PART III
GROWING UP
I
Life took on a completely different complexion after my fathera€?s death. I stepped out of my childa€?s world, a world of security and thoughtlessness, to enter the fringes of the world of reality. I think there is no doubt that from the man of the family comes the stability of the home. We all laugh when the phrase comes, a€?Your father knows best,a€but that phrase does represent what was so marked a feature of later Victorian life. Fathera€“the rock upon which the home is set. Father likes meals punctually; Father mustna€?t be worried after dinner; Father would like you to play duets with him. You accept it all unquestioningly. Father provides meals; Father sees that the house works to rule; Father provides music lessons.
Father took great pride and pleasure in Madgea€?s company as she grew up. He enjoyed her wit and her attractiveness; they were excellent companions to each other. He found in her, I think, some of the gaiety and humour my mother probably lackeda€“but he had a soft spot in his heart for his little girl, the afterthought, little Agatha. We had our favourite rhyme:
Agatha-Pagatha my black hen,
She lays eggs for gentlemen,
She laid six and she laid seven,
And one day she laid eleven!
Father and I were very fond of that particular joke.
But Monty, I think, was really his favourite. His love for his son was more than he would feel for any daughter. Monty was an affectionate boy, and he had great affection for his father. He was, alas, unsatisfactory from the point of view of making a success of life, and father was unceasingly worried about this. In a way, I think, his happiest time, where Monty was concerned, was after the South African War. Monty obtained a commission in a regular regiment, the East Surreys, and went straight from South Africa, with his regiment, to India. He appeared to be doing well and to have settled down in his army life. In spite of fathera€?s financial worries, Monty at least was one problem removed for the time being.
Madge married James Watts about nine months after my fathera€?s death, though a little reluctant to leave mother. Mother herself was urgent that the marriage should take place, and that they should not have to wait longer. She said, and truly I think, that it would be even more difficult for her to part with Madge as time went on and their companionship drew them closer. Jamesa€?s father was anxious for him to marry young. He was just leaving Oxford, and would go straight into the business, and he said it would be happier for him if he could marry Madge and settle down in their own home. Mr Watts was going to build a house for his son on part of his land, and the young couple could settle down there. So things were arranged.
My fathera€?s American executor, Auguste Montant, came from New York and stayed with us a week. He was a large stout man, genial, very charming, and nobody could have been kinder to my mother. He told her frankly that fathera€?s affairs were in a bad mess, and that he had been extremely ill advised by lawyers and others who had pretended to act for him. A lot of good money had been thrown after bad by trying to improve the New York property by half-hearted measures. It was better, he said, that a good deal of the property should be abandoned altogether to save taxes. The income that was left would be very small. The big estate my grandfather had left had disappeared into thin air. H. B. Claflin & Co., the firm in which my grandfather had been partner, would still provide Granniea€?s income, as the widow of a partner, and also a certain income for mother, though not a large one. We three children, under my grandfathera€?s will, would get, in English currency, ?￡100 a year each. The rest of the vast amount of dollars had been also in property, which had gone down hill and fallen derelict, or had been sold off in the past for far too little.
The question arose now whether my mother could afford to live on at Ashfield. Here, I think, mothera€?s own judgment was better than anyone elsea€?s. She thought definitely that it would be a bad thing to stay on. The house would need repairs in the future, and it would be difficult to manage on a small incomea€“possible but difficult. It would be better to sell the house and to buy another smaller house somewhere in Devonshire, perhaps near Exeter, which would cost less to run and would leave a certain amount of money from the exchange to add to income. Although my mother had no business training or knowledge, she had really quite a lot of common sense.
Here, however, she came up against her children. Both Madge and I, and my brother, writing from India, protested violently against selling Ashfield, and begged her to keep it. We said it was our home and we couldna€?t bear to part with it. My sistera€?s husband said he could always spare mother a small addition to her income. If Madge and he came down in the summers they could help with the running expenses. Finally, touched I think by my violent love for Ashfield, mother gave in. She said at any rate we would try how we got on.
I now suspect that mother herself had never really cared for Torquay as a place to live. She had a great passion for cathedral towns, and she had always been fond of Exeter. She and my father sometimes went for a holiday touring various cathedral townsa€“to please her, I think, not my fathera€“and I believe she rather enjoyed the idea of living in a much smaller house near Exeter. However, she was an unselfish person, and fond of the house itself, so Ashfield continued to be our home, and I continued to adore it.
To have kept it on was not a wise thing, I know that now. We could have sold it and bought a much more manageable house. But though my mother recognised that at the time, and must indeed have recognised it very much better later, yet I think she was content to have had it so. Because Ashfield has meant something to me for so many years. It has been there, my background, my shelter, the place where I truly belong. I have never suffered from the absence of roots. Though to hold on to it may have been foolish, it gave me something that I value, a treasure of remembrance. It has also given me a lot of trouble, worry, expense, and difficultiesa€“but surely for everything you love you have to pay some price?
My father died in November, my sistera€?s marriage took place the following September. It was quiet, with no reception afterwards, owing to the mourning still observed for my fathera€?s death. It was a pretty wedding and took place in old Tor church. With the importance of being first bridesmaid I enjoyed it all immensely. The bridesmaids all wore white, with white wreaths of flowers on their heads.
The wedding took place at eleven in the morning, and we had the wedding breakfast at Ashfield. The happy couple were blest not only with lots of lovely wedding presents but with every variety of torture that could have been thought up by my boy cousin Gerald and myself. All through their honeymoon rice fell out of every garment they removed from suit-cases. Satin shoes were tied on to the carriage in which they drove away, and chalked on the back, after it had first been carefully examined to make sure that nothing of the kind had occurred, were the words a€?Mrs Jimmy Watts is a first-class namea€?. So off they drove to a honeymoon in Italy.
My mother retired to her bed exhausted and weeping, and Mr and Mrs Watts to their hotela€“Mrs Watts no doubt also to weep. Such appears to be the effect of weddings on mothers. The young Wattses, my cousin Gerald and I were left to view each other with the suspicion of strange dogs, and try to decide whether or not we were going to like each other. There was a great deal of natural antagonism at first between Nan Watts and me. Unfortunately, but in the fashion of the day, we had each been given harangues about the other by our respective families. Nan, who was a gay boisterous tomboy, had been told now nicely Agatha always behaved, a€?so quiet and politea€?. And while Nan had my decorum and general solemnity praised to her I had been admonished on the subject of Nan, who was said to be a€?never shy, always answered when she was spoken toa€“never flushed, or muttered, or sat silenta€?. We both therefore looked at each other with a great deal of ill-will.
A sticky half-hour ensued, and then things livened up. In the end we organised a kind of steeple-chase round the school-room, doing wild leaps from piled-up chairs and landing always on the large and somewhat elderly chesterfield. We were all laughing, shouting, screaming, and having a glorious time. Nan revised her opinion of mea€“here was somebody anything but quiet, shouting at the top of her voice. I revised my opinion of Nan as being stuck-up, talking too much, and ina€with the grown-ups. We had a splendid time, we all liked each other, and the springs of the sofa were permanently broken. Afterwards there was a snack meal and we went to the theatre, to The Pirates of Penzance. From that time the friendship never looked back and continued intermittently all through out lives. We dropped it, picked it up, and things seemed just the same when we came together again. Nan is one of the friends I miss most now. With her, as with few others, I could talk together of Abney and Ashfield and the old days, the dogs, and the pranks we played, and our young men, and the theatricals we got up and acted in.
After Madgea€?s departure the second stage of my life began. I was a child still, but the first phase of childhood had ended. The brilliance of joy, despair of sorrow, the momentous importance of every day of onea€?s life: those things are the hallmark of childhood. With them go security and the complete lack of thought for the morrow. We were no longer the Millersa€“a family. We were now just two people living together: a middle-aged woman and an untried, naive girl. Things seemed the same, but the atmosphere was different.
