Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (9 page)

For the rest of 1912 and the first half of 1913, I went to more dances, paid calls, skated and tobogganed, played a good deal of Bridge and a great deal of tennis and golf, had music lessons and acted in amateur theatricals; in fact I passed my days in all those conventional pursuits with which the leisured young woman of every generation has endeavoured to fill the time that she is not qualified to use. Even my persevering attempts to follow, in accordance with St Monican tradition, the intricacies of Home Rule and Welsh Disestablishment through the columns of
The Times
gradually slackened and ceased for lack of external encouragement. My only concession to the social conscience uncomfortably developed in me at school consisted of reluctant visits to my mother’s ‘district’ in the village of Burbage, near the limekilns below the sickle-like curve of Axe Edge. Here I made myself ‘useful’ by distributing copies of
Mothers in Council
, the official organ of that curious Union which believes the compulsory association of antagonistic partners to be somehow conducive to the sanctity of marriage.

My desultory and totally unorganised reading of George Eliot, Thackeray, Mrs Gaskell, Carlyle, Emerson and Merejkowski made little impression upon this routine, though their writings offered occasional compensation for its utter futility. ‘The reading of
Romola
,’ enthusiastically records my diary for April 27th, 1913, ‘has left me in a state of exultation! It is wonderful to be able to purchase so much rapture for 2
s
. 6
d
.! . . . It makes me wonder when in my life will come the moments of supreme emotion in which all lesser feelings are merged, and which leave one’s spirit different for evermore.’

Throughout those months which witnessed the outbreak of the first Balkan War, the renewal of the Triple Alliance, and a great deal of intermittent agitation over German spies, I never ceased - though often now with a failing heart, since the possibilities had begun to seem so small and the obstacles to be overcome so great - to pester my parents to send me to college. These importunities were invariably received by my father with the statement that he had already spent quite as much on my education as was necessary, and that ‘little girls’ must allow their elders to know what was best for them. I found this attitude of good-natured scepticism peculiarly exasperating, since in my own eyes I was not, of course, a ‘little girl’ at all, but a twentieth-century evangelist entrusted with the task of leading a benighted universe from darkness to light.

The apparent objects of my upbringing being what they were, some of my acquaintances have been surprised that I was never sent to Paris to be ‘finished’ - i.e. to be shaped yet more definitely in the trivial feminine mould which every youthful instinct and ambition prompted me to repudiate. Despairing of Oxford, and defensively smitten with the idea of postponing the dreaded isolation of Buxton, I had even, in my last term at school, misguidedly pleaded for a few months in Paris or Brussels. But my father was almost as much opposed to Paris as to college, on the ground that as soon as I got over there I should probably be seized with appendicitis - a not unnatural fear on his part, though I had never been threatened with the disease, and up to the present have escaped it.

Baulked of the minor alleviation, I returned again and again to the major attack; the desire for a more eventful existence and a less restricted horizon had become an obsession, and it never occurred to me to count on marriage as a possible road to freedom. From what I already knew of men, it seemed only too probable that a husband would yet further limit my opportunities - a conclusion fully warranted by the fact that nearly all the men I knew not only lived in Buxton, but regarded it as the most desirable place of residence in England.

Each fresh refusal to spend another penny on my education (though the cost of my music lessons, and of the expensive new piano which was ungrudgingly bought for me to practise on, would have paid for nearly a year at Oxford) plunged me into further depths of gloom; I felt trammelled and trapped, and after a few months at home I hated Buxton, in spite of the austere beauty of its peaks and dales and the health-giving air which induced so many rheumatic invalids to live hopefully in its hotels and take its waters, with a detestation that I have never since felt for any set of circumstances. Nearly two hundred miles from London, and therefore completely cut off - in days when a conscientious provincial mother would almost as soon have submitted her adolescent daughter to seduction as allow her to spend a few unaccompanied hours in town or entrust her with the Baby Austin type of freedom - from the groups of ambitious, intelligent boys and girls who naturally gravitate together in university towns and capital cities, I was wholly at the mercy of local conditions and family standards. I had nothing to do and no one to talk to; Edward for most of the year was at Uppingham, and with Mina and Betty I became more and more out of touch as the months went by.

Even at eighteen, a mentally voracious young woman cannot live entirely upon scenery. Two things alone prevented me, during Edward’s school terms, from dying of spontaneous combustion - my diary, which I kept in a voluminous detail that now makes me marvel at the amount of time I must have had on my hands, and the appearance in a neighbouring village of a rationalistic curate, whose unorthodox dissertations on the Higher Criticism I took for the profoundest learning, and whose florid, dramatic sermons, to which every Sunday I walked three miles to listen, seemed to me the most inspired eloquence. The holidays were more bearable, for Edward’s return from Uppingham always brought with it a fresh outburst of music, which lent, if only vicariously, some object to life. I was never more than a second-rate pianist, for my hands were too small to stretch an octave easily, but Edward - already a skilled and passionate violinist - depended upon me to accompany him in the complicated sonatas and concertos that he brought home from school. So at Christmas and Easter and midsummer I went round with him to local At Homes, amateur concerts and musical evenings, ploughing strenuously after him through the
prestissimos
and
rallentandos
, the
arpeggios
,
tremolos
and accidentals, of the Beethoven No. 1 Sonata, the Mendelssohn and Spohr Concertos, and the rippling seventeenth-century melodies of Alessandro Scarlatti and Pietro Nardini.

