The Pursuit of Laughter (65 page)

As soon as I was grown up I acquired dozens of clever friends, and no doubt they are the salt of the earth. What they lack in good nature they make up for over and over again in the amusement and interest they provide. Mrs Hammersley was extremely clever and the best of good company, and it is curious that with so many friends who were writers she
produced
so little herself. I think it had to do with her character and her physique. She was not strong. and she certainly made the most of her various illnesses and was probably too engrossed in them to force herself to write. The French say
‘il ne faut pas trop s’écouter;’
Mrs Hammersley listened to herself to a rather disastrous extent.

During a journey in North Africa with the Sitwells she fell ill, and Osbert Sitwell wrote a short story about her called ‘… that Flesh is Heir to’. The theme was that Mrs Hammersley (easily recognizable) was a carrier of every disease that flesh is heir to, and her bag stuffed
with germs. When this was published she was, rather naturally, furious. With the brashness of extreme youth I invited them both to a dinner party on the same night. There was a moment of hesitation, and then they fell into each other’s arms and Osbert was forgiven.

St Leonard’s Terrace had now been sold, and she lived nearby in Sargent’s old studio in Tite Street. She also had a charming little house, Wilmington, at Tolland Bay on the Isle of Wight. Not long after this she suffered a nervous breakdown; she sent a message, would I go round. I found her lying on a chaise longue in the drawing room at Tite Street; she looked desperate. Her face was yellow, I suppose from jaundice; her eyes were tightly shut and tears were flowing. She seized my hand and clutched it, murmuring: ‘Child! Tell me something to make me better. Tell me that we are going on a journey together. Say you are going to drive me to
Cornwall.’
I fell in with her request as best I could. She wanted to be convinced, she wanted to be able to say: ‘I am far too ill to go to Cornwall,’ and for me to reassure her by persuading her that this was not so, ‘Oh no, Mrs Ham, you’ll soon be well enough and I will take care of you.’ I cannot remember how long she remained thus. I visited her several times. Cornwall faded from her mind as she painfully climbed out of the pit of despair. This depression had not, so far as I know, been brought on by any particular worry or sorrow. It came, and it went.

Nearly all her letters are complaints about ill health, or unlucky accidents that had befallen her; sometimes she fell back on the weather if there was nothing much else to complain of. But she had sympathy, too, for friends. In 1937 Kit, speaking in the open air in a street in Liverpool, standing on the roof of a van, was struck by a brick thrown at his head by an opponent. Unconscious, he was taken off to hospital. Mrs Hammersley read of it in the papers and wrote at once.

I was then living at Wootton in Staffordshire. I invited nobody to stay because Kit loved to be able to come at any time and guests bored him. Solitude was what he craved, for a few days or even hours in the whirl of his crowded, busy life, and that he found in the peace and beauty of Wootton. Our marriage was still unannounced, but naturally Mrs Hammersley knew very well that if I lived ‘so far over the hills’ it was for his sake. I made her an
exception
to my rule about no guests. Kit liked her company.

She used sometimes to be driven up to Staffordshire by Unity. After tea in the nursery we had wild games of racing demon. Unity and I each helped one of my little boys aged six and seven which enraged Mrs Hammersley because in spite of this drag on our speed she
could never win. She tried to get us to help
her
, but we said she was much too old to need help. Part of her great attraction was that even nursery racing demon was taken so
seriously
by her.

She was very fond of Unity and visited her in Munich. Unity’s love of everything German, and in particular everything Bavarian, was a passion she wanted others to share. She took Mrs Hammersley to Nymphenburg, and was delighted by the admiration evoked by the castle, the park, and the Amalienburg.

After a while, ‘Child,’ said Mrs Hammersley, ‘is there anywhere here where I could
retire?
’ ‘
Oh yes
, Mrs Ham,’ was the enthusiastic reply, ‘the whole Schloss is full of grace and favour flats with old princesses in them, oh
do
come!’ She already envisaged the pleasure of having Mrs Hammersley as a permanent neighbour. But all Mrs Ham wanted was to be shown a lavatory.

Tite Street was a lovely house, and in the high drawing room, formerly Sargent’s studio, her full-length portrait by Wilson Steer was shown to perfection. It is a masterpiece. She is sitting under a Gainsborough-like tree wearing a voluminous white satin dress. ‘Oh, Mrs Ham, if you won’t leave me your ring,
please
leave me the Steer!’ we used to beg.
Unfortunately
this splendid picture, which should be in the Tate, was acquired by a gallery in Australia; when Tite Street was sold she had nowhere to put it.

She once took me to see Wilson Steer, who also lived in Chelsea near the river. After looking at his pictures we all walked rather slowly along the Embankment, as it was a fine spring day. Every now and again Steer stopped and put his hand inside his overcoat. Mrs Hammersley said that if he felt a bead of sweat on his chest he immediately returned home; he was a hypochondriac, and pneumonia was his favourite terror.

Once when I was lunching with her at Tite Street Mrs Hammersley began inveighing against the wretches who borrow one’s books and fail to return them. A fellow guest, Logan Pearsall Smith [brother-in-law of Bertrand Russell and author of
Trivia
], got up from the table and opened a glass-fronted bookcase. He took out three volumes at random, and each had somebody else’s name on the fly leaf. She was unabashed.

Not only an inveterate borrower, she never hesitated to ask for something if she
happened
to want it. After I grew up there was the reiterated cry of ‘Child! Will you
céder
me that dress?’

The answer was usually: ‘Oh Mrs Ham, I wish I could, but you see it’s the only one I’ve got.’

She made me take her to Harrods because I refused to
céder
her a rather cheap coat I could not spare. The department where it was to be found was called Junior Miss, which seemed almost incredibly inappropriate for El Greco’s widow: nevertheless she found what she wanted.

She knew we called her Mrs Ham, and in fact generally signed her letters ‘Fond love always, Mrs Ham.’ ‘Wid’ was another matter, and I am not sure whether she knew we
generally
referred to her thus among ourselves; certainly to my mother she was always Violet.
However, one day Muv, very vague, answered the telephone, and we heard her say: ‘Hello. Who? Oh, is it you, Wid?’ There was a long pause, and then Mrs Hammersley said
firmly
, ‘
Yes. Fem
.’ Fem (short for female) was the cheeky name my younger sisters had given our mother years before.

Poor Mrs Ham! Life, in the inexorable way it has, gave her many blows; quite enough to justify any amount of gloom. The worst by far was the death of her son David. Christopher lived far away, in the West Indies, so that she saw him rarely. Only Monica, with four
children
, remained, and she was too busy to have much time to spare for her mother, who now lived mostly in the Isle of Wight. Mrs Hammersley added a garden room to Wilmington and showed us the architect’s plans. In one corner was the word ‘German’. ‘Oh Mrs Ham, you
are
lucky to have a German in the corner!’ said Unity. It was where she intended to put a china wood-burning stove.

Our own tragedies were overwhelming, and Mrs Hammersley was full of sympathy. When my brother Tom was killed, at the end of the Second World War, she wrote to me:

Now that the war was over, she gradually became slightly more cheerful. Working on a book, Nancy went to stay with her at Wilmington; rationing was still at its most stringent. Nancy wrote to me: ‘The Widow performs the dance of the seven veils for the butcher, but he never gives us anything.’ We had just killed a bull calf on the farm, and I wrote asking whether I should post them a few pounds of veal. A telegram handed in at Totland Bay arrived; it contained the one word: ‘Yes’. Mrs Ham was famous for her short telegrams, sometimes they were so short as to be incomprehensible to the recipient, which
necessitated
a second telegram. Her only rival in this respect was a French friend of ours, Jean de Gaigneron, who, hearing of the death of an old lady in whose house he had lunched and dined times without number for fifty years, telegraphed her son: ‘
Navré
’ and signed it with his surname.

During this visit Mrs Hammersley complained to Nancy that now the war was over she felt rather constricted by living entirely in the Isle of Wight and wished she had something in London. She missed her friends. She often stayed with the Julian Huxleys, but she
wanted
a place of her own. Monica had no spare room. The sort of hotel she could afford was rather wretched. Tite Street had fetched very little, much less than she had hoped it would. And so on and so forth. Nancy listened for several minutes and then said brightly: ‘I know! Buy back Tite Street,’ a remark which called forth a deluge of reproaches.

At this time we had a small publishing business, Euphorion Books, and we published
Thackeray’s Daughter
, a memoir of Lady Ritchie written by Mrs Hammersley in collaboration with Lady Ritchie’s daughter. It had a modest success; having taken the trouble to write it, Mrs Hammersley was anxious to see it in print, and we obliged. Later on, more ambitiously, a volume of her translation of a selection of Mme de Sévigné’s letters appeared, and for this the publisher was Secker & Warburg.

As I have said, she was a demanding guest. She was always welcome at Chatsworth, where Andrew and Debo could easily accommodate her desires, and where they and their friends delighted in her company. ‘Come on Violet, think of the Pope!’ Andrew used to say when urging her to get up out of a deep sofa. She also stayed with them at Lismore Castle in Ireland; we had a house not far away and Debo took Mrs Hammersley to see it.

She wrote to me:

When Nancy got her flat in Paris at 7 Rue Monsieur, where I sometimes stayed during the years before we bought the Temple at Orsay, she made me promise not to tell Mrs Hammersley that there was a bed in the dining room. We lunched and dined in the big
drawing
room, and the fact that there was a dining room with a bed in it was supposed to be a secret from Mrs Ham, who was never left alone in the flat for fear she might open the door of Bluebeard’s chamber. Nancy thought to have her to stay would make too much work for the
bonne à tout faire
, Marie.

In any case, just then the annual visits to Mme Costa at Fontaine-les-Nonnes were resumed. They were a tradition for Mrs Hammersley ever since the days of her youth,
interrupted
only by the two wars. She introduced Nancy to Mme Costa and they took to each other immediately. Nancy was invited to stay at Fontaine, and these autumn visits had
nothing
in common with the two hurried days of a weekend in the country followed by an
endless
wait in a queue of cars returning to Paris on Sunday evening. They were more like
visits
in the eighteenth century and lasted for weeks, the golden weeks of September and October. Some of Nancy’s happiest days, perhaps the happiest of her whole life, were spent at Fontaine with Mme Costa, Mrs Hammersley and a few chosen guests. They gossiped, played cards, and went for long walks across the vast stubble fields of Seine et Marne from which an abundant harvest had recently been cut.

Although so fond of her, Nancy could never resist teasing Mrs Hammersley; she was an
ideal victim because she always rose so satisfactorily to the bait. Nancy’s teasing was usually on the same lines: ‘While I slave away writing books, you live comfortably on your
rentes
. Oh to be rich like you!’ Nothing could be calculated to annoy Mrs Hammersley more, because in fact it was now Nancy who was rather rich. In any case Mrs Hammersley’s poverty, dating from 1923, had grown to be an integral part of her, not to be doubted, much less made fun of. Mme Costa was very rich and, according to Mrs Hammersley, hardly a day passed without nuns calling at Fontaine, where they knew Mme Costa was a ‘soft touch’; her own daughter had taken the veil. Their conversations with Mme Costa seemed to last an
eternity
, the sacred hour for luncheon came and went, the hungry guests grew impatient. Then there was a sound of crackling bank notes, and the nuns went on their way. Once Mme Costa came looking for pen and ink, and infuriated Mrs Hammersley afterwards by saying the nuns had been good-natured enough to accept a cheque, as she had run out of cash. This definition of good nature was altogether too much to be borne.