and kindness, and he never blunders in matters of sentiment or emotion. He doesn’t blunder in anything, for the matter of that, but you know in those matters how fatally easy it is to go wrong. After the cold misery of the last three years I feel as though someone has come and put a fur cloak round me. Or like one shipwrecked on a lonely island, and I have found another shipwrecked mariner to help me build a hut and make a fire. He is a widower and I knew his wife and he knew Hubert so we can talk about them. His name is Thomas Terry Tucker and his whole life seems to have been spent in doing good. Also he is fond of laughter and, and likes the same kind of jokes that please me. I am very, very happy. I feel as though I had opened another volume of the book of life (the last volume) and it is full of beautiful stories and poetry.31
Tommy took over the management of Well Hall and ensured that paying guests occupied just two or three bedrooms. One was Russell Green, editor of the influential literary and artistic magazine Coterie. During the autumn of 1920 Edith spotted an advertisement he had placed in the New Statesman seeking accommodation outside London. She offered him a tiny bedroom that overlooked the back lawns. He recalled a crumbling iron-railed balcony and a moat choked with briars and brambles.
Green, who stayed for three months, regarded the household as “a psychological kaleidoscope.” He described Edith, aged sixty-two, as looking her full age with gray hair and gold-rimmed glasses. Yet she was “sprightly and sharp” and possessed a “fairy godmother charm.” She was often in the company of little girls aged between six and ten. He detected “a hint of hardness in the pressure of her lips,” which suggested to him “a very strong and unrebuttable will.”32 Edith seemed unconcerned by aging. She told Berta Ruck that she “never wished to change the outward appearance, or rather the selfness of my body with all its defects.” She found it terribly funny when one old suitor who called to see her exclaimed in obvious distress: “But what has become of all your good looks—your pretty hair, your lovely eyes, your soft little hands?”33
When war ended in November 1918, Edith’s first thought was for Paul. “Thank God for this day!” she wrote in a note to his wife, Gertrude. “Now our boy is safe!” They got on well, but Gertrude seemed rather in awe of Edith and called her Mrs. Tucker until she read a couplet Edith had scribbled on her trademark colored paper:
Gertrude, holding Paul’s dear hand,
Do not call me “Mrs Bland.”
Call me Jane or Peg or Sue
Anything but what you do!34
They settled on MIL and DIL. Sometimes Edith signed her letters “MII,” which was her shorthand for Mother Two.35 She dedicated her poetry collection Many Voices “To my dear Daughter in law and Daughter in love, GERTRUDE BLAND.”
Tommy had worked for the duration of the war, and Edith hoped he would now retire, but he continued to work until May 1921. Occasionally she would accompany him on the ferry. He was “Skipper” and she was “Cook,” which was upgraded to “Mate.” She would grill them a steak or make coffee in the galley. She told Edward Andrade:
I feel fur-wrapped from the cold of old age. Wrapped, indeed, in furs of price, for he is (as my gardener said of him) an “only” man. There is no one like him. I grow fonder of him every day.36
Edith considered Tommy “a born observer” who was blessed with “words to clothe his thoughts and observations.” “If we had time,” she told Harry, “I am sure we could do some good writingwork together.” They did collaborate on stories, articles, and sketches for the Saturday Westminster Gazette, the New Statesman and the New Witness.* Edith wrote up several of his nautical tales and included one, “Tammy Lee’s Jack,” in Five of Us and Madeline (1925), her last book for children, which Rosamund edited after Edith’s death.
Money was shockingly tight by then, and Edith took a loan from Edward Andrade. She also sold some of her precious possessions, letters from Kipling and postcards from Shaw. With Hubert no longer there to keep them together, Alice moved out of Well Hall and went to stay with her sister in Yorkshire, although she did eventually return to London, where she shared a flat with Lillian Evans for a time. Edith was delighted when children’s writer Olive Hill approached her for advice and agreed to move into Well Hall to help her out.
It was clear they simply could not generate enough revenue to continue living in Well Hall. It was time to give it up for a more modest home. In Wings and the Child, she described how the wild and lovely spot she had moved to as the last century came to a close had changed over time:
Once the road from Eltham to Woolwich was a grassy lane with hedges and big trees in the hedges, and wild pinks and Bethlehem stars, and ragged robin and campion. Now the trees are cut down and there are no more flowers. It is asphalt all the way, and here and there seats divided by iron rods so that tired tramps should not sleep on them.37
* A soldier with engineering duties such as building and repairing roads and bridges, laying and clearing mines, etc.
* Blundell, whose real name was F. N. Butterworth, may have known Edith through the Authors’ Club, since he was secretary for a time.
* Archibald Cameron Corbett purchased the Eltham Park Estate and from 1900 to 1914 developed it with well-constructed suburban housing.
* A weekly paper established by Cecil Chesterton in 1912. When Cecil joined the British Army in 1916, his brother G. K. agreed to fill in as editor. Cecil died in a French military hospital in 1918 and G. K. was left in charge.
CHAPTER 22
“TIME WITH HIS MAKE-UP BOX OF LINES AND WRINKLES”
On February 2, 1922, before she left Well Hall, Edith decided to write her will. She was sixty-three by then and in reasonable health, although she was plagued by bronchial complaints that left her gasping and wheezing. She made Tommy her executor and asked a couple called Elliot, paying guests who would take over the lease on Well Hall, to act as her witnesses. Under the terms of her will, her estate was to be divided between Tommy, Paul, and Iris, although she did not anticipate leaving much since publishers had lost interest in her stories and poems. Turning to her adopted children, she wrote: “Rosamund is well provided for by her marriage and John had his full portion of his family’s money in legacies from his father and aunt.”1
It seems she was favoring her natural children, but there was a certain brutal logic to her thinking. John was an undergraduate at Cambridge at the time and had a bright future, while Rosamund’s husband, Clifford Sharp, was well remunerated as editor of the New Statesman. In John’s case, her instincts were correct. He obtained a medical qualification from the Society of Apothecaries in 1924 and registered with the department of pathology at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. He was promoted to Senior Demonstrator of Bacteriology there and spent a good portion of his successful career overseas. Rosamund, in contrast, was left destitute when Sharp’s chronic alcoholism destroyed his career.
Edith invited Ada Breakell and Olive Hill to accompany her to her new home. She even made provision in her will for their right to live there for the remainder of their lives. Ada decided to stay in London, but Olive moved with her and supported her tirelessly to the end of her life.
A last glimpse of Edith at Well Hall was left by Donald Finch, son of an antique dealer from Blackheath. One bitterly cold day in spring 1922, father and son arrived at Well Hall to value items Edith wished to sell. It was Tommy who ushered them in and served them tea. Donald took him for a servant. They waited for Edith in a “dimly lit but cosy room lined with books”:
After about ten minutes we heard someone coming and like a ship in full sail E. Nesbit appeared in the doorway. To me, at first, she seemed a rather awesome person—in black in the fashion of a previous generation—almost Victorian. She was wearing gold spectacles which helped to give her that severe look.
She put young Donald at ease by chatting about his family, and she invited him to select a book from her shelves. He chose The Railway Children, which she inscribed with a personal message on the flyleaf
in her “firm rounded hand.” She also inscribed books for his brother and his two sisters. Donald’s father negotiated a price for her Georgian silver candelabras, which had decorated the long dining table in the stone-flagged hall on so many glittering occasions. They remained in the Finch family for decades.2
Tommy and Edith found the perfect home on Romney Marsh on the southeast coast of England. Romney Marsh had a reputation for witchcraft and lawlessness. Visitors avoided it in ancient times, fearing its unwholesome air might carry plague. Ford Madox Ford, who lived on its fringes, called it “an infectious and holding neighbourhood.” He wrote in Return to Yesterday: “In the Middle Ages they used to say ‘These be the four quarters of the World: Europe, Asia, Africa and the Romney Marsh.’” He knew how captivating it could be and warned: “Once you go there you are apt there to stay.”3
The hamlet of Jesson, likely named after Jesson Farm and renamed St. Mary’s Bay in 1935, was situated in the borderland between Kent and East Sussex, close to St. Mary in the Marsh, but even closer to the sea. At the end of a cul-de-sac behind Jesson Farm stood two decommissioned brick huts that had been used by the British Air Force as a photographic laboratory and a storehouse for medical materials. The whole structure required a great deal of renovation in order to make it habitable, and Tommy and Edith completed much of it themselves. They christened the huts “The Longboat” and “The Jollyboat.” From their windows they could gaze out across the marshes toward the seawall. The huts were connected by a passage they named “The Suez Canal.” Edith brightened the walls with lithographs by Gerald Spencer Pryse and H. R. Millar’s brilliant depiction of the Queen of Babylon from The Story of the Amulet. Her writing room became “the magic room.” It was there that she dedicated her final novel, The Lark:
To T.T. Tucker,
With Love
Jesson St Mary’s,
Romney, Kent
In 1923 she completed To the Adventurous, a collection of short stories with a supernatural twist, but enthusiasm for her work had waned. The Spectator described them as “readable little tales” and suggested: “They might while away time in a doctor’s waiting-room.”4 When novelist and playwright Winifred Ashton, who wrote as Clemence Dane, expressed admiration for Edith children’s books at this time and begged her to write another, Edith admitted that publishers “tell me that children don’t want my sort of book any more.”5 Her last book for children, Five of Us and Madeline, was considered one of her weakest.
She still had literary admirers. When Gladys Bronwyn Stern had visited Well Hall with Eva Courlander, she was taken aback to find such a celebrated author baking dozens of cakes and pies. Now she came to Romney Marsh with her husband and writing partner, outspoken New Zealander Geoffrey Holdsworth. When he chastised Edith for simply disposing of her characters at the end of Dormant, she confessed that she had simply grown too tired of them to deal with them as she wished. Gladys and Geoffrey were both in poor health, so they were grateful for Edith’s “almost divine kindness and understanding.” In a letter of thanks, Gladys assured her: “You are quite the nicest and most comforting person I have ever met.”6
Another welcome visitor was the “wildly dramatic” Agnes Thorndike. Edith knew her from Dymchurch, where she owned adjoining coastguard’s cottages on Marine Terrace. She brought her adult children, Sybil and Russell, both actors, although Sybil was the more famous and Russell had a larger reputation as author of the Christopher Syn mysteries, which he wrote while sitting on the seawall at Dymchurch. It was Russell who identified the sandpit in Five Children and It, a gravel pit “like a giant’s wash-hand basin,” as the one in St. Margaret’s in Rochester, where Sybil and he had played as children.7
Sybil enjoyed Edith’s company and was intrigued by her “contempt for conventionally ‘good’ children whose main virtues were keeping quiet and keeping clean.” She noted her preference for children who were “curious, creative and considerate.” During the summer of 1922 Sybil visited with her son John and he described the welcome they received from the “tiny stocky man with a beard” who was “almost a caricature of an old sailor”:
“Avast there me hearties!” he would shout as Anxious Annie [their car] drove up to the bungalow. “Come aboard. Tea’s ready in the Long Boat but Madam’s titivating herself in the Jolly Boat.”8
In 1921 Edith’s friend Athene Seyler, an actress, lent her holiday house in Dymchurch to a young writer friend named Noël Coward. He was bicycling around the district looking for a home for his mother that he could use as a writing retreat on weekends. He took a cottage in Romney Marsh, which he described in his autobiography Present Indicative as “nestling up against a public house [the Star Inn] in the village of St Mary in the Marsh.” It had four rooms and outside sanitation but he loved the “superb view from the upper windows of unlimited sheep.”9
Coward was a huge fan of Edith’s stories and was thrilled to discover she lived nearby “with her husband, and a gentle friend, in a series of spacious huts.” He wrote in Present Indicative:
There was a second-hand book-shop on the way where I could buy “back numbers” of the Strand Magazine for a penny each, and I hoarded my pocket money until I could buy a whole year’s worth in order to read the E. Nesbit story right through without having to wait for the next instalment. I read “The Phoenix and the Carpet,” and “Five Children and It,” also “The Magic City,” but there were a few numbers missing from that year, so I stole a coral necklace from a visiting friend of Mother’s, pawned it for five shillings, and bought the complete book at the Army and Navy Stores. It cost four-and-six, so that including the fare (penny half-return, Battersea Park to Victoria) I was fivepence to the good. In later years I told E. Nesbit of this little incident and I regret to say that she was delighted.10
Coward called on Edith and was relieved to find her “as firm, as nice, and as humorous as her books had led me to expect.”11 She was, he noted in a letter to his friend, children’s author Noel Streatfeild, “absolutely charming with greyish-white hair and a rather sharp sense of humour.”12 He left a description of Tommy too: “The skipper, her husband, was a grand old man, who loved her and guarded her devotedly through her last, rather sad years.”13
Edith grew fond of this talented young man and was content to discuss his plays for hours at a time. She seemed less keen on his mother and appears to have taken little trouble to hide this, since Violet Coward decided she was “stuck-up.”14 But it was Violet who suggested that Noël hire Iris Bland as costume designer for London Calling, his first publicly produced musical. He is said to have replied: “I’m sure no daughter of Nesbit could make anything in the least ‘chic’ and one can’t jeopardise one’s chances of success by promiscuous charity.”15
Edith could be sharp, and much of this sharpness was the result of worry and pain. As 1922 came to a close and the weather turned colder, she was laid low with bronchial complaints. Something was dreadfully amiss, since she struggled to eat and lost a great deal of weight. She rarely got out. When she engaged the postman’s daughter to help her with letters and papers, she admitted that this girl was “the only new person I have seen lately.”16 It was then that she renewed her friendship with Berta Ruck. They had been estranged since 1909, and it was Berta who took the blame for the breach and initiated the reconciliation. She was aware that Edith had remarried and had “heard legends of breezy unconventionality and Old Saltiness.” At a fancy-dress dance she attended, a “large young man in the dress of a Hawaiian native” had called her by name and asked if she remembered his sitting on her lap. She “thought he had drink taken,” but apologized when he introduced himself as Dr. John Bland.17 When she bumped into Iris and Pandora, she remarked on the little girl’s strong resemblance to her grandmother. Later Edith remarked to her: “When I see Pandora in her Eighteen Seventy-Two frock, I see my own ghost: only I had less nose, and not quite such big eyes.”18
In 1923, when Berta learned from Iris that Edith was gravely ill, she sent a brief no
te with a copy of her latest book. Edith invited her to visit but warned her that she was very ill. “I suppose I shall not get well again,” she wrote matter-of-factly. “But like Charles II, I take an unconscionable time over the business.” She had not lost her self-deprecating humor. “You would not know me, I am so thin,” she wrote. “Once a Rubens Venus in figure, I am now more like a pre-Raphaelite St Simeon Stylites.”19 That summer Berta made her way to the huts on Romney Marsh and was greeted by a “short, hatless, collarless, unmistakably sea-faring figure, bearded like Captain Kettle.” She found Edith lying “in the pose of someone who is too tired: too tired for more,” and she described how altered her friend appeared:
Her hair, that I knew brown as garden-earth, was grey as frost. There was no colour in her cheeks. Her hands—that was what shook me; her hands that used to be sun-burned brown as a sandal from her rowing and her garden-work were now so strangely white. Not a trace of tan, but the freckles . . . a challenge! They stood out, those freckles on the pale skin like a challenge from another century’s arduous and ardent summers. She looked up at me and with that old imperiousness said: “You’re very late, girl?” I swallowed the lump in my throat and admitted: “Fifteen years.” She gave a little approving nod, as at a piece of “theatre” she liked.20
Berta noted with relief that, despite her obvious frailty, Edith’s nature was characteristically warm:
The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit Page 33
