Among the Bohemians (16 page)

Edward and Constance Garnett, though they did not abandon their only child David (‘Bunny’) to the care of healthy brown peasants, were also Rousseauesque in his upbringing.
In their remote Arts and Crafts house in the Surrey woods, his parents left Bunny very much to his own devices from an early age.
He was shy and wild, antisocial and with an innate contempt for ritual; but he was also self-sufficient:

I [acquired] independence of character and thought, a readiness to do things for myself and a love of nature, an ability to handle an axe, light a fire of wet sticks, sleep out of doors in comfort, even in wet weather, and so on.

He poached rabbits with his dog Nietzsche, played truant in the woods, eating the bark of trees mixed with digestive biscuits for his lunch, and on summer mornings crept out of the house before sunrise to explore the
Surrey Weald with his closest friend, Noel Olivier.
Bunny was also brought up to think for himself, which instilled in him a stubborn streak that remained all his life.
At the age of four he critically dismissed the well-meaning uncle who told him that it was unmanly for a boy to sit on a potty: ‘[I] secretly thought him a fool…’At five years old Bunny was sufficiently sceptical to enter into philosophical discussions with George, the odd-job boy, who told him that he and his family would burn in hell because they did not go to church.
Bunny smugly rebutted him with: ‘You only say that because you’re the boy who cleans the knives.’

Like his contemporaries, Bunny was encouraged by his parents to call them by their Christian names: Edward and Constance.
The culture of deference had no place in Bohemian families.
For Romilly John, Dorelia was ‘Dodo’; for Julian, Quentin and Angelica Bell their mother was ‘Nessa’.
Igor Anrep knew his mother, Helen, as ‘Doey’, and felt no compunction about calling her ‘a bloody fool’, because at times she appeared to him to be exactly that.

*

Such attitudes stood out in sharp contrast to their time: for the old clichè of the nineteenth-century family – ‘Children should be seen but not heard’ – still held sway.
Victorian and Edwardian children often inhabited an entirely different floor of the house from their parents, meeting them only at stipulated times.
When they did meet, they were expected to display model behaviour.
Childhood was not supposed to be fun.
Enforcement of hated disciplines – such as churchgoing – was justified on almost homeopathic grounds: ‘The more you hate it… the more good it does you’ the young Margaret Haig was told when she complained.
Life was full of pressures and prohibitions:

Never take a second mouthful before you have finished the first.
Do not finish to the last crumb or spoonful, or scrape your plate.
When finished do not clutch your knees.

General remarks.
Do not read much.
Do not eat too much butter or jam.
Say your prayers.
Keep your hair in order.

(Rules drawn up by her sisters for Margaret Gladstone, 1882)

Ursula Bloom, an austerely brought-up child of the middle classes, remembered how children’s bedtimes before the First World War observed a hierarchy as strict as holy writ, according to age.
Babies were put to bed prompt at five-thirty, and small children at six.
From the age of nine bedtime
was raised to seven o’clock; at twelve to seven-thirty.
A fifteen-year-old was sent upstairs at eight.
The formality of family life could be suffocating.
Lesley Lewis, who chronicled her own upbringing in this era, remembered how after nursery tea schoolroom-age children were garbed in layers of elaborate, prickly underwear, fastened at the back with complicated buttons, surmounted by heavily starched pinafores or shirts, and led down to the drawing room for an appointment with their parents.
Mealtime discipline was rigid; finger-marks or smears on the table or silverware were frowned upon, ‘indeed breathing was very much discouraged in the dining-room’.

Part of the horror of the Victorian era felt by ‘enlightened’ people came from the sheer hardship that children were made to endure.
To spare the rod was to spoil the child, and physical comfort was seen as little short of sinful.
In the 1860s doctors wrote books – echoing Rousseau perhaps, but without his emphasis on the individual – extolling methods of ‘hardening’ children.
They must not sit by the fire, nor lounge on cushions in easy chairs, nor sleep on soft mattresses with warm blankets.
Cold baths were obligatory.
Sweets were banned; a plain bun without currants might be permitted for special occasions.
Jam was a luxury.
All food provided must be eaten; nothing was to be left on the plate.
Even on the wettest, coldest days of winter an afternoon walk was obligatory, no matter if the raw weather brought tears to one’s eyes, and chilblains were endemic.
‘They’, the authorities, had ordained that children must be, like Pip in
Great
Expectations,
brought up ‘by hand’.
So rigorously was this rule of terror imposed, that when the writer Ford Madox Ford grew up he still had difficulty persuading himself that he was an autonomous adult, who could do what he liked:

Lurking at the back of my head, I have always the feeling that I am a little boy who will be either ‘spoken to’ or spanked by a mysterious
They.
In my childhood
They
represented a host of clearly perceived persons: my parents, my nurse, the housemaid, the hardly ever visible cook, a day-school master, several awful entities in blue who hung about in the streets and diminished seriously the enjoyment of life, and a large host of un-named adults who possessed apparently remarkable and terrorising powers.
Now-a-days, as far as I know, I have no restraints…

The adult Ford made a bid for liberty one day when he took a piece of uneaten fish and hurled it out of the window at the helmet of the policeman standing in the street below, but guilty feelings prevailed when he later felt tempted to lob a large bag of mouldy flour at the same ‘awful entity in blue’.
He resisted, inhibited by the unseen
They
of his childhood.
Ford recognised that the emotions and anarchic impulses of his childhood were ever-present within him, and that he, like many others of his generation if only they would admit it, had never really grown up.

*

Ford felt that staying in touch with this essential childishness was what made him a free and creative individual.
One can only imagine how
They
might have reacted to the twelve-year-old Julian Bell letting off a loaded airgun under the dining-room table at Charleston.
And what on earth would
They
have made of the disorderly upbringing of the John babies?

The haute bourgeoisie had its position to keep up; if one let things slide, if one’s children didn’t conform, or mixed with dirty lower-class children, one could be stigmatised and lose caste.
Bohemia was happily
hors de combat
in the competition for social position; these were people who had long relinquished any such claim, so why not allow their children to hurl fish and let off explosions?

Many parents saw the provision of liberty for their children as a prior condition of creativity, both their own and their children’s.
But at times one feels that this neglect was as much expedient as ideological.
Bringing up children is very hard work.
For parents with not much money, teams of nursemaids boiling nappies, starching frills and enforcing table manners were beyond their reach.
Leaving children alone to get on with their lives was a great deal simpler and cheaper than keeping them up to the mark.
And choices had to be made.
You could maintain cleanliness and order, or spend the time on creative activities – but not both.

Robert Graves insisted to his friend the writer Peter Quennell that it was not impossible; the child could be minded, the soup kept from boiling over, and a stanza composed simultaneously.
But Quennell noted that Graves’s look of severe strain told a different story.
The family finances did not run to childcare, and anyway Nancy was determined to look after the four children under six years old herself.
She did her best to sew their clothes, feed and clean them, at the same time as attempting to draw and paint.
She had high standards, and instituted punctual bedtimes and rest-times; the children were not allowed to eat meat or drink tea, but might have as much fruit as they wanted.
Otherwise they ran wild and free in the fields near their home village of Islip, in contact with farm animals, enjoying their frolicsome games in the riverside mud.
Nevertheless the strain of childcare began to tell on Nancy, and her health broke down.

When Robert Graves started to make a little more money from his writing, Nancy capitulated and they took on a nanny.
This was in the 1920s, when domestic help was expected as a right by everyone except those actually surviving on the breadline.
It may seem surprising that servants and Bohemians coexisted.
In fact a nanny was paid around twenty pounds a year plus her keep; this could not be regarded as an extravagance.
In proportion to their annual income, the cost of childcare might amount to what a household today would spend on running a small car – which they would no doubt regard as indispensable.
Vanessa Bell did not have a car, but for her a nursemaid was a necessity.
It would not have occurred to her to undertake the arduous side of childcare herself.

But of course nurses and nannies were a mixed blessing, and it took a rare one to cope with the delinquency of some of their little Bohemian charges.
It was not what they were used to.
In the bourgeois home, Nanny ruled supreme, while parents were remote and godlike beings.
Angelica Garnett’s memoir
Deceived with Kindness
(1985) paints quite a different picture.
Her mother Vanessa Bell experienced anguish at Angelica’s tantrums when the nurse Nellie came to bear her off to bed, breaking into the idyll of their most intimate fireside moments.
The conflict hurt both of them.
Vanessa’s freedom to paint, or to leave the house, was bought at the price of guiltridden relationships with the lower-class women to whom she entrusted her children, while Angelica suffered from the suffocating, compensatory love lavished on her by her mother during their times together.
Vanessa’s permissive views necessarily clashed with those of nurses like Nellie who forced cold plates of uneaten porridge on the children at successive mealtimes, while Angelica uneasily transferred her love from one to another.

But Angelica would never have traded her ambiguous upbringing for the persecution, the all-out neglect, the sheer cruelty endured by some of her contemporaries.
Evidently, the severity of childhood oppression was in itself instrumental in driving misfits and free spirits out of captivity, to become refugees in Bohemia.

That hunger they felt for life beyond the prison bars can hardly be overestimated.
Take the case of Dorothy Brett, whose father, Reginald, was a Liberal MP and also a member of the inner circle surrounding Queen Victoria.
The Brett children’s father was almost a stranger to them, and in adulthood Dorothy would recount a family story about how she and her sister Sylvia were taken by their nursemaid for an airing in their pram in Hyde Park.
The nursemaid spotted Reginald across the way strolling with a friend and told the children to wave to their papa.
Reginald was baffled; why were those two little girls waving at him and who could they possibly belong to?
‘Perhaps they are yours,’ hazarded the friend.

The Brett children were subjected to neglect bordering on abuse.
When their mother discovered that the nanny she had employed to care for them was habitually drunk, she did not dismiss her, but simply forbade her to offer alcohol to the children.
Nanny locked them in cupboards, beat them, and bludgeoned their pet bullfinch to death.
She was still not sacked, and only finally left of her own accord on discovering to her indignation that the children had been sent on holiday to the seaside without her.
When Dorothy eventually went to the Slade School of Art her choice was regarded by her parents as undutiful and wrong-headed, but she was all the more bravely determined to persevere in her course.

The writer Philip O’Connor’s father, known as ‘the cad’, was absent and unfaithful; he never saw his son, which was just as well as he had threatened to drown any male child of his in a bucket.
Philip was brought up by his mother, with erratic help.
When he was three his nurse dropped him twenty feet from a window on to a stone courtyard; and once pulled him out of the bath by his hair.
She was sacked.
Philip’s mother then abandoned him to the care of a Frenchwoman who was over-affectionate, and took the child into her bed.
As he grew up Philip was increasingly aware of how little he fitted in with English society.
Bohemia was to be his place of asylum, a retreat where this damaged and unhappy outlaw could find solidarity and an ever-open door.

Edith Sitwell was slighted and maltreated by her parents to a degree which affected her for the rest of her life.
She was unloved, regarded as hideous by her father, and neglected, apart from the infliction – as she saw it – of two instruments of torture.
One was an orthopaedic brace to correct incipient curvature of the spine, the other a contraption that she was made to wear at night to rectify her beak-like Sitwell nose.
She christened these oppressive devices her ‘Bastille’.
In the face of such unhappiness, Edith retreated into the world of her imagination; for the rest of her life poetry and art were to be her solace and
raison d’être
.

*

Tyranny and negligence, oppression and permissiveness: the poles of parental attitudes can be seen nowhere more clearly than in the artists’ uncharted world.
Here creativity clashes with its negative force, and the neglected child feels in the dark for absent boundaries.
The child in Bohemia experienced all the elation of liberty, but also all the precariousness of insecurity and loss, for freedom can be as oppressive as captivity.
A child without rules and restrictions may have to impose them for himself – few so drastically as Augustus John’s second son by Ida, Caspar, who decided in 1916 that he
wanted to join the Navy.
The unbridled informality and freedom of Alderney had given him an overpowering desire for a life circumscribed by rigid routine, and security of an orderly kind.
Augustus, despite his affection for them as babies, developed into a cantankerous and unreasonable parent to his teenage boys, and Caspar found approaching his father with his request to become a naval cadet a terrible ordeal: