Three Houses (10 page)

On the top floor of the blue staircase was a bedroom where Nanny and our baby sister slept and next to it the maids’ bedroom into which I never penetrated in all the years I stayed at Rottingdean. There was a complete taboo on their door and my brother and I who were only too ready to go anywhere when we weren’t wanted never once dared to attempt the adventure. This same taboo was on the kitchen which we never dreamt of visiting without an invitation, whether it was the temporary abode of Mr and Mrs Mounter, or Mrs Snudden from the village, or a London cook who was brought down for the holidays. It was unexpected to find a basement kitchen of the worst period of
Victorian civilisation in a whitewashed cottage. Both kitchen and scullery were well below the ground-level and lighted by windows which looked out, the one into an area some three feet wide, the other on to the brick steps by which the tradesmen came down with their parcels. There was no through ventilation except what came through a couple of iron gratings in the brick path behind the house and the larder was tucked away near one of them. In later years a passage was made under the corner of the hall to join the kitchen to the boot and knife and furnace establishment in the brown-staircase house, but in early days the kitchen was a dark cellar, very different from the large airy ground-floor kitchen of my grandparents’ house in London. However, maids were used to troglodyte conditions and in winter it was at least deliciously warm with a huge fire in the little room. In summer they opened the window, hung up quantities of fly-papers and took things as they came.

When we went down to the beach in the morning the kitchen often provided us with slices of dripping cake and a friendly cook waved good-bye from the window as the nursery cavalcade set out. The procession
beachwards used to begin about ten o’clock on weekday mornings in August and September – on Sundays Nanny would not allow us to go within sight of the sea – with perambulators coming majestically out of all the houses where there were nurseries. First came our perambulator pushed by Nanny in her summer uniform of stiff white piqué and severe straw hat (for even Nannies wore boaters in the ’nineties), containing my baby sister, my brother with his legs dangling over the side, two wooden spades, two tin pails, and all the family bathing dresses and towels. I walked beside them with a green sixpenny shrimping net in which nothing was ever caught and the shilling for buns tightly clasped in my hand. At the corner of the green we were joined by the contingent of visiting grandchildren from The Dene, Didi, Lorna, Margot who was christened Pamela Margaret but called herself Perambulator Margaret, and Oliver. The other brother and sister came later and never really belonged to those days. Our Nanny and the Baldwins’ head nurse were firm friends and Edie, the pale-eyed, fair-haired nursery maid, was allowed to be a hanger-on at their gossipings. So the perambulators and nurses and children swept down the village street in a solid phalanx, moving aside for nothing
less than the half-past-ten bus as it wandered round the village collecting passengers for Brighton.

All down the street were friends to greet. Mrs Ridsdale bearing down on us like a galleon, Mr Ridsdale with his velvet coat, Arthur Ridsdale the doctor, off on his horse to some outlying farm. Then Julian Ridsdale and Aurelian Ridsdale, with Uncle Phil and our cousin Ambrose Poynter, the last two down for a weekend, all wondering what to do and very ready to tease the nursery party for want of better employment. Aurelian and my grandmother had lately had a friendly dispute over a matter of a few pounds which each insisted was due to the other from some committee, and Aurelian had cut the knot by putting it into three Post Office Savings Bank accounts for myself and my brother and sister. It was the first time the nursery had had a banking account and I, being over seven, had the unfair advantage of being able to withdraw my wealth personally. Aurelian was the justest as he was the most generous and upright of men. There was always considerable confusion in my mind about his name because the Ridsdales had brought pieces of cornelian back from Egypt and I didn’t see why one name should
be used rather than the other. Julian though, with his easy lazy banter, was perhaps the nursery favourite.

