Summer at the Haven

THE HAVEN
, a private Home for elderly ladies, was by now not unlike its inmates, but it had originally been the proud achievement of a prosperous Victorian merchant who had pulled down the old Tudor farmhouse, once a Manor, and erected on its site a handsome structure in the fashionable pseudo-Gothic style with a side turret and stained-glass windows over the porch and on the stairs and even in the proud bathroom. His sons had been killed in the 1914 war, the family had faded out and the house, untenanted throughout the Second World War, had at length been sold off cheaply to be converted for its present purpose. It was thoroughly unsuitable for this, being just too far away from the large village of Darnley for convenience or company. Its rooms were big and had to be divided, which made them disproportionately lofty and a queer shape, and the menace of worn floors and windows and roof tiles was always present to the harassed house committee. It was also too secluded to attract domestic staff and there was not enough money available to tempt them by high wages.

The house made a brave effort, however, though this was never enough to achieve an all-over effect. Some sections peeled obviously away while others showed a distinct facelift and, where once there had been an elegant conservatory, a square annexe containing the offices, which looked rather as if it were constructed of cardboard.
had been painted a bright pink.

The Victorian merchant had found nothing much in the way of a garden. There were a few old fruit trees growing out of a rough grass space ending in an ancient ditch, on the other side of which was a little copse of oak, ash and thorn. He had laid out a lawn and flowerbeds and, though he had left the old trees, he had planted near the house a monkey-puzzle and a deodar which had grown to fine proportions. As with the house, there was now a struggle to keep the most visible and utilitarian part of the garden trim and flourishing. The narrow beds each side of the gravel sweep were filled with neat bedding plants, begonias and geraniums in the summer, chrysanthemums and dahlias in the autumn. Spring bulbs were not encouraged because they were untidy. In fact, all the cultivated parts of the garden were rather like the shelves of a self-service store with rows of the same sort of goods kept orderly and separate. At the back of the house, a short strip of the old lawn was regularly mown and there were two beds of floribunda roses, one pink and one red. There was a small trimmed shrubbery of privet, laurel and lilac and, in a discreet corner, ranks of vegetables. Only under one window, was a plot where well tended but not very tidy flowers were happily mixed up together like the goods in an old-fashioned village shop.

The Haven, when full, could accommodate eight old ladies. Each had their own room containing their remnants of furniture, china and pictures. It also housed the warden and whatever resident staff that could be scraped together.

Mrs Thornton’s room was the larger of the two attics. It had originally held three narrow iron bedsteads in which had slept a parlour maid, a housemaid and an underhouse-maid. The smaller attic had been the cook’s and was now used as a boxroom. Mrs Thornton had chosen her room because she did not like the sound of people tramping above her and because, as the other attic was empty, she felt
an assurance of comparative privacy. The shape of the room, too, appealed to her – the interior of the absurd turret opened out of one corner – this had been where the parlour maid had slept, thus claiming her superiority over the other two maids, and Mrs Thornton in her turn had thought it very convenient for her own bed, which was the one on which her son had been born. From the little turret window she could see the railway line and the trains, now, alas, much depleted in number, that connected the branch station with the main line, seemed to her like a link with the outer world. The other window looked on to the front drive, used by whoever called in from this outer world. So, although the lift stopped short of the attic floor and it was cold there in winter and hot in summer and the sloping ceilings allowed little wallspace, she felt the advantages outweighed the disadvantages.

Besides her bed, she had brought with her her mother’s rocking-chair and her husband’s bureau, the gate-legged table they had bought together when furnishing their first home, and as many books as she could find room for. All these articles were thickly encrusted with memories. On the whole, if no longer happy, she was content. When tempted to indulge in melancholy she would take herself in hand and at such times she would hear the voice of her Scotch nanny quite clearly, as though she were in the room: “Count your blessings, Miss Milly.” It was her favourite maxim and perhaps next came: “Eat up everything on your plate, now. I canna have a faddy bairn in my nursery. There’s many a poor callant would be glad to have what you are wanting to leave each day.” At the time, when suffering from some childish grief or lacking appetite – for she was a delicate little girl – Nanny seemed not only unsympathetic but stupid. Any other blessing but the one denied her then and there seemed quie unreal, and as for the unwanted dinner, how she wished the poor child would come and take it away from her. But in old age and at The
Haven, while more profound advice was forgotten, Nanny’s precepts remained and stood her in good stead both at the rather unappetizing meal times and in moods of dejection.

One wet cold May morning, then, she began deliberately to count her blessings. She was not deaf like old Miss Brown, only a little hard of hearing; she was not going blind like old Miss Norton, only with gently failing sight; she was not crippled and wracked with arthritis like old Miss Dawson, only troubled at night by one hip and one knee; she was not bald like old Miss Ford underneath her wig, only going a little thin around the temples; she was not asthmatical and bronchial like old Mrs Perry; above all, unlike poor dear old Mrs Langley, she was still in her right mind; only proper names eluded her in a stupidly arbitrary manner. It was strange, she realized suddenly, that she was thinking of everybody as old when she herself was as old, or in some cases, even older than they. She must try to remember this. One other blessing occurred to her – her heart was not all that strong, unlikely, as in some cases she knew, to outlast the rest of her. She gave it all the work she could, walking up and down to her attic, for instance, disdaining the help of the lift for the first two floors.

She had got thus far in practising Nanny’s maxim that morning when she was disturbed by a voice, not altogether unlike Nanny’s own in tone, and when she was not at her best either. It was the voice of Miss Blackett, the warden, from the landing below.

“Mrs Langley, whatever are you doing?”

A foolish little laugh in reply floated up through Mrs Thornton’s half-open door and then she heard another door firmly shut and Miss Blackett’s steps ascending the stairs. The warden could only be called a mixed blessing and Mrs Thornton braced herself for the encounter. Hardly waiting to knock, Miss Blackett marched into the room.

“Mrs Thornton, I wonder that with your door ajar you didn’t hear Mrs Langley wandering about. I have just found her playing absolute havoc with the linen cupboard – sheets and towels all over the floor and herself actually standing on a pile of blankets trying to reach the upper shelves; and when I asked her what she was up to she said she was looking for her baby’s clothes and that her husband was coming this afternoon to fetch them both. She thinks that this is a maternity home and that she’s just had a child. She shouldn’t really be here now and I don’t think we can keep her any longer. She must go into the geriatric ward at the hospital.”

“Oh, no!” exclaimed Mrs Thornton, “surely not, Miss Blackett. She is so happy and she never does any real harm, it is only that she doesn’t live in the present any more. She believes her husband and her friends she has loved in the past come to see her every day – she never stops believing it and so of course they do.”

Miss Blackett stared at her blankly and Mrs Thornton swore inwardly. Would she never learn not to make remarks like that to people like Miss Blackett? No, she supposed at her age she never would. It would almost certainly make it worse now if she went on, but go on of course she did.

‘If she goes into a geriatric ward she will be treated like an invalid and she’ll have to leave everything behind, all her things, I mean, and then she may wake up, you see.”

“Well, wouldn’t that be desirable,” said Miss Blackett crossly, “though I fear it isn’t at all likely, senility never regresses – and as to her things, she has far too many of them and she never dusts them.”

Residents at The Haven, if able-bodied, were expected to do their own dusting. It gave them something to do and relieved the domestic situation just a little.

“She says that Susan, her housemaid, who has been with the family for years, sees to all that whenever I mention it,” went on Miss Blackett, adding with a rare touch of
humour: “I only wish I could lay my hands on that Susan.”

Immediately Mrs Thornton felt herself thaw and she noticed for the first time, too, how tired the warden looked and that she was leaning against the door as she talked.

“Isn’t Brenda due back tomorrow?” she asked. Brenda was the latest living-in help and away for a week’s holiday.

“She isn’t coming back at all,” said Miss Blackett. “She phoned last night that she’s taken a job in a shop – too quiet here, she says. She didn’t even have the decency to give in her notice.”

Mrs Thornton looked distressed, she and the warden both belonged to the generation that expected a month’s notice and could not easily accept modern casualness.

“Oh, dear, that leaves only Gisela and Mrs Mills,” she said. Gisela was the au pair from Germany who was a recent arrival. Miss Blackett did most of the cooking herself. She was an adequate but not a good cook, not being interested in food. Mrs Mills, the gardener’s wife, came in to do cleaning.

“Yes,” sighed Miss Blackett, “I shall have to let the committee know and try advertising again, I suppose”.

“I’ll do Mrs Langley’s dusting,” said Mrs Thornton.

Miss Blackett merely sniffed in response, recalling Mrs Thornton’s remarks about Mrs Langley with irritation. She had thought Mrs Thornton had more sense, but they were none of them to be relied on. She turned and went downstairs. Why ever Mrs Thornton chose to stay on in that attic when there was now a good room available on the second floor, she failed to understand. If she moved down the attic floor could be left to take care of itself, which would save a good deal more work than doing the dusting for Mrs Langley, who ought not to be here any longer anyway. But none of them thought of anyone but themselves. The old were so self-centred.

After lunch and resting time were over, Mrs Thornton knocked on Mrs Langley’s door. She had thought out her
plan of action carefully and marched in flaunting her duster about and talking rather loudly and quickly.

“I know it is Susan’s day out, Mrs Langley, and I wondered, as you are sure to be having visitors for tea, whether you would like me just to go over your lovely china so as to have everything looking just as it would if Susan were here.”

Mrs Langley, who was in her nineties, was sitting by what should have been the fireplace but was now only a cold radiator, for the heating was turned off, it being May by the calendar though nearer November in temperature. She was a pretty old lady with large faded blue eyes and white curls done up with a narrow green velvet ribbon on the top of her head. Her face was singularly smooth and unlined. She was wrapped in a none too clean little grey shawl and Mrs Thornton’s heart smote her as she saw it.

“Dear Jessie,” said Mrs Langley, “how very kind.”

She always called Mrs Thornton Jessie, but who Jessie really was she had never discovered. She preferred it, however, to her own name, for Milly, rhyming inexorably with silly, filly and frilly, had been unfortunate for her in her schooldays.

“I am expecting the vicar,” went on Mrs Langley. “He said he’d come about the christening – not that he’s likely to notice a little dust, gentleman don’t, do they – but it’s well, perhaps, to be on the safe side.”

The lovely Chelsea shepherdess on the mantelpiece had the same slightly neglected, soiled look as her owner, but Mrs Thornton soon put her to rights and her attendant shepherd, too. Between them was a row of enchanting tiny china houses and a Dresden flower piece. But Miss Blackett was right, the room was really too cluttered up with ornaments and furniture, and all the wallspace was completely covered with photographs in dark oak frames and pale watercolours in gilt ones. There were far too many chairs and small tables and they none of them seemed to
know what they were doing or where they were meant to be. Yet Mrs Thornton was sure that everything in her room was significant and precious to Mrs Langley. She dusted them as carefully and quickly as she could and finished just as Gisela, the German girl, appeared with tea – a brown teapot, a plastic cup and a plate upon which were two slices of bread and butter and a dull little cake.

Mrs Langley clicked in disapproval. “Would you mind getting out the Worcester cups from my corner cupboard? My husband will be here directly, I always hear the carriage at about this time.” She seemed to have forgotten the vicar by now. “My husband likes to drive himself, you know, though he brings James with him to hold Bessie and Brownie while he is here, such a dear fine pair they are.”

Mrs Thornton found the cups and placed them on the tea tray where they looked sadly out of place. Such as the happy expectation in Mrs Langley’s voice that she caught herself listening for horses and carriage wheels as she went upstairs to her own room. She did not hear them but she knew that Mrs Langley would.

Meanwhile Miss Blackett was having her own welcome cup in her office sitting-room and making notes in preparation for the house committee meeting on the following day. These were held only quarterly unless a crisis arose needing immediate attention. On the whole, Miss Blackett enjoyed them. She was listened to with respectful attention when she gave her report, for the committee knew she would be difficult to replace.