My mother had bad heart attacks since my fathera€?s death. They came on her with no warning, and nothing that the doctors gave her helped. I knew for the first time what it was to feel anxiety for other people, whilst at the same time being a child still, so that my anxiety was naturally exaggerated. I used to wake up at night, my heart beating, sure that mother was dead. Twelve or thirteen may be a natural time of anxiety. I knew, I think, that I was being foolish and giving way to exaggerated feelings, but there it was. I would get up, creep along the corridor, kneel down by my mothera€?s door with my head to the hinge, trying to hear her breathing. Very often I was quickly reassureda€“a welcome snore rewarded me. Mother had a special style of snoring, beginning daintly and pianissimo and working up to a terrific explosion, after which she would usually turn over and there would be no repetition of the snoring for at least another three quarters of an hour.
If I heard a snore then, delighted, I went back to bed and to sleep; but if there happened to be none, I remained there, crouching in miserable apprehension. It would have been far more sensible if I had opened the door and walked in to reassure myself, but somehow that does not seem to have occurred to me, or possibly mother always locked her door at night.
I did not tell mother about these terrible fits of anxiety, and I dona€?t think she ever guessed at them. I used also to have fears, when she had gone out into the town, that she might have been run over. It all seems silly now, so unnecessary. It wore off gradually, I think, and probably lasted only for a year or two. Later I slept in fathera€?s dressing-room, off her bedroom, with the door slightly ajar, so that if she did have an attack in the night I could go in, raise her head, and fetch her brandy and sal volatile. Once I felt that I was on the spot, I no longer suffered from the awful pangs of anxiety. I was, I suppose, always over-burdened with imagination. That has served me well in my professiona€“it must, indeed, be the basis of the novelista€?s crafta€“but it can give you some bad sessions in other respects.
The conditions of our life changed after my fathera€?s death. Social occasions practically ceased. My mother saw a few old friends but nobody else. We were very badly off and had to economise in every way. It was, of course, all we could do to keep up Ashfield. My mother no longer gave luncheon or dinner parties. She had two servants instead of three. She tried to tell Jane that we were now badly off and that she would have to manage with two young, inexpensive maids, but she stressed that Jane, with her magnificent cooking, could command a large salary, and that she ought to have it. Mother would look about and find Jane a place where she would get good wages and also have a kitchenmaid under her. a€?You deserve it,a€said mother.
Jane displayed no emotion; she was eating at the time, as usual. She nodded her head slowly, continued to chew, then said: a€?Very well, Maa€?am. Just as you say. You know best.a€?
The next morning, however, she reappeared. a€?Ia€?d just like a word with you, Maa€?am. Ia€?ve been thinking things over and I would prefer to stay here. I quite understand what you said, and I would be prepared to take less wages, but I have been here a very long time. In any case, my brothera€?s been urging me to come and keep house for him and I have promised I will do so when he retires; that will probably be in four or five yeara€?s time. Until then I would like to stay here.a€?
a€?That is very, very good of you,a€said my mother, emotionally. Jane, who had a horror of emotion, said, a€?It will be convenient,a€and moved majestically from the room.
There was only one drawback to this arrangement. Having cooked in one way for so many years, Jane could not stop cooking in the same strain. If we had a joint it was always an enormous roast. Colossal beefsteak pies, huge tarts, and gargantuan steam puddings would be put on the table. Mother would say, a€?Only enough for two, remember, Jane,a€or a€?Only enough for four,a€but Jane could never understand. Janea€?s own scale of hospitality was terribly expensive for the household; every day of the week, seven or eight of her friends were wont to arrive for tea, and eat pastries, buns, scones, rock cakes and jam tarts. In the end, in desperation, seeing the household books mounting up, my mother said gently that perhaps, as things were different now, Jane would have one day a week when she could have her friends. This would save a certain amount of waste, in case a lot was cooked and then people did not turn up. Thenceforward Jane held court on Wednesdays only.
Our own meals was now very different from the normal three-or four-course feasts. Dinners were cut out altogether, and mother and I had a macaroni cheese or a rice pudding or something like that in the evening. Ia€?m afraid this saddened Jane a great deal. Also, little by little, mother managed to take over the ordering, which formerly had been done by Jane. It had been one of my fathera€?s frienda€?s great delights, when staying in the house, to hear Jane ordering on the telephone in her deep bass Devonshire voice: a€?And I want six lobsters, hen lobsters, and prawnsa€“not less thana€|a€It became a favourite phrase in our family. a€?Not less thana€was not only used by Jane but also by a later cook of ours, Mrs Potter. What splendid days for the tradesmen those were!
a€?But Ia€?ve always ordered twelve fillets of sole, Maa€?am,a€Jane would say, looking distressed. The fact that there were not enough mouths to devour twelve fillets of sole, not even counting a couple in the kitchen, never appeared to enter her head.
None of these changes were particularly noticeable to me. Luxury or economy mean little when you are young. If you buy boiled sweets instead of chocolates the difference is not noticeable. Mackerel I had always preferred to sole, and a whiting with its tail in its mouth I thought a most agreeable looking fish.
My personal life was not much altered. I read enormous quantities of booksa€“worked through all the rest of Henty, and was introduced to Stanley Weyman (what glorious historical novels they were. I read The Castle Inn only the other day and thought how good it was.) The Prisoner of Zenda was my opening to romance, as it was for many others. I read it again and again. I fell deeply in lovea€“not with Rudolf Rassendyll, as might have been expected, but with the real king imprisoned in his dungeon and sighing. I yearned to succour him, to rescue him, to assure him that Ia€“Flavia, of coursea€“loved him and not Rudolf Rassendyll. I also read the whole of Jules Verne in Frencha€“Le Voyage au Centre de la Terre was my favourite for many months. I loved the contrast between the prudent nephew and the cocksure uncle. Any book I really liked I read over again at monthly intervals; then, after about a year, I would be fickle and choose another favourite.
There were also L. T. Meadea€?s books for girls, which my mother disliked very much; she said the girls in them were vulgar and only thought of being rich and having smart clothes. Secretly, I rather liked them, but with a guilty feeling of being vulgar in my tastes! Some of the Hentys mother read aloud to me, though she was slightly exasperated by the length of the descriptions. She also read a book called The Last Days of Bruce, of which both she and I approved heartily. By way of lessons, I was put on to a book called Great Events of History, of which I had to read one chapter and answer the questions about it set in a note at the end. This was a very good book. It taught a lot of the main events that happened in Europe and elsewhere, which one could link on to the history of the Kings of England, from Little Arthur onwards. How satisfactory to be firmly told So-and-So was a bad king; it has a kind of Biblical finality. I knew the dates of the Kings of England and the names of all their wivesa€“information that has never been much use to me.
Every day I had to learn how to spell pages of words. I suppose the exercise did me some good, but I was still an extraordinarily bad speller and have remained so until the present day.
My principal pleasures were the musical and other activities into which I entered with a family called Huxley. Dr Huxley had a vague but clever wife. There were five girlsa€“Mildred, Sybil, Muriel, Phyllis and Enid. I came between Muriel and Phyllis, and Muriel became my special friend. She had a long face and dimples, which is unusual in a long face, pale golden hair, and she laughed a great deal. I joined them first in their weekly singing-class. About ten girls took part in singing part-songs and oratorios under the direction of a singing-master, Mr Crow. There was also a€?the orchestraa€Muriel and I both played mandolines, Sybil and a girl called Connie Stevens the violin, Mildred the a€?cello.
Looking back on the day of the orchestra, I think the Huxleys were an enterprising family. The stuffier of the old inhabitants of Torquay looked slightly askance at a€?those Huxley girlsa€?, mainly because they were in the habit of walking up and down The Strand, which was the shopping centre of the town, between twelve and one, first three girls, arm in arm, then two girls and the governess; they swung their arms, and walked up and down, and laughed and joked, and, cardinal sin against them, they did not wear gloves. These things were social offences at that time. However, since Dr Huxley was by far the most fashionable doctor in Torquay, and Mrs Huxley was what is known as a€?well connecteda€?, the girls were passed as socially acceptable.
It was a curious social pattern, looking back. It was snobbish, I suppose; on the other hand, a certain type of snobbishness was much looked down upon. People who introduced the aristocracy into their conversation too frequently were disapproved of and laughed at. Three phases have succeeded each other during the span of my life. In the first the questions would be: a€?But who is she, dearWho are her peopleIs she one of the Yorkshire TwiddledosOf course, they are badly off, very badly off, but she was a Wilmot.a€This was to be succeeded in due course by: a€?Oh yes, of course they are pretty dreadful, but then they are terribly rich.a€a€?Have the people who have taken The Larches got money?a€a€?Oh well, then wea€?d better call.a€The third phase was different again: a€?Well, dear, but are they amusing?a€a€?Yes, well of course they are not well off, and nobody knows where they came from, but they are very very amusing.a€After which digression into social values I had better return to the orchestra.
Did we make an awful noise, I wonderProbably. Anyway, it gave us a lot of fun and increased our musical knowledge. It led on to something more exciting, which was the getting up of a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan.
The Huxleys and their friends had already given Patiencea€“that was before I joined their ranks. The next performance in view was The Yeomen of the Guarda€“a somewhat ambitious undertaking. In fact I am surprised that their parents did not discourage them. But Mrs Huxley was a wonderful pattern of aloofness, for which, I must say, I admire her, since parents were not particularly aloof then. She encouraged her children to get up anything they liked, helped them if they asked for help, and, if not, left them to it. The Yeomen of the Guard was duly cast. I had a fine strong soprano voice, about the only soprano they had, and I was naturally in the seventh heaven at being chosen to play Colonel Fairfax.
We had a little difficulty with my mother, who was old-fashioned in her views about what girls could or could not wear on their legs if they were to appear in public. Legs were legs, definitely indelicate. For me to display myself in trunk hose, or anything of that kind, would, my mother thought, be most indecorous. I suppose I was thirteen or fourteen by then, and already five foot seven. There was, alas, no sign of the full rich bosom that I had hoped for when I was at Cauterets. A Yeoman of the Guarda€?s uniform was adjudged all right, though it had to be made with unusually baggy plus-four trousers, but the Elizabethan gentleman presented more difficulties. It seems to me silly nowadays, but it was a serious problem then. Anyway, it was surmounted by my mother saying that it would be all right, but I must wear a disguising cloak thrown over one shoulder. So a cloak was managed out of a piece of turquoise blue-velvet among Granniea€?s a€?piecesa€?. (Granniea€?s pieces were kept in various trunks and drawers, and comprised all types of rich and beautiful fabrics, remnants which she had bought in various sales over the last twenty-five years and had now more or less forgotten about.) It is not terribly easy to act with a cloak draped over one shoulder and flung over the other, in such a way that the indelicacies of onea€?s legs were more or less hidden from the audience.
As far as I remember I felt no stage fright. Strangely enough for a terribly shy person, who very often can hardly bring herself to enter a shop and who has to grit her teeth before arriving at a large party, there was one activity in which I never felt nervous at all, and that was singing. Later, when I studied both piano and singing in Paris, I lost my nerve completely whenever I had to play the piano in the school concert but if I had to sing I felt no nervousness at all. Perhaps that was due to my early conditioning in a€?Is life a boon?a€and the rest of Colonel Fairfaxa€?s repertoire. There is no doubt that The Yeomen of the Guard was one of the highlights of my existence. But I cana€?t help thinking that ita€?s as well that we didna€?t do any more operasa€“an experience that you really enjoyed should never be repeated.
One of the odd things in looking back is that, while you remember how things arrived or happened, you never know how or why they disappeared or came to a stop. I cannot remember many scenes in which I participated with the Huxleys after that time, yet I am sure there was no break in friendship. At one time we seemed to be meeting every day, and then I would find myself writing to Lully in Scotland. Perhaps Dr Huxley left to practise elsewhere, or retiredI dona€?t remember any definite leave-taking. I remember that Lullya€?s terms of friendship were clearly defined. a€?You cana€?t be my best friend,a€she explained, a€?because there are the Scottish girls, the McCrackens. They have always been our best friends. Brenda is my best friend, and Janet is Phyllisa€?s best friend; but you can be my second-best friend.a€So I was content with being Lullya€?s second-best friend, and the arrangement worked well, since the a€?best friendsa€?, the McCrackens, were only seen by the Huxleys at intervals of, I should say, roughly two years.