Then Mr Green would come by, or Miss Mabel Green whose cheerful habit of countenance made Didi Baldwin call her ‘Miss Smileyface’ and be horribly scolded by her nurse for impertinence, or Miss Bates who always walked solitary with a black poodle. As we passed by the shingle-covered road that led to Hilder the butcher’s house and shop, the noise of home-killed South Down mutton might come bleatingly and bellowingly to our ears. Then there might be the vicar whose Adam’s apple surpassed in size that of all other clergymen, or his successor who shocked the nursery, always staunch Conservatives, by wearing an open collar and white tie instead of the conventional dog-collar. Then from various lodgings in the village other children joined the beach party. All Herbert Trench’s boys and girls with their friend Peggy Middleton who were lodged during the holidays in some of the buildings of St Aubyn’s school and had the school gymnasium as their most enviable playground. Gillie and Chrissie whose father was, we understood, a very glorified kind of policeman. Their elder brother and sister Charlie and Julia – poor Charlie who had a banjo and used to
play ‘When Father laid the carpet on the stairs’ in the Mermaid on a summer afternoon, with all my family and The Dene and Hillside applauding. He was at odds with life for many years. Then his name shone at Gallipoli, but he aged too soon and died in another land, so far from the youngster who sang at Rottingdean.

All the summers run into one as the young shadows of so many friends come to join us. Viola and Una Taylor talking French with their mother, which seemed a little suspicious to our less cosmopolitan nursery, Viola adoring my little brother and giving me a set of Miss Edgeworth’s
Early Lessons
, a very early edition with tiny steel engravings pasted in as vignettes for chapter headings; Molly Stanford, dark and long-legged, from her father’s school. There were two boys’ schools at Rottingdean, St Aubyn’s in the village, owned by Mr Stanford, and a newer school out beyond the village on the road to Woodendean kept then by a Mr Mason. The village’s estimation of the two schools was shown in those days by the one being known as ‘Mr Stanford’s’ and the other simply as ‘Mason’s’. Oliver Baldwin was to go to Mr Stanford’s school later, and when Didi Baldwin grew up her little boy was to go there too. 

Mr Stanford was related to our beloved ‘Aunt Madeline’, Mrs Percy Wyndham, and so had some of the blood of Lord Edward Fitzgerald and the enchanting Pamela, and more than one Fitzgerald descendant was at his school.

If we were lucky Nanny might have to stop at the village Post Office and we could talk to Mrs Champion and look covetously at the iron spades which were absolutely forbidden to us in case we cut off our toes. Mrs Champion also sold buckets and shrimping nets and sandshoes and quantities of shell-ornamented boxes which I still think are among the most ravishing products of art. The
chef d’oeuvre
of the Champion collection was a little mirror encrusted with coloured shells such as any mermaid might have been proud to own. It was so much admired by the fastidious Charles Ricketts that I had to get him one for his private collection.

Then came the baker’s shop kept by our friend Mr Stenning. He was undoubtedly the stoutest man ever made, and rumour had it that he spent all his holidays at Dieppe – an easy journey from Rottingdean which was only a few miles from Newhaven – where his bulk, discreetly veiled in a black alpaca jacket, was
less noticed among the portly Gauls than on his native beach. But I have never known a man with such a noble conception of buns. His penny buns were larger than the largest Bath Buns, fine upstanding voluptuous creatures warm from the oven with a deep brown ambrosial varnish on their outsides, heavy with currants and sultanas and more spice-flavoured than any ordinary hot-cross bun. We usually bought a shilling’s worth – thirteen buns in those spacious days – to take down to the beach for the bathers after their encounter with the icy summer waters of the Channel.

After this we might exchange a few pleasantries with Mr Shergold (mysteriously known to us as Shamrock), who drove the village fly. My brother, seating himself one day against orders on the back of the fly, was carried far away into the distance, too frightened to jump off, and had to walk miles back along the hot road. A little further on an archway on the right led under some cottages to Rottingdean’s indubitable slum called Golden Square, where several families lived in great squalor within a stone’s throw of the open downs. Mr Murphy, the head of one Irish family, was blind of an eye, and was held up to us as an awful warning because his trade was
stone-breaking and he would not wear glasses to protect his eyes and one day a splinter flew into his eye and he was blind to this day. Where exactly the moral came in I don’t know, as our opportunities of stone-breaking were practically nonexistent; but it impressed us very much. One of his daughters, Annie, entered my mother’s service in an ill-omened hour as between maid, and inaugurated her service by leaving an oil lamp turned up so high that the bedroom which it was to have warmed was knee deep in soot before my mother was alarmed by the smell and rushed upstairs. Then we might have to stop at Mrs Mockford’s little shop to order fruit for North End House and buy a penny bar of Fry’s chocolate cream.

The approach to the beach was down a cutting in the chalk cliff between grass banks, where there was a hand winch to wind the fishing boats well above the high-tide mark in stormy weather. Each perambulator had to be got down separately by two Nannies, the one behind straining on the handle to act as brake, the one in front walking backwards holding on to the folded hood in case the whole machine got out of control and plunged down the steep descent. Not till all three perambulators, one of ours and two from The Dene,
were safely stowed on a little bit of level ground at the bottom were the younger children allowed to get out and stagger across the shingle to the place which the senior Nanny had chosen for the morning’s camp. Here rugs were spread and the most tremendous amount of dressing took place before we were allowed to paddle. In those days no one had thought of anything better than heavy blue serge for little girls to wear at the sea. Our cuffs were unbuttoned and turned up to the elbows, our skirts were gathered into a handful behind and twisted like a rope and rammed into our voluminous serge knickerbockers, which must have given us a curiously bunchy look, and we were allowed to take our shoes and stockings off and put sandshoes on. Then the legs of our knickerbockers were rolled up as high as they would go and with awful warnings against getting wet we were let loose with spades and buckets. What happened to the younger children I don’t remember. Certainly the Nannies wouldn’t have trusted them to us and equally they would never have spoilt their morning’s chat – ‘talking about Him and Her’ we used to call it – by escorting their young charges to the water. I can only suppose that the babies played with
pebbles or banged their pails on the stones for sheer joy of the noise till some one stopped them.

If it was a lucky morning the tide was low so that we could dig in the wet sand and explore the rocks, and just on the turn so that we could bathe later on when the grownups came down; a great host of parents and friends and relations accompanied by the third contingent of cousins in perambulators from The Elms. They could not come earlier because they had a governess as well as a nurse and they are harder to get started.

And now everything was in train for bathing. That science had made but little progress since the days of Leech’s drawings of pretty ladies coming out of the canvas hoods of bathing machines and horrible old bathing women with bonnets, apparently walking about in the sea all fully dressed. On the beach above high-water mark was a row of bathing machines, little houses with pointed roofs and a door at each end with a flight of steps to let down. When the tide was right for bathing the boatmen used to push them down the shingly slope to the water’s edge and it was our great ambition to get into the machines and go down to the sea in triumph. Of all uncomfortable places for bathing Rottingdean was
perhaps the worst. The sea there was of such paralysing coldness that you could only dash in, swim violently about, and dash out again. The beach was entirely composed of shingle except at the lowest of tides when a little sand appeared among the rocks. The chalk cliffs afflicted one with blindness by their glare on sunny days and though they sheltered one from the north wind when it happened to blow, they were no protection against the more usual south-west gale which flattened you against them and blew what sand there was into your face. There were many days when the sea was fringed with a line of seaweed and dirt through which you had to wade to open water. When the wind blew from the east, the late contents of your waste-paper basket drifted ashore from the rubbish tip further up the Channel. Yet in spite of all these drawbacks there was a glamour about the beach at Rottingdean that no discomfort could dispel.

I always shared a machine with Lily Ridsdale who could brave the stormiest seas and had me under her charge. Inside the little house it was deliciously snug. There was a seat along each side and a little window with a wooden shutter that one could pull across. I can still smell the damp seaweedy smell and feel the wet sandy
floor under my bare feet. The machine was like a door into a different world. You had gone up a ladder from a beach full of friends, with boats and cliffs and everything safe; you emerged through the further door upon a waste of waters which were already lapping round the foot of your ladder. It needed some courage to make the first strokes in that cold tossing sea, but with Lily one was quite safe and could swim out to the end of the pier and back. How one kept afloat at all in the dresses one had to wear then I can’t imagine. My grandmother had brought me a particularly fashionable one from Paris. It was of heavy dark blue serge in two pieces. The knickerbocker part was very baggy and buttoned just above the knee; the tunic part had a very full skirt knee length, puffed sleeves, a high neck and enormous collar or cape embroidered with daisies. I don’t know why I wasn’t pulled down by the sheer weight to a fishy death, but it was the thing and one accepted it. On the shore my mother would sit, watch in hand, anxiously counting the minutes, and the moment our time was up she waved a white handkerchief and we had to come in.