Those two pre-war years in Buxton left me deeply imbued with a form of snobbishness which I do not suppose that I shall ever outgrow, and which is, perhaps, the only one in which I was not deliberately educated. The universal middle-class snobberies of birth and wealth and Anglicanism I soon repudiated and took a naïve delight in so doing; I even believe that I have set myself free, though only within recent years, from the more insidious snobbery of puritan respectability, which causes women of my class and generation to regard the sexual lives of their husbands as a species of personal property, and to treat with sour disapproval or self-conscious patronage any female acquaintance who happens at any time to have indulged in extra-marital relations. But from the snobbery of metropolitanism, the superiority of the Londoner towards the small-town dweller, I do not think I am likely to recover, even though the calm voice of reason - so irritatingly disdainful of our dearest prejudices - tells me that the wireless and the cinema and the long-distance motor ’bus have probably transformed the provinces out of all recognition since 1915.

To me provincialism stood, and stands, for the sum-total of all false values; it is the estimation of people for what they have, or pretend to have, and not for what they are. Artificial classifications, rigid lines of demarkation that bear no relation whatsoever to intrinsic merit, seem to belong to its very essence, while contempt for intelligence, suspicion and fear of independent thought, appear to be necessary passports to provincial popularity. Its mean, censorious spirit is typified for me by the local bank-manager’s querulous little wife who took my mother, as a young married woman giving her first small dinner-party in Macclesfield, severely to task for having ‘mixed her sets’.

In some of the larger provincial cities a rich and enterprising life does seem possible which is free from this carping pettiness; I am thinking especially of Manchester, where we often used to go for a day’s shopping. The home of such remarkable families as the Pankhursts and the Laskis and the Simons, Manchester seems to have escaped the stigma of provincialism - perhaps on account of the national standing of the
Manchester Guardian
(which in Buxton we never saw, the household preferring the Manchester edition of the
Daily Mail
), perhaps even more because the hard-working
habitués
of the city keep the leisured members of their families out of the way in the surrounding suburbs. Social snobbery and unreal values seem to reach their height in towns with between ten and twenty thousand inhabitants. Buxton, which my father used to describe as ‘a little box of social strife lying at the bottom of a basin’, must have had a population of about twelve thousand apart from the visitors who came to take the waters.

I am not, I think, a naturally vindictive person, but in those years when the beautiful heather-covered hills surrounding Buxton represented for me the walls of a prison, I used to swear to Edward that one day I would take my revenge in a novel - and I did. None of my books have had large sales and the least successful of them all was my second novel,
Not Without Honour
, but I have never enjoyed any experience more than the process of decanting my hatred into that story of the social life of a small provincial town.

2

Sometimes, during Edward’s holidays, I used to relate to him incidents destined to appear in this book in much the same way as, during our childhood, I had kept him awake at night with tales of the fabulous ‘Dicks’. He was still as good a listener as ever, since the chief interest of his life and the exclusive object of his ambition was, as in earlier years, his violin.

It is, and always has been, difficult to estimate what manner of person Edward really was at the close of his Uppingham years, and it becomes harder as time marches on. He came, soon after the War broke out, to mean so much to me, and I to him, that I sometimes wonder whether either of us troubled completely to understand the other apart from our very close mutual relationship. Undoubtedly he was handsome; in incongruous contrast to my five-foot-three, he grew to be well over six feet in height, and had dark, velvety, rather sombre brown eyes beneath long thick lashes and almost black arched eyebrows, which gave some substance to my mother’s theory that there had been French or Spanish blood in her family a little distance back. At sixteen he was inclined to be rather priggish and self-righteous - not such bad qualities in adolescence after all, since most of us have to be self-righteous before we can be righteous.

By the time that Edward reached nineteen, he had acquired a charming, easy-going manner (another inheritance, perhaps, from our musical grandfather) which won him a good deal of popularity and was particularly effective in interviews with senior officers and War Office officials; but beneath the agreeable surface I and others who knew him well continually came up against something adamant and rigid through which we could not penetrate - ‘like a vein of flint in a soft rock’, as I described it in my diary in 1914. Mentally, I suppose, he was intelligent rather than intellectual; his taste in literature was limited to plays, short stories and a few poems, most of which had some practical significance, and though he won a good many prizes as a small schoolboy, he continually missed them as he grew older. At Uppingham he was invariably second or third in his form; his school reports, apart from those of his music-masters, were never brilliant and never unsatisfactory.

His one absorbing passion was music, to which he added the persistent determination that our unlucky grandfather had so conspicuously lacked. At seventeen he had already begun to compose songs and concertos; as soon as a sheet of music paper was in his hand he became a different creature, irritable, alert, absorbed. On instruments other than the violin - the organ, the piano, the viola - he became a tolerable performer after a very few lessons. How gifted he really was as a violinist, how promising as a composer, I cannot now tell, though it is perhaps significant that both Mr R. Sterndale Bennett at Uppingham and Sir Hugh (then Dr) Allen at Oxford were keenly interested in his possibilities.

My father’s plans for him varied between the successorship to himself at the paper-mills - an occupation to which I should have been better adapted than Edward, who had no business ambitions and no interest whatever in commercial processes - and the Indian Civil Service, for which his form-master declared that he would never pass the necessary examinations. In his private dreams Edward always visualised himself as a famous conductor-composer, a kind of junior Sir Henry Wood, but he had too much discretion to press the claims of his talent upon my father, who regarded music (for a man) as one of life’s non-essentials, and always explosively objected to the sounds of violin-practising.

Edward’s whole nature led him to prefer round-about methods of persuasion to the challenging directness with which I was wont to stir up parental opposition. ‘Dear child! So
worried
!’ he used to remark with laconic amusement whenever I emerged, breathless and angry, from one of my belligerent encounters with the family. Secretly he determined to read Music as well as Greats at Oxford, and to let his future be dictated by the result. He was, I think, inwardly relieved when he failed to win a scholarship for New College in 1914, but passed in easily as a Commoner on his papers; he was thus freed from the obligation to work for a high Honours Degree which would have interfered considerably with the time available for music.