Among the Bohemians (15 page)

Ida contemplated the birth of a fifth child with glum dread.
She feared her confinement, and confessed, ‘I am dreadfully off babies just now… in a fortnight or so the silent weight I now carry will be yelling its head off out in the cold.’ These forebodings were tragically justified.
It was Henry’s birth in March 1907 that brought on the puerperal fever that killed her.

Even with all her characteristic serenity and goodwill, Dorelia could not be expected to look after the entire lot.
Ida’s formidable middle-class mother, Ada Nettleship, immediately offered to take in her three eldest grandchildren.
At this point it was not in Augustus’s power to refuse, but he made it clear that he intended to get his children back.
Soon the boys were the victims in a tug-of-war between Augustus, who wished them to return to Dorelia’s care, and their conventional grandmother.
By Summer 1907 Augustus managed to reassemble his family at Equihen, a village near Boulogne, but Mrs Nettleship firmly insisted on coming too.
There, she was horrified by what she saw as Dorelia’s incompetence: the children were dressed like gypsies, their bedrooms were full of uncontrolled frogs and grasshoppers, and on one occasion they only escaped drowning en masse because they were rescued by a local fisherman.
Then all the children caught eye infections.
That was the last straw.
Mrs Nettleship scooped up three of her grandsons and transported them back to Wigmore Street to be cured, shampooed, and fumigated.
Augustus was dismayed at the thought of their beautiful locks being shorn and their lovely tattered, colourful clothes being replaced with constricting shoes and tight collars; he ranted at the thought of them being turned into ‘little early Victorian bourgeois prigs’.
But Mrs Nettleship was no less appalled at the prospect of her daughter’s children being reared by their father’s mistress, and got up like ragamuffins.
The denouement came with a heated chase around London Zoo, where Augustus
finally succeeded in cornering two of his boys behind the pelican house and carrying them off as hostages.
Despite Mrs Nettleship’s protests, all but Henry were eventually brought up by Dorelia.

*

Augustus John sincerely believed he had his children’s best interests at heart.
His view was that Dorelia was a rare genius, who would bring them up to be brave and beautiful and free.
Restraint and discipline were not words in John’s vocabulary.
He loved babies; he loved them physically, loved to see them crawling about, loved gently to bathe their soft naked bodies; and he loved to make as many of them as he could.
There were seven by the time Ida died.
Dorelia’s two girls Poppet and Vivien came next.
Nine recognised children.
Then Zoe, Amaryllis and Tristan to miscellaneous mothers, and who knows how many more, unrecognised?
^*
The John household was overflowing with progeny; the visible and audible expression of the great man’s potency, they peopled his world.

Augustus John’s sketch of his baby son Pyramus, ‘the most adorable of
children’, who died of meningitis aged six.

Augustus John set off in the spring of 1909 with two gypsy caravans, six horses, Dorelia, her sister Edie and seven assorted children to camp in fields outside Cambridge.
Rupert Brooke visited them there and was completely entranced:

The children are lovely brown wild bare people dressed, if at all, in lovely yellow, red or brown tattered garments of John’s own choosing… They talked to us of an
imaginary world of theirs, where the river was milk, the mud honey, the reeds and trees green sugar, the earth cake, the leaves of the trees (that was odd) ladies’ hats, and the sky Robin’s blue pinafore… To live with five wild children in a caravan would really be a very good life.
I shall take to it one day.

Romilly John, who must have been three at the time of the Grantchester camp, left his own memoir of the John upbringing.
In 1911 the extended family moved to Alderney Manor near Parkstone in Dorset, where he and his brothers were allowed to live a primitive, amphibious life, in and out of the garden pond, or running around naked to get dry and warm up.
Callers such as the vicar were startled to see a horde of children in a state of nature blocking his entrance to the front door – ‘he retreated instantly’.
At intervals the troupe appeared, clothed or otherwise, for meals, then returned to their games in a nearby brickyard or sand quarry.
The human occupants of Alderney shared their existence with a farmyard full of cows, donkeys, hens, cats and ponies; there were two tame saddleback pigs on which Poppet and Vivien used to ride around the house and garden.
The children were greatly occupied in rounding up cattle, making butter, collecting eggs and firewood.
From 1917 the four children of Augustus’s friend Francis Macnamara swelled the ranks at Alderney.
According to Kathleen Hale this crowd was quite without the need for adult intervention to provide them with amusement.
They had no toys, but were utterly absorbed in their own private pursuits.

*

The John household was depicted, travestied perhaps, but not without a grain of truth, by Margaret Kennedy in
The Constant Nymph
, her best-selling novel of 1924, a work of romantic fiction which descends from
Scènes de la Vie de Bohème
and
Trilby
.
Kennedy chose the Austrian Tyrol rather than the Dorset heathJand for the opening scenes of her novel, but apart from this Augustus’s mènage at Alderney is not so far removed from the composer Albert Sanger’s extended family living in the Karindehütte – an overflowing chalet full of children and guests:

Few people could recollect quite how many children Sanger was supposed to have got, but there always seemed to be a good many, and they were most shockingly brought up.
They were, in their own orbit, known collectively as ‘Sanger’s Circus’, a nickname earned for them by their wandering existence, their vulgarity, their conspicuous brilliance, the noise they made, and the kind of naphtha-flare genius which illuminated everything they said or did.
Their father had given them a good, sound musical education and nothing else.
They had received no sort of regular
education, but in the course of their travels had picked up a good deal of mental furniture, and could abuse each other most profanely in the
argot
of four languages.

