V
Thinking over what gave me most pleasure in my childhood I should be inclined to place first and foremost, my hoop. A simple affair, in all conscience, costinga€“how muchSixpenceA shillingCertainly not more.
And what an inestimable boon to parents, nurses, and servants. On fine days, Agatha goes out into the garden with her hoop and is no more trouble to anyone until the hour for a meal arrivesa€“or, more accurately, until hunger makes itself felt.
My hoop was to me in turn a horse, a sea monster, and a railway train. Beating my hoop round the garden paths, I was a knight in armour on a quest, a lady of the court exercising my white palfrey, Clover (of The Kittens) escaping from imprisonmenta€“or, less romantically, I was engine driver, guard, or passenger, on three railways of my own devising.
There were three distinct systems: the Tubular Railway, with eight stations and circling three quarters of the garden; the Tub Railway, a short line, serving the kitchen garden only and starting from a large tub of water with a tap under a pine tree; and the Terrace Railway, which encircled the house. Only a short while ago I came across in an old cupboard a sheet of cardboard on which sixty odd years before I had drawn a rough plan of all these railways.
I cannot conceive now why I so enjoyed beating my hoop along, stopping, calling out a€?Lily of the Valley Bed. Change for the Tubular Railway here. Tub. Terminus. All change.a€I did it for hours. It must have been very good exercise. I also practised diligently the art of throwing my hoop so that it returned to me, a trick in which I had been instructed by one of our visiting naval officer friends. I could not do it at all at first, but by long and arduous practice I got the hang of it, and was thereafter immensely pleased with myself.
On wet days there was Mathilde. Mathilde was a large American Rocking Horse which had been given to my sister and brother when they were children in America. It had been brought back to England and now, a battered wreck of its former self, sans mane, sans paint, sans tail, etc., was ensconced in a small greenhouse which adjoined the house on one sidea€“quite distinct from The Conservatory, a grandiloquent erection, containing pots of begonias, geraniums, tiered stands of every kind of fern, and several large palm trees. This small greenhouse, called, I dona€?t know why, K.K. (or possibly Kai Kai?) was bereft of plants and housed instead croquet mallets, hoops, balls, broken garden chairs, old painted iron tables, a decayed tennis net and Mathilde.
Mathilde had a splendid actiona€“much better than that of any English rocking horse I have ever known. She sprang forwards and back, upwards and down, and ridden at full pressure was liable to unseat you. Her springs, which needed oiling, made a terrific groaning, and added to the pleasure and danger. Splendid exercise again. No wonder I was a skinny child.
As companion to Mathilde in Kai Kai was Truelovea€“also of trans-atlantic origin. Truelove was a small painted horse and cart with pedals. Presumably from long years of disuse, the pedals were no longer workable. Large applications of oil might have done the tricka€“but there was an easier way of making Truelove serviceable. Like all gardens in Devon, our garden was on a slope. My method was to pull Truelove to the top of a long grassy slope, settle myself carefully, utter an encouraging sound, and off we went; slowly at first, gathering momentum whilst I braked with my feet, so that we came to rest under the monkey puzzle at the bottom of the garden. Then I would pull Truelove back up to the top and start down once more.
I discovered in later years that it had been a great source of amusement to my future brother-in-law to see this process enacted, for sometimes an hour at a time, always in perfect solemnity.
When Nursie left I was, naturally, at a loss for a playmate. I wandered disconsolately about until the hoop solved my problem. Like all children I went round trying to induce people to play with mea€“first my mother, then the servants. But in those days, if there was no one whose business it was to play with children then the child had to play by itself. The servants were good-natured, but they had their work to doa€“plenty of ita€“and so it would be: a€?Now run away, Miss Agatha. Ia€?ve got to get on with what Ia€?m doing.a€Jane was usually good for a handful of sultanas, or a slice of cheese, but suggested firmly that these should be consumed in the garden.
So it was that I made my own world and my own playmates. I really do think that it was a good thing. I have never, all through my life, suffered from the tedium of a€?nothing to doa€?. An enormous number of women do. They suffer from loneliness and boredom. To have time on their hands is a nightmare and not a delight. If things are constantly being done to amuse you, naturally you expect it. And when nothing is done for you, you are at a loss.
I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays, and have things arranged for them, that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas in holiday time. I am always astonished when children come to me and say: a€?Please. Ia€?ve nothing to do.a€With an air of desperation I point out:
a€?But youa€?ve got a lot of toys, havena€?t you?a€?
a€?Not really.a€?
a€?But youa€?ve got two trains. And lorries, and a painting set. And blocks. Cana€?t you play with some of them?a€?
a€?But I cana€?t play by myself with them.a€?
a€?Why notI know. Paint a picture of a bird, then cut it out and make a cage with the blocks, and put the bird in the cage.a€?
The gloom brightens and there is peace for nearly ten minutes.
Looking back over the past, I become increasingly sure of one thing. My tastes have remained fundamentally the same. What I liked playing with as a child, I have liked playing with later in life.
Houses, for instance.
I had, I suppose, a reasonable amount of toys: a dollsa€bed with real sheets and blankets and the family building bricks, handed down by my elder sister and brother. Many of my playthings were extemporised. I cut pictures out of old illustrated magazines and pasted them into scrap-books made of brown paper. Odd rolls of wallpaper were cut and pasted over boxes. It was all a long, leisurely process.
But my principal source of indoor amusement was undoubtedly my dollsa€house. It was the usual type of painted affair, with a front that swung open, revealing kitchen, sitting-room and hall downstairs, two bedrooms and bathroom upstairs. That is, it began that way. The furniture was acquired, piece by piece. There was an enormous range of dollsa€furniture in the shops then, quite cheap in price. My pocket money was, for those days, rather large. It consisted of what copper coins father happened to have in his possession every morning. I would visit him in his dressing-room, say good morning, and then turn to the dressing-table to see what Fate had decreed for me on that particular day. TwopenceFivepenceOnce a whole elevenpence! Some days, no coppers at all. The uncertainty made it rather exciting.
My purchases were always much the same. Some sweetsa€“boiled sweets, the only kind my mother considered healthya€“purchased from Mr Wylie who had a shop in Tor. The sweets were made on the premises, and as you came in through the shop door you knew at once what was being made that day. The rich smell of boiling toffee, the sharp odour of peppermint rock, the elusive smell of pineapple, barleysugar (dull), which practically didna€?t smell at all, and the almost overpowering odour when pear drops were in process of manufacture.
Everything cost eightpence a pound. I spent about fourpence a weeka€“one pennyworth of four different kinds. Then there was a penny to be donated for the Waifs and Strays (money-box on the hall table); from September onwards a few pence were salted away to save up for such Christmas presents as would be bought, not made. The rest went towards the furnishing and equipping of my dollsa€house.
I can still remember the enchantment of the things there were to buy. Food, for instance. Little cardboard platters of roast chicken, eggs and bacon, a wedding cake, a leg of lamb, apples and oranges, fish, trifle, plum pudding. There were plate baskets with knives, forks and spoons. There were tiny sets of glasses. Then there was the furniture proper. My drawing-room had a suite of blue satin chairs, to which I added by degrees a sofa and a rather grand gilded armchair. There were dressing-tables with mirrors, round polished dinner-tables, and a hideous orange brocade dining-room suite. There were lamps and epergnes and bowls of flowers. Then there were all the household implements, brushes and dustpans, brooms and pails and kitchen saucepans.
Soon my dollsa€house looked more like a furniture storehouse. Could Ia€“could I, possiblya€“have another dollsa€house?
Mother did not think that any little girl ought to have two dollsa€houses. But why not, she suggested, inspired, use a cupboard. So I acquired a cupboard, and it was a wild success. A big room at the top of the house, originally built on by my father to provide two extra bedrooms, was so much enjoyed in its bare state by my sister and brother as a playroom that that is what it remained. The walls were more or less lined with books and cupboards, the centre conveniently free and empty. I was allotted a cupboard with four shelves, part of a built-in fitment against the wall. My mother found various nice pieces of wall-paper which could be pasted on the shelves as carpets. The original dollsa€house stood on top of the cupboard, so that I now had a six-storied house.
My house, of course, needed a family to live in it. I acquired a father and mother, two children and a maid, the kind of doll that has a china head and bust and malleable sawdust limbs. Mother sewed some clothes on them, from odd bits of stuff she had. She even fixed with glue a small black beard and moustache to the face of the father. Father, mother, two children and a maid. It was perfect. I dona€?t remember their having any particular personalitiesa€“they never became people to me, they existed only to occupy the house. But it really looked right when you sat the family round the dinner table. Plates, glasses, roast chicken, and a rather peculiar pink pudding were served at the first meal.
An additional enjoyment was housemoving. A stout cardboard box was the furniture van. The furniture was loaded into it, it was drawn round the room by a string several times, and then a€?arrived at the new housea€?. (This happened at least once a week.)
I can see quite plainly now that I have continued to play houses ever since. I have gone over innumerable houses, bought houses, exchanged them for other houses, furnished houses, decorated houses, made structural alterations to houses. Houses! God bless houses!
But to go back to memories. What odd things really, when one collects them all together, one does remember out of onea€?s life. One remembers happy occasions, one remembersa€“very vividly, I thinka€“fear. Oddly enough pain and unhappiness are hard to recapture. I do not mean exactly that I do not remember thema€“I can, but without feeling them. Where they are concerned I am in the first stage. I say, a€?There was Agatha being terribly unhappy. There was Agatha having toothache.a€But I dona€?t feel the unhappiness or the toothache. On the other hand, one day the sudden smell of lime trees brings the past back, and suddenly I remember a day spent near the lime trees, the pleasure with which I threw myself down on the ground, the smell of hot grass, and the suddenly lovely feeling of summer; a cedar tree nearby and the river beyonda€|The feeling of being at one with life. It comes back in that moment. Not only a remembered thing of the mind but the feeling itself as well.
I remember vividly a field of buttercups. I must have been under five, since I walked there with Nursie. It was when we were at Ealing, staying with Auntie-Grannie. We went up a hill, past St. Stephena€?s Church. It was then nothing but fields, and we came to one special field, crammed with golden buttercups. We went to ita€“that I do knowa€“quite often. I dona€?t know if my memory of it is of the first time we went there or a later occasion, but the loveliness of it I do remember and feel. It seems to me that for many years now I have never seen a field of buttercups. I have seen a few buttercups in a field, but that is all. A great field full of golden buttercups in early summer is something indeed. I had it then, I have it with me now.
What has one enjoyed most in lifeI daresay it varies with different people. For my own part, remembering and reflecting, it seems that it is almost always the quiet moments of everyday life. Those are the times, certainly, when I have been happiest. Adorning Nursiea€?s old grey head with blue bows, playing with Tony, making a parting with a comb down his broad back, galloping on what I feel to be real horses across the river my fancy has set in the garden. Following my hoop through the stations of the Tubular Railway. Happy games with my mother. My mother, later, reading Dickens to me, gradually getting sleepy, her spectacles half falling off her nose and her head dropping forward, and myself saying in an agonised voice. a€?Mother, youa€?re going to sleepa€?, to which my mother with great dignity replies, a€?Nothing of the kind, darling. I am not in the least sleepy!a€A few minutes later she would be asleep. I remember feeling how ridiculous she looked with her spectacles slipping off her nose and how much I loved her at that moment.
It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous, that you realise just how much you love them! Anyone can admire somebody for being handsome or amusing or charming, but that bubble is soon pricked when a trace of ridicule comes in. I should give as my advice to any girl about to get married: a€?Well now, just imagine he had a terrible cold in his head, speaking through his nose all full of ba€?s and da€?s, sneezing, eyes watering. What would you feel about him?a€Ita€?s a good test, really. What one needs to feel for a husband, I think, is the love that is tenderness, that comprises affection, that will take colds in the head and little mannerisms all in its stride. Passion one can take for granted.
But marriage means more than a lovera€“I take an old-fashioned view that respect is necessary. Respecta€“which is not to be confused with admiration. To feel admiration for a man all through onea€?s married life would, I think, be excessively tedious. You would get, as it were, a mental crick in the neck. But respect is a thing that you dona€?t have to think about, that you know thankfully is there. As the old Irish woman said of her husband, a€?Himself is a good head to mea€?. That, I think, is what a woman needs. She wants to feel that in her mate there is integrity, that she can depend on him and respect his judgment, and that when there is a difficult decision to be made it can safely lie in his hands.
It is curious to look back over life, over all the varying incidents and scenesa€“such a multitude of odds and ends. Out of them all what has matteredWhat lies behind the selection that memory has madeWhat makes us choose the things that we have rememberedIt is as though one went to a great trunk full of junk in an attic and plunged onea€?s hands into it and said, a€?I will have thisa€“and thisa€“and this.a€?
Ask three or four different people what they remember, say of a journey abroad and you will be surprised at the different answers you get. I remember a boy of fifteen, a son of friends of ours, who was taken to Paris as part of his spring holidays. When he returned, some fatuous friend of the family said, with the usual jovial accent inflicted on the young, a€?Well, my boy, and what impressed you most in ParisWhat do you remember about it?a€He replied immediately: a€?The chimneys. The chimneys there are quite different from chimneys on houses in England.a€?
From his point of view it was a perfectly sensible remark. Some years later he started studying as an artist. It was, therefore, a visual detail that really impressed him, that made Paris different from London.
So, too, another memory. This was when my brother was invalided home from East Africa. He brought with him a native servant, Shebani. Anxious to show this simple African the glories of London, my brother hired a car and, sitting in it with Shebani, drove all round London. He displayed to him Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, the Guildhall, Hyde Park and so on. Finally, when they had arrived home, he said to Shebani, a€?What did you think of London?a€Shebani rolled his eyes up. a€?It is wonderful, Bwana, a wonderful place. Never did I think I would see anything like it.a€My brother nodded a satisfied head. a€?And what impressed you most?a€he said. The answer came without a momenta€?s thought. a€?Oh, Bwana, shops full of meat. Such wonderful shops. Meat hanging in great joints all over and nobody steals them, nobody rushes and pushes their way there and snatches. No, they pass by them in an orderly fashion. How rich, how great a country must be to have all this meat hanging in shops open to the streets. Yes, indeed, England is a wonderful place. London a wonderful city.a€?
Point of view. The point of view of a child. We all knew it once but wea€?ve travelled so far away from it that ita€?s difficult to get back there again. I remember seeing my own grandson Mathew when he must have been, I suppose, about two and a half. He did not know I was there. I was watching him from the top of the stairs. He walked very carefully down the stairs. It was a new achievement and he was proud of it, but still somewhat scared. He was muttering to himself, saying: a€?This is Mathew going down stairs. This is Mathew. Mathew is going down stairs. This is Mathew going down stairs.a€?
I wonder if we all start life thinking of ourselves, as soon as we can think of ourselves at all, as a separate person, as it were, from the one observing. Did I say to myself once, a€?This is Agatha in her party sash going down to the dining-room?a€It is as though the body in which we have found our spirit lodged is at first strange to us. An entity, we know its name, we are on terms with it, but are not as yet identified fully with it. We are Agatha going for a walk, Mathew going down stairs. We see ourselves rather than feel ourselves.
And then one day the next stage of life happens. Suddenly it is no longer a€?This is Mathew going down stairs.a€Suddenly it has become I am going down stairs. The achievement of a€?Ia€is the first step in the progress of a personal life.