The story that follows is the stirring romance of the elfin Tessa Sanger, whose untamed nature stays constant to her twin soul, the young Bohemian musician Lewis Dodd, to whom she has been devoted since childhood.
Lewis is captivated by the ‘wild, imaginative solitude of her spirit’; while for Tessa ‘her love was as natural and necessary to her as the breath she drew’.
She is fourteen when the novel opens, quick-witted, unstable, ragged, barefoot and unkempt; she personifies the free spirit, the child of nature.
She, like her brothers and sisters, has no discipline in any field except music.
When Albert Sanger dies, well-meaning relatives send her to England to be tamed in the boarding-school system, but she escapes.
Though Lewis marries and years pass, Tessa remains true to her childhood attachment, and eventually they run away together; but it is too late.
Tessa is too frail and evanescent a spirit for this world, and she must die.

The Constant Nymph
is a romantic glorification of a state of grace, of the ideal of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s innocent, experience-taught child, uncorrupted by ‘civilised’ values.
This child was possessed of innate worth, instinctive intelligence and knowledge of its own interests.
According to Rousseau, most teaching distorted and denatured the child’s inner sense of what was good:

I contemplate the child, and he pleases me.
I imagine him as a man, and he pleases me more.
His ardent blood seems to reheat mine… his vivacity rejuvenates me.

The hour sounds.
What a change!
Instantly his eyes cloud over; his gaiety is effaced.
Goodbye, joy!
Goodbye, frolicsome games!
A severe and angry man takes him by the hand, says to him gravely, ‘Let us go, sir,’ and takes him away.
In the room into which they go I catch a glimpse of books.
Books!
What sad furnishings for his age!…

Leave him alone at liberty.
Watch him act without saying anything to him.
Consider what he will do and how he will go about it.
Having no need to prove to himself that he is free, he never does anything from giddiness and solely to perform an act of power over himself.
Does he not know that he is always master of himself?… He is always ready for anything.

In other words, trust the child to know what is good for him.
In
Emile
(1762), Rousseau advocated that the child should be allowed to run barefoot, that it should be hardened by cold baths and outdoor exercise, that its immunities should be permitted to develop by resisting interference when
a child is ill.
‘The farther we are removed from the state of nature,’ he wrote, ‘the more we lose our natural tastes.’

Rousseau’s model of the naturally brought-up child became the foundation for an alternative way of thinking about the raising of children.
It has pervaded educational discourse ever since.
In the late nineteenth century the eagerness to embrace Rousseau’s precepts was more urgent than ever, as liberals sought new ways to free themselves from the stranglehold of Victorian orthodoxy.
Vanessa Bell may never have read Rousseau, but his influence can be felt in her determination to prevent the stunting of her own children by over-protective parenting.
At Charleston the Bell children grew up in an almost prelapsarian world, a kind of Eden.
Following her children around the walled garden with her Box Brownie camera, she captured their cherubic nakedness, or their intent absorption in the mud of the cattle pond, or a burgeoning soap-bubble, or a flower.
Julian, Quentin and Angelica grew up barefoot and naked; children of nature, unruly, subject to every danger and subjects in every painting:

In the eyes of the grown-ups we had one virtue [remembered Quentin]: we did not need to be amused.
We could be trusted to amuse ourselves with games of our own invention.
When I was about eleven or twelve I used to bicycle into Lewes (the roads in those days were very safe) and purchase gunpowder from a shop which still had a few customers who used the old muzzle-loaders.
The grown-ups must have noticed the occasional explosions which startled the birds in the garden and were sometimes accompanied by fragments of flying metal, but I can remember no enquiry, and certainly no reprimand.
All this enabled us to enjoy Charleston to the full, and I am still grateful for the policy of wise neglect which made it for us so happy a place.

In this world the child’s own sense of what was right for him or her – in this case, gunpowder – sufficed in identifying material for joy and frolicsome games.
Vanessa did not interfere with the boys’ amusements beyond providing pencil and paper and a few books, or ‘… any small objects they can pretend are armies, such as peas or beans, or cards, [which] will keep them happy for hours…’

Indeed, like the John children, the Bell children appear to have been content with few toys and distractions.
Although a wide range of toys was available to children of that era, few childhood memoirs of artists dwell on them; long hours were spent absorbed with simple playthings.
The more ‘enlightened’ the parent, the fewer the toys provided; and on the whole such children seem not to have felt deprived.
Rosalind Thornycroft, it is true, couldn’t help longing for a beautiful porcelain doll ‘… with eyes that
opened and closed… long lashes and ringlets…’ Her progressive parents despised dolls on aesthetic and rational grounds: ‘Fringes, ringlets and dolls were all taboo and beneath contempt.’ Rosalind and her two sisters Joan and Elfrida had to be content with a set of wooden nine-pins, which they adorned with calico and ribbons to become exemplary dolls.
Their brother Oliver branded poker-work faces on to the skittle-heads, which gave them all unique characters, and they were put to bed in grocery boxes.
Children like this were expected to use their time creatively, and they did.

Apart from their more combustible and explosive obsessions, which were mostly confined to Charleston, Quentin and Julian Bell had one special London game that titillated them more than all the others, and which gave them early lessons in human psychology.
They would manufacture a small tightly wrapped parcel, and drop it on to the Gordon Square pavement below; from their upper-floor window they would then watch with fascination the reactions of passers-by to the potential ‘treasure’.
Would they ignore it?
Would they immediately pick it up and pocket it?
Or would they edge it into the gutter with their foot before sidling across to ‘accidentally’ appropriate it?
A very few might even seize the package and rip it open, only to find that it contained – nothing.
Yet again, nobody intervened or rebuked the boys for this heartless hoax.

Iris Tree was equally set upon a course of benign non-interference:

If by the grace of heaven I ever have children I shall send them for about a year at the age of 10 to some farm, alone with healthy brown peasants, where they can be in the mud and steal pears and get killed as much as